Does anyone else sometimes concentrate on a float so hard that when it does go under, you forget just for a moment what it is that you're meant to do?
So there's a blank hole in time - of maybe a second or two - where you just look at that empty piece of water where your float used to be.
And sometimes - the worst of times - that moment when your brain starts to work again and instructs the hand to strike (hard as you can! it must be massive to have made the float just vanish....) is the precise same time as the float re-emerges, polaris-like into view, causing your over-enthusiastic strike to send your favourite float in to a tree.
I had a similar experience last summer on the wye. Feeder fishing at relatively close range, my attention had been caught by something away from my rod tip, probably the lovely scenery or some wildlife... when I looked back at the rod, the tip was round in a 90 degree angle to the rest of the rod, and just holding there, perfectly still.... and I just looked at it. And then looked at it some more, thinking "that's odd, it didn't look like that just a second ago...." About three or four seconds later, the very tip of the rod just trembled slightly and I realised that the reason for the bend was that it was attached to a fish that had bent the rod to the very limit... a lovely 9lb barbel which I was a little fortunate to land!
