No pain No gain

Yesterday was a hardcore day. I arrived home at a minute past midnight,had something to eat and was in my bed about ten minutes later. My kayak is still on the roof of the car and I'll decide later today if it stays there till Sunday. Nice tides this week, I didn't like the look of how the wind was doing a complete 180 over 2/3 days so took Friday off. There were squalls and occasionally the wind would drop off, for the most part it seemed a constant 15-20mph.

As I drifted into a bay I had an explosive take on my mag popper, as the wind caught me I had to get on the pedals to manoeuvre myself back out . At one point the fish snagged me but I managed to get above it and coax it free. I netted the fish on the opposite side of my kayak and peddled out to open water to sort it out. I like a long handled net, the main reason being you can rest the fish in the water and get yourself sorted out. This normally works well, not today. I brought the fish in from my left(my routine is to the right) sat it between my legs and managed to got a loose treble deep in my finger with the point showing through on the other side. I went straight for the Leatherman and cut the shank and put the fish back in the net. Nightmare. Back on the pedals and out I went again, took a couple of pictures on timer and sorted the mess out.

I've put an effect on here to salvage something for this post

I thought about coming out the water an hour or two later but didn't and stuck to the plan. The fishing wasn't exactly fired up but with five fish and two crackers, on balance ,it was worth it. The water temp was a little cooler but the surface route seemed to be still the way to go. I'm just glad I crush barbs and on this occasion I wasn't on X3 hooks. Treble hooks are an absolute menace on a kayak. Having thought about using singles occasionally before it's maybe time to have a serious look at them. It was a tiring day with various problems. Yet again, I have had exposure problems on my TG-4 camera. I' have it set to auto and have a piece of electrical tape across the dial that can move the settings, despite this, the four images I took were ruined, in fact the worse yet. It might be the case that with the reflective nature of a Bass, of a decent size in the sunlight, at the distance my camera is at is causing the problem. I've had the same problem with any decent bass I've caught this year.

This was the best of the images

That was the longest 11 hours on my Outback yet, it was a very weary retrieval......