But the river stayed brown, and high and coloured, from no matter which angle I looked and stuttered. Perhaps a bugger would have done, but somehow it didn’t seem right. I walked and walked, then turned and tried, to photograph the sight of clouds drifting by in a golden sea of light.

Well, I’ve arrived at a mental service station and before long it’ll be back along the road to trout city. It’s that time of year where opening day creeps over the dashboard and into view. I’ve been thinking about what the new season might hold and between fits of flashbacks from previous years a few new thoughts have crystallised.

This is going to be the year of the Spey. Last season a pal of mine called Ally taught me how to roll cast properly and it soon became a critical part of my fishing arsenal. Having said that I almost never use a standard roll cast, not with groovy alternatives like the snake roll and the double Spey. These days I can Spey cast almost as far as I can overhead cast, which either means I’m an absolute god of casting or my overhead needs work. Spey casting is unbeatable for fishing spiders and streamers across and down, and dry flies in tight corners. One of the great benefits is the lack of turbo-fish-spooking as caused by overhead flailing.

Old boy Alistair, our urban flyfishing guru, has staked out 2007 as the year of Stealth. This is of course a superb idea, and it’s one of the main reasons that I catch so many more big fish than Al. I am almost entirely invisible to trout when in stealth mode, apart from when falling in whilst attempting to simulate the hatch of a man-fly.

This is also going to be the year of the presentation cast. The wiggle cast is already par for the course. In fact, and I hate to return to this, I know that Al has mastered this as part of his revolutionary APC approach. We of course refer to the Automatic Presentation Cast which manifests itself as unavoidable wiggly lines on completion of every delivery. A real beauty that one.

I’ve been working on curve casts and aerial mending. Never again shall Mr Trout be spooked by a poorly laid fly line. Unless intended of course, but we already knew that. Somewhere along the way my favourites, the snap casts, shall make an appearance, most probably during the difficult days of July and August. No fish shall fail to be impressed by my hard fought casting prowess.

In that strange place called reality I fear that all this shall turn out to be a pile of CBS. Closed Season Bullshit is an affliction I seem to have been particularly struck by this winter. Let’s hope the new season bug provides a suitable cure.

Carefully playing down this feat I tried to paint a rosy picture to my brother. Images of crisp winter sunshine, secret pools and massive grayling enticed him down from the north east to spend a few days here. I described short, relaxing days spent prospecting for monsters. The evenings would bring searing hot curry at our favourite joint and a few pints of the best of beers to round things off.

Here are some statistics for you. In four trips for grayling I have:

spent 20 hours chucking bombs into icy rivers
struck 316 times at false takes from snags
spent 5 hours thawing out frozen feet
lost 11 flies
lost 4 complete leader setups
broken the tip of 1 rod (a particularly proud moment)
lost my mind
and… caught no fish

Not since the earliest days of my fishing career have I blanked so impressively: this was truly spectacular failure. I should add that I swore on several occasions, most notably when coming incredibly near to falling in (twice). This is clearly bad form, and generally leads to further bad luck. In case this all sounds a little, um, negative, I did HOOK one fish on the second trip. Actually, it was a damn big fish, probably somewhere north of 2.5lb. Of course it came off. It would almost have been a shame to have ruined a perfectly good bit of blanking with a lunker.

With this kind of success rate, I’m seriously considering a career change to martian exploration. It certainly makes you realise that no amount of obsessing over casting, fly tying or other peripheral matters will make you catch fish if they’re not there. Finding grayling in winter can be soul-destroyingly difficult. Despite this, I think that in general if you get your flies to the fish, they’ll usually take. But something about these trips just felt wrong. I never really felt near a fish.

The dreaded question does inevitably creep up at a time like this: what the HELL is the point?

Well, if I had an answer to that then maybe I’d be rich. More likely I’d have taken up cross-stiching. I think that basically, I don’t like failing. I’m perfectly happy to accept that I’m shit at something, but that doesn’t stop me having a pretty long go at it (my PhD studies are a case in point). For the moment, grayling fishing has got the better of me. It’s time to give it a rest, at least until my toes look a little less blue. There is actually a trip in the works to a secret river in a couple of weeks. It’s supposed to have loads of grayling. If I ever DO catch one, I’m going to kiss it and say thanks for taking pity on a blank-firing angler.

In the interest of fairness, I should further point out that my (again, more experienced ) pal did actually catch a grayling on one of the trips. This was, it should be even FURTHER pointed out, only after my brother and I painstakingly woke him up with 39 drifts right over his head. Talk about being a gillie.