Anand's been wanting to go fishing for sometime now but cannot make it on weekends. So he finally got his chance with Asif not being able to make it during the Independence Day weekend.
Before we left we had to repair his Ugly Stik as it had a crushed stripper guide. Shakespeare were kind enough to let him have a replacement for free, so that was half the battle won. Removing the damaged guide and retying and epoxying the replacement wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, though I am not entirely satisfied with the job.
I gave the winding a final coat of rod finish the night before and by 4:45 a.m. I was on my way to Anand's place.
I really was expecting a very dull day of fishing thanks to the rains that lashed Bangalore but kept that to myself.
Children at a village school preparing for their Independence Day parade.
Our first port of call was Headworks and Anand decided that he would ledger with ragi for mahseer. I hedged my bets by rigging two baitasting combos for ledgering and lure fishing repectively.
I started off with a spinner and had a beaut on my second cast. With the water level and currents being very high and fast even the small fish felt like fighters.
However, they were still no match for the TFO C703-H and Daiwa Exceler (loaded with 15 lb Berkley Trilene Big Game) combo.
Here's the first fish of the day.
I was trying to take a pic whilst the guard was unhooking the fish and had my rod resting vertically against my shoulder. Unfortunately, the fish flipped-flopped a bit whilst it was being unhooked and the tip must have bent severely opposite to its spine and was broken. Naturally, I was gutted at having one of my favourite rods being broken but accepted the loss, learnt from my mistake and proceeded to change the terminal tackle on the other set-up so that I could continue to lure fish.
I had bought a new casting rod from Cabelas (Shimano Clarus 80MH2) to match the Abu 6500 C3 and had primarily bought it for ledgering. However. I decided to use it with the lures and it proved to be a good combo. The only irritant being that the tip guide isn't angled outwards as is on the TFO and this lead to line winding itself along the tip top ever so often.
I think I caught five or six mahseer (was unable to take pics of two or three mahseer, so don't have a pictorial record of the exact number) on the Clarus - Abu combo before I decided to exchange the Abu for the low profile Exceler. This proved to be a good decision as the combo was far more comfortable to use.
In the meanwhile, Anand was having a very dull time but that soon changed when he switched from ledgering to spinning. His first two fish managed to throw or bend the hooks and get away but he started fairing well after he switched to Mepps Agila No. 4. He managed to get four mahseer and would have made it six had the other two not broken his line twice.
I fished the outflow side of Headworks until noon and then moved to the inflow side for another hour. We finally wrapped up our session at Forbes at 1 p.m. (a mistake in hindsight) with a total of 11 mahseer and one chilwa.
Just one more to go for my 50th mahseer. Will it be a biiig old fiesty grandma? If so, we will name her Grumpy.
From Headworks we motored down the short distance to Forbes, had some tea and lunch and were getting ready for some murrel action when the coppers came along. I recognised the inspector in the front seat as the newbie in the area I had met a few months previously, so stopped the jeep and had a bit of a chinwag with the fellow.
The murrel 'action' was anything but. We must have spent a couple of hours casting for them but barring two appearances, it was as if they never existed. With Anand falling asleep in the coracle and me having to get home early, I decided to call it a day even earlier than what I had planned for. Before I end the report, I would just like to say one thing - baitcasters beat spinning reels in almost all respects. Despite being very new to baitcasters, I regretted my decision to switch to a spinning outfit when going after murrel and did not enjoy myself that much.
....Nice to see u hook some Beauties inspite of High water ,