Blowing the Cobwebs away

I think I am getting old,  today after a fishing trip the process of getting out of the neoprenes resulted in me breaking out in what can best be described as a muck sweat, if I was so foolish to engage in a post christmas weight loss routine then my exercise routine is sorted.  Whoever created neoprenes clearly intended them to be a fiendish torture tool for the overweight and underfit.

The day started well the wind had dropped the weather whilst been cold had been settled long enough for the rivers to settle and fine down.  Fishing trips at the moment are at the mercy of the shorter days and wayward river levels so the opportunity was siezed, I fished czech nymphs, a method that I can use but one that doesnt give me the pleasure of other methods , three hours of concentration and repeated casting resulted in one sprat sized grayling and a potential case of repetitive strain injury.   For the last half hour the sight of a rising fish inspired me to revert to a klinkhammer. There is something uplifting to the spirit to see that surface fly drifting with the current.  As I have posted before I am a slave to the method and know  its a habit i need to to kick but a depressing december afternoon wasnt the time to go cold turkey.

The rivers are curious this year.  The cold water has dropped clear and the water reveals that the summer weed beds are still intact.  We have had no really cold temperatures and no large spates to rip out the summer weed beds,  it will be interesting to see what effect this will have on the river next year if the weather pattern remains.  Even the sheep are still out on the bankside pastures , which are still displaying an unusual degree of fresh growth.

Anyway tomorrow brings a new year,  I wish you all tight lines for it.  My fly tying starts in earnest now to fill those boxes ready for the new year . First will be my new found delight . North Country spiders. Watch this space.

In the ring of the rise

This time of year is when I tend to do a bit more reading.  Vincent Marinaro   "In the ring of the rise" is my current interest  its a title I have meant to read for a considerable period.  I apologise in advance to those of you that have already absorbed the book and are aware of its contents.

What fish actually see is of supreme importance to the fly angler,  the book explores brilliantly what the fish see and the effect it has on their feeding behaviour and how the evidence of such behaviour can be seen in the resultant rise form the fish leaves.  It also explores how fish see and react to the fly in, on or below the surface film.

When you consider how important the understanding of what fish see is its surprising that so little is written in the angling books, magazines and these days online.  I guess the easier approach is to concentrate on fly dressings , patterns and presentation.   I am not suggesting that people have not discussed the issue. Over the years many a diagram has been drawn .  Skues and Halford both discussed rise forms and spoke on the subject in loose terms.  Mottram in Fly Fishing some new arts and mysteries explores the problem draws diagrams and endeavours to reach some conclusions.  But I cant recall the last time I read a magazine article discussing the ideas the book contains.  

During my reading of In the ring of the rise,  one light switched on my brain which to me which partially explains the startling effectiveness of the klinkhammer to bring up Grayling from depth.  Again many of you may have already made this link and although I guess it should be obvious its still worth stating .  Fish are limited to a very small advance vision window as the surface film acts as a mirror from below until the fly is quite near, the emerger style of fly surely will be visible for a much longer period as it approaches a fish.  To those of us that have fished a klink style fly it is astonishing the way a grayling can intercept a fly.  

Also I listened to a talk recently by a fly fishing guide who stated that he liked to cut a V in the underside of a dry fly hackle , he beleives that the balanced footprint of the fly in the surface film gives the trout better advance warning of a fly approaching its feeding window.  The indentations of the trimmed hackle acting as a triggor point,  Same principle ? yes and something I will be trying in the forthcoming season.  If you havent read the book then get hold of a copy It may just open your eyes a little, it has mine.

A Fly tyers christmas

Shooting season is in full swing around here , when passing the local butcher and game dealer the hooks above the window displayed a fly tyers delight.  Pheasants, French Partridge and Red Grouse.  A pair of each for the pricely sum of £12 .  Now one pair of the Pheasants looked very nice, long tails and lovely church window hackles ,  thoughts of PTN and bracken clock.  The Red Grouse lots of flies here those lovely mottled feathers look very spiderish. Those Grouse series of sea trout flies.  The French Partridge not as good as the english but I am sure they will have their uses those nice barred feathers look good so do the little dark neck hackles...So money changed hands.....

