If you fish from a float tube, and are sitting in chest waders for hour on end, you will be aware that it is a good idea to go for a wee before you set sail. Very often the margins are sheer and rocky and so it becomes impractical to haul up and answer the call of nature. This is particularly true of Concepción where Steven Lawler and I set out on Saturday to do battle with black bass.
Mindful of the hard-won lesson about the need to powder one´s nose before setting out, I trotted off into the long grass this morning just as soon as I had tackled up.
No sooner had I begun attending to this essential biological function than a red-legged partridge burst into the air at my feet. I believe the term used for this behaviour is “flushing” which seemed particularly apt under the circumstances.
Red-legged partridge are by no means uncommon here but I bump into them rarely enough for the event to be worth noting. You may recall that I came across one recently at the Club del Sol tennis club. What it was doing there remains something of a mystery. Today I wasn´t expecting to find another much less nearly piss on the thing!
Soon after this encounter with the local birdlife, Steve and I set out in search of a bass or two. Unfortunately the bass seemed less enthusiastic about this prospective rendez-vous and remained completely indifferent to whatever we offered them.
It seems to me that black bass are either “on” or “off.” It is almost as though Mother Nature has a great big lever that she pulls to switch the fish from one condition to another. She probably has many such levers to operate simultaneously – some to make the bass come on, others to tell the bee-eaters that have recently joined us to make the crossing from Africa and to return there again in the late summer, other levers again to tell the vultures we saw overhead leave their roosts and rise on the thermals coming off the mountain.
Steven and I covered a lot of water this morning, certainly several hundred metres of shoreline with really nothing to show for it. I had what felt like a good fish on for a while but it dropped off and I didn´t get another offer. Steven saw plenty of small carp but the bass were simply not playing ball.
At one point I saw a shallow rise at the shore that indicated a safe place to pull up and stretch my legs. On the other side of a narrow isthmus was a lovely calm pool which was really a bay connected to the reservoir. In this pool a fine gypsy barbel was taking a leisurely cruise and exploring the gin clear water for breakfast. This is the furthest I have ever seen a gypsy barbel from the river mouth.
The fish had not seen me and I snipped off the woolly bugger which the bass had been ignoring all morning, and tied on a little nymph in its place. By the time I had carried out this little task the barbel was gone.
Steve had pretty much the same response from the fish he was pursuing and so the net result of all that paddling and casting was zero. We didn´t catch nuffin!
Were we disappointed? No, not really. We had had a wonderful day on the Guadalhorce the previous day and felt that a few black bass would have been the icing on the cake. But there will be no complaints from us. You can have a hell of a cake even without icing.
The scenery on this reservoir is stunning. I have tried to take a few pictures to show this but they do it little justice. You need to feel and hear a place as much as see it and you to be there to be dwarfed by this country; the mountains, the blanketing trees, the prickly pear cacti clinging to the hillside. In the high summer the cicadas here will crush you with their song. You have to be jostled by the growing waves as the wind picks up in the early afternoon. These are the things, as much as the bass and the barbel that bring us to places like this.
We could only stay at the reservoir until around lunchtime. Steve had a couple of hours to get home and some things to get on with. Me too, although for me the journey would be shorter.
In the evening, when neither of us would be there to witness it, the shadows of mountains would creep across the water and, again un-witnessed, a switch somewhere would be thrown and the black bass would be on again.
Fish or no fish, there´s nothing wrong with spending a few hours in a place like this.
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