Pascal Bouillon: Spring means waking up

I had only just left autumn behind me, barely celebrated Christmas and New Year's Eve and the new season was already just around the corner. We anglers feel spring earlier than everyone else and long before the birds start chirping again in the morning. It's the first warm wind from the south-west, the first warm low pressure in February that wakes us up.
Anyone who loves fishing like I do will understand me: It's the same every year and yet never quite the same.

 

Yes, I go into a new season less meticulously prepared, but the euphoria and passion are unchanged.

My primary fishing destinations are no longer hundreds of kilometres away, but I also find goals and satisfaction in my home climes.
I no longer buy useless tackle and fewer small items than before, but what I really need is always to hand.

The time of great doggedness seems to be over, but when I sit at the helm at night in the wind and rain, I feel it as if it had never been gone.
I still get annoyed when I lose a fish in the wood or all the good spots on my target water are taken. It still makes me nervous when I'm sitting in meetings in the right weather instead of being on the water, but all that has become easier than it used to be.

And as long as lightness dominates and well-dosed doggedness always wins when it counts, you've made it. Okay, I don't manage to do that often enough, but more and more often.

And so it can happen that you put old beliefs behind you, take a chance on something new and spring suddenly turns out to be completely different to what you originally thought.
So this spring I actually gave new lures a chance, and believe it or not, it was worth it.

It was the first time in what felt like ages that I hadn't been to France for a whole spring. While others were making the big blue reservoirs of the south unsafe or pulling fish out of the reeds of the lowland lakes, I stayed in Good Old Germany. And it was okay. 

I caught a few fish early in the year when the water was still freezing cold and quickly got the feeling for the new season. We spent the entire Easter holidays on holiday without fishing at all, and that was okay too.
Overall, I fished a little less than I wanted to, but I was as focussed as ever. And on at least two days, I managed the feat of being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. You know these days and probably love them as much as I do, because the big ones bite on them and no matter what you do, it seems to work.

Alexander Kobler convinced me at some point to join his Hammer Family. With a good mix of charisma and angler DNA, an interesting bait project and, last but not least, the prospect of being able to write about my fishing again, he had an easy time of it.
Spring may officially be over, but the season will certainly still provide us all with plenty of adrenaline and adventure. If I can still provide some entertainment from time to time, that's my greatest pleasure.

Fishing and storytelling go hand in hand, because entertaining stories about fishing can be compared to the start of a new fishing year: ‘They all sound the same, but they're never quite the same.’

A la bien cousins!

Pascal