Over the weekend I was lucky enough to be able to convince my beautiful wife to come fishing with me for a couple of hours, even though I knew the fishing would be impossible.The reason I say “ the fishing would be impossible” is because on my local waters over the last couple of years I have noticed that when there is periods of heavy rain the fish do not seem to bite and we had just had a spell of heavy rain. Having know the fishing would be tough I thought it would be a great opportunity for both my wife and I to clear our heads and take in some fresh air as we both work really hard in our day to day jobs and for the last couple of months it has been particularly stressful and I have always found there is no better medicine for stress than getting outdoors.
I packed the car with a rod each and a tackle box of lures, enough for a couple of selections each and headed down to my local fishing ponds. I must say that my wife was very enthusiastic on the journey commenting on how she was going to catch the biggest fish. We arrived put on our boots and selected our first lures. I chose a brightly colored soft plastic fished on a 15gram jig-head, the bait is called Smelt-Shad by Quantum Specialist in Salt & Pepper pattern Image below
I selected this lure set up so that I could maximize fishing at all depths in the the colored water to locate the fish. My wife selected a shallow running soft plastic on a 7gram jig head, the bait was a Savage Gear Real eel in Olive pearl pattern. Why did she chose this lure you ask ? well my thoughts are she had caught her personal best pike on this very lure.
It was a 5 minute walk to our first spot and on the way we had a laugh as my wife continued to insist that she was going to catch not only the first fish but the biggest and the most. We arrived at the first pond and my wife selected her swim I moved down to the next wishing each other good luck as we parted ways. I could have only had a couple of casts when I heard my name being called. Could my wife have already caught a fish ? I rushed over to see what this was all about to find my wife jerking her rod around, I knew what had happened when I saw this. My beautiful wife had managed to get her lure snagged in a submerged tree. I took over the rod as I could see the frustration building. Now I consider myself an expert on dislodging lures from snags having done this for many years now however this one was well and truly stuck. I resorted to breaking the line which was a task in itself as the line was 11lb Quattron which is really tough stuff. I reassured my wife that loosing lures to snags is all part of the sport, tied on an inline spinner and went back to my original swim. I guess we fished around the first pond for about twenty minutes with no luck. We needed to move spots and decided to work our way down to the river as I knew a few spots where there would be slack water and hopefully a few fish.
I found that both my wife and I were walking to the next spot laughing and making jokes about the week just gone by and smiled to myself as this was exactly what we needed. We stopped at a new swim that had recently been widened to accommodate two anglers and started casting. My wife bless her, managed to cast directly into a large overhanging tree along the bank. After ten minutes of playing I was tying on another of my soft plastic lures as I could not retrieve the inline spinner successfully. We then moved to the river. By now my wife was visibly annoyed with herself but I kept reassuring her that these things happen to all lure fishing enthusiasts. Five minutes later I watched in shock as my wife casted straight over the river and directly in to a tree. Hoping that I could save this lure I ran over to assist with the retrieval, it was too late I tried for a further fifteen minutes trying to retrieve the lure but again having to resort to breaking the line. I offered to put another lure on but my wife insisted that she was happy to just sit next to me while I fished. I agreed and I have to say I really, really enjoyed this time as it felt like we were really talking to each other with out the distractions of mobile phones, T.V’s and computers.
It did not occur to me until later that night at the dinner table that we had not caught a single fish now normally this would have really bothered me however as my wife and I were now totally relaxed and stress free, the day loosing lures was for me absolutely worth it. Being stress free with my wife being more reward than I could have hoped for.