Casualty.....and a reminder of what it's all about.

Photographing Ephemerids, I've found out recently, is not as easy as you might think. Given a compact camera with a macro focus function, it's not too difficult as there is plenty of latitude with shutter speed and depth of field, meaning that just by pointing and clicking a decent image can be made.

However, I recently embarked upon a more ambitious project to catalogue in some semi-scientific kind of way, the males and females of each life cycle stage of the British Ephemeroptera. Proper, detailed macro photography and associated control of exposure, background etc, requires a dedicated macro lens mounted on a digital SLR; and with that come all sorts of difficulties concerning sharpness at narrow apertures, depth of field, slower shutter speeds when dialing in exposure compensation to lighten a white background etc etc etc

This is not a photography blog however, so I won't bore you with techno-geek camera talk. Suffice to say that the biggest challenge facing the would-be macro photographer, is that of keeping the bloody insect still for long enough to get a blur-free shot. The only really workable solution I have come up with to date involves chilling the critter until it becomes slow and dopey - but not so long that it expires from hypothermia.

Which is exactly what happened here. Mr olive upright (Rithrogena semicolorata), had all of two minutes in the chest freezer.....and came out stone dead. I feel a little guilty about this as most of my subjects make a full recovery from their icy sojourn and are released in the back garden. But my conclusion is this: olive uprights are to the Ephemeroptera, what rich tea are to dunking biscuits - lacking in moral fibre. I'll never see them in the same light again.

On a positive note, I am compelled to direct you to one of the best reads I've come across in a long while. Mike Cooper's blog Trout vs Fly is a delight and his latest posting concerning a recent trip from his native Kent, up to the Eden Valley, left me smiling from ear to ear. It's been a good few years since I made the transition from coarse fishing, through small stillwater trouting, finally to arrive by the banks of a wild river, and I confess I had forgotten about the feeling I had when first I began to explore our northern rivers in search of the trout and grayling therein.

Lucky as I am to live in this part of the world, it's easy to take what we have for granted - the scenery, the rivers, the opportunity for complete solitude. Fly fishing is such an absorbing pastime that it's almost inevitable we become more and more involved, descending ever deeper into the minutiae of analysis - weather and the season's changes; entomology, river levels, predation, farming practices and so on. Reading Mike's blog brought back again that purest feeling of joy in catching a wild brown trout - unlikely golden treasure from the flinty depths. The short video partway down the post is worth the visit alone, I promise.

As I write, the countryside continues to bloom into summer and with it, I hear much improved reports from our rivers this week. The next few days will see me out in the waders at some point, maybe proving to myself that I can catch a fish or two at times? Fingers crossed.

Tying in threes......

For those of you who have yet to listen to Glen Pointon's podcasts, might I recommend that now is a good time to start. The most recent edition features an interview with Stuart Crofts on biosecurity, Tenkara and the fun side of fly fishing generally. Glen's accent might be damn near unintelligible to those of us not residing near his native Potteries, but you cannot fault the guy's initiative in setting up such an enterprising venture; and you cannot help but smile at his immense enthusiasm for the sport. Good work Glen, keep it up!

Like I said, Stuart Crofts pops up on the latest edition. I've always been a big fan of Stuart's style and admire the great generosity with which he gives his time and advice to everyone he meets. My favourite part of this particular interview is where he describes the regime of his one time fly tying mentor:

tie in threes: one to fish, one to lose and one to give away

What a great way to go about your tying! I tried it out this afternoon, lashing together a triumvirate of Adams parachutes, which made a nice change from my usual attempt to tie at least half a dozen. This isn't a pattern I use all that often, so three will be plenty...and the first person I meet next time I'm out on the river will be getting one of them!

  

An explanation?

http://www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/?p=3840

Another slow session at the weekend got me feeling a little bit despondent. With grannom streaming off in their thousands, just where were the fish? Nymphing with suitably 'caddis-y' patterns produced a few fish but overall the going was extremely slow.

Well the above link might go some way to providing an explanation. If, as this study of trout scale readings suggests, the trout growth and related activity is 4-6 weeks behind normal, then we can expect some sort of normality to be reached any time now......hopefully!

A retrograde step.

