I am really excited about getting on the water tomorrow, even if only for a few hours.
New patterns to take for a swim and, of course, my first session with the new Hardy Zenith 10' 3wt!!
I decided it was time to get my act together in preparation for the spring, particularly for specific hatches including various uprights like BWO's and LDO's, Danica and yellow mays... so here's what's shaping up
BWO/LDO:
Danica emerger:
Yellow may emerger:
mainly variations on patterns that have worked for me in previous years with the incorporation of stuff that I think I have evolved over the last year...
I did a talk at the Sussex Fly dressers Guild last night. We had a lot of fun talking fly pattern design and I demonstrated the Yarn Spider and the Pettis egg.
I fished with Jeremy last year September in Poland and again in November on his home water the Cumbrian Eden. Jeremy is thoroughly engrossed in perfecting fly presentation. I really enjoy spending time with people that are fanatical about an aspect of flyfishing... they're never boring and you usually learn an immense amount about a specific subject far quicker than if you occasionally thought about that corner of the sport by yourself, from time to time.
When we fished the Eden together the river was very high and pretty discoloured, not great for fishing, so we spent the few hours of afternoon light standing in the river messing about with Jeremy's Leader to Hand technique. Jeremy has worked with recent developments in leader design, such as the French nymphing concepts, to develop 30 foot leader that casts like a light flyline and provides for drag free drifts you won't believe possible.
Jeremy explains in detail here and you can visit his site here. I shot a quick video of Jeremy working his leader system, it's not easy to film this in a way that clearly shows the leader, but isn't that the point? It's thin, near invisible, light as a feather and effortless to cast. Note that in most of the drifts he is achieving more than 30 feet in drag free drift and in the last drift he mends upstream to extend the drift below him totalling over 60 feet of drag free drift! Yes, I was there and achieved it myself... you need to try this.
I think this might be the catalyst for the next major evolution in flyline design...
re-reading John Gierach's "Even Brook Trout get the blues" for the umpteenth time I was reminded of this great line from Robert Traver:
... And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant and not nearly so much fun.” ― Robert Traver
My mate Jacques and I fished the Lambourn in Newbury yesterday. This is a very pretty little chalkstream with a good population of Grayling. we fished the Donnington Grove beat, which flows past a golf course so there were a lot balls in the water... I didn't get used to that.
The water was extremely low, really worrying given we're in mid winter and in a drought.
We were looking for grayling and we did find some but they were extremely difficult: maybe because of the low water, maybe because there were huge amounts of stocked browns everywhere. It was difficult to keep the fly clear of stockies in some areas.
Eventually I got a grayling to play ball. He was right against a bed of cress on the bank, nosing about in the silt. We had seen the odd redd, with some wild browns managing to spawn in amongst the stockies so i decided to try a small egg pattern... as the silt cleared from his nose he saw the egg coming downstream at him and he lunged forward and had it!
The river had a good head of wild fish so it made no sense to stock at all, especially some of the leviathans we saw charging up and down the river freaking out the wild trout and grayling.
.JPG)
.JPG)
