Like the majority my fishing opportunities tend to be weekend/ long weekend when everyone else has the same idea. With this in mind, I decided to bypass all the regular well known locations and headed for a fish on what I thought would be a remote section of our local braided river.
It started off well not seeing any other cars at the road end. It is about 45 walk to get to riverbed and another 30 min upstream to where good fish holding water is. I figured I got all day and as it was only 7.30am I would explore a bit of the braided sections in the hope of getting a small fish or two. After an hour of unproductive fishing I decided enough time wasting and move on the higher probability water.
The next stretch of water produced 2 rainbows and on brown average about4-5 lb. the next pool above producing another 3. As I just hocked into the 6 fish of the day I could see two anglers in the pool above me moving down stream. They were spinning and continued to move down the pool even though they could see me. At first I thought they were going to come down and have a chat so we could discuss how to fish together. My fish decided to bolt downstream. The two spin anglers continued to systematically flog the pool and then moved down and started at the top on the pool where I was making my way up and catching fish
At this point I was getting furious, but could not do much as my fish was keeping me busy.
Anyway by the time I landed my fish too a photo, and got organized. The two spin fishermen were walking back upstream. It was about midday. My gut feeling was to leave as they probably have spooked and disturbed all the water above that I wanted to fish. I decided to stick with it and went back to the top of my pool and got another hook-up and landed another nice trout.
And this continued for the rest of the afternoon. I ended up landing 11, dropped 4 and spooked 2. What amazed me was I was literally fishing in their footsteps and the fishing was great. I did come across a dark slab of a fish In a slow shallow bit of water that looked like it was recovering and not in good health, not feeding and left it alone, was not even spooked as I waded past it.
Moral of the story, stick with it and give it a go, you never know.
Also if you see an angler on stream, take 5 mins to have a chat and show a little respect