Last weekend saw yet another interruption to the forward progression of spring when the winds again turned north easterly and a peppering of snow on the high Pennines heralded a return to winter grayling type conditions on our local rivers. Another month of this rubbish and we will be able to sum the preceding year's weather thus:

"It pissed down all summer, turned straight to winter, and then went completely to ratshit "

It's Godawful stuff and the whole north of England fly fishing fraternity is bloody sick of it. Keeping up with mates via email, text, twitter etc reveals a sorry tale in the making: Annan, Aire, Eden, Wharfe, you name it - the same frustrations vented as my fellow anglers brave the elements to pick off what little sport can be had with fish which seem to have hardly come out of hibernation mode. When will it all end?

I had the pleasure of guests last weekend. The fishing may have been more erratic than bambi on tranquilisers, but there was the consolation of good company at least. Paul and Dave had spent the Saturday on the AAA day ticket water at Bolton Willows whilst I scratted around our club water trying desperately to locate potential targets for the following day when we would meet up and fish together. This reconnaissance mission proved pretty pointless as I learned nothing which I didn't already know (ie that the going would be very tough), whilst avoiding the blank myself courtesy only of a suicidal 12 incher late in the day.
Meanwhile Dave and Paul had struggled on a completely dead Bolton Willows; a tough introduction to the delights of the Eden Valley.

Sunday may have offered a slight improvement in conditions, but little more in the way of sport. We nymphed some pools up to lunchtime and then staked out a couple of likely spots, on the lookout for rising trout. This proved only partially successful: I did manage to find one feeding fish during a brief flurry of dark olives, which afforded Dave his chance to cast to a big Eden brownie. For someone with very little flyfishing experience indeed, he did a sterling job and managed to rise, hook and land this corking trout of just over 2lb in weight. Well done that man!

Otherwise, chances were at a premium. Insect activity was restricted to occasional dribbles of olives, a few midge, and a single adult grannom (first one I have seen this year). As the afternoon wore on there was a tangible sense that we just were not going to see any proper sport, that the residents were not yet prepared to move onto spring feeding lies. As if to squeeze a little value out of the day, we spent a couple of hours searching late on, and it is to Paul's great credit that he managed to extract a couple of trout and two spanking - although out of season - grayling, thereby rescuing some return from an otherwise dour day. Dave even managed to drop a very large fish whilst upstream nymphing a likely spot, which may have gone some way to increasing his confidence in a method he was previously unfamiliar with. A small victory maybe, but on a day like this sometimes small victories are enough!

Paul into a fish....

Later in the week I met with Rob Denson, Stu Llewellyn and Phil Price for our now traditional opening day meet on Malham Tarn. Except this year we eschewed the delights of that particular water in favour of easier pickings on nearby Stocks Reservoir, for reasons I won't bore you with here.

In marked contrast to my most recent Eden trip, the sport was hectic and not altogether testing, although I did my best to make it so by fishing like a complete plonker. Such days come to us all I guess.....but I really did have a personal nightmare afloat on the northern shallows and with hindsight I was probably lucky not to have been cast overboard by Phil on account of my near constant moaning, cussing and generally childish behaviour!
With recent returns on the reservoir being excellent and the day's conditions looking good, we motored north in absolute certainty that we would catch - the only question was how many. Well two hours into the session, the answer from the Eastham-Price boat was 'not fecking many'....none in fact. I'm still not sure where we were going wrong, but a couple of hundred yards away, Rob and Stu were already into double figures.

I'm not a competitive angler by nature, but that sort of thing can lead to envy and frustration; and whilst Phil and I quietly stewed and talked of the other two using maggots and stinkbait, my normally organised boat fishing approach went completely to crap. I got my team of three wrapped around the prop, re-built my leader only to snarl it irretrievably around my rod tip on the very next cast....then spent the entire next drift re-building again....only to tangle once more. Then I got the point fly stuck in one of the drogue ropes on a sloppy back cast......... you get the idea; I was about ready to break my rods and start a John Cleese-esque kicking the boat routine.

Fortunately, we (well I - Phil was quietly getting on with things with no drama), eventually got our act together and started finding fish. And when we did, the action came thick and fast. The rainbows seemed to be herded together in the northern shallows and along the bank up to the causeway and drift after drift brought fish to the net. I continued to fish like a pillock, but somehow managed to keep catching. I finished on 17 for the day and Phil's 13 made the boat tally up to an ostensibly respectable 30.
However, to introduce some perspective to things, Rob and Stu finished on 24 and 30 fish respectively - in my view, a truer realisation of the potential we sensed at the start of the day. Well done lads, that was good fishing!

