River Chew - Sunday 10th April

Old Smoothound · #1 04-10-2005, 08:55 PM

Hi Guy's,

Today I thought I would try fly fishing for some river species on my club waters of the River Chew. This is the River that fills the mighty Chew Valley Lake at one end and runs back out of the other. The location of the stretch that I fish has to remain secret, but it is not far from where I live.

The morning was glorious although a bit chilly, my quarry would not be rising to dry flies today I thought.

The method of fishing was a weight forward 5 floating line on my Orvis Silver Label river rod and my Orvis Battenkill reel. A blob of float dough was holding up a couple of weighted nymphs....more later on how to tie and present them.

The River was in fine fettle after the recent heavy rain as it runs off very quickly. I fished a wonderful little pool with a riffle that runs into a deeper glide before hitting a slight bend. I cast upstream some 10 yards, put a decent aerial mend in the line and the die was cast.

First run down ...nothing......second run down..... slight tremble at the tip of the line.....third run down....wham! Scorching run and whatver it was dived straight into a sunken tree stump!

Sh*t...

Things went very quiet for 30-40 minutes while the swim settled down. On re-casting up and accross at about 45 degrees, my first Rainbow of the day about 1lb 4ozs, a few more casts another couple of Rainbows of about the same weight.

Then on almost the last cast of the session a right scorching run again...straight upstream...oh no not the tree stump again....a better fight than the Rainbows...this is something different.... its right in the flow now and still fighting hard. Is it a Brownie i'm thinking.........

No it turned out to be a nice Grayling of about 1lb 12ozs. very lean though probably been a tough winter and its fighting for the local spawning rights on the river now.

But all the same a very pretty little fish...safely returned to fight another day