Yorkshire Fly Fishing

Twitter is addictive, it’s digital crack for the feeble minded (myself included). It’s also a reflection on how messed up the human race has become. You sit there thumbing through pictures of kittens/tanks getting blown up/motivational posts/arguments with death threats and wonder what the f*ck is going on with the world. I also end up with endless posts in my feed of anglers holding up ginormous brown trout. I click ‘like’ but sometimes I rage a little inside, fuck off with your fucking massive trout and your fucking hashtags you fish pushing fucks! I’m actually just jealous that I have no time to go fishing and even when I do I’m pretty terrible at it. Bastards.

Anyway, last weekend a rare moment in time to hit the river and perhaps a chance to be a fish pushing f*ck. I’d tied up a couple of yellow may dun imitations the night before as word on the river was they were doing the business. I really wanted to tie some yellow klinkhammers but discovered I had no yellow cock hackles and nor could I find any to buy so I invented some CDC creations instead. I also created some knotted tapered dry fly leaders. I made my way to the river armed with my new Vision Nymphmaniac rod with the intention of seeing how this specialist nymph rod fared as a tool for dry fly fishing.

My previous couple of visits to the Wharfe were in Winter so it was bloody marvellous to see the river alive again. I headed downstream, stopping at likely spots to see if there was much happening until I got to a pool which felt like the right place to start. A couple of fish were moving, what they were taking was anyone’s guess but I stuck on a good general purpose pattern, the parachute Adams. First cast, a nice fish slashed at my fly but we didn’t connect. I tried again then it stopped rising so I held off and had a few pops at another rising fish which ignored my fly. I dropped the Adams blind back where the first fish had been and something walloped it. It was a decent sized brown which fought hard, rolled around the leader then pinged off as I tried to ease it in towards the net. My heart sank a little. On the positive front, the Nymphmaniac was really impressing me as a dry fly rod – I’d been concerned it was maybe going to be a one-trick but absolutely not! I did eventually hook and land a smaller brown off this pool which was nevertheless most welcome

I meandered further downstream to a good bit of fairly quick water which has a bit of depth and swapped reels over to one ready configured with a French leader.

I am really trying to master this technique and every time I try it I learn something new/forget something old! I started feeling happier with my drifts and then sensed a take without really seeing anything, which converted into a nice grayling that put a goodly bend in the rod. I took a couple of pictures then spent plenty of time waiting for it to revive itself in the water.

I spent another hour or so on the river but landed no more fish but this little session has definitely got me back in the mood for river fishing. That same weekend I tied up some more flies and ordered some more goodies, namely a new net and a lanyard to facilitate easy access to spools of leader etc. The lanyard is great but the net is a bit of a joke and is going straight back – any self respecting fish could jump straight back out of it. Indeed, when I put a picture of it on Twitter (you see how I’ve top and tailed this post?!) someone commented it would make a better tennis racket!