James Sinnamon helping solve the riddles.
NO BETTER PLACE ON EARTH Shaun Cooper tell his story about an educative day chasing reluctant Western Lakes browns. I am often asked if I have crossed paths with the young guru known as James Sinnamon in my travels in the western lakes. Somehow I had not, maybe because we both deliberately avoid crowds whilst fishing. But recently I did catch him perusing the aisles in our local fly store and quickly we realised we are on the same page and a trip was planned. We arrived at the car park on the plateau at the gentlemanly hour of 5am with high anticipation of having the whole place to ourselves. It was a Tuesday, but had been pipped at the post by three other cars. This was not going to ruin our mood as we knew the forecast was for blue skies and 22 degrees which in October is a real luxury. After a brisk jaunt up the valley we saw the sight no fly fisher of this area enjoys seeing — tents — three of Fishing News - Page 38
them! Oh, the pain! Still, we weren’t to be deterred as we knew in this weather we could cover ground quickly with fantastic polaroiding conditions and make our way to more secluded waters. By 12pm we had sighted at least a dozen fish and set what we thought were more than adequate traps but the fish had other ideas. We began to have the thought that many an angler has had before, imagine ‘donutting’ on a day like today. These thoughts were enough to force us to stop, have a lunch break and re-assess our plan. We had thrown stick caddis and scud at them to no avail by this stage and decided that if we were going to be refused it may as well be on a dry fly. Our standard 9ft leaders were changed to 15ft x 5lb and lighter, in the hope that we could give ourselves a bigger window with a more subtle presentation. Hedging our bets,
James tied on a proven performer — a Black Spinner and I went with a fly I have supreme confidence in — a variant of a WMD hopper, size 14. This was surely a winning recipe. The next fish was spotted from quite a distance away sitting stationary on the edge of a weed bed in the middle of a bay. In hindsight we should have really known that to be able to see this fish from that distance that it was going to be a sizeable fish. But being buoyed by the hope of our newly hatched plan we quickly made our way down to the lakes edge to set our trap. We had pretty well lost count by this stage of whose turn it was at this fish after countless failures. James was given the task of showing this fish that we had figured out what he wanted. He made his way round to the northern flank of him to maximise the sun’s assistance.
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