As I write a week later, the weather does seem to have taken a turn for the better. Temperatures are creeping into double figures and the sun is occasionally showing itself. On a normal year, I would be turning my thoughts to the start of evening fishing on our rivers, but at the moment that still seems like a distant glimmer of light. At what point will this horribly late spring catch up and we reach a point of 'equilibrium restored' I wonder?

Barnsfold: Roe and Rudd.

A bit of a strange one at Barnsfold last night. Usually on a mild evening in mid April, you would expect the place to be alive with hatching midge and Frank Casson's fine rainbow trout rising to sip the struggling emergers from the surface film. However, despite the conditions appearing favourable for such an event, the place was weirdly quiet. Maybe we really are still a month behind normality for this time of year.

I did find sport, just not in the expected manner. A very occasional riser convinced me that if the trout weren't exactly surface feeding, then they would surely be mooching about in the upper layers. So on one rod I set up a floating line and a team of diawl bachs and nymphs, whilst on the other I went for a fast glass intermediate with a black and green cormorant on the top dropper ahead of a pair of nymphs. Luckily the fish showed interest in the former set up almost straight away, a 'tweaky' figure of eight retrieve bringing a couple of nice rainbows early on, although a fishless half hour followed before I connected with a third.

As it turned out, that was the pattern of the evening for me: a couple of quick fish followed by a lull necessitating a move to another spot. One thing which did surprise me was that half of the fish I caught appeared to be in spawning condition, and not the triploid rainbow trout one would expect. The fish below in particular was obviously full of roe, vent extruded ready to release:

Later on, I did finally get some surface sport. A sparse hatch of big black midge brought a few fish up as the breeze died and the sun began to sink. Problem is, not many of them were trout! I ended up scaling my gear right down and enjoying a fun half hour locking horns with pods of cruising rudd, returning half a dozen bronzed beauties up to perhaps half a pound. Again, not what I had expected.....but a good test of the reflexes!

The evening's main point of interest for me though, was the fact that of the 9 trout I returned, every single one of them came to the same pattern - the scruffy black nymph in the top photo, which I had on both rods - point position on the floater 'DB' set up and middle dropper on the intermediate. It has proved useful for me in the past, although never to such a degree as last night. The original version was given to me by a friend, along with a batch of the synthetic hackle material which is used in its tying. I've included the dressing of my variant below for the benefit of any fellow visitors to Barnsfold who may wish to give it a swim.

Scruffy Black Nymph
Hook: FM comp heavyweight #10 or 12
Thread: black UTC 70
Tails: black cock fibres
Body: black Hareline 'pseudo hackle' trimmed short
Cheeks: JC splits
Head: gold Lite Brite and chocolate brown Diamond Brite
Varnish: three coats of Hard As Nails liberally soaked into head dubbing

Tying to order.

Although I don't make a habit out of tying flies for sale, I do occasionally take an order on request. Recently I've received more enquiries than usual - presumably due to the start of the season and folks realising their fly boxes are looking a bit empty - and it has reminded me why I have avoided such enterprises to date.

Tying to sell is so much different than tying for oneself, or even for mates. The moment cash is accepted from a fellow fisherman in exchange for your wares, a duty is imposed to produce the goods; not only to the best standard of which you are capable, but to a deadline. Ok, well not a deadline as such, but you get my meaning - it's one thing taking a week or two to honour an order, but another thing entirely to make your customer wait six months! For someone like me with too little spare time on their hands and a tendency to throw out dressings of an appalling quality from time to time, the net result is that every time I agree to supply some flies, I do so with sweaty palms a touch of anxiety.

I have a friend who is far better at this like than me. He ties beautifully neat stillwater patterns, in impressive quantity, very quickly and rakes in a good wedge of pocket money in the process. In my case, the economics just don't stack up so well. Consider the following example:

I was recently asked for £20 worth a north country spiders. At a market rate of £1.10 each that comes to 17 flies, allowing just over a quid for postage costs - so £18.70 in the pocket. Let's deduct our costs:

Hooks: Mustad R50s. Ok, so I bought mine in bulk from the States, but when shipping is added the cost per hook works out more or less the same as buying packs of 25 from the UK - 12p.

