After our travels it was good to have a few days back home in North Devon.
It started off with a bit of unsuccessful mullet fishing in the River Torridge at Weare Giffard. I had decided to try using a baited spoon for the first time having made a few the night before out of old Mepps and ABU Droppen spinners.
The problem was the river is not very wide and the banks at low tide are high. So when I had a mullet follow (and I saw two close in, the angle of retrieve changed rapidly resulting in the turning away.
There also seemed very few about after the floods. This may have been due to the lower salinity of the river (one to watch for). So I switched to legering worm catching a little basslet, as did Graham, my companion.
We didn’t have long as we headed off to Braunton Burrows with Sandy and Jane on a Devon Wildlife walk looking for orchids. I’m not a botanist but it was a great opportunity to learn more and hopefully see a bee orchid.
I just couldn’t get over the sheer number of plants there from thyme, evening primrose through to an assortment of orchid including a bee orchid which sadly had just gone past its best flowering stage, but a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
The next day Graham ad I returned to the Burrows to try to fly fish for bass in the estuary. As we approached, we saw a shoal of schoolies disappear and they didn’t return. They all gathered at the man outflow from the lagoons as the tide ebbed, where there was an angler fishing with a bubble float and small rubber eel. He was getting several takes every cast, but he schoolies were often just pulling at the tail of his lures so his catch was only just into double figures as we tried without success.
When the tide turned we moved into the channels we felt the fish would run through and managed one apiece. Not a great return on the day in a place where we normally catch several, but we really were surprised at how they bunched into one small area in a massive estuary.