I tried to find a spot that was sheltered from the chilling wind, and almost succeeded. The trouble was it was in a swim I've had next to no success in. However, it did allow me to cover a lot of water by casting baits out and working them back to me every half an hour. Which was what I did for the first two hours.
Despite the touch of colour in the water I wasn't feeling very confident. Unlike the robin that came to see me. No doubt used to being fed maggots and scraps of sandwiches it was out of luck as I had neither maggots not sandwiches with me. Even so it was finding plenty of small invertebrates in the mud that had been paddled up in the damp grass around the swim.
After those two blank hours I was getting restless and had a move. That was the cue for the weather to change from overcast with sunny spells to overcast with rain. I was a little happier in the new swim though, having caught from it in the past. Not this time. The whole place seemed lifeless. Yet another day when there was no pike activity to my rods and little bird activity around the water. With the hawthorns all but bare of berries there's nothing to tempt the winter thrushes. Even the tits made only a brief appearance and the goldfinch flocks were elsewhere or keeping low. To be honest I was glad when I packed up. It had been ne of those sessions. Not even fishing two bits of lamprey made a difference.
Back on the rod front I've fitted another Alps reel seat to a spinning rod for a customer. I have to confess that these Alps seats are exquisitely machined. Very nice if you like that sort of thing but no more practical than a bog standard Fuji seat.
All reel seats with inserts for decorative purposes require extra faffing about to fit to a rod. The one in question required more than usual. It's typical of designers to make things look pretty without giving a thought to how they'll be put to use. A reel seat has to be well bonded to the rod blank. That means there has to be enough of a gap for glue to fill. It's obvious from the photo that there's not much space for glue with this seat, and what there is is at each end. Still, a little ingenuity (not to mention a bit of bodging...) has done the trick.
One more thing. Fuji's composite reel seats were rightly hailed as an advance when they were introduced. They were not only corrosion proof, they were warmer to the touch than the all metal reel seats that were standard in the seventies and before. To my mind this fad for fancy machined aluminium reel seats is a step backwards, no matter how nice they look. Not that they all look nice. Some are plain ugly!
