I feel like crying!

[no-one in particular]

Sometimes you misread the conditions. Sometimes you just lose your mojo for a bit, and have a few c**p sessions on the run. But an especially demoralising one is when you're next to someone fishing abominably and catching more. I took a novice - a former sea angler, stuck inland - with me for a few weeks one summer. His answer to the tactical demands of any peg on running or stillwater was one of those big flat Drennan block-ends. The sort a man targeting barbel with a gallon of maggots might use. It went in like a brick, and the pattern went CRASH.......I've got one on, Kev! Well done, Mate, I'd say, but I was thinking ....bloody hell.

I had a mate like that once, sea angler, fingers like sausages and he never could get used to tiny hooks etc. His answer was the biggest Polaris float you could buy and a big arsely bomb beneath it; no matter what we fished he would put this on and invariably he would miss bites all day, but he loved that float and I could never persuade him to change it. It was never the floats fault or his, the fish were always wrong.
But I have seen the beginners, useless gear, catch the best/most fish syndrome many times. I think us "experts" probably just overthink it all sometimes.