Please visit Waterfeature...

...and if you watch the video at the top, then read the background to the Kelham Island hydro scheme and wish that the good folk of Sheffield would learn from the terrible consequences of hydro schemes elsewhere and reverse the decision to plough ahead with their own hydro scheme, please vote on the petition at the top right hand side of the blog.  You need not be a citizen of Sheffield to vote. All you need to be is a citizen of the world and care about the life in and around the world's rivers.



...the terrible consequences of hydro schemes elsewhere...

The river Don, a natural salmon river, has suffered about 400 years of abuse.  It is an amazing example of how a river can come back to life if folks stop abusing it.  The saddest aspect of this scheme is that, after a few short years of improvement, the river Don is going to be set back to the impoverished state it was in, when really it should be getting all the help it can to keep on coming fully back to life.

You can give the Don some help by registering and voting your disapproval on http://waterfeature1.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/screening-and-cleaning.html

Thank you.


Regular Rod

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

A really inconvenient truth!

There is a weed.  A really weedy weed that has stalks as weak as juliennes of cooked carrot.  Bend it and it snaps.  It has no thorns or stings to protect it.  It is only an annual so dies every winter.  It is easily pulled from the ground due to it only putting down shallow roots.  In Great Britain, it is a foreigner, thousands of miles from home, so it is out of its natural habitat.  Yet it is going to wipe out our rivers' populations of native, riparian plants and by so doing kill millions of baby trout every winter unless something is done to prevent it.

What is this weed?  If it is so weak, how can it possibly do so much harm?

It is Himalayan Balsam.  An inconvenient truth is that it has been brought to these shores and allowed to spread into the wild.  Another is that it makes an abundance of seed that will grow in almost any substrate in the most unpromising conditions. 

This example is growing in a tiny pocket of mossy loam on the side of a tree.

It sows its own seed by firing them off with almost the same range as a Diana BB gun.  Flinging seeds across a road, to find new ground to grow in, is no problem to the Himalayan Balsam. 

On this side of a road here is a plant growing in a salt pile.  The salt is placed there because modern cars and modern motorists can't drive properly in the snow.  This plant actually seems to be doing very well on its saline base.  Across the road there are already some seedlings taking hold...

How can such a weedy thing do harm?

It does it by the exuberance of its seed, it's speed at growing above the native plants, the shading of its leaves kills the natives through lack of light and then, come winter, it dies and leaves the earth bare for its seeds to take over more easily.  By dying away and leaving bare soil to be washed into the rivers and streams where it blinds the gravel and suffocates the trout eggs.

What is the remedy?  There are two remedies, one immediate and very effective, the other needs money before we can have it and clear this alien invasive from our shores once and for all.

The immediate remedy is to pull it out of the ground and leave it to die as its roots dry out.  This anyone can do and any angler will find pulling 100 plants is a quick and easy task of only a few minutes.  The time to pull it is right now before it has chance to flower and send its seeds pinging out all around it to maintain its invasion.  Get all the plants out and the following year there will be fewer plants to pull up as the seed will be at least a year old. The year after that there will be even fewer.  Keep this up for five years, the plant is gone and the native plants will re-establish themselves and the bare soil will be covered and protected by roots.  Erosion of the soil will be reduced.  The trout eggs will no longer be killed by suffocation.

The other, permanent remedy does not exist yet.  This needs the chemical industry to develop a selective weedkiller that kills Himalayan Balsam and nothing else.  This would cost a lot, millions probably.  Where should the money come from?  Well anglers for a start.  It's no good expecting anyone else to do it for us.  They won't.  The Environment Agency position is "It's endemic now.  There is nothing to be done about it!"  Wildlife Trusts often have a similar position, sometimes even worse with the silly, "Well the bees like the flowers..." remark, as if native plants are anathema to bees!  Unfortunately the bees tend to bypass native plants to get to the extra sugar content of the Himalayan Balsam flowers and the natives suffer even more.  Maybe if the good folk at the RSPB realised that Himalayan Balsam has a negative effect on native birdlife some money might be made available from its massive reserves?  You can see why the ideal solution will probably never exist.

This carpet of Himalayan Balsam has crowded out all the natives except for a few Red Campion and the hardwood shrubs.  (Though for me the Rhododendron in the foreground can come out and be burned as an alien too!)

