To say that the spring fishing has been a bit testing this year would perhaps be a bit of an understatement. The unseasonable and persistent strong northerly winds kept the temperature down and thinned out the expected early hatches of March Browns, and Large Dark Olives. The northerly airstream persisted throughout May and limited the Grannom hatch, which can be spectacular here in the right conditions. There often wasn’t really the numbers in these hatches to turn the fish on and key them into a particular food source. As a consequence, the bigger fish weren’t coming out into the main stream, preferring to stick close to cover and feed a bit more opportunistically. So they didn’t get into a steady, regularly rising pattern and were a lot tougher to spot and fish to.
When the conditions are like this, the temptation is to work the river, swing spiders, fish the duo, klink and dink. It’s hard to hold back when you’ve spent those dark winter nights reading John Inglis Hall and Geirach and worked hard at the vice preparing for this moment; you’ve got to catch a fish! If you’re not in the water ‘waving a stick around’ you’re not fishing. Over the years, I’ve learnt to resist this. For me, getting into the water and casting is the last part of the process. I spend most of my time while on the river, looking and listening, moving slowly along the bank, trying to not break the skyline. I can often find myself watching a wee back eddy on the far bank for half an hour because I’ve thought maybe there was a tiny displacement; spend another twenty minutes easing my way into a casting position without creating a bow wave; stand for another ten minutes waiting for another sign, while watching closely what fly-life is drifting through the swim. Then, if I’m lucky, I might get a cast at a good trout. Sometimes it’s the ferocious gulp of a large fish that halts you in your tracks. You look around for the rise pattern - nothing. So you stand there waiting for it to happen all over again. Eventually it does, and you realise there’s no rise form because it’s deep in the overgrowth below the low hanging branches of a bush. That tiny wee displacement in a riffle or slight bulge in a bit of slack water under the far bank can so easily be missed if you work the river, or worse, your disturbance puts down these fish. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I never fish speculatively. Bugging for trout and grayling late summer can be amazing in the upper river and can pick up some cracking fish, but for me spring is about sight fishing with dries. Why would you do anything else?
When the conditions are testing like this, I always think it’s important not to get frustrated; better to slow down and look harder. On those occasions when there was a bunch of upwings on the water, the trout seemed to be refusing them. Looking more closely I could see fish dimpling. They were keyed into something else, obviously an emerger, but tiny, almost microscopic. Then a wee flat winged fly landed on my sleeve - midge! Not the tiny wee blood sucker but the slightly larger non-biting type, probably somewhere between 6 and 8mm in length and with an orange hue to the body. I search through the hundreds of winter tied olives of different tyings on 14 and 16, looking for something close and eventually find a shop bought 18 parachute with an orange body and peacock herl thorax. First drag free drift through, and the fly is sipped off the surface with no hesitation resulting in a chaotic explosion of white water below the tail of a leaping large trout. It wasn’t long until that fly was battered out of shape with the parachute hackle slipping off and the whip finish unfurling.
When I got back home, to refresh my memory, the Goddard ‘Waterside Guide’ was pulled out and the blurry photograph I took of the fly was more carefully scrutinised. Yes, a midge, probably a large ginger. I find it can be rewarding revisiting these texts, often there are subtleties that are forgotten or observations that can help nuance what you’re doing. Goddard describes how the pupa hangs below the surface, the ‘strongly curved body, often ribbed with the colour of the adult showing through, while the head portion is quite bulbous where the wings, thorax and legs have been developed’. I spent a couple of hours on the vice and produced a few flies on Partridge 16 and 18 klinkhammer hooks. The body, a simple orange silk thread, peacock herl thorax with a grizzle parachute hackle. This has been the standout fly during this challenging month of May and helped pick up some good fish in difficult situations. Hopefully the weather is going to change and we will have some good evening Sedge hatches.