Silk: Pearsalls at about £3.70 per spool. I'm not sad enough to do work out how many flies I get from a spool of Pearsalls, but lets say 100nr at a rough guess - 3.7p per fly

Hackle: again, difficult to quantify. This afternoon was spent on orange and yellow partridges, using a male grey partridge skin at £20. Given the relative dearth of #14, 16 & 18 sized neck and shoulder feathers off the bird, lets be conservative and say 5p per fly.

So, total material cost per fly = roughly 20p per fly = £3.40 for this order.

Net profit therefore is in the region of £15.30

Now bear in mind that I'm not a particularly fast tyer. I reckon that a basic spider pattern takes me about 5 minutes to tie, which should result in a yield of 12 per hour.......but factor in the inevitable rejections, false starts, coffee breaks, leg stretches etc etc etc and in reality my output is probably half that. In other words, this order for 17 flies is going to equate to at least a couple of hours work - at profit of £7.65 per hour max!

Worth the effort? Well yes and no. It's clear that this is not a 'get rich quick' scheme. And it's also clear why most commercial fly tying operations employ cheap materials and African labour in order to squeeze the maximum profit out of a fairly marginal business. At the end of the day though, a bit of bonus cash is always welcome for doing something which in all honesty isn't too much of a chore. It helps to keep my eye in at the vice, and there is always that important - but less easily quantifiable - factor of personal pride: the satisfaction of thinking that someone somewhere might just be catching fish on a fly you tied.

This afternoon's spiders are for a gentleman from Northern Ireland. He's had some off me before so hopefully he will find them to be of the expected quality. Partridge and orange, followed by partridge and yellow. Next week I'll make up the balance in waterhen bloas.....Goddam it, dubbing on that mole fur is going to erode my profit margin yet further. Note to self: don't ever, EVER, take an order for Oliver Edwards style heptagenid nymphs!

Cormorant damage/damaged cormorant

Something approaching normal spring conditions greeted me on the Eden yesterday. Although the river had risen with a couple of inches of chilly snow melt, the air was mild and still and chaffinches were singing in the bankside trees. For the first time this year, it was a real pleasure to be fishing.

The day passed off without much of real note. After an hour's fruitless searching with nymphs, I noticed the first LDO (and later on March brown) duns begin to cluster on the current seams, and shortly after an odd trout starting to rise. I made the switch to tapered leader and dry fly and enjoyed a couple of hours of steady sport with fish averaging around the pound. It wasn't exactly hectic, but there were definite signs of a river coming back to life.

However, there were also signs of a threat to this river's equilibrium. We anglers are only too aware of the damage that can be done by cormorants. I'll be honest and say that I've never seen more than an odd one or two at any one time, but I hear all the time of huge roosts of them lower down our rivers - counts of 40-50 birds in fish-plundering pockets. Who can say what damage that sort of population can do?

I saw first hand evidence of this yesterday, and it was shocking. Two of the trout I caught - both fish over the pound mark - exhibited signs of cormorant damage. One of these in particular had taken a right old mauling and had open splits in the skin on both of its flanks. If these birds are capable of tackling 14 inch trout, then the impact they have on the smaller fish population must be massive. It's all a bit depressing.

There was one moment of karma though: later on I took a walk along one of our beats further upstream and found the rotting carcass of one of the big birds washed up in the branches of a bankside willow. How it met its end was impossible to ascertain, but the important thing was that the stinking, slimy great thing was dead and staying dead. A small victory in a battle we anglers look destined to lose.

Some photos:

The two mauled fish:

One of the culprits?

They're here!

The March browns were very much in evidence on the middle Eden this afternoon, offering the fish a meaty alternative to the large dark olives which trickled off after lunch. I snaffled a couple and took them home to photograph - a male and a female, although I had failed to notice that Mr MB was missing a couple of legs. So I had to settle for the above image only - female sub imago of Rithrogena germanica. A more handsome fly you will struggle to find around these parts.

Jingle Away!

Ah the Jingler! A fly I've raved about more than once I admit. It goes against all my fly tying instincts and yet has proved again recently - as it did last spring - to be uncommonly effective amongst early season fish. Of the 11 I've landed in my first two sessions so far, 9 have been to the Jingler, and I still can't get over the way the trout so gratefully accept this untidy haystack of a pattern.