Now here's the rub.  The second remedy won't exist and the first remedy may as well not exist.  With a very few, very notable, exceptions, anglers will not pull up 100 plants apiece every time they go-a-fishing.  They expect someone else to do it and anyway most anglers don't care about the presence of Himalayan Balsam!  Why is that?  Well it's for the very same reason they don't join the Angling Trust, the same reason they don't remove litter, the same reason they don't write to their MPs to get bad hydro-power stopped immediately, the same reason they don't report pollution the instant they see it. 

It's because it doesn't immediately help them catch more fish!

NOW THAT IS A REALLY INCONVENIENT TRUTH!



Regular Rod

The next valley...

... is certainly browned off too.

You would not want to fall in just here just now!

Regular Rod

Browned Off!...

...is an expression the English use to indicate that one is displeased with a situation.  To be "Browned Off" indicates a degree of grumpiness and irritation and so it is with yours truly today.

No fishing today, the rain has kept on and on for hours and the river is up and coloured with run off and ochre from disused mines upstream. 

I had planned a lovely day of mayfly fishing for my guests, good friends from upriver to come down and enjoy the delights of Duck Holds Wood.  It was not to be and we have literally taken a rain check.

Ah well, there will be another day, hopefully soon.  Meanwhile the rain can only be doing the river good.  Better to lose a day or so of fishing than to suffer the horrible droughts we have had in the previous two years...

Regular Rod

Reasons to be cheerful, part three???

At least seven, rather than three parts to being cheerful yesterday.  This picture post is really an attempt to just begin to explain why fishing on Derbyshire's River Wye is so special.  It is no coincidence that not a single picture of a fish, wishing it was back in the water instead of laid out on the folds of a landing net, is in this mini-series.  Angling, especially angling with the dry fly is NOT just about catching fish, even though it is one of the most effective ways of doing so.  It is surely a communion if the angler is to gain the greatest joy from this noble Sport?

This time of year highlights the point even more so.  Here we are at one of most pleasant times of the English year, our tackle is not cumbersome, we roam freely with only the tiniest of burdens, a light rod, a similarly lightweight landing net, a little bag perhaps with a lightweight raincoat in it, the tackle and the victuals for the day.  The leaves are nearly all fully out covering lots of hidy holes for our quarry.  The fish are at their most secure now with food aplenty drifting into each fish's chosen feeding station.

Here's a cracker to start the day.  Twenty minutes and one nice brown trout after this snap was taken you nearly lost this blogger as he slipped off that little log bridge landing inelegantly astride it.  Henry wondered what the Devil was going on as his best friend struggled to maintain consciousness and regain the ability to breathe, before clambering back onto the bridge to finish crossing to the little island on the right of the snap.  No real harm done.  Personally speaking, procreation has ceased to be a life mission for some time now anyway!

After some productive fiddling about round these little islands, some of which are no longer accessible to the angler as their bridges have been swept away in the winter floods, it was time to wander slowly upriver and send the mayfly over to explore these wonderful hidy holes...

A long chuck that needed to collapse inside this hidy hole so the leader didn't drag the fly for a few seconds, just long enough to convince another brown trout into making the desired mistake.

These two spots among these branches needed the rearmost fish to be caught first and quickly heaved out into the open water to prevent certain disaster then it was time to winkle out the frontmost fish in a similarly rude manner.  These were both wild rainbow trout.

Only a matter of ten yards or so further upriver is a tangle that each year seems to get more and more difficult to deal with.  Not least of the difficulty is actually squeezing into a position where a cast might be made.  It spelt defeat for the angler this year.  Not to worry though as, maybe this next winter it will be altered once again by the floods, especially if a heavy tree is borne down here like a medieval battering ram.  The highlight here was seeing a willow warbler carefully examining under every leaf to find mayflies waiting to become spinners and, having found them, snaffling each one instantly.

Then the rain came a little heavier.  Henry was glad we found shelter under the leaning trunk of an ancient willow.

Calopteryx splendens - the Banded Demoiselle (only this is a boy)

This fellow too was sheltering under a broad blade of grass.  He had cleverly positioned himself vertically to reduce the chances of being bombed by a big raindrop.  Look closely and you can see that he has turned his head to use both eyes to check out the potential threat of this great one-eyed silver monster that was peering at him (in super macro mode). He sat it out and the "threat" went away.

