What I've been up to....

Well there was no fishing to be had, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t far away from my thoughts, in fact, I still managed to do lots of fishy related things. The bulk of the weekend was taken up with a theatre trip Corrinna and I had booked quite some time ago. It was always going to be a bit weird as it was to be the first time we’d left Jessica since she was born. But, Phantom of the opera was fantastic and we returned Saturday morning to a happy smiling baby.

Sunday was the day I was due to go fishing, a day’s river fishing, but after corresponding with Paul all week we decided that it would be better if we left it till the following week in the hope that the rain eases and the river gets back to looking like somewhere we could catch a few. So with fishing off the menu it was time to get some tackle tarted up.

I had been restoring an 11ft glass Bruce and Walker Mark IV S/U that my good friend Ed gave to me. The cork was cleaned up, all rings and inters were removed and I re-whipped the rings back on and varnished over the course of a week. This weekend I managed to finish the rod, although I will take it to my trod builder friend just to nib down and give one last coat of varnish. He does this using his finger, just as Dick Walker and Maurice Ingham did and gets much better results than with a brush.

The other project was servicing my Mitchell reels. I did notify a pal asking how much and when he could do them for me. But after seeing an instructional video on the forum I decided to have a bash myself, purchased some degreaser, some grease and a small screwdriver and set to work. After a couple of hours I had two Mitchell 300s looking and feeling like new. I was apprehensive, but as I said, I have a friend who does this all the time, so if I got really stuck I could always ship them off to him to sort out for me. On the subject of reels, I recently purchased another Mitchell 300 to go with the floater rod I’ve restored. This one is a little different due to the fact all the black paint has been removed and the metal polished up, looks a bit different.

I fixed the pen drawer of my desk with some wood glue I bought, it was one of those jobs you need to do but just never seem to get around to. Now I have a much neater desk with everything in its rightful place, for now anyway. Still no Vintage fountain pen yet, but I have a payment coming from amazon shortly for my kindle book sales, so will purchase one out of that. Kind of putting back into my writing what I earn from it.

I recently found a new venue too, a very exciting complex of three pools, one of which is right up my street and I hope that my application is successful as evenings stalking there will be very cool. I’ll be keeping the location and pool name a secret in the hope that the place doesn’t get too crowded, but for the purpose of the blog it shall be called Oaks Melt Pool.

Fly fishing for carp is something I've been thinking about for a while, and I have a 9ft split cane fly rod on its way to me right now. I already have a fly reel and a friend is making me some carp flies, so this season will see me taking my hand to this new method. I’ve seen folk use this method to great effect on some of the waters I fish, gently laying the bait on the surface without spooking fish, so decided I’d give it a whirl.

This week I am awaiting arrival of my new reel, some floats I ordered from Stu at Fat Fish Floats and an ally spool for the Mitchell, so all eyes on the letterbox. Next blog will hopefully be all about catching lots of nice fish from the river on Sunday, here’s to a week with no rain.