Why this should be so is still a mystery to me; I'm clutching at tenuous evidence here, but this is my hyposthesis:
Although fully collar hackled dry flies seemed to fade from fashion on northern rivers some years ago, I do know a handful of anglers who still swear by such traditional patterns in the early season only. One such chap opts for the Kite's Imperial, ginked up and fishing on it's 'tippy toes' for example. My own experience has brought me to conclude that in the spring, fish do indeed seem a tad more receptive to fully dry patterns than the emergers we rely on so heavily these days. Why so?

My theory concerns the lower water temperatures we encounter at this time of year. Cooler water means a greater degree of surface tension - the cohesive force of water molecules which allows insects and other lightweight, but denser than water objects to sit atop the surface. In the context of our early season large dark olives and March browns, that may mean the emerging duns have greater difficulty breaking through the meniscus into fresh air, but it also means that once there, they stand right up on their toes, well clear of the surface film. The photo below illustrates this adequately (apologies for the poor quality, it is a heavy crop of a slightly out of focus shot):

See how this large dark olive (photographed on the Ribble in air temperatures of only 5C last week), makes contact with the surface only via its feet and the tip of one tail.....and possibly a very short section of the upper abdomen, although it's impossible to tell for sure from here.

Viewed from below, this dun will manifest as a dark shadow above several small, individual dimples of refracting light. This is interesting because it may explain why high riding collar hackled patterns are so effective at this time of year....and it would also suggest that the abdomen colour of our chosen fly matters not one bit as the only part of the insect's colour visible via transmitted light is likely to be the wings.....but that's a discussion for another day.
This all of course relies upon the assumption that later in the season when water temperature increases and so surface tension decreases, then the newly emerged duns ride lower in the surface film, possibly with the full length of abdomen lying against the surface.....perhaps explaining the greater effectiveness at that time of patterns such as the paradun and various low riding cdc based duns? I'll be keeping a close eye on this and will confirm findings in due course.

It's a shaky hypothesis at best, but one which might have at least some valid grounding. The timing aspect certainly seems to correlate, as in the case of the Jingler its effectiveness drops off markedly after the end of April. I think the truth might lie somewhere in a combination of the above surface tension factor, coupled with the large profile of the fly (which undoubtedly appeals to hungry spring fish on the lookout for a good protein rich meal), and the use of partridge hackle at the front end - an embelishment which for reasons known only to the fish, always proves a good bet. Whatever, it works a bloody treat and that's all we really need to know!

I stocked up on them recently. The licence to be slapdash and scruffy with my flytying is a liberation. I'm not a neat tyer by nature and the Jingler allows me to get away with this in pleasing fashion. That said, compared to what I've seen of the native Scottish original, my version is relatively lightly dressed so perhaps I need to get even more heavy handed with the hackle! These have worked for me though, and in spectacular fashion. With warmer weather upon us and the potential for a feeding frenzy very much on the cards, I'd definitely recommend giving this pattern a go in the coming weeks.


Large Dark Olive Jingler

Hook: Partridge SLD #14
Thread: Griffiths sheer 14/0 cinnamon
Tails: Coq de Lyon, tied in long-ish
Abdomen: thread, stripped quill, dubbing, or as used here, Hends body quill
Collar hackle: leggy red cock, tied long and bushy
Head hackle: grey partridge tied concave (ie wrong way round) and long

Weird Science

So that's it then; officially the coldest March since 1962 and more of the same expected well into April. At least we are not alone - I read in this morning's paper that a German circus lost their entire 300 strong band of performing fleas when they froze to death in transit. Still, it's all pretty depressing and not at all what we wanted after suffering the Chinese water torture of last season's proceedings.

Until today I hadn't had the chance to fish. Nothing to do with the weather - it could have been the mildest March on record and I would have had to look on in frustration as others fished dry fly in shirt sleeves - but it is fair to say that whilst I've done a whole bunch of thinking about fishing, not once have I honestly wished I was actually out there. Correspondence with several talented anglers I know has revealed the early going to be unsurprisingly tough, with much talk of water temperature and the threshold at which trout actually start to become active. A couple of chaps have been lucky and skilled enough to land on a decent hatch of large dark olives allowing a brief spell of dry fly sport; others report seeing good numbers of fly on the water, but a total lack of interest from the trout......and one or two more report seeing nothing at all to indicate there is any life in their river whatsoever.

