Paul Arden | Wednesday, 4 November 2026
The lake here has risen and there are snakehead babies around with their parents. The adults that spawn at this time of year are generally smaller adults. Why this would be I don’t know, but the usual size is around 2.5KG. It’s certainly possible to find bigger adults (6-8KG) but this would be extremely unusual. There are however more sets of babies to be found, so I’ve always seen this as one of the prime times of year. You can still get 10-shot days which is as good as it gets nowadays.
It’s been some years since the lake has risen at this time of year. For the past 4-5 years the lake has been dropping at this time of year and only started to rise around the end of the month. So this year the Wet Season is early, which is actually how it used to be.
My Ironman is in just over two weeks, so I am juggling a few things right now!! I fly to the UK mid-December for three weeks. Mostly I’ll be in Edinburgh for Xmas but I’ll also make a trip to the blank factory in Spain at the beginning of the trip. We will have a casting day there too.
This does leave two weeks for fishing here at the end of November/ to mid December. David is thinking of taking one of these weeks. If someone else is interested in the other week then please let me know. From what I’m seeing now these should be excellent weeks to visit. Possibly better than I’ve seen for some years. Which would be nice of course.
I had an interesting experience this morning. Yesterday I tied a popper with a slightly slimmer head. I didn’t mean to; it was late, dark and I was watching a movie at the time, whilst also having difficulties with superglue that almost caused my underpants to catch fire. And then, this morning, my shots were off the mark.
Now I know that I haven’t been taking a lot of shots recently and there is a lot on my mind at the moment, but it was more than this, and something didn’t feel right.
Usually I have glue and extra foam in my boat fishing box, but this time no glue. No doubt the glue had gone solid and so I had removed the tubes. But I did have some popper heads that I used for dislocated popper experiments some years ago. So I trimmed one of these and added it to the front of the fly.
Immediately my shots were back in place and I proceeded to catch 10 fish.
Actually that’s not true. Immediately my shots were back in place – end of story.
I have a Malay lesson now, I can hear an afternoon storm rumbling in. Maybe I’ll have a bit of a swim, catch up on emails, and then hopefully the storm will clear in time for me to chase some sets.
I’ve brought the boat to a part of the lake that sees other people fish too. But being mid-week I should be fine. Friday I’ll pull out and fish somewhere else.
Tracy and James are back next week!
Cheers, Paul