I visited Drumtassie Coarse Fishery on Thursday to try my luck at catching a Siberian sturgeon again. I've had a few attempts now and was beginning to think it might take me a long time to eventually get one. A potential new nemesis. Having chatted to a customer in work who had caught them during a recent session, I arrived very early to ensure that I got a peg in the area he had been fishing. During my last visit, I had fished in fairly shallow water, whilst he had caught them from the deepest part of the pond. I quickly got set up, and was soon catching a few fish using a pretty straight forward approach.
 |
| Nothing fancy, just a couple of pieces of chopped worm, ledgered on the bottom using a light feeder rod. |
After four hours, I’d caught several common, mirror and F1 carp, a few tench, an ide, and a perch. After a short break for a bite to eat, I started fishing again. In my head I'd imagined how a sturgeon might fight, in some strange way given it looks so different to other freshwater fish, so when I hooked a fish that didn’t fight in any way unusually, I thought nothing of it. When it came close to the surface however, and I got a brief glimpse of a shark like tail fin, my heart rate instantly increased quite dramatically! I’d hooked my target!
Don’t come off. Don’t come off. Don’t. Come. Off!
Playing the fish carefully, trying not to bully it too much in case I pulled the hook, it eventually tired, came to the surface, and was drawn into my waiting net!
 |
| A juvenile Siberian sturgeon. My first sturgeon of any kind! |
 |
| A small but perfectly formed, if somewhat odd looking, freshwater fish. |
 |
| Its head was hard and bony, with a quartet of barbules. |
 |
| They also have a protrusible mouth, that reminded me of the mouth of a saltwater ray. |
I was ecstatic, and even better, soon followed it up with a second shortly afterwards. I'm not sure how many of them have been stocked, but I think they must be swimming around the pond in groups. Anyway, it was another species mission successfully accomplished! It's very satisfying to catch what you are after, and another species had been added to my Scottish lifetime list, edging me a little closer to my goal of one hundred, leaving me with only four to go!
For the remainder of the afternoon, I decided to move to the smaller of the two coarse ponds at the fishery. There, I wanted to try and catch one of the very colourful koi carp, that have been recently stocked into it. I changed my tactics and switched over to a method feeder, fishing a bright purple 5mm wafter on a bait band.
 |
| Wowsers "Hi Vis" wafters in bright purple. |
 |
| A nice contrast against my 2mm feeder pellets. |
The move proved to be a good choice, as I enjoyed fairly steady sport for the remainder of the session. Each time I hooked something, I was hopeful that a brightly coloured koi would appear, but it wasn’t to be. I can't complain though, as I caught plenty of nice fish and the sun even came out for a while.
 |
| I caught several bream,… |
 |
| …lots of F1 carp,… |
 |
| …a few small tench,… |
 |
| …and few carp, including this nice mirror. |
So, having caught my ninety-sixth species from Scottish venues, what’s next? Well, I’ve got a few ideas around what species I can target, but I think things are really going to get very tough now. I’ll probably be doing a lot of travelling over to the west coast of Scotland over the coming months, and the weather will no doubt play a massive part in how many trips I can do. Fingers crossed the summer gives us better weather than what we've had so far in 2024.
Tight lines, Scott.
No comments:
Post a Comment