Next the birds were skinned and left to dry a while.  Then the skins will be frozen for a few days before been trimmed and cleaned up then treated witha little borax, 

Of course you cant waste what comes inside the beautiful feather wrapping so the pheasant legs will be added to a yuletide casserole and the breast meat from all the birds will go into a christmas game pie.  Best £12 I have spent all year...

A hard but good day on a chalkstream after grayling.

Wednesday was a day that I have anticipated for some considerable period.  The venue for the grayling expedition was Mulberry Whin on the Yorkshire wolds. It is nearly a year
since the same trip last year was cancelled due to  freezing weather which resulted in the following post.
 

http://brooksandbecks.blogspot.com/2010/12/grayling-and-nativity-in-snow.html.

My box of Grayling bugs and nymphs was up to scratch. From size 14s to size 20 with lead or tungsten or barely any weight at all...But would any work there magic on Thymus,,,

Well this wednesday the reorganised day arrived.  It was somewhat overshadowed by the news from one of our party who is an accomplished angler and even guides on the beat when he had announced that conditions were tough, this translates as bloody difficult for us mere mortals.  The river was very low, flow was canal like and this pristine of chalk streams carried an unusual murkiness that meant sight fishing to individual fish was very hard as the gravel bottom was silty and weed beds obscured the fish. 

Even though the fishing was very tough grayling were caught ,  none  to my rod I must add.  My success was with a couple of out of season trout. They were two of the very few rising fish that I saw that day.  But the

day was great, interest and enthusiasm constantly refreshed and challenged by the glimpses of the large grayling that populate that stretch I saw several fish that must have been 2lb plus and the beat holds fish that greatly exceed that 2lb milestone.

I saw how effective a tenkara outfit can be for close range nymphing and suffered the frustration of missing countless takes as the fish toyed with my less than perfect presentation. When you could cast to visible fish I watched my nymph drfit past them, my attempts at unducing a take were treated with distane. I am certain the my nymph was taken by the fish only to be released within a nano second , my gentle strike seemed to take place about a century to late, 

But at the end of the day I reflected on an enjoyable day. It was a lovely river with plenty of good fish there was good company and that ever present anticipation of what the next cast might hold and at the end of the evening there was even a fishermans sunset to send us on our way.

Addenda : I fished this in late 2017 ,  sadly the decent levels of fish seem to have crashed and very few fish remain .. 

More changes on the river,....

Just a few days after I publish my rant about the loss of wildlife ,  the telegraph publishes this:   Its nice to know I am not on my own....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/country-diary/8866765/Time-to-prey-on-predators.html


Andy

What changes for the river

I went for a walk down by my local beck a few days ago and I got to thinking how the fauna of this part of the world has changed so much in the last half century,  I have lived hereabouts all my life.  The beck I fish now was my playground as a kid and I have seen all the changes over the last near 50 years.  I have always been bit of a bird and animal watcher and one pocket in my fishing waistcoat always carries a tiny pair of roof prism bins.... Anyway when I was out the other day I saw Grey squirrels by the gang load. I saw signs of the resident otter and several roe deer and walked by a couple of active badger setts, what I didnt see was much in the way of bird life. 

Now when I was a kid I remember that the woods around here didnt hold a single squirrel nor did they have any deer and badgers were a real rarity.  As for otters they were something you saw at a zoo or in books,  but the woods were full of birdlife and the little local beck side was alive with smaller finches and stuff. Now when you can see the hedgrows through the balsam and the bloody giant hogweed they seem deserted  apart from collared doves and magpies ,  even the bands of starlings so common in the past would be a welcome sight again.  In the countryside around we have buzzards in abundance and even Peregrines nesting on the castle headland but the small stuff has a tiny population compared to the past. 

As for the beck itself well that has changed to.  I can remember seeing the banks black with the elver runs that used to come upstream in that strange annual ritual.  I could not have imagined that such super abundance could dissapear completely. In the wider picture we have signal crayfish invading and now the bloody killer shrimps.  I bet we see a lot more of those in the years to come. 

