A couple of nights back I tied up some flies for black bass. They were as ugly as Cinderella´s sisters and, even worse, there are three of them! Whatever the aesthetic shortcomings of these flies, I doubt it will have much bearing on whether the bass decide to eat them. Bass have history for ingesting any kind of thing when the mood takes them. They are not the wine connaisseurs who will take a tentative sip only after rolling it around in a glass and sniffing it. They don´t even drink wine. They don´t know what it is. It is beer for them and they slug it straight out of the bottle.

Yesterday evening, evening as soon as I could escape, I left work and raced off to a little water that a friend told me about. I hope you don´t mind if I don´t tell you where it is. He asked me not to. The plan was to launch the float tube to see if the bass would show interest in those ugly flies.

I had a plan for how to fish them. One version had some foam built into the body and I hoped that they would float or, at the very least, sink very slowly. This was to be my point fly. Three feet away, on a dropper, I fished the sinking version.

You should see this water. It is beautiful and peaceful. People who are stressed out by this crazy world, or who are doctor´s advice to lower their blood pressure, could do much worse than get themselves into a float tube and drift around here for a few hours. If fishing is not your bag, try bird watching. I heard something unfamiliar in the threes as I was finishing up yesterday: an Iberian green woodpecker.

There are some chunky carp in here but they do the kind of drifting around in mid water that makes them pretty much impossible to catch. I have set up some ambushes in the past in the hope of tempting one with a nymph but, so far, to no avail. Carp fishermen do come here and the fishing is good but it is not, as fishermen everywhere seems to say, as good as it used to be. Anyway, it is the bass that I come here for. That, and to keep my blood pressure in check.

So how did those ugly flies do? Happily, the bass gave them the thumbs up and I might have had a couple of dozen altogether. None were giants but it is fun to be kept busy and to cast into the margins in the expectation that something interesting might happen. Some would take a point fly at the surface but many took the sunken version. The takes were often surprisingly subtle and often little would register beyond the straighteing out of any curves on the floating line. I suspect that the bass took them for damselfly nymphs and there was enough movement in the hackle and in the marabou tails to make them look alive.

Those flies may not look pretty to you and me but to the bass, thankfully, they looked just about pretty enough.