Somehow most of the middle part of the year seems to have gone begging, sucked away into the vortex of new job life and ‘other commitments’. It was thus with some excitement that I planned an evening down at a favourite summer haunt last night.

This time of year and this river always speak to me one acronym loud and clear, BWO. I arrived hoping there would be a blue-winged olive spinner fall, and over the next two hours I got as much and more.

The air was abuzz with life. Male BWO spinners danced up and down in columns and sputtered into my polaroid glasses as I crossed the first field. As I crouched by the waters edge, there were thick swarms of gnats rolling up and down over the riffly pools in that curious, pulsating manner. Every few moments a silver sedge torpedoed into my jacket. Pale wateries were on the wing, as well as a host of terrestrials. A summer river in full life, surely one of angling’s greatest treats.

I set up with a longish leader and a size 16 F-fly, fairly typical fare for such conditions. A few small trout quickly got quite excited by this offering, but it still felt like I was somewhat overgunning things. So I dropped back, first to a little BWO sherry spinner, and finally to a size 22 nondescript greyish spinner thingy, at which point I started to get much more confident rises. Little sups, often impossible to see amid the rolling water.

Moonrise.

I’ve said it before in these pages (as I’m quite sure have many others before me) that fishing like this on summer evenings has a feel much more like upstream nymphing than the dry fly fishing of spring. It’s a hilariously frustrating task trying to track a size 22 greyish fly as it tumbles over greyish seams topped with hundreds of size 22 greyish bubbles. Intuition, I think they call it.

By half 8 it was getting distinctly darkish, and within 40 minutes the moon was the main light source. I slowly fished on up through knee deep seams and runs, getting the occasional sup, or at least imagining so.

There’s a wonderful calm in fishing the dusk session at this time of year. The night descends, the air cools sharply, the water tugs ever so slightly heavier at your ankles. Fishing a very short line now, maybe 2 yards of fly line out the tip, trying to impart a bit of extra flick to push the leader out. Spot a sup, cast over it, a bit too far right, try again, it’s short, and again, that’s just about right…. “    “   …. that’s the sound of a ’sup’ by the way. Jerk the rod upright in mild surprise, missed another one, move on a yard, try again…

There’s this mesmerising rhythm, which I think is ever intensified by the diminishing light level which has a kind of focusing effect, like slowly turning the barrel of a camera lens and seeing things more clearly. With each passing minute, each drop in the available light, you have to concentrate that bit harder, so you are more entranced, and another minute passes, and the earth continues on its arc away from light, and I continue on my arc towards it.

As in all fishing it’s the lines and seams, the drop-offs and edges, that are most interesting. I think that holds especially true for the line between day and night, and nowhere can that be more clearly felt than passing a few hours in the company of a summer evening on the river.

So it was with some excitement that a fishing pal and I stalked through woods and across fallow fields towards a hidden stream which slid quietly through the undergrowth. We arrived to find the water running slightly high and with a beautiful Ardbeg tinge. After the barren month of June all this recent rain suddenly felt rather welcome.

We tackled up under a tunnel of overhanging trees. Upstream the late afternoon light crept through the layers of canopy and twinkled all over the streamy runs and pools. The feeling of anticipation on such days is tangibly electric. I wasn’t expecting anything big, indeed that was not the point at all. It was something else, much less describable, to do with the combination of yellow light, yellow bellies and the perpetual flow of clear water.

I flited about between fishing a small dry terrestrial and putting up a similarly small nymphal offering. Hope prevailed (as it seems to when on a river) and on went the dry. Some poor wading, poor casting and generally shocking rivercraft soon put paid to the first few pools. By the time a large, slow bend pool was reached however, I’d come down a few sizes to a no. 22 nondescript grey spinner and was once again feeling optimistic.

After several further failed attempts I finally managed to concoct the right combination of airy cast, steady feet and luck, and the first yellow-belly came scrapping back towards me. A couple more followed before we moved upstream as the sun dropped lower and coolness started to fold itself around the valley.