Taking this into account, I have wondered if it's worth venturing out at all. But as the great Dale Winton famously says, "you've got to be in it to win it", and the holding of that thought along with a modicum of desperation, drove me out onto the Ribble today. What ensued was weird science - a reminder that sometimes, the only predictable thing about fly fishing is its sheer unpredictability. And yet if there is a time of year when river fly fishing can be regimental in its nature, surely this is it. We know what time of day to be on the water almost to the minute. We know what the trout will be feeding on and what patterns to use to fool them.....and we know that by teatime the action will likely be over and we can drive home without fear of missing an evening rise. I have come to love this predictability early season and the comfort which comes with the various elements - reassurance that the river is as healthy as I left it last autumn.

I wasn't expecting to find much comfort today. A bitterly cold easterly wind blew downstream and both air and water temperature hovered around the 4.5C (40F) mark - precisely the aforementioned threshold below which many experts believe trout cease to feed.

Brrrrrrrrr!

  I had a couple of spots in mind which would offer some shelter from the unforgiving breeze and made a beeline for them, as much seeking warmth myself as in the hope of finding a hatch. When I arrived at the first pool after a long walk upstream, various factors seemed to have coalesced to result in pretty much perfect conditions; and this is where the Weird Science begins.........

In the film of the same name - as anyone who grew up in the '80s will fondly recall - our two adolescent protagonists feed a set of 'requirements' into a preposterously unlikely computer set-up in order to create from scratch, a real woman. Breast size, leg length, model looks and so on, are all specified....and when the button is pressed and a sudden blast of dry ice clears from the room, out from the ether walks Kelly LeBrock. Truly the stuff of teenage dreams.

Spring fishing is much like this (bear with me here!), in that we look for a set of favourable variables to coincide in order to make the difference between thrashing the water of an apparently lifeless river, and enjoying a few hours of first class dry fly sport. These are some of the things we know:

1. If trout are going to rise it will most likely be to a hatch of large dark olives. Midge and  - if your river has them - March browns, also factor....but usually we are looking for the LDO.
2. The hatch will take place sometime between 11am and 4pm with noon to 2pm being the optimum window in 'normal' conditions.
3. We need the water temperature to be sufficient to allow invertebrates (and trout) to become active, but cool air temperatures are actually to be embraced. If it is too warm and sunny, the olives get off the water and away far too quickly. Under cold, leaden skies, they remain anchored to the surface and it takes only a relative trickle of them to attract the trouts' interest.
4. Hatches can be extremely localised and it pays to cover ground during the times mentioned above as finding inactivity in one pool can be followed by a bonanza just a few yards away in the next.
5. If it's windy and unpleasant, try to find a few sheltered spots and look for the fish there.

Bearing in mind the above, the odds should have been in my favour when I arrived at that first pool. All the right bits had been plugged into the supercomputer and I expected our Kelly to turn up at any moment...well, a few rising trout anyways. The surface of the pool was littered with so many stricken duns, clustering in the eddies away from the worst of the wind. But not a single fish stirred during the half hour I waited and watched. I poked about in the margins and scum accumulations - always a sure fire way of finding out what is going on insect-wise. As well as the olives, thousands of midge were in evidence, the photo below being an example of maybe 4 inches across.

With so much food on the water, it seemed incredible that the trout would refuse to stir, low temperatures or not. I fruitlessly prospected the pool with spiders before heading off downstream......
and that's where things took a really surprising turn.

Part way back to the car I passed a normally productive pool which today resembled a wind whipped lake, so fresh was the breeze channeled down the valley. As I mooched slowly past, I heard something which sounded suspiciously like the 'sloop' of a feeding fish...then again....and again. Hunched down in the grasses, I watched as it slowly became apparent that the pool was alive with large dark olives! The duns were streaming out in huge numbers and scudding about on the surface, pirouetting and skating along in the ruffles of the surface. The supercomputer should have generated Ann Widdecombe's uglier sister, but amazingly, the further upstream I looked, the more rising fish I marked - they seemed to be quartering around, chasing down the windblown olives at will! Amazing stuff and proof once more that we fly fishers never stop learning new things about the places we fish.

