First Day on the Club Water

So, I thought it was time I started a blog. Mainly as a record for myself but hopefully it will prove somewhat interesting for others too.

I have fished for many years, coarse fishing as a teenager and, after a fairly lengthy break from all fishing, fly fishing on stillwaters. In the last two years I have been venturing onto rivers, something I have really enjoyed and this year for the first time I have joined a club with a good amount of river about an hours drive from home. I'm also a keen photographer (although that doesn't necessarily mean I'm especially good at it), hence the name of the blog.

I fished this river last year as a guest with Ben Lupton of inpursuitofspotties fame and had an excellent day including catching the fish that features in the title bar of this page.

Today I went to the river for my club induction and again fished with Ben.

We started fishing upstream of where we met, Ben fishing upstream nymph whilst I opted for a duo with a large klink with a bead head below. A cold and blustery upstream wind made casting with accuracy quite tricky and being somewhat rusty a few tangles and caught foliage resulted.

Very little was hatching out and we didn't see any rises for most of the morning, nevertheless we picked up a few fish, one trout and one grayling a piece.

In the afternoon despite the forecast for rain things actually brightened up a little with the sun breaking through the clouds from time to time. As well as providing some welcome warmth, we were quite chilly by this point having expected it to be warmer, this also led to a fairly decent hatch of large dark olives.

LDO

This specimen I picked up out of the flow and photographed when I got home. This encouraged some fish to start rising and we spent some time working a pool with several rising fish. Those at the bottom half of the pool turned out to be grayling and we managed 3 between us before moving on, all on dries. Ben's Barbour Paraduns working well for me. We thought there was at least one good trout at the top of the pool from the look of the rise but we couldn't tempt it and moved on. Ben caught a good trout of around 14" a little further along, again on a dry and I picked up a further fish a little way up.

Ben was running short of time by this point so we walked the rest of the beat to get an idea of the lay of the land for next time. There were a lot of fish in the top section and we wished we had time to fish through. After that we went back to the cars. Ben headed off and I walked downstream to check out the lower beat. This was the one I fished last year with Ben but I wanted to see it again to remind myself. I saw some fish rising in a slow pool but couldn't see what they were rising to, something small certainly, so I opted for a size 20 black paraloop gnat. First cast it was nailed by a nice chub.

I fished on as I'd seen a trout in the pool as I passed. Catching this one seemed to put the rest down so I moved on. I finished walking the beat, certainly less fish in this section and I didn't fish anywhere else, being quite tired by this point I called it a day. All in all I was pleased with my first day on the club water. Looking forward to the next trip, although that will have to wait for a couple of weeks as I'm off to Yorkshire next weekend to fish the Wharfe with Invicta FFC and try to tackle five rivers in a day with Danny (Pinkshrimp) having won an auction lot on the Monnow Rivers Trust auction over the winter. Hopefully plenty of action to report on next week. I'll finish with another photo from today, just because I like it and I haven't used it yet.