fishydreams

I had a very fine fish on the Río Grande this afternoon. I was delighted with it, not only because it was a beautiful fish, but because I had my work cut out to catch it.

The Grande is a little coloured now following recent rain but I thought that the extra water it was carrying might encourage the fish to spread out a little and explore the reaches upstream of the deeper pools which are off limits when the river is skinnier.

Things were looking a little grim when I arrived at the river and discovered my little box of nymphs was back at home. So I made the most of whatever else I had available. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and the best I could come up with, by way of a fly, was a black woolly bugger with a tungsten head. I bit off most of its marabou tail (having also left my scissors at home!) and trimmed back the hackle and ended up with a crude looking fly that, at a pinch, might just be taken as a drowned terrestrial or some obese nymph.

I swam this ugly creation through the turbid pool that is a reliable fish holder and took a couple of fish before wandering off to see if increased river flows had coaxed some of the fish upstream. There were some but they were few and far between and they were hard to see. The big fish was the first barbel I saw in maybe 300 metres of river. It ghosted briefly into a little recess just off the main current and I figured he would have been there only for a very short time and so I pitched my fly to him and he had it first time of asking.

There are times when you get just one shot. This was one of these. The fly landed a few inches in front of the fish and it moved towards it. I gave it a couple of seconds and tightened and everything went solid before the fish turned into the current and shot off downstream. We slugged it out, the two of us, until I was able to beach him in the grass of the margin.

Some fish make an quite an impression and this fish, quite simply, was one of these.

This lovely fish was the best of five I had this afternoon.

The fish wandered briefly out of the main current into the little recess in the foreground. I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

I´ve tied some ugly flies before but this one, further mutilated at the riverside, is about as ugly as they come!