I switched to a wee brown-wire nymph, but our dutiful comrade stuck to his guns with a dirty duster and was rewarded with a pool of multiple rising trout. A couple of LDRs followed before finally his first brownie of the season came to hand, followed in quick succession by a brace more.

Twenty minutes later and the fish were still sipping at some indeterminable surface offerings, but a mutual decision was made to draw things to a close and go in search of a mucherious goodfoodus (pizza). This we achieved with not even a hint of a long distance release.

Regular readers of this blog, however, will know about my minor obsession with grayling. A couple of years back I had a period of concentrated winter grayling fishing where I tried hard to become a competent nymph fisherman. I wanted so dearly to understand the subtleties of fishing nymphs to the silver grayling that I know inhabit many waters close to where I live. I did have some success, particularly when a good pal showed me exactly where to fish. But I was left with the nagging feeling that to reach the same level of comfort I’d attained with spring trout would take much more effort.

Graying spend most of their time close to the bottom of rivers, feeding off the bugs that crawl around down there. This is something I’ve read many times, and have also grown to accept as largely true for many of the rivers I fish here in Scotland. I have caught grayling on dry flies, but never to the same size or with the same consistency as I’ve had on nymphs. This makes it sound like I’ve had consistency with nymphs. Relative consistency, relative.

Recently I find myself most interested in grayling as the trout season is dying. This is partly due to seeing the remarkable success that some of my pals have had at such times. It’s also because I’ve noticed on quite a few occasions recently that there seems to be a distinct increase in the prevalence of grayling relative to trout at that time of the season, particularly on some of the waters I visit. I wonder if it’s a localised thing, or if it’s simply because I tend to fish nymphs and spiders more often as the levels of surface activity decline. Whatever the case, I enjoy spending a sunny September afternoon by the side of a favourite small stream, searching out the deeper pockets of water and hoping for the electric moment when yet another minor snag becomes a bristling bar of silver enthusiasm.

This year I decided to keenly concentrate my September efforts on a small section of a small stream I like to fish. I tried to visit as often as possible, hoping that with time I would develop a better understanding for the moods and architecture of my chosen retreat. I was also hoping that maybe, just maybe I’d get a glimpse at a more comfortable truce with the nervous twitch of a grayling’s tail.

On one of my first visits to the river I arrived and set up a wee 8′ rod and a 3 weight line. I tied on a whopping monster of a dry fly, something like the lovechild of a chernobyl ant and a coch y bonddu. Let’s call it a Tammy’s Terror. I had the bizzare notion that if I couldn’t nymph the grayling out of their secret lies, I’d tempt them up for a gobble at the Terror. So enthused and convinced was I by this wonderful idea that I strode up to the nearest looking bend, planning to survey ‘my territory’ for the most opportune pools, and completely spooked three enormous grayling. The Terror, it seemed, had terrorised.

I caught one fish on that day, to a little peacock herl nymph. It almost stretched from the base of my hand, across the vast expanse of wrinkles and peaks that cover my palm, to the bottom of my fingers. Yes, on the same hand. It was a grayling though, and was caught fairly on a nymph. Five hours of fishing and only one (tiny) fish, but categorical success wasn’t on my mind. Nope, the only thing I could see when I closed my eyes that night was an action replay of three giant Terrorfied grayling making like hay in all directions.

There was only one thing for it, I had to phone that most interesting of gods, the grayling god. Unfortunately I don’t have his phone number any more, as apparently gods, even grayling ones, do sometimes migrate. So I emailed him instead (he is a he). Several long exchanges later and I was feeling ready for the second wave. Small, tungsten-beaded peacock herl nymphs were tied up, and the nearest sheep found itself plundered of some lovely fluffy white wool.

I consider fishing for good-sized trout or grayling in a small stream to be amongst the loveliest of of the many lovely ways to spend a day. The only problem is that with enough anticipation, sweaty palms and enthusiastic optimism, any lovely activity can end up being a little disappointing. I thus tried hard to control my usual fantasies, aiming for a calculated, hunter-gatherer ethos. Hate the fish, hate the damn fish. Must. Kill. Fish. [Political aside: I love grayling too much to kill them, that is what is known in the Isle of Britain as a 'joke'.]

