I had an invite to go to the Wye with my friend Paul for a spot of fishing, which would be really nice as I had been to the Wye guiding about seven times over the last two and a half weeks, not quite as nice watching other people catch fish!
We got to the river about 8.30 am, I had a walk along the river for about 20 minutes just to see what was happening, not a lot it seemed. Only the odd rise, so I thought I would tackle up with a team of spiders, a lovely way to fish, nice and easy and very relaxing. After the long winter I had tied up loads of different spider patterns, so now was the time to give them a try, little PTN on the point and two of my own creations on the droppers.
Fishing the shallows at the start of the first run two casts a little pluck, another three casts, first fish of the day a nice little trout around half a pound, had taken the ptn and made a good account of its self jumping through the air and making the reel scream as well. You would have thought it was three times the size, another ten casts and this time a grayling about the same size, this time on the top dropper, even nicer as it was a fly all of my own devices, all in all about eight fish came out of the first run.
I walked about fifty metres up stream to a very shallow riffle, which had a slightly deeper edge to it, this run was about thirty to forty metres long, this run produced another ten fish all to the point fly or the top dropper. The water above this run seemed too shallow to be worthwhile, so I walked to the top of the beat. The water was about 18 inches deep and as I looked, there was a lovely looking fish ( so I thought). As I put a cast in front of him, a small grayling took hold of the point fly and went ballistic, the larger fish was still there, so try again, this time a better trout took the top dropper, right by where the nice fish was sitting. Now something seemed a little wrong. It wasn’t a fish but a very fishy looking long thin rock! In this run about 15 - 20 fish came to hand, some times two at a time, below this run there was what I thought was the best stretch of water I had come across all morning, but only about six fish were caught, with some quite small trout and grayling. On the tale of the run, I thought I had caught a far better fish, it was but it was a chub!
As I worked my way back down the river to meet up with Paul, I fished a couple of nice looking runs, all producing some nice fish. I walked a bout a mile downstream with no sign of him, I always like to fish at the back of a little island, sometimes it fishes well and other times you would think there wasn’t a fish in it, but today it was stuffed full of them, fifteen in all. Iit was a fantastic day, every thing I tried worked, with my new spiders taking the cream of the crop. One strange thing was only one fish to the middle dropper and I had tried a lot of different patterns on the middle dropper, I would of thought if the fish would take a nymph on the river bed and also come up to take a spider on the top dropper, almost in the waters surface, they would be prepared to take the fly on the middle dropper?
One of fishings little mysteries!