The rain stopped.  Later on, working slowly upriver, through a lovely wood and out into the sunshine, the angler is met by this exquisite run that abounds in rainbow trout mid river, brown trout under the trailing edges of the Ranunculus beds and grayling in the glides.  The light was perfect and just out of sight a woodpecker was drumming on that standing dead tree behind the bushy, healthy looking alder tree in the left middle ground of the picture. 

Yes it was a good day for fishing and a good day for participation in the beauty of being here, where the angler belongs.  Certainly plenty of reasons to be cheerful...



Regular Rod

James Ogden Day 2012

Yesterday was the 147th Anniversary of the day that James Ogden demonstrated to the Duke of Rutland's steward, Robert Nesfield, that the floating artificial mayfly would "kill" during the drake.  By way of celebration it is your faithful correspondent's habit of going out with a rod built by James Ogden in the 1880's and attempting to prove that the efficacy of the floating artificial mayfly still applies to the Derbyshire Wye.  You can read about James Ogden in this old newsletter.

Henry came along and was surprisingly well behaved except for his insistence on trying to "help" with the landing of the fish. 

We both like chicken and rice so we shared luncheon more or less 60:40 in my favour!

It was a breezy day and the drake were around in batches.  One moment the river was devoid of drake, suddenly there would be many dozens for five or ten minutes and the fish responded favourably.  Then it would all go quiet for a while until it started again maybe half an hour later.

The mead above "Black Barn" was glorious with wild flowers.  It was worth the walk just to see them.

Here is a fish that was very satisfying to catch and even more satisfying to gaze upon.  Just look at that mayfly filled belly!

Click for a closer look

This crudely joined together image illustrates why the trout was "satisfying to catch".  It came from under the far bank on the extreme right by those laid over dead stalks from last year.  The cast had to be winkled in and out of the "letter box" on the extreme left and swung across the river, whilst yours truly hid behind the alder just visible on the right hand edge of the picture on this bank.

Of course if wading was allowed here it would have been a simple thing to approach from directly below and make the easiest of casts to betray the fish, but then the merit of this "meritocracy" would just disappear making both fish and anglers all the poorer for it.

Regular Rod

It's a Cold, Cold, Shower...

Remember on St. Mark's day how the Iron Blue Dun was saving the swallows from starvation?

Then in mid-May we had another cold spell and the Iron Blue Dun came to save us all again.

Well here they are again!  The temperature is 8 degrees Celsius and the windchill makes it feel like considerably less.

This time, instead of swallows, we have the house martins to gracefully receive this bounty along with a few struggling Drake. 

It is still worth fishing though.  When is it ever not?


Regular Rod

The Low Down Show Down...

Good, ex-Military, Gore-Tex overtrousers are not expensive and encourage you to take full advantage of their qualities.  It is not an idle boast that a pair of these, used properly, let you catch more fish.

You can sit anywhere, keep your trousers clean and your backside protected from thistles, nettles, ordure and... water!


Regular Rod

Different but the same...

Last year

This year

Same river, same spot, but completely different this time round.  Different weather, different water levels, different flies, but it still produced a fine fish to the Gray Wulff variant and made sure the day, although wet enough to cause a scurrying home to change into some dry clothes and then a scurrying back again, was sufficiently encouraging to keep the angler happily engaged to his pleasant task.

Last year

This year

This spot was a little discouraging in that the nettles had been sprayed, the cover was gone and so were the big fish that used to line up here.  Only smaller fish this year and egotism demands that this was not due to faulty angling but due to the absence this year of the tangled cover that made a letter box cast essential last year.

It was good to be out though and the Drake is getting nicely underway in Derbyshire, as well as in the sunny south of England.  The next few days are anticipated with eagerness...

...by angler, fish and birds alike.


