Boy! What a weekend, I really wanted to go fishing, but the rain? I have a really good rain coat made from gortex with a zip on woolen lining designed for trekking the Himalayas. This jacket is great but it stops at the waist and with no waterproof leggings or pants the bottom half of me gets soaked and the wet slowly makes its way up, then it gets very cold. I had $20 to spare and after checking out all the tackle shops I came up empty handed, the cheapest waterproof pants I could find were $35. Oh well, I called my brother Anthony who lent me his Driza-Bone coat, it looked pretty good and almost reached my ankles – I thought it might keep me dry.
Off I went, rain poring down, must have looked a bit weird with all the gear on and a life vest on top of a Driza-Bone. It would have been a sight to be seen.
I had on a really light soft plastic rigged with what is called a stinger hook, rather than the hook coming out of the middle of the plastic I had two hooks rigged right at the end of the lure. The ones I was using were called ‘Spines’ but I believe they go by a different name now. I’ve always thought my target fish ‘bream’ go the head of the lure rather than the tail and after a good session in the rain the bite marks on my lures proved me correct as I lost so many fish that were going the head where the hooks weren’t that I quickly lost confidence in these finicky rigs, went back to the single TT jig heads and started catching more fish.
Back to the rain, after two hours of getting flogged, the water had made its way through the big coat and completely soaked me, when you start to cramp and shiver you know it is time to head in. Next week I’ll be going back to the $35 dollar shop to grab a pair of those waterproof pants as I reckon if I put some tracky dacks under them I’d be feeling toasty. It was pretty bad out there but I did get into the fish, maybe a little rain livens them up, just hope we don’t get too much. Cheers.
David Solano
