The garden tasks are waning now and I had a day off Monday for the English Bank Holiday. I had already decided over the weekend I needed to get onto a river but as the day approached I became more and more uncertain where to head. The Tummel? The Clyde? The Carron? The Devon?
Where to go?
Permits were the issue. I fancied going somewhere on the Clyde I had not fished for some time, maybe Hosier or The Lamington section but then that meant having to traipse around trying to get permits as neither are online. A friend reported that Mid-Clyde was high and dirty on Sunday and though the Middle River isn’t really a good indicator of the upper stretches it meant I would need to head further afield to fish and some of those areas get a lot of pressure at the best of times.
I also heard the Tummel was fairly low, I wasn’t in the mood for the Carron and didn’t have a permit for the Devon….. So while still eating my breakfast and mulling over the options on Monday morning the Earn came to mind. A quick call to the Ghillie at Kinkell Bridge, Sandy and it was decided, the River Earn it was.
I was there by about twenty past nine and the sun came out, it was really most pleasant and while bright sunshine doesn’t usually make for the best fishing conditions it does make for a pleasant day out after the recent poor run of weather we have had and I was perfectly happy. “At least you will catch a suntan, Sandy said to me”. The river had been fishing well for Brown Trout and Grayling, Sandy told me and was saying how the river was high and dirty for about a week after the colossal thunderstorm we had a couple of weeks ago and it seemed to have brought the big trout out in numbers. They were eager to feed in the dirty water I was told. It wasn’t dirty looking now and was around 600mm on the gauge. Certainly not high…. but as I soon learned it was fairly steaming through in places.
Chewin’ the fat
By the time we had chewed the fat over COVID, anti-social behaviour, Salmon netting, the sale of the beat, recent trout angler visits and fishing in Sutherland, it must have been getting on for half past ten. I also had been a total numbnuts when loading my gear into the car. As my garage has been a mess recently with materials for the garden, I had my stillwater gear in the boot of the car. I took this out on Monday morning, grabbed my river gear and headed out. Except having taken my stillwater rods out the car and put them in their storage rack, I then removed them again and put them back in the car!
Who does that?
Fishing the old 4 weight
Fortunately I did manage to lift my old Greys Streamflex Plus rod in a 4weight and had a 4weight line and reel in my sling pack. So I had something to fish with when I got to the Earn. Actually it ended up a good choice for the day as I found myself trying all different methods to try snare a fish and it was a good compromise for fishing bugs, Klink and Dink and single dries in sometimes windy conditions.
As soon as I started fishing the sun vanished and having waded across half the river to reach the first fast run I opted to target, I realised how cold the water was. Much colder than I anticipated. Also it was running through with considerable force. My two bug set up just wasn’t going to cut it as is, a 3.5mm bug and 3mm on the dropper weren’t even starting to get down. Luckily I had a small box of VERY heavy bugs in the pack and a tungsten shellback was tied on to get things fishing properly. I have only rarely had to resort to this kind of “ammunition” even in winter. I modified things to try three bugs with the shellback on the point and felt I was getting down now and fished up the entire run and never encountered a fish until right at the top when I hooked a small Parr or Brown Trout…. think it was a Parr judging by the markings.
By the time I got back to the bank I had to pull on my fleece ( which I had removed earlier in the sun) before moving to my second section. The water was a perfect bugging pace and depth here and I fancied my chances. But I was starting to get cold, the sun had gone and had been replaced by a quite cold upstream breeze. I wasn’t fishing too long, back to a more conventional two bugs and a Czech Nymph three fly team, when I had a welcome thump and I netted a nice Grayling of about 30cms or so , maybe just shy of a pound. A welcome fish for the efforts so far. As is so often the case it had taken at the end of the drift as the flies begin their swing up from the bottom. As I worked up I had several good knocks and one very snatchy grab at the flies right as I was lifting off, that I would hazard was more likely a Trout than a Grayling but nothing else that would stick.
Change of method
As none of the offers were right hard on the bottom, I decided that after I had removed myself from the water I would swap to a more conventional fly line and try a small black klinkhammer with a small black nymph underneath and see if this got any interest. It would also let me fish further out into the current than I could reach with the French Leader. What fly to use for the dry/indicator was really a guess as the river was not making things easy for me, I barely saw a natural fly come off all day. They were very few and far between.
Right up the run I was seemingly rising fish to the dry but none were taking with any conviction and I wasn’t convinced they were fish of any size in any case. By the time I had done the run again with the Klink and Dink approach, I was really feeling the cold and had to retire to the bank to warm up- I was also regretting not bringing a flask of tea with me as a bottle of diet coke really wasn’t warming me up! I was going to fish upstream in the afternoon so decided to head back to the Bridge and detour back to the car and pull on a pair of Jogging Bottoms that I keep as a dry change of clothing in case I ever all in the river. This made the afternoon a much more comfortable affair even though the weather never improved.
Sandy had shared with me that some fish had been getting caught in the flats though there was quite a lot of weed and it was hard to say what size the fish that were evidently rising there were, They looked to be small. So spending time watching I spotted one area where there seemed to be several fish rising and I decided to change to a single dry fly and went down to a small size 16 Quill bodied F Fly. Right away this hooked a fish but again it was a Parr and for the next twenty minutes I was plagued by these wee fish. If there was anything bigger there, they were being crowded out by the wee guys higher in the water column.
I kept walking right up to a weir ( it looks like a fairly natural waterfall, to be honest so must be pretty old and has long since fallen into disrepair). Above here the water was flat and very weedy and wasn’t especially inviting looking so I turned back and decided to give the tail out of the weir a go. The water was very fast and so I was trying to target the creases and seams of the fast to slow water transitions. Right away I was hitting Parr so Off came the small fly and I decided to go the other way, getting something on that maybe the small fish could not take….. but would it work?
I decided to tie on a Lifejacket Caddis, for no reason other than it’s big, floats like a cork even in fast water, I could see it in the waves and foam, and if I wanted to suspend a small nymph under it, that should not be a problem. I cast up into a seam just off the main current and right away it was grabbed and this was a much better fish. Using the swift current the fish, a Grayling was able to get below me and it became much heavier on my line but I was able to coax it back above me again without needing to get out and move downstream myself ( I was reluctant in case it was able to use that opportunity to get into a clump of weed) , and it was soon in my net. Not an enormous Grayling probably about 33-36 cms and in the upper half of the 1-2lb range. It had been eating well let’s say though I doubt it was 2lb.
Catching Grayling on dries is a rare treat for me, I have done it on occasion but its few and far between. I was though hopeful I would coax more to the big fly but it wasn’t to be. I had the odd small fish splash at it but it was too big a mouthful for most I think and I wasn’t bothered by any more Parr, though I wasn’t “bothered” by anything bigger either. Byt he time I was back at the bridge, Sandy was back on the other side of the river too and he shouted across to ask how i had fared and was saying that the river had risen five inches over the day and that wasn’t going to help. I can’t say I had noticed as I had no real datum to judge things by having kept moving all day. But the next river outing I need to be warmer dressed I think.
