Tuesday the 17 finally came, and the weather was promising, sun, warm and no wind! After the weather of the last week this must be the eye of the storm! Had arranged to meet Louis " Orangeotter" at a farmhouse on the way to Bala for breakfast at 0930. The sun is still out I'm amazed, an excellent bacon roll and we set off to Bala to pick up our ticket for the day from the post office. £7.50 for the day, a bargain.
As Louis had fished here before he led the way to the first section which was on the Dee a few miles outside Bala. Accessing the river here was very easy from the layby,
We decided to fish here until midday and then move to another section. The first stretch of river had a steady flow around 2ft deep.
Both of us fished upstream nymphs, no fish up to the first set of riffles, I had 1 touch but no fish, plenty of photos. Louis is still using my spare rod until his turns up so he took the opportunity to try out my other rod, finding it a lot lighter and with the 12.5ft furled leader reaching more water.
Louis then moved above the riffles to a run about 50mts long. Immediately he hooked into a very large Grayling well over 2lb on a PTN,
with the fish netted and photographed I joined him in the section.
Time now was around 12, then the hatch started, Grammon where popping off in the centre of the run, a feeding frenzy started! Big, Big Grayling were humping through the surface taking the emerging nymphs just sub surface. A friend of Louis last year caught a nymph which Louis had copied but as yet not proved its worth, one was handed to me and attached very quickly. Second cast and my big grayling was on, big smile and photographs as my new tamo was wet.
Other fish came and went, this only lasted for around 30 mins and then stopped as quickly as it started. One fish was still rising at the tail of the pool, I covered it, the fly disappeared but before I could react the fish snapped the line, I can only guess what and how big the fish was? What did I learn? If you match the hatch you catch very quickly! The fly in question was in "Trout & Salmon" sometime last year.
By now the low pressure promised had started to come in, cloud cover and a downstream wind making fishing very hard, also the fish now had no interest I what we had to offer.
We made our way back to the cars for some lunch then still in our waders off to another section of the Dee lower down.
The wind by now had become cold in the face and strengthen, but as we walked downstream fish could be seen rising taking what we later discovered to be a large hatch go March Browns,
Louis pointed out this was an excellent indication of the river doing well as there had been a decline in this insect over the past years. A few were captured to be copied by Louis on his return home, they turned out to be females. We tried spiders at first to tempt the rising fish but for some reason they were not willing to feed on our offerings? March Browns were still floating downstream so we both changed to our own versions of a Brown Klinkhammer. Then the fun started, in the last run before the car it seemed like every cast produced a good fish, mainly grayling but to make the day legal one fine brown trout decided to play,
Grayling do not know they should be now breeding and not taking our offerings! At around 4pm we decided to call it a day and pack up, one good days fishing had not been spoiled by a leaking wader sock, if you gets chance, fish the upper Dee it's stuffed with good fish, but it also helps to have a fellow angler with you who has the killer fly.
Simon.
P.S. the remaining photos are in the photo topic as there are a few.