Now, if I resemble a football, this guy looks like half-a-dozen of the aforesaid rolled into one. A deadringer for Danny DeVito is our Arif. Keeping this in mind, my concern for the jalopy's suspension over long stretches of bad roads and paths was only natural. Needless to say the Nips have their engineering down pat and the too'ing and fro'ing was a toot.
I have often wondered about the result of Arif and I getting into the same coracle and had I not experienced this for myself, I would have remained a Doubting Thomas. Let's just say, we went fishing and with that I will get on with the report.
It remained overcast throughout the day and the wind did not get up too much and neither did it rain. The first thirty minutes saw a murrel latch on to my spinner and a while later there was another on my modified froggie. And no, I am not telling.
Arif on the other hand was having a torrid time as I forced him to wear the WASI lifejacket (damned if I am going to lend him mine and suffer the consequences) and the ruddy thing was chaffing his armpits.
To make matters worse, murrel actually took his lure quite a few times but being new, eagerness and a mounting sense of frustration had him striking too early. He'll learn....Two and a half hours of this and we went back so that another WASI member could use the coracle but he decided to push off instead. We decided on an early lunch and I was looking forward to the scrumptious samosas I had asked him to get. Guess what? The blister had forgotten them at home and in its place was a big dish of chicken curry and what not but that simply did not tickle the old appetite. So, with 'lunch' out of the way, I went spinning along the edges whilst Arif got himself some shuteye.
4 p.m. saw us setting off again for murrel enroute to the mahseer casting point but we managed to catch bug*3r-all. The first hour or so of ledgering for mahseer was dull, dull and thrice dull. I occupied my time by putting the baitcaster on free-spool and spinning for a murrel I knew was close by and managed to hook the blighter after a few casts.
With the murrel accounted for I got back to ledgering and we had a brief window of 30 or 45 minutes when the mahseer went for the bait and we got ourselves four.
Arif got the first one and he was all smiles. I permitted him to take off the jacket because I do have a heart......somewhere.
I got the second one and whilst I estimated that it would atleast be a 2 kg mahseer, the ghillie was estimating about 5 kgs due to the fight it was putting up. Believe it or not, it was nothing more than this small tiddler who gained the respect of all in the old tub.
Soon after I hooked into another and had another good scrapper at the end of the line.
I then managed a third fellow who was bigger than my first one but he came in without a fight. Boring!
After this the action died and it stayed that way until it was time to leave.