I'd love to say that I set about these early season fish with elegance and grace.....but the truth is I thrashed my way into the wind in an very agricultural manner. Line control was nigh on impossible and the first two fish were both dropped. The next two were missed altogether, and then the penny dropped: I reverted to a square or slightly downstream presentation, keeping low and kneeling on the river bed to avoid being seen through the gin clear water. In this manner I was at least able to introduce some control to proceedings and fish soon followed. A couple of out of season grayling and four nice trout fell to the jingler and olive emerger before I gave up with fingers feeling colder than at any point during the winter. I reckon there were 10-12 fish feeding in that 30yd long section of pool at one point - what a turn up for the books! None were large, nearly all of them being around 12 inches; but the fish below at maybe a shade over the pound, was the best of the day......and given the conditions, I'll settle for that.

To the Eden next and, I suspect, and altogether sterner challenge!

A web of spiders...

Ready to go: a dozen yellow partridge spiders, tied for a FFF fly swap.......

Crawling out from under a stone near you!

Ecdyonurus torrentis, the large brook dun. Turn a few littoral stones over in your local spate stream and you'll like as not find a few of these handsome beasts clinging to the underside. Some anglers have observed the duns hatching in open water a la the March brown - the two flies certainly look similar to the untrained eye. However I have rarely found this emergence regime to be prevalent on my local waters, the nymphs hereabouts preferring to crawl out onto the surface of part submerged stones before making their break for freedom. As a result, large brook duns don't really figure in our plans as they are seldom available to the trout in significant numbers. They are still one of my favourites though: once I see the unmistakeable speckled brown of the big duns creeping about the margins, I know for sure that spring has arrived.

Icy Grip

Arggghhhhh!!! Whatever aspirations I had to resume trouting in a timely fashion have been obliterated by winter weather which just refuses to bugger off. A high pressure block and associated cold easterlies continue to fend off the benevolent advances of the warmer gulf stream air -  a situation made all the more galling by the fact that after last year's abysmal summer, I was more excited about the start of the season than I have been for some years.

A few hardy souls have braved the elements and made a start......but then again, few fish have been caught. Several very experienced anglers I know have made blank starts to their seasons; and if they have struggled, what hope for a thrasher like me? No, the rods remain stashed and my frustration steadily grows.

I did sneak a couple of hours right at the start of the month, back when the course of spring seemed to be following the expected trajectory, back before all this Barely Above Freezing nonsense occurred. I happily checked off all the usual signs: the song of the chaffinch, blackbirds ducking in and out of hedgerows, and the unfurling leaves of celandines in the hedge bottoms. All appeared in order as I walked the banks of the River Ribble, although a strong easterly was making its presence felt, even then. Only when I found a wooded corner of the river where the surface remained unruffled by the wind, did I find any signs of life. There along a small pool, olives were hatching; and not just a sparse trickle but a good steady procession.
Two grayling were rising to them periodically and I gratefully extended a first line of the year over the rearmost of them. The fish played its part and sipped down the artificial, and I made sure the start was an inauspicious one by knocking it off on the strike. That in turn sent the upstream fish down and signalled an end to proceedings. Well done that man.

All that remained was to collect a couple of the large dark olive duns (male and female), kick starting my long term project to photographically catalogue the northern species of Ephemeroptera. More on that another time perhaps, but in the meantime, a by-product of my attempts to arrive at some sort of standardised photo set up for the specimens, threw up one or two more unconventional images. I thought the one below might be interesting to show - a head-on view of the business end of Baetis rhodani. I like it because it illustrates so well the large bulbous eyes of the male insect - a feature common to all upwing chaps, and one which I believe evolved as a response to their tendency to congregate beneath the swarming female spinners at mating time. Not surprising perhaps - I know the 'bottom view' has always made my eyes widen!

Baetis rhodani (male sub imago)

Gallery

Out of sheer boredom I was thumbing through some back copies of Trout & Salmon magazine, and was inexplicably drawn to the long running 'Gallery' section where readers post in their photos of notable captures. I think the edition I was reading was from the early '90s or thereabouts and it struck me that the standard of photography was - perhaps understandably given the advances in technology over the last two decades - frankly abysmal.

