frustration

We got to the river, I tied him up a new leader and we started making our way down stream. We quickly saw a fish that was eating on top but quite far from the nearest mulberry bush. A good chance to show him what the presentation should be like so I quickly caught it before we moved down to a nearby bush with probably 30 fish sitting under it. Happily for us someone has cut the bank but left a nice verge uncut right on the river.  Unfortunately John managed to get everything tangled up in the verge multiple times and rather than hiding behind it, he noisily crashed through it so he was both audible and highly visible.  When I asked him what he was doing, he said he wanted to be closer to make the cast easier. It was 20ft. So he basically shut off the fish that were upstream of the bush and most of them pushed off upstream and away. We moved to the downstream side and he almost managed to get a good cast in and a semi-suicidal carp came chasing the fly which he inexplicably pulled away from it. After that he started putting the fly all over the place then immediately ripping it back off the water. Mulberry fish are pretty tolerant but I'm pretty sure you can imagine that this beyond their limit. This pattern was repeated at various bushes we went to until I managed to get him to listen and stop. It took a while.  But eventually he would leave the short casts to drift away from the bush before gently lifting off.

He caught a fish eventually, but it was a fully suicidal carp that chased and ate his mulberry as he stripped it upstream. He started flailing around again after that so I walked downstream a bit and caught a couple of fish while I let him settle down a bit. Shortly after that I saw some bits of bread floating down the river, he'd thrown a baguette in! The carp switched on to the bread pretty quickly so that was the fishing scuppered for a good half hour or so. I think this is where I started to lose patience. Luckily we found a couple of snakes to keep things interesting while we waited. 

Further down stream at another bush full of fish that wanted to get caught John took a full 2 minutes to get get ready to cast, after he'd walked up and made himself visible again. 

The fish moved off before he’d even cast. It was short anyway and then he started on the ripping off and re casting again before switching to a two hand log chopping action when casting.  Shortly after that he asked me if I was getting frustrated... it must have become apparent.

I mentioned that his casting hadn’t got any better and might actually have got worse. Which is when I found out he hadn’t practised since before we went fishing in March! I wanted to boot him in the arse but instead gave him a bit of help with the casting and we moved to a slower wider stretch with a few berries on it. For some reason he started chanting “10 and 12” while casting, I can only guess he’d watched some casting video with the old 10 o’clock-2 o’clock stuff and he’d mis-remembered it. Whatever the reason it did seem to have a positive effect, and he was nearly able to make decent presentations. And he caught a couple of fish which mollified me somewhat and I did get to carry on and catch a few more myself.  In the end he managed a few fish, and was quite pleased but it should have been 10 or so as really is the easiest time of the year. If only he’d practised his casting. I hope he’s realised that he needs to practise, but I’m not so sure because we still got him on fish.  Dave suggested just putting him on a river and leaving him to figure it out on his own, that might be the next step but we’ll see if he gets his finger out. He’s been at this for 18 months now and it’s not like we’re asking for 100’ + , just fair accuracy up to forty. Perhaps I could be more patient but I’m not sure that’s it.