John Goldie and John Poote fished Draycote reservoir on Thursday, 2nd August, 2018.

The weather started comfortably warm in the morning, became hotter in the late afternoon but with some cloud cover and sunny spells. There was a nice breeze most of the time coupled with a good ripple.

The fishing started with a drift from A buoy to B buoy with John Poote fishing dries and soon catching on a fiery brown shipmans buzzer. John Goldie fished a floating line with diawl bachs and buzzers.

During a period which John Poote describes as “John Goldie nodding off at the end of a retrieve ”…….. Bang!  A fish hit John G’s fly. John G claims that he was “in deep thought” (as is often the case apparently) but managed to land this very aggressive trout.  John G tried the same technique of pretending to be “in deep thought” and Bang! another fish.  The fish wanted the flies on the hang (ie static) under the boat. The technique worked for John P as well, as both started catching fish.  The most successful flies were size 12, black buzzer with green holographic cheeks and red headed diawl bachs.

Late in the afternoon they went to fish the boils and joined six/seven other boats who had the same idea. They both caught numerous fish mostly on red holographic diawl bachs. The successful technique was to allow the flies to move freely in the natural currents created by the boils and avoid the temptation to retrieve through the boils.

Unfortunately, on the day, they only had one landing net in the boat. Several times both Johns hooked into fish simultaneously.  The result was that they had to pass the net back and forth between themselves as a fish seemingly under control and coming to the net on one rod suddenly took off.  At one stage they were both bringing fish to the boat when John G managed to lose the net overboard! Suddenly there was panic as John P realized he could lose his fish and his new boat net! Fortunately, the net had foam on the handle, so floated and was soon retrieved. (There is at least one useful lesson here!)

They finished the day with a total of 30 fish to the boat.  Back at the boat dock, the boatman advised them that many had struggled to find feeding fish and that few fish had been caught on the day.

The fishing gods had indeed been kind to the two Johns.