Opening day dawn over Colliford Lake on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall.When I last fished Colliford five years ago, I wrote an article covering most of the basics (Colliford Lake Revisited Flystream 2019). Cornwall is the UK's Gold Coast, the destination of choice for four million overnight stays and 14 million day trips annually. For a county that's 150 km long and an average of 30 km wide, that's a lot of people. School holidays are pretty much grid-locked roads.
Anyway, once again, I find myself in Cornwall with my family, enjoying a real spring. The green, to be honest, can be a little overwhelming!
Well-maintained fences with a kissing gate access, and the basic rules.As this UK trip is going to be for a while, I've joined a local angling club with access to some great river fly water, and I made a point of finding a lake to visit for Opening Day! Yes, in the UK they close their lakes for winter. I'm not certain this is for the benefit of the fish, but more for the countryside - which pretty much turns into a bog for several months each year. I think I'd blocked out that bit of my Cornish upbringing, where 'get out and play' meant living in welly boots, mittens, and sou'westers for 3 months of the year.
Opening day at Colliford was amazing. I set off from home at dawn and drove the half hour to the lake where the only other vehicle was the South West Lakes Trust van, engine still warm. I assumed the bailiff was around, but I didn't see him. I had, of course, paid my $40 for a day ticket. A brisk easterly didn't take the edge off the atmosphere of morning twilight, and the anticipation of another day on Bodmin Moor trying to find a decent lake brown.
Small browns were, the order of the day, but I knew there were bigger fish out there (which I subsequently caught post opening day).After an hour of early morning fishing on a likely looking bank, I hadn't connected with either a fish or another human. But then, a trout attacked my indicator at around the same time as a chap called Keith wandered down from the carpark. We chatted for a while, and he gave me a Top Hat buzzer (a size 10 pupa body with a cone of foam to fish in the surface film) to try out if I had another indicator attack. He was rigged with a Soldier Palmer on the dropper and a black Woolly Bugger on the point.
Shortly after he marched over the hill to get the easterly over his shoulder, another fish attacked the indicator. Bizarrely, I struck... I then tied on the Top Hat for ten minutes, but it was just too cold to stand still fishing an inert fly. I then marched over the hill to get warm and put the easterly behind me. The rest of the day I spent chatting with the other few hardy souls who wandered past, none of whom had caught a fish, making me feel a little guilty that my rolly-pollied Woolly Buggers were actually getting quite a lot of interest, albeit from small browns - although I did feel some stronger resistance on at least a couple of occasions.
More work is required on this lake over the next few months, which I've already begun... for research purposes of course!
Some subsequent 'work' at Colliford has yielded more fish and some reasonable ones, especially to Black & Gold variations.As a P.P.S., a new art project has just been opened right by the lake, a 56 metre diameter labyrinth. "Kerdroya" celebrates Cornish stone hedging.
Kerdroya, the labyrinth.