We seem to continue to develop a worrying unbalanced ecology where the in vogue stuff gets supported and helped but in the process damages the rest of the system and dominant species continue to overun the rest. The ecology that had some sort of natural balance is dissapearing as fast as ever.  We hear on the news the RSPB are hailing record numbers of birds of prey.  Other bodies praise the rise in the otter population, and whilst  the birds of prey are now abundant and the Otters which are nice to see are becoming a problem in some areas.

 I am not suggesting that wholesale culling should take place , but until we as a society accept that we do live in a managed enviroment and manage it properly , that is all of it not just the bit that we are been monitored and KPId on . Then it will continue to be a cock up.    In some ways we have come so far rivers now appear to be clean and the industrial pollution problems are dissapearing , Instead we have hidden dangers, fertiliser run of and the effects of hormones from the birth control pill that now get into the rivers.  Or whats left of so many after abstraction of ground water to water mono culture plants and wash more fertiliser into the rivers.

I know this was just a rant and offers no solutions but it worrys me what sort of a world we will leave for future generations and I see no sign that anyone is willing to grasp the whole bloody nettle they just want to hold on to their particuler leaf whilst the root of the plant may be dying,......

Andy

A time for reflection.

Last weekend saw me out on the bank again after Grayling .  Trips to the river now are a two edged affair, will a mild day encourage the ladies to flirt with a bit of surface action ?, or will cold or unstable water levels send them skulking to the depths?. I will plumb the depths with the czech style heavy nymphs when I have to but much prefer to see that lovely boiling rise as the fly is snatched from the surface. and if I am honest I struggle with the nymph and know its an area I need to improve.

What that means is that  I can be guilty of neglecting all other  approachs and try to cling on to the surface fly when Autumn is here.  I am not a dry fly snob but I will often persevere with the dry when I could catch more with a nymph. 

This weekend saw such a trip the fish above was the only one that I could persuade to come to the surface . The last hour I resorted to a heavy pink shrimp and caught three more.  I feel sure fishing the nymph sooner would have given results.

Thinking about this and seeing the threads on forums and other blogs  about what you have achieved this season has made me think again as to what it is that presses our individual buttons about this sport.  Plainly there are those for whom the fly tying has almost become the overiding passion ,  for others its the collection of rods and reels.  Others still the pursuit of that elusive target weight specimen. Or a larger number of fish than last year .  There are even those whom I am convinced just talk about it .

 Certainly for me all those things are important although my gear is a pretty motley collection and my flies are somewhat variable in quality and I certainly dont keep any sort of record of my catches other than on my blog. I guess more than anything the quality of the fishing and its surroundings is top for me and if such a place has good fish then even better.  I live close close to several high quality stocked fisheries.  Holding large high quality well finned fish but for me they have limited appeal because they are man made featureless lakes.  I have several friends who love those places and am glad for their enthusiasm but I am dissapointed when these same friends accompany me to a small hidden gem of a stream but do not share my enthusiam for the wondrous markings on the specimen 12oz wild brownie they spent 20 minutes catching...

I guess all this is just defines why fly fishing is such a popular and adictive pastime.  Should you  be a collector or  an obssesive a born again hippy or even an ultra competitive type the sport can become what ever you want it to be.  Even if you just want to talk or write about it...

Anyway following that reflection here my idea of a lovely river...

The soft autumn light does make the countryside look its best so even when the fishing is slow the surroundings can help.  The leaves are really turning now and a windy day or two will see the river surface covered with rafts of leaves

One good windy week and the river will be full of leaves and perhaps with all the bugs and flies that live on them...

Thirty or forty years years ago I would not have given all of this a thought all that was important was catching fish, lots of them. The pleasure arose from the capture and not from the method employed or the surroundings.  When I was eleven I fished with a teacher at my school, it was due to him I first held a fly rod, He showed me how to catch chub with a black gnat on his split cane rod with a silk line.  I was fascinated and that day lit a spark that smouldered for years till I was able to take up the fly rod for myself. 

When I met him many years later he revealed he had given up fishing he said that he still loved fly fishing but that for him the climax was to get the fish to rise and the subsequent playing and landing and unhooking of the fish was merely a further distraction and had even become an unpleasurable experience.  I dont beleive that my own thoughts will ever head to that conclusion but I find it fascinating that one sport can generate so many views and feelings.