Tuesday 14 April 2009

Cant Clough, can't catch (almost)


Jonny took us up to Cant Clough, one of his club waters on Sunday, a high moorland res perched in the Pennines near Todmorden. It took about four hours to cover the water & in that time we threw everything at them & almost blanked. It wasn't that we weren't getting takes, we just couldn't land anything. The fish were taking lightning quick & just shaking the hook everytime. Only when I beefed up my gear a little & stripped back a lure did I manage to bully one in.

Saturday 11 April 2009

Lunksville

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.

Wednesday 1 April 2009

mink or gollum

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.