Regular Rod

Happy in Hampshire

Friends are wonderful things to have and be...  This weekend, one of my closest friends, the trumpeter John Barker, and I visited friends in Hampshire.  John worked on Saturday in Salisbury and on Sunday we were delighted guests on a chalkstream tributary of the Test.  Our host was Howard Bennett who, as well as arranging for us to be his guests for a day on the river, very kindly fed us with barbecued steak, sausages to his own recipe and all sorts of other goodies.  Howard is a respected guide in Hampshire.  In 2008 he gained first place for the Leading Guide Award in the River Test One Fly competition.  He came second in 2009, which to me means it wasn't just a flash in the pan...  We were going to be in good hands.
On Saturday afternoon, the lady in the local fly fishing shop advised us that we'd be better off not fishing until 8 o'clock in the evening.  She had a point in the heatwave conditions, but we ignored her advice and fished through the whole day, in the blazing sunshine!

Not John's first fish of the day, this fish was one of his later captures

John caught the first fish of the day with his first cast on his newly acquired rod - a priceless, unused (until this Sunday), "88" by Sharps of Aberdeen built of impregnated cane in the 1960's.

Here he is casting up to a rising fish with his "88".

The fishing, for your faithful correspondent, was slow to start with but, as the day wore on the true mayflies, the Drake, came on and on and on...  At this time of the season the trout were still wary of these big flies and made their attacks with what seemed like a little bit of fear and circumspection.  Occasionally a fly was taken with easy confidence.  Those were the fish I decided to target.  The trick was to have picked the right fly to watch just prior to it being taken to work out what fake mayfly would be likely to work best. 




Eventually it became clear that the comfortable trout were eating the Spent Gnat, the mayfly spinners.  These were mingled in amongst the freshly hatched and hatching Drake and I'm sure they were from the day before.  So...  The Poly Prop Spent Gnat (PPSG) was put on and, bit-by-bit, the Sport became better and better.




After feeding us at luchtime our host and guide, Howard, told me how far up the beats went and whetted my appetite when he mentioned that the top beat was rather wild and that nobody went there very often.  I resolved to work my way up there and after fishing it a little to come back down and join the rest of the group for the evening.

We split up and went in different directions.  David, a pal of Howard's opted to fish around the fishing house as that was where he had his new partner, Riley, lightly and longly chained up in the shade with plenty of water.  Riley is 8 weeks old and already a charming character.

Here's Riley with Fred, Howard's Brother-in-Law on the left, John holding Riley in the middle and Howard our friend, host and guide, on the right of the picture.

Fishing intermittently as I walked and worked my way upstream it became clear that the Drake were getting very busy indeed.  The duns were coming off at great speed.  The hot sun had their wings dried instantly and they were only on the surface for two or three seconds each at most.  The spinners were returning in greater numbers and there were more trout happy to eat them.  Certainly there were duns being eaten but the majority of flies being eaten were the dead and dying spinners, the "Spent Gnat".

The fish came rather easily and after catching and snapping a few before returning them I thought I'd call on the cell 'phone and check on how John was doing.

"Hello..."

He sounded a bit too quiet, subdued even.

"How are you doing?"

"I've had nowt since lunchtime..."

"Are they not rising down there?"

"Aye but they're not taking my fly."

"What have you got on?"

"That white bodied mayfly with the yellow hackle."

"They're on't Spent Gnat!  Get a Spent Gnat on and come up here.  I'll leave these and go on.  Just walk up river until you come to a right hand bend and electricity cables high over the river.  And get a Spent Gnat on!"

"How long will it take to get up there?"

"Ten minutes at most!  Get thissen up 'ere!"

Quick march, past all the fish rising nicely to the Spent Gnat, through a couple of gates and I was at the bottom of the top beat.  It is quite a small river up here and there are more trees and bushes overhanging the water's edge.  The whole of this river has very little cover to hide behind so it is necessary to crawl into position and use what tufts and tussocks you can find to lurk from.  Up here it was the same but there was more cover for the fish and it made for some interesting casting.

Here's an example of the cover for the angler...  Those thistles on the right will do nicely but the head has to be kept down low.  If necessary to sit back from the water's edge and cast overland a little bit.

As the sun lowered it became more and more important to keep the head down...

Here's a cracking spot.  The rising trout was on the other side of the hanging fronds of willow calling for a crooked cast and some courage in the face of the potential for losing the fly.  It was almost like being at home in Derbyshire!

Here's the fish.  I think it might be a wild bred fish...  Scale adhesion is excellent, the fins are a little bigger than those of the others and the white leading edges to the pelvic and anal fins make me think it really is a wild fish.  Either way it was worth the effort.  Click on the picture and judge for yourself.