So I began to look at more recent copies and found much the same. And then it dawned on me: the problem wasn't one of image resolution, equipment, or even print quality. No, much worse than that, the issue seems to be a fundamental lack of awareness amongst some anglers as to what constitutes an appropriate manner in which to display your fish of a lifetime.

So if you've ever recoiled in horror at the alarming visage of a gurning sportsman, wondered what the hell that is on the kitchen unit behind, or shaken your head in dismay at the bleached carcass of a once beautiful game fish, then I bid you a happy new year and proudly present.......Trout and Salmon Gallery: the very worst of. Tony Hart will be turning in his grave.

#10. There's only one thing better than catching an about-to-spawn cock fish and that's bear hugging it for a photo with your mate, in which the mighty beast's bottom third is excluded from the frame.

#9. Your boy has just caught a fine trout, so what do you do? Stand him in front of the Land Rover of course......but do make sure your shadow extends completely over the subject while you're at it!

         

#8. A suitably uninspiring portrait of a fish that was probably being hand fed 24 hours earlier.

#7. Anyone who has a salmon fishing father will probably have been on the receiving end of a photo like this - I know I have. And after all, there cannot be a better way of recording the awesome power and beauty of the 'king of fishes' than by dangling it before a pyjama-clad toddler.

#6. Is that actually the colour of his house? I'm not sure which is uglier - the house, the captor or the 'only just removed from the boot of the car' sea trout........

#5. I love this one, I really do! The thumbs-up presumably for the benefit of anyone who is unsure if this is A Good Thing.

#4. Fair play to the young dude, but.........is that a kelt??

#3. "Put your waders on love and get in the back garden. I'll get the camera and young Johnny.........can someone move the bench.......oh bollocks, that'll do!"

#2. I couldn't resist keeping the caption to this one (apologies Mr MacIntyre, if you're reading). But the reference to 'wild' is just too amusing to pass up. Skateboard presumably for scale........

#1. Man and beast in perfect harmony......sorry, beast and beast in perfect harmony. The plaintive expression on the hound makes this truly one for the scrapbook.

That's all for now. I have others which I might save for a later date. And if anyone recognises themselves and wishes to lodge a complaint, then feel free...but also feel ashamed!


Wishing you all a productive 2013 season!

Rolling my own

And so to tapered leaders. I've been 'rolling my own' for a while now and although I wouldn't eschew altogether the shop bought jobs, the vast majority of the time I use the old school method of constructing various lengths of leader using different diameters of copolymer.

You might question what I could possibly gain from such a long-winded enterprise, when lovely knot-free versions are readily available for a just few quid apiece. Well the main benefit is that we can build a leader of whatever length and taper we require, thus tailoring it specifically to our needs. I have gradual tapers, wind-beating tapers, dry fly leaders, French nymph leaders - each tweaked to exactly the specification I personally require. Probably the biggest single advantage is the ability to create a longer leader than is generally available in the shops; commonly the latter are available at 9' and in my eyes that's just not long enough for most river dry fly work. Granted some manufacturers (Hardy and Rio to name a couple), have started producing 12' tapers, which is better.

Such a huge proportion of fly fishers recognise the importance of tying their own flies as a means to more accurately and delicately match the insects on their home waters. I wonder if a similar proportion attach as much significance to the presentation of their lovingly crafted patterns, and set about tailoring their leaders accordingly? Somehow I doubt it.

So I would argue that the flexibility afforded in tying your own leaders is a definite step forward. It is economical too - after the initial outlay in accrueing the neccessary spools of copolymer (I use Orvis Superstrength in diameters 0.58mm down to 0.17mm), a large number of leaders can be churned out before any single spool need replacing......and if you terminate the leader with one of those nifty little 2mm seamless rings, you only ever need to replace the tippet section without eating back up into the main body of the taper, meaning they will last as long as you like. 

The image below shows a typical example - the recipe, the leader itself and the labelled-up storage baggie. I knocked four such up this afternoon and they will certainly last me a couple of seasons.

The formula and label come courtesy of a great little spreadsheet called 'Leadercalc2007'. I have mentioned it hereabouts before and still find it an invaluable resource for anyone interested in tying their own. If you feel the urge to spend a few hours practicing your blood knots, then the spreadsheet - along with tons of interesting blurb, can be found here:

Global Flyfisher - Leadercalc2007 download