Can you get an indian summer in the middle of winter? Well, it certainly seems we have one here! Yesterday I was off galavanting on the river in shorts and crossing the river, as I usually do, in wearing a pair of neoprene diver´s boots. It seems quite odd to get away with this while much of Europe is, if not yet in the grip of winter, not far away.
At this time of year many fly fishermen switch to species like grayling and pike which don´t seem to mind the cold too much or which are not excluded by close season rules. There are no grayling in my neck of the woods although nearby reservoirs contain pike. What we do get, here in my local river, are gypsy barbel and common carp and both of these were in fine form yesterday.
I started out with a pretty “standard issue” size 14 bead head nymph but the wind came up and it was a little difficult to control it on a longish leader and so I decided to tie on a relatively monstrous fly with a tungsten head. I tied this thing pretty badly and the body tended to slide down the hook shank. But it was scruffy, had movement in the materials with which it was tied, and seemed quite palatable to the fish. Any serious fly tier would have a fit if they saw a fly like this but the fish were more tolerant and gave it the nod of approval. Before everything remaining of this battered fly was stripped off by a particularly combative underwater weed (the tungsten bead and hook alone survived the ordeal), this ugly creation had accounted for a carp and four or five barbel.
Yesterday the fish were prepared to tolerate a kind of presentation that disturbs them when they are one of their finicky moods: the nymph could be cast beyond them and then drawn in front. At least one fish took it while it was being moved. It was sometimes possible to “ambush” a cruising fish by placing the nymph in its path and just create a small movement when it approached. I love this kind of fishing.
After my monster fly was destroyed by the weed, I swapped again to a little nymph and took a carp and a barbel on a small bead head in my favourite stretch of water – where a fast shallow glide enters a broad pool. In the eddy created here, carp cruise just off the fast water and it is well worth waiting around for one or two of these fish to put in an appearance. I was lucky enough to catch one of these. I wasn´t banking on catching anything here because a woman on horseback had walked her horse through this water an hour or so before!
She was a very nice lady and we spoke briefly. She expressed surprise that I was wading the river in a pair of shorts. I told her the river water was not too cold. I tried to bite my lip and refrained from telling her that she had just marched her bloody horse through the stretch of water I had been planning to fish! The funny thing is that I greeted her and had a quick chat just BEFORE she walked her charge into the shallows. It didn´t seem to cross her mind that a horse traipsing though the middle of a shallow river might make life a little more difficult for a fly fisherman trying to sneak up on a fish!
Here´s me and a gypsy barbel.
I caught 8 barbel and this was the best of them. It took the big ugly nymph that I used to overcome difficulties trying to cast a very lightweight fly on a long leader.
This carp came from an eddy at the mouth of a pool. I was forced to “rest” this pool after a woman walked her horse through it!
I was thinking so hard about not dropping my camera into the drink that I nearly missed the subject of the photograph! Here the “eddy” carp is being released. I landed it in the calm water downstream of where it was taken.
fishydreams 