With the temperature creeping up into the teens today so my Trout barometer shifted me riverwards accordingly.
There was a little bit of a hatch & the odd fish was rising sporadically so I decided to try something Stuart Crofts suggested at a talk he gave to Horwich fly dressers, he recommended fishing a buzzer New Zealand style off a dry, not a fly combo I had previously tried on rivers but, one that definitely works.
An injury I'm seeing increasingly on Trout in the river, it's not like the Heron stab marks you sometimes see on fish, this is more like a chunk that has been bitten out. I'm sure this is down to the mink that are present as the river here is devoid of Cormorant, Goosanders & Gollum.
Spotted a pod of three fish sipping down flies tight to the near bank under some branches & managed to waft a little EHC just in front of them with a side cast. With a big swirl the fish took & shot off upstream jolting the rod forward & stripping line. It jumped once trying to shake the fly then I didn't see it for the next five minutes as it bored up & down the river. As usual I'd forgotten my net so had to hand him in.
You can see the fly just knicked in the scissors.
There was a little bit of a hatch & the odd fish was rising sporadically so I decided to try something Stuart Crofts suggested at a talk he gave to Horwich fly dressers, he recommended fishing a buzzer New Zealand style off a dry, not a fly combo I had previously tried on rivers but, one that definitely works.
