More Mayfly Madness

With my original intention of fly fishing the river on hold due to my new fishing buddy having to work, I continued on with my investigation of the beck. Things looked promising as I peered over the bridge to see mayflies fluttering about.

Having entered the water at the bridge I found the first section to be unfishable with a fly rod due to low lying branches right across the water and a tunnel of hawthorns. There were, however, one or two fishing rising to the mayflies under the hawthorns. I attempted to drift a fly down to them by feeding the line down. Due to the swirling currents this didn't work, the fly kept dragging or swinging over to the wrong side.

Further upstream I found a trout, a veritable monster for this little beck, taking the odd mayfly. Hidden under a trailing briar, it would shoot out, grab an insect before dropping back underneath. My first cast, with a HWM, landed inches from the briar and was quickly grabbed. Luckily for me the fish shot upstream into the deeper water, after a bit of toing and froing it suddenly shot back downstream into it's lair and becoming firmly lodged there. By the time I had stumbled upstream to the briar the trout had gone, but not before knotting the tippet round a stem with a overhand knot.

After battling my way through more trailing branches I came to a very narrow section of fast moving water infested with minnows. Any fly I cast into the area was immediately nudge about by them. Passing through the area I came across some fish rising at he small midges, the mayfly had now disappeared. These turned out to be a shoal of little 4-5" dace, again they would happily nudge the dry flies about or splash at them and sink them. The fly life was now very sparse with only the occasional up-wing and a few midges to be seen.

 I continued to the top of this section with some speculative casting of one of the John Storey flies I tied earlier in the day. These had been treated with floatant on the hackle only so that the peacock body is under the water and the eye pointing at the sky, looking all wrong this is the correct way to fish it.

A cast to a couple of small trout feeding very close to the edge resulted in the tippet wrapping round a dead stalk before the fly landed on the water and was taken by one of the trout. The fish then proceeded to flap about frighten several fish away. Obviously it had fallen of by the time I got to it. As I was near the top of the section and with a long walk back I called it a day.