Mistified...?

Up and out in the thick early morning fog and made it to the river bank despite losing my bearings walking across the fields and ending up going in completely the wrong direction away from the area I was heading for ! With visibility down to about 30 or 40 ft it was difficult to pick out the usual landmarks like trees and hedgerows etc and was pretty disorentating, in fact it's easier to find your way in the dark than fog as thick as that, and I can quite easily see why hillwalkers get so lost in mountain mists, it would be frightening.

The gates over there somewhere ... erm, I think?

I was on deadbaits today so once I'd found a nice slack on the outside of a bend, a sardine was halved and each piece put on the two rods and cast out into the murky mists. The right hander showed movement within minutes but as the float went under and I wound down bringing the bait back in minus half it's flesh instead of bending into a nice fish! Something had striped it. Second cast and the same thing happened then, third, forth and so on. There was obviously a clawed culprit at work here or possibly eels ? but my fear is the former. That will be bad news for the river in terms of succesfull fish egg and fry recruitment, but good for specimen sized fish feeding on young ronnie and reggie I suppose, not that this river struggles too much in specimen sized fish anyway.

go on .... go on.....!

After an hour or so I had wondered around the stretch trying out a few more  swims with no joy.  I just couldn't get into really depite being excited for the last few days about coming over to this river. Sometimes it just doesn't happen for you and so you might as well pack up and go home rather than slog it out half heartedly.  By 11:00am I was back home with a warm brew building a scalextric track in the lounge for the kids and me to keep ourselves occupied on a murky foggy Sunday morning.