Fresh autumn days....

Went fishing this morning to a little swampy river close by. Weather was nice for fishing: Cloudy, calm and a little foggy, a refreshing autumn weather. Way too calm for pike feeding frenzy though.

Calm waters

Water has got surprisingly cold but most of the vegetation is still intact. Last summer with its record breaking water temperatures really made these shallow areas bloom, I don't think I've ever seen that much vegetation in here. This also made fishing very difficult during the summer so I needed to concentrate on other species.

Back to the fishing trip then. I pushed my little boat to water and started gently rowing upstream. Water was as calm as it gets, not even a slightest breeze in the air. I tied on a red-yellow fly made of slinky fiber and craft fur. It's one of my favorite color combinations together with pink-white and red-white. I like to tie those slinky flies quite fluffy so they have a nice profile and I finish the head with a collar of bright colored craft fur. This gives a nice color contrast as slinky fiber doesn't have any striking colors. Some epoxy to the head and a pair of eyes of course. Epoxy and craft fur create nice spherical head which gives a nice side-to-side action to fly.

After a few moments of casting both sides of the river, first jack hits the fly. I can clearly see a golden flash heading towards my fly just before I can feel the strike in my fingers. And on the very same moment my fly has traveled about 10m, this little snot rocket really hit the fly with all it's rage. Too bad it started to bleed badly from gills so I needed to take it for the dinner. I have only needed to take a few pikes this year as all the others have been virtually unharmed. I also usually keep the fish in the water when taking pictures.

Swimming in your river, eating your flies.

I manage to catch a couple more pikes in the same 1.5-2kg range and one bigger monster decides to follow my fly to the side of my boat and make a huge splash when I pulled my fly out of the water. Always freaks me out badly when after a period of silence, some big bugger comes close to the boat and gives a "bye bye" with its tail.

Shallow and rocky.

I head to a place where the river starts. I have caught some nice fish there in the late autumn but this time I only managed to see something large swimming slowly through the water lilies. Oh, I caugth my smallest pike for ages, still wondering how it could get the fly in its mouth....

Weapons of choice.

Back to the shore and I started cleaning the unlucky jack. When I got back home, the kitty was already waiting for his meal. As I'm writing this, kitty came back for some more of his favorite, pike fillet. A cat weighing in about 6 kilograms seems to be able to eat almost 1 kg of pike in one day, how cool is that?