Sandbagged!

Sandbagged!
Photograph by Steve Barnett

Monday 18 June 2012

Oh Happy Days...

...Well happy evenings actually! 

The festivities with the Drake are now, more or less, over and the little Blue Winged Olives have been showing in increasing numbers every day, with a corresponding increase in the activity of their spinners, the Sherry Spinners, well into the gloaming and actual dark.

It is time to put away the boxes of budgerigars and canaries that we have been tempting the Drake munching trout with and get back to "proper" dry fly fishing with little flies.  It was fun with the Drake and fun with the Hawthorn beforehand but now we can look forward to heavily scented and sultry evenings and rows of trout serenely rocking up and then down as they sip in spinner after spinner.  I have to admit I am so very glad of it.

The little Poly Prop Sherry was just what the trout wanted tonight. 


It may be possible to get another evening out of this particular example but the trout's teeth have somewhat modified it from its immaculate beginnings.  No matter it owes me nothing...

Have the trout locked onto spinners in your part of the world yet?


Regular Rod

7 comments:

  1. I never seem to hit a spinner fall. Looks like it would be fun...like shooting fish in a barrel, so to speak.

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    1. Round here Howard the way to be there when there is a fall of spinner is to... well, be there! Woody Allen wrote about his early career in show business saying that he discovered 80% of success was turning up.

      It's like that with spinner falls.

      For us that means staying late. Hunger or bed may call but the thing to do is stay out there and watch, wait and when the action starts to try, without scaring the fish, to get your fake in the right place on the conveyor belt so your chosen trout will accept it as serenely as she or he is accepting the real spinners. It is not easy, that last bit makes it hard and the fly has to be right or it will be ignored...

      If you can get all these things right it might sometimes look to an onlooker to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Get one thing wrong and you will be "watterlicked" ("skunked" in America).

      :)


      Regular Rod

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  2. Took a few Sunday evening using such a fly RR.

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    1. So Dave was telling me! That spot in front of his house can be a fine place to end a day on the Wye...

      ;)

      Regular Rod

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  3. Every post of yours catches me by surprise at the timing difference, the Wylye is only a couple of hundred miles away, and our Mayfly only really started a fortnight ago, yours seems almost over, and your already into BWO. Excellent post about Japanese Knotweed by the way.

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    1. That timing difference is weird. The usual expectation would be that your rivers in the south should be in advance of our more northern rivers.

      Regular Rod

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  4. Hi RR. Walked the Bradford on Sunday night to see the air alive with BWO. Miraculous considering last year's drought. A nymphing fish 'on the fin' in the high water was taking a mouthful every 5 seconds. Fingers crossed for the future.
    Chris K on 26/06/12

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