What a change a few days makes! Following the succesful trip of last week I went off to Bewl full of expectation. The weather had changed somewhat and the previous day had seen high temperatures and cloudless skies. Sunday was a grey and threatening prospect and the weather kept changing all day. Torrential rain for 10 minutes followed by warm humid conditions and then rain or cold breezes. Experience shows Bewl fish do not like that and we struggled to find any fish. I ended up with three fish using the cormorant booby washing line combination from the week before. There was a Lexus competition on and the majority of the boats were holding off "No name bay" or the dam but I really don't like fishing in crowds. In retrospect we should have joined them as elsewhere was very patchy.

First trip of the new season and what a start! Fishing in our club competition I started off on the old green bank at the top of Hook Straight. Regulars of Bewl will remember "Flo " who used to fish here a lot of the early season, I still chuckle at the memory of her berating an angler for throwing his fag packet over the side. Anyway, the fish were hard on the banks and with a slime line set up with four flies, a peach blob on the top dropper, two size 12 cormorants and a viva on the point I quickly got into fish and had four in the first 30 minutes. These were all smallish stockies but superfit and in great condition. It went dead for 45 minute before a change from the viva to a booby on the point resulted in a further four fish from just under the surface. I took two at once which was exciting for a while, luckily the both ran in the same direction and I was able to net the top fish and unhook it before landing the fish on the point fly more conventionaly. My boat partner got to 7 by lunch. We stopped and chatted as a group and I was surprised to find that the others had not done so well with only Russell having got 6 fish. After lunch the flotilla followed us back to our drifts and there was an ugly moment as Russell brought his boat in too close as Mark hooked a big fish. In trying to stop it running under Russell's boat he managed to break it off and was not even a little bit happy. Thankfully he immediately hooked another fish and finished off his limit.