On the way home, we had set off shortly before 11 o'clock in the evening, I found myself drifting off to sleep while John did the driving.  In my dreams I saw my fly being taken again and again.  At one point I awoke with a start and realised I'd been striking at the fish in my sleep.  Poor John must have wondered what on Earth I was up to...

All in all we had a splendid time in the Hampshire sunshine.  What a generous treat we had.  Thank you Howard, you certainly know how to look after us.  We hope to do the same for you in future.



Regular Rod

"Useless" Flies!

Of course nothing in Nature is "useless".  So these flies are not really useless.  However, the fly tier could waste a lot of time and materials imitating them exactly with a view to using them for Dry Fly Fishing.

Here are a few snaps of flies that can lure the angler into a blind alley.  They were all photographed in my garden...

Large Dark Olive Male Spinner

Copy his wife by all means but this fellow is rarely seen on the water.  You are more likely to find his corpse, first thing in the morning, in a spider's web on a gate to the river.



Caenis Dun

Of course you could tie a tiny dry fly on a size 22 hook and cast it to the fish during a rise to these little flies, in the faint hope that they might choose your attempt at a fake in preference to the thousands of real Caenis littering the surface...  But you'd be better off adopting the strategy we looked at with the Double Badger!

Iron Blue Dun Male Spinner "The Jenny Spinner"

I've been told these do come back to the water but have never witnessed this myself.  They are beautiful but another candidate for the spider's web on the field gate rather than a dry fly "must have"!  The Sport with the Iron Blue Dun is to be had when the flies are duns and have put in one of their "bad weather" appearances that you must take advantage of immediately you see them, for their appearances are fleeting as well as furious.

Large Brook Dun Male Dun

What a whopper!  The sight of these splendid flies is enough to get any of us reaching for the fly tying kit, but hold on a moment!  To eclode from their nymphal shucks these creatures climb up the stalks of plants, or up the sides of emerging stones and then come out as flies, very rarely ever touching the water as duns, the sub-imago stage.  It's a different story when they are female adults, at the imago stage.  They DO come back to the water as the "Large Red Spinner" and lay their eggs by dipping down to the surface and scraping off little batches of eggs until they are gone.  They are big and a welcome meal to the trout when they are spent.  So make your patterns bright orangey red spinners with spent wings to lie flat on the surface and eschew the duns as the trout are unlikely to be seeing them.  A size 12 hook or even a 10 will be about right for the spinners.


Regular Rod

That Black Fly - Oh and that Black Dog again...

This evening I had company once more...

 He wasn't too bad but he upsets me because he whines pitifully when I release the fish.  He is convinced we are both going to starve to death if I don't soon learn how to hang on to these river prey so we can both eat them!

Warren tells me he knew a chap who took his dog fishing as it taught the dog to be patient.  It is not working very well in our case.

The fish came to me via Charles Cotton's Black Fly.

Charles Cotton really did create a versatile fly when he made his Black Fly. The Hawthorn Flies have nearly finished hereabouts but their memory lingers on. As a result the trout still eat biggish black flies with such ferocity they hardly need striking to set the hook. Basically they hook themselves. Terrestrial flies in general can be subjected to this ferocious style of attack from the trout. My pet theory is that the potential meal is a substantial one that has been known to escape suddenly, so the trout don't mess around with them. Bam!

The water was very bright facing into the west this evening and it was best to continue with the Black Fly even though the fish were clearly eating olives.  "How can this be?" you may well ask, "Surely 'Matching the Hatch' is the best ploy?"

Yes it is, usually.  This evening, however, it was important that I could see the fly.  It was better to risk some fish ignoring this wrong fly and hoping for others that were still keen on black flies.  Me being able to see the fly was more important than a fly that perfectly matched the olives that the fish were eating.  You can perhaps make out the fly in the stripper ring?  I'd just caught a fine wild rainbow trout here and thought a snap would nicely illustrate the type of water I'm trying to describe here.

Have you tried this trick of using a dark fly on a bright water when the sun is low and leaving the 'Match the Hatch' policy behind for that evening?

Of course it is not always a good idea.  If the fish are preoccupied on a particular natural fly then it is certainly best to maintain the normal rule of 'Matching the Hatch' as best you can.


Regular Rod