I arrived at the place of Terror as a beautiful September morning gave way to a beautiful September afternoon. Clouds shuffled across the sky in a nice orderly fashion, occasionally thinning for long enough to allow some golden autumn sun to light up the river banks. I put up the 18′ leader that the grayling god had mentioned, including about 5′ of thin tippet. On the end went a peacock herl nymph, quickly followed 4′ above by a pinch of the stolen white fleece. I crept up.

After watching trout parr dancing in a shallow flat pool for about half an hour, it was clear that the grayling, were they still around, would be in the deeper water upstream. I slid into the water, creating a rapidly traveling wave of parr that I was sure would spook anything this side of Glasgow. I crossed the river in three paces and climbed up the far side. Now on my stomach, I frog-crawled upstream, peering hard into the deeper seams. If only I could spot a fish, and know where to cast, it would have given me supreme confidence. After eying a particularly fish-like shape for ten minutes, I began to grow impatient. More minutes passed, and the debate in my head swung markedly towards the ‘lump of mud’ camp.

The whole escapade seemed to be veering dangerously towards the tourist’s favourite sentence involving weather and ‘last week’. So I debunked downstream, sent off another shockwave of parr on re-entry, and started to creep slowly back up towards the run.

The landscape is particularly interesting at this spot. The river describes a slow, continuous bend, over a distance of about 30 yards. The right hand bank (looking upstream) seems to have collapsed on itself many times, leaving a strange pattern of ridges and islands. The Quiraing in miniature. It means that there are a couple of pronounced ‘grooves’ in the river channel, where the flow has been squeezed between bits of collapsed bank. If a grayling was going to be anywhere, surely one of those deeper runs would be the place.

Hearing the voice of the grayling god in my ears, I set myself up for a false-cast-free flick cast. A 10 yard loop of line hung in the current downstream, my rod pointing at it and the wee nymph pinched between the finger and thumb of my left hand. I slowly swung the rod upstream, quickening and quickening andthenagentleflick. As long as you let go of the nymph at the right time, this cast works remarkably well, and puts no fly line whatsoever above any upstream lying fish. On that first occasion the drifting breeze caught the line and dumped the whole lot too far to the left, in an area of dead water. Two or three times more the same ritual was repeated, with the same result. I finally plucked up the courage to really go for it, and was momentarily delighted to see the cast stretch out beautifully in front of me, and right over the deep run.

I say momentarily, because the cast was too good. The nymph had been grabbed by one of the islands, and the whole cast lay tensioned out in front of me. A quick and precise application of tweakage, along with a not-so-quick-and-not-so-precise application of poor language and the nymph skipped free and plopped into the water. It was at this point that everything started to go slow. Non-fishers will think I’m trying to make this dramatic (I am), but it really does have some truth in it. Perhaps it was all the time-wasting that preceded, but as the cast twisted and drifted down the run I had enough time to remind myself to strike at anything.

The wool behaved perfectly as the current dictated, shifting left, then right as it entered the narrowest part of the channel. I instinctively raised the rod as it came close, ready for the next cast. Then suddenly, with the wool just a couple of metres upstream, it paused. Not a pull, not dive, just a short little think. I twitched the rod up, and within a fraction of a second a beautiful big grayling materialised from the run, gills flared, pectoral fins erect and dorsal at full mast. I have the most vidid image burned into my mind of that moment, when a tumbling stream turned into a tumbling stream containing a fighting grayling. I can see it now, appearing from the deep like a mini-zeppelin suddenly released from its stream bed cage.

One of the funny things about small streams is that there’s only so much water in which to swim. The grayling first headed upstream, before thinking better of it and bolting downstream between my legs, and straight into a waiting net. Seconds from minding his own business above the safety of a gravel run, to being in some buffoon’s landing net. Needless to say, your writer was pretty chuffed.

Despite all my egging and building up, the grayling wasn’t even that big, certainly not by the standards of some that are caught in Scotland. 1.5lb dead on, and 14″. But for a stream that Jonathan Edwards could easily skip over, I think him remarkable nonetheless. Typical trout up in those parts are measured in small numbers of ounces, not pounds.

