Luckless on Loch Leven

I’ve always had very mixed success on Loch Leven, and never figured out quite why. Anything from over 70 thornbacks to double figures in a day, down to struggling to catch just 1. Still, it’s a easy venue to fish and worth a punt every now and again – so Ian and I decided to give it a go in mid-March.

We headed across the loch to our usual starting point at the fish farm, roughly half a mile away. Tying up to one of the anchor buoys we lowered baits to the seabed, around 90 feet below us.

The fish farm is one of the more reliable places to catch early season mackerel and small sabikis picked up quite a few. Most were pretty small but we managed to keep a few bigger ones for bait.

Sadly (especially for the mackerel!) we needn’t have bothered, our fishing only being interrupted by squawking gulls. Nothing troubled our baits at all…:-(

We shifted to the other end of the fish farm as the tide changed, but with exactly the same result. Only a bonus whelk came aboard.

Having nothing to lose by this point we decided to head past the narrows at Caolasnacon. The plan (not sure you can really call it that!) was to target a few mini-species and then have a bash for rays at a different mark.

We soon started on the wee fish all right – several mini-codling coming aboard for both Ian and myself.

Some of the cod were probably into double figures – but ounces rather than pounds! We’d a few poor cod as well before dropping anchor and settling down to try for rays.

Just to keep the day consistent, the rays stayed well away from our baits. Ian managed 2 or 3 dogfish whilst I managed some coffee and little else.

A final session tucked in to the base of the slate mounds at Ballachulish didn’t change our luck one iota.

Just to add to the joy, after retrieving the boat through mounds of rotting seaweed I discovered I had a puncture. Pretty sure it was raining by this point too 🙂

Share this: