Hello friends,
Couple of days back I and Ali while discussing angling locations in and around Mumbai, decided to head towards Nasik (200 km from Mumbai) to check few locations, meet family & friends and attend the Independence day party at the army's Temple Hill Institute at Deolali..
We left Mumbai in the late afternoon on 14th on an exciting but back breaking journey to Deolali (road was littered with potholes).
At deolali, we received a warm welcome at the beautiful army bungalow by Mrs. Javed (Mr. Javed is a high ranking Army officer & Ali's brother-in-law).
The decided program was to;
I'll go to meet an old friend in nasik
we all meet at the party at the army institute at by 9.00 Pm (I was late as usual but it was a fantastic experience )
wakeup early and leave by 6.00 Am sharp to Barve dam with Ali's friend Ashish.
Ashish arived sharp at 6.00am & we left for a wrongly informed "only 9 Km, 15 min" journey to barve dam.. it turned out to be 22 Km, one hour cross country road journey (the road looked like it was indiscriminately shelled by nearby artillery school)
The water at barve dam was very high & brown in colour with local fishermen telling us to come back once the water level goes down & the color improves if we seriously want to catch fish.. (was not an encouraging news as I was almost awake the whole night dreaming about my first murrel).
We decided no matter what the local wisdom says we will check couple of locations around the dam for murrel waters. In the process we walked for miles and made 100's of castings.
It was not a easy thing to do as we had to walk through ankle deep mud with all the gear.. on top of it, it was raining, very windy & cold, lots of snags and no sight of any fish activity..
Then, as Ali was trying to free his snagged spoon, I thought I'll make one last cast before I go and try to help him and then we head on to another location.
As I was reeling in my 4 no. mepps, at a distance of 7 to 8 feet from the banks, I saw a something dark coming in after the spinner, I knew it was a murrel, with a big open mouth & dark eyes the murrel looked real greedy, but so was I looking at a fish I wanted to catch for a long time.
the murrel took the spinner and turned to go back in to the deep, having heard stories of murrel spitting back spinners there was a no second chance from me, on a tight drag it was pulled out in seconds, but every moment of it will be remembered for long.
A nice 2 kg something murrel, my first.
The place should be a lure fishing heaven for murrel & Wallago attu once the waters are clear and we have promised fishes that we'll be back
The rest of the day was spent waking some more miles in mud, making few more hundred casting, getting wet, and in the process we enjoyed exploring a part of our beautiful country ..
Santosh
Here are some pics..
On way to nasik
Ali & Ashish at the dam wall
spoon casting
Murrel on Mepps No. 4
Lunch break
Dam history