It’s fascinating that certain fish are able to adapt to the available feeding and grow on so well compared to the more established species. The plentiful evidence of cased caddis and other nymphs seems to back this up. I’ve been told that the general feeding strategy of grayling is quite different to that of trout. Trout of less than a pound or two spend much of their time ‘drift feeding’, holding in the current and waiting to intercept passing nymphs. Grayling on the other hand are more proactive, and use their overhanging mouth to grub around and seek out nymphs on the bottom. I’ve seen this behaviour once or twice, and others I know have seen it much more often than that.

Back on the river I managed to winkle out another lovely grayling, almost a twin brother to the first, from a deep pocket further upstream. It’s a funny way of fishing really. Hours of false takes as the nymph snags on something, interspersed with occasional moments of pure excitement when the snag starts shaking and swimming around. Spring dry fly fishing it ain’t, but there is a strangely elusive charm to it all.

I can’t help but feel that those September days have indeed helped me to get a bit further along the path to grayling comfort. I’m still a good way off being consistent, but I think that by fishing long leaders, small nymphs and by stalking slowing, I’ve improved my approach a lot. A quiet demon, however, is still waving the Terror in front of my polaroids.

Maybe. In Pink.

To me summer is late evenings on my favourite stream, casting at crimson water with sedges buzzing around my head. It’s the feeling of ariving to swarms of spinners pulsing forward and back, up and down around my car. It’s the sight of a blue winged olive perched on the windscreen, looking at all his pals in the air.

The other night I pulled the car up next to the verge and stepped out into the gathering dim. Swallows swept in their loopy dance above the field, and that feeling of summer magic crept out from its hiding place somewhere in my conciousness.

In recent months I’ve spent rather too much time contemplating where I’m going in my life, and thinking about all the things I’m not doing. Although I am still what one might call ‘young’, I do sometimes feel that life is moving on rather too fast. But on evenings with swallows and fragile little olives, I feel sure I’ve found something special and worth looking after, and enviable to most if they only knew.

Summer is blue winged olives. It’s the squinting eyes that dart to and a-fro in search of the little sherry spinner on the end of my leader, as it’s tugged forth and back through low water eddies. With the passing seasons, though, I worry less and less about actually seeing the size 16 speck on the water.

I increasingly view spinner fishing as being the mysterious brother to upstream nymphing, where the best success comes from seeing the surface of the water rather than looking for a fly lying prostrate on it. I try to focus all my attention on casting the end of the fly line to where I’ve seen a sipping trout, subconsciously timing the pace of the river as it brings the spinner back to the fish, and waiting for a rise. In the gloaming of 10pm in July it hardly seems worth the effort trying to see an artificial fly lying flat in or just under the water’s surface.

There usually comes a point in the evening where I decide that’s it’s time to cut loose and sedge for glory. This time normally arrives as I determine that it’s getting close to the point of no-tying-on-a-fly return. If the fish are obviously still on the spinner then it’s obviously a bit silly to switch to the sedge. But I have grown rather fond of the release granted by suddenly having a hunk of deer tied to a size 10 hook at the end of the leader, instead of the delicate filaments of poly-yarn and seal’s fur that comprise my sherry spinner.

It’s been a strange year down at riffle city. Since I discovered that supplementary stocking of trout takes place there, things just haven’t been the same in my head. Nevertheless, summer has become so connected with riffle city that I’m uncontrollably drawn there come July.

The trout this year have been uncommonly small. As with one of the other river’s I like to fish it has been hard work to get through the wee’uns. I’m beginning to think now that come summer the rule to follow is that there’s an inverse relationship between the apparent agressivness of the rise, and the size of the fish. So during these past two trips to the riffles I have been trying hard to spot the subtle rises.

I’ve even had some success using this principle, but have no evidence to prove as much. It’s also been a season of fish falling off.

As I drove my mind flickered between locations. I always find this the difficult bit, which exit to take.. I eventually decided on a bit of small stream action on my favourite of small streams. However, as I drove close to its bigger brother, I felt inexplicably lured to have a go there instead. Time was short, so I stopped at the nearest access point (ok it’s not the nearest, but near enough the nearest) and pulled on my waders.

