Another fishing opportunity arose on Monday so I took myself off to the Wharfe for the afternoon. It had been raining but the river levels website suggested it was coming down so screw it, worth a punt. I also wanted to remind myself of the particulars of this beat which I’ve only fished once quite some time ago. Our very informative members pack contains a warning about being careful not to trigger an alarm whilst cutting through a particular part of a farm on this section. Well for fuck sake, that’s just asking for trouble where I’m concerned. The only time I ever went canoeing I fixated beforehand on the worry of capsizing until I basically wobbled myself into capsizing – it was inevitable!
The water didn’t look too bad, bit of colour but still fishable. I decided to have another go at French Nymphing on a run where it must be about 4 feet deep with a bit of a push through. I had 2 heavy flies on and they were clunking along the bottom nicely but as Poncho said, Not a thing. Not a fucking trace. No blood, no bodies… We hit nothing! so moved upstream to the next bit of water I thought might be suitable. Again, nothing. Perhaps people are overselling this technique to me but I expected to be getting a fair bit of action!
Eventually the little red devil on my shoulder said “Go on Bobby, set fire to the orphanage switch leader, turn around 180 degrees and do the bad thing”. And so it came to pass that I found myself chucking a Gold ribbed Gold head hare’s ear down and ever so slightly slightly across. It wasn’t long before I got a nice little grayling.
The rest of the session was filled with grayling that made the one above look huge! I did however see 2 kingfishers which was a marvellous little bonus and I didn’t set the alarm off which came as a surprise. As an addendum, some of you may have seen the recent furore on social media about sewerage…sewage…sewerage..whichever it is, being discharged into the Wharfe and I must admit it has played on my mind to the point that I washed my hands about 5 times before I dare pick up the baby when I got home!
Nice post about changing tack to reap some success. And sometimes, it means going against the grain, either in terms of offending purists (!) or even doing it ‘wrong’. I think we sometimes get too hung up on what others might think rather than concentrating more on what we think at the time. I hope you will not mind that I mention one of my own blogs where I discuss these issues specifically, here: https://fishmyflies.wixsite.com/blog/post/opinion-some-interactions-between-dry-and-wet-flies-and-lines Thank you, Gary.