Having spent the weekend working in The Wirrall, Monday was supposed to be my day off to recuperate and go fishing at Bewl with Harry. Unfortunately, the tattered remnants of Hurricane Nadine chose the weekend to hit the UK like a steam train, with gale force winds and skies full of rain causing flooding, traffic chaos and general disruption.
This made our journey back from Liverpool incident-filled, long and frustrating. That notwithstanding, Monday dawned warm, misty and oppressive. The rain started again about mid morning leaving winding rivers running down the middle of roads and trees dripping a melody of water music. As that cleared away around lunchtime it was followed by huge gusts of wind that bent reed beds horizontal, shook trees as if they were shrubs and clattered telegraph wires on their poles causing a disconcerting threnody of rattles and whines like a wheezing old machine of uncertain maintenance.
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| Nadine... |
We went fishing anyway - hardened as we are and inured against the British weather as all serious fishermen must be. Naturally, we started with cake! Having avoided the vast expanses of Bewl we arrived at the Lodge at Brick Farm in time to see the hopeful sun nudging its way through the bullying clouds and in fact we didn't see the rain again that day.
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| Trout and Ragwort |
We caught though - me on a floating line and Harry on the intermediate. The fish seemed to be as wary of the weather as we were and stayed deep coming to goldhead damsels and Scottish hairy wet flies, perhaps resembling drowned daddy longlegs or other wind blown insects.
Nadine, Honey - is that You?
