New Line - Same Grayling

I've had a nymph line for quite a while now but never used it. It's one of those lines that is supposed to work with weight 2-5 rods and having cast it about over grass with a couple of rods it does appear to work. How it worked on the water, I was about to find out. Setting up a czech nymph type rig, but with a split shot rather than a second dropper it performed as expected even when cast a bit further upstream, when I couldn't get along side the deeper runs. Not that it really mattered as I wasn't getting anything on this set up. 

Around midday a few fish started rising. A quick change to a #22 IOBO and four fish in four casts, tiny things mind you. I only photographed the one as I couldn't see the point in loads of photos of tiny grayling, preferring to flick them off the hook so as not to cause undue stress to them. The new line behaved well and landed the fly where I aimed it. After this though I was back to missing takes, left-right-and-centre. As the light altered, and with the help of the clip-ons, I could see what was going on. The clean takes occurred when only one fish was rising to the fly. When two or three fish all rose they missed. It appeared as if they had only one eye on lunch and the other on the competition.

After a couple more fish I moved on to the next spot where fish were rising. Again these were of a similar size and again caused similar hooking rate problems. One thing I noticed here, when the light was right, was there were some slightly larger fish that never seemed to rise to the fly. I tried bigger dries, traditional wets and various nymphs, all to no avail. I'd seen something similar years ago, only with considerably a larger grayling. I was happily taking fish around the 6-8oz mark when I noticed a few fish about three times the size, just seemingly hanging mid-water, ignoring everything. I sometimes wish I couldn't see what's going on as it can get rather frustrating.

By the time the sun had disappeared and the rises had stopped I'd taken 14 of the little beasties, as I was within site of the car and the temperature was plummeting rapidly I called it a day. The new line had performed rather well, in fact while dry fly fishing it had performed a lot better than I'd expected it would. Not sure how it would perform on a breezy day mind you, I'm sure I'll find out.