Yesterday morning I took my little trio of newly-tied carp flies to the reservoir at El Chorro to see whether I might come across a carp to tell me whether or not they were up to scratch. As mentioned previously, the carp here may or may not put in an appearance. They´re kind of moody.

For most of the perimeter of this water there may be only a couple of meters from the shore where you can make out the bottom and anywhere beyond this it becomes too deep for the bottom to be seen or the fish silhouetted against it. The odd shallow bay can improve prospects for spotting fish but carp have minds of their own and may decide to leave those places alone.

Early on I had a couple of half chances with fish that moved close to the edge of one of these shallow bays, the edges of which had been heavily trampled by the hooves of goats. Beside the prints left by the goats was a muddy pool about the size of a bath tub created by wild boar under the cover of darkness.

To be honest, I should have done better with the chances I had in that bay. Each of the two fish I covered vanished in pretty short order when I tried to put a fly over them.

In the deeper part of this bay a couple of carp rose to the top and took some kind of surface insect and immediately returned to the depths. These rises were so infrequent that I decided against fishing a dry fly and, instead, stick to the plan of slowly patrolling the shoreline in the hope that a fish might wander close enough to the side that I might have a shot at it.

And that, eventually, is what came to pass. The fish was swimming slowly parallel to the shore in the leisurely way that they seem just to glide without effort. A strong breeze gave me some cover as I positioned myself within casting range. Helpfully, from my point of view, that breeze kept the leader upwind of the fish. The fly landed where I wanted it to land and began to sink into the field of view of the fish. I could no longer see the fly but I knew that the carp must have been very close to it and a slow shift of its body position towards to the shore suggested that it had moved to intercept it. I gave it a second, lifted the rod and then off it went!

Perhaps it is not true to say that these fish are hard to catch. When everything comes together it actually all seems remarkably simple. But there are a lot of variables at play, many of them outside of our control, and so I always feel I have beaten the odds when I manage to catch one of these beautiful carp that briefly edge their way in to patrol the margin and give us a chance to take it on a fly.