Looking around me the light was really beautiful, a piercing warm orange glow as the sun passed close to a storm cloud. The cloud seemed to encourage the wind too, for it was merrily puffing away as I strung up the 5-weight. I vaulted the nearest fence and made like a ferret across the field in a downstream direction. I say made like a ferret, but that’s not really a particularly accurate statement of fact, as indeed the fact was that with at least one broken rib I probably made more like a wheezing, crippled goat across the field.

I walked for a while, until I was well downstream of my target pool. Standing in the riffles beyond the tail, it looked sumptuous in the evening light, swirling eddies and foam lines like a mass of jumbled contours on a map. I slowly edged forward..

An hour later I slumped myself down on the bank and scratched my nose. Parr rising and splashing all over the place, and nothing else. I’d carefully fished more than halfway up the pool on dries, and things were ending up looking more like a session of casting practice. I turned over the idea of chucking a streamer down through the riffles and into the pool below, but it somehow didn’t feel right on such a beautiful evening.

On a complete whim I decided to put up a pair of small nymphs and fish them upstream through the rest of the pool. I slid myself off the bank and slowly ambled a few feet into the water. It had been many moons since I last fished nymphs like this, so after letting the current lengthen the line I pulled up the leader and slipped a tiny foam indicator about 3 feet above the top nymph. At last satisfied with my setup, I made a cast upstream and slightly across.

It can be a funny business fishing nymphs like this. In the winter I have failed many times to catch grayling using such techniques, growing steadily more frustrated as each little bob and stop of the indicator turns out to be a piece of weed or a rock. Second cast up, and as the indicator was brought back to me by the current, it paused for thought about 2 or 3 metres upstream of where I was standing. I pulled my rod up and stripped in the slack and found myself attached to a moving rock. It swam in a small circle, before heading downstream towards the riffles. I caught a glimpse of a silvery side as it flashed past.

It didn’t take long to realise that not only was the rock not a rock (two nots don’t make a right…), but it wasn’t a trout either. Finally drawing the fish towards me I saw a gigantic dorsal fin, which flipped over from side to side as I slid the net through the water and under him. A beautiful spring grayling, not really a fish to be targetted at this time of year, but nevertheless a welcome surprise. A quick look at the weigh-net scales showed he was a smidgen over 2.5lb, a real beauty in any river, and in absolutely cracking condition. I know the grayling should be getting into spawning season very soon, if not already, but you wouldn’t really have known it from this fish.

After slipping the grayling back I fished on for another hour but connected with nothing else bar a few enthusiastic parr. I don’t know if I’ve ever had such an immediate and superb response from a change in tactics. I was undoubtedly lucky to come across such an apparently solitary large grayling, but it was still a really good feeling to think that I managed to do everything else right. Perhaps I’ll have to give the winter lark another try..

Just to round out a truly fantastic evening, on the way back to my car I came across a cute wee hedgehog padding through the grass. I tried to get a close up, and was greeted with the spiky-football treatment.

Back on the 7th I went down to a nice bit of water known to produce the odd monster. I was hoping for (April) March Browns. As I crawled up to the water I immediately spotted a couple of wonderful swirls. Adjusting my gaze above the water’s surface I quickly made out ranks of tell-tale zeppelins fluttering upstream.

The slightest upstream wind warmed my neck, and that feeling of infinite possibility crept out from its winter hibernation. The sight of rising fish in spring always convinces me that having a six month closed season is worth it, if only for the heightened sense of joy come April. Senses dulled by months of time away from the water find themselves jolted back to life. Memories and feelings thought passed forever return with renewed vigour. What a great time of year.

I stealthily stumbled down to the water’s edge and tried to take in the sight of multiple rising fish before me. Which to choose?

I decided that the most steadily rising fish, twenty yards upstream, looked the most temptable. I began a slow waddle through the thigh-deep water, suddenly more afraid than ever of spooking my newly-reacquainted adversaries.

