More Tadpoles Than Fish

It had just started to rain when I got to the parking spot, much as the weather forecast had said it would. This appeared to be one of the occasional showers, occasionally heavy. I sat in the car supping tea, waiting for it to ease off, which it did after 15 minutes. Wandering to the downstream end of the section didn't inspire me with confidence as I didn't see a single rise.












I started with a small foam beetle fished close to the edge or along the tree line as this was a tactic that had worked well after a rain when terrestrials get knocked out of the trees or bank-side vegetation. Didn't work this time though. Nor did anything else for that matter.  For two hours I made my way back upstream with out sign of a fish. I tried spiders, goldhead nymphs, dries large and small, emergers, non of which elicited a thing. I even hauled a couple of lures through a couple of the deeper pools.

 










Back at the car I met another angler who'd had a couple of fish on the upstream section,  before the downpour, but nothing after. He'd even tried worming to no effect . He doubted there would be any point fishing until the evening. Seven O'clock he reckoned. He was right. After spending another couple of hours fishless on another section, I caught my first fish of the day just after seven. This also caused a moment of panic. I reached to the pocket where I keep my phone only to find it unzipped,and empty. No sign of it in the other pockets either. If it had dropped out of the pocket the chances of finding were about nil, given the length of the vegetation and the fact I'd been wading as well. After a while I managed to convince myself I'd left the phone in the car.
 











I carried on fishing, upstream, with the size 16 Foam Dun that had caught the first fish and managed eleven more before arriving back at the car. The phone was on the parcel shelf, not the best place to leave it really. With about half an hours light left i I had a wander upstream and found several fish rising to olives in a largish pool. One problem though, I couldn't hit a take for love nor money. A change of fly and I was in. A larger than average fish, at seven inches. With plenty of fish still rising  and a couple looking a bit bigger I thought I might enjoy some more sport. A couple of mallards had other ideas though. Drifting into the pool with their ducklings before panicking and fleeing, wings flapping downstream right through the pool. Nothing stirred after that, so I took the hint and headed home.

The journey home was not with out incident either. Due to a broken tractor on a single track road, I had to take a different route to usual. This involved going through a few wooded areas and the deer were on the move. Several times I had to brake sharpish as they bounded across the road.