Once upon a time in the East - part one

While most off the people in the Netherlands were celebrating Liberation Day I was part of a posse of four man heading out to the East in search of the elusive brown trout.
After reaching our destination the expectations of some great fishing went up even more when we had a look at the river. Clear water, nice pools and riffles and the weather wasn't to bad either. Yep, conditions seemed perfect. A little to perfect, like we should have known.....


After two of us rushed onto the river. Me and my fishing partner for the rest of the trip took the calm-and-collected attitude to a new level. We were on a short holiday and we hadn't seen any manic rises, so why hurry right? Right, and then nothing happened. It wasn't that there weren't any bugs on the water. There actually was a very nice hatch of different kinds off bugs, but for some strange reason no trout accepted this dinner invitation.

I had a good look at the entire stretch of the river but in the end all I had was a nice walk and not one fish had shown me it's presence. Now, i don't like to jump into the river unless there's a good reason, but no matter how often you tell yourself that it only takes one good cast to catch a fish, after a few hours of "doing everything right" (read: sit your ass down, be quiet and watch&wait) on the riverbank, the confidence starts crumbling.
My remedy for those moments is to get the burner and a can of soup out of the backpack and have something to eat. And so we did....

Upon returning at the hotel for an early dinner to be back in time for some more fishing in the evening we decided to have a drink in the hotel-bar first. We had a chat with an elderly gentleman who had been fishing the river for over 35 years. He told us how good the fishing had been in the past and how shitty it was right now.
It seems like every stream has got at least one of these fisherman that have seen it all and done it all. What the man told us didn't sound very promising if all of this was true. Which he only knows....

We didn't really get the chance to test this the next day because off some horrible weather. At breakfast the next day we decided to pack up and go to another river, hoping the weather would be a little bit better.
More about that in the next entry. Here's some pics.