April 2017

Traditionally, I’ve been spending two weeks in March with my father and my brother on the Ebro River in Spain, opening the spin fishing season. The chances to catch a big one in March are quite good, but the fishing conditions might be quite unpredictable. The last two years, we were facing cold weather, strong wind and high water level due to snow melting. From our experience, the cold snowy water makes catfish inactive. With such conditions in the past, we were more focused on zander fishing. However, this year we were lucky. We arrived to Spain at 17^th of March and stayed for two weeks at Riverside Lodge, the fishing camp run by my brother and his associate. The weather was nice with daily temperatures of 20-25 ℃, dropping down by night to 8-12 ℃. The temperature of the water was 11-12 ℃. We started good from the first day catching a couple of smaller cats and one big catfish of 230 cm, caught by my brother. And it was getting better and better. The next day, my father caught another one of 232 cm, followed by mine of 226 cm. My brother unfortunately renewed his tennis arm injury and he could not fish all the time with us. Even when he was fishing, he couldn’t manage to fight the fish himself, but my father or I had to take over his rod. Nevertheless, after one week, we already caught seven big ones and plenty of zanders and smaller cats. At the end of the first week of our stay, the weather changed. It started raining and even snowing in the mountains. One could see white colored mountain tops in the distance. This affected the fish activity, and in the next 3-4 days, we didn’t have much of big fish action. As the weather got warmer, the fish started to show more activity again.