I paused and prepared to cast by letting the current pull out a long loop of line downstream. As I looked around to check the line for tangles a fish swirled aggressively in the seam just off to my left, barely five yards downstream and across from where I stood.

Gift horses in the mouth and all that, I decided to have a speculative chuck. Two drifts produced nothing more than a nice V-wake as my DHE dragged downstream. I tried a third cast, incorporating a ludicrously over-exagerated upwards motion to try and produce a parachute cast. The fly and cast landed nicely and started to slip downstream. As the cast neared the point of no-drag-free-drift return the fish came up and engulfed the fly. By some twist of luck or ironed-in instinct I struck nicely and the fish was on.

As fly-angling readers will know it can take a trip or two to really get back into things after a winter away from all things fishy-tailed. This is particularly true for playing hooked fish, which can be an art-form in itself. The recently-attached fish paid no ounce of thought for this as it screeched off across the river at full pelt. There was little need to put the coils of loose line back on the reel as within moments they were distinctly straightened and heading for the far line of trees. I tightened up the reel and tried to lever the fish back in my direction. This succeeded in transmitting a message to the fish that the only route of escape was upwards, which was exactly where it headed, twisting and turning in the sunshine.

Some moments passed, and as I started to get control of things I got a good look at the cause of all the trouble. Hmm…distinctly silver flashes, but was it just the light? I finally slipped the net underneath the water and drew the fish over the rim. Glory hallelujah, it was silvery all right. Long, slightly lean, full-spotted and shimmering with blue-silver energy, it was unmistakably a sea trout. I popped off the handle of my weigh-net and the scales drew down to just a smidgen over 4lb. Regular readers may know that I’ve been on the hunt for a sea trout for some time, and have failed quite miserably to ever catch one using conventional wisdom. Well, there on that beautiful spring morning, March Browns a-buzzing, I caught my first sea trout, with dry fly and floating line. Not the worst start to a season I’ve ever had.

I had a good look at the fish as I cradled it in the current. Despite its silvery sheen and keen battle-spirit, I guessed that it was a kelt. Its lower tail was quite badly torn up, which I thought may have been due to spawning frolics. But who knows? Maybe it had just had a run-in with a seal on its way up the estuary. Whatever the case, its short visit to have a chat with me opened a little jar of happiness by that quiet riverbank.

Last weekend I headed over to a favourite river for some serious lone time. Lone time, with added trout. As part of my ongoing musings into the optimum rod to use on rivers, I strung up the shotgun for a bit of a fling. Old stiffy, as she is now also know, turned out to be a whole lot better than I imagined. (For new readers, Old stiffy is a Sage XP, 9′, 5 weight.)

Streamers and dries lie at the opposite ends of the fly fishing spectrum. I already love dries, and fish them wherever possible. But I’ve recently felt an unnerving attraction towards streamers, with their unashamed brashness and ‘use me or screw me’ attitude. This may or may not have something to do with the incredible number of large trout that a certain fishing acquaintance of mine has caught whilst using them over the past couple of seasons. The problem, or perhaps `challenge’ is a better word, lies in combining the two approaches in an outfit that allows both vices to be enjoyed equally.

For the first couple of hours I used an intermediate line with a fast sinking polyleader looped onto the end. Together with a weighted streamer this combination can get reasonably deep quite quickly, so is perfect for searching out deeper runs and seams. This last sentence is yet another wonderful example of the bullshit I spout on occasion (`only on occasion‘ the audience screams!), for I am a total newbie to streamer fishing, and have only ever caught a handful of fish like this. What I should have said was that it feels like a perfect setup for searching out the blah blah blah..

Well I searched and I searched for quite a few hours, and didn’t see, hear, feel or smell any trout. Disgruntled that all my good feelings about streamer fishing weren’t producing, I sat down and mused. There was plenty of evidence of the recent floods our rivers have experienced. The high water line looked like a frightening prospect in comparison to the clear water flowing past my feet. It was funny to see the silt deposited on leaves that normally only shower in the rain. The clear water drew my attention again, and I longed for dry fly simplicity.

Off with the intermediate-sink-tip-polyleader-good-feeling nonsense, and on with a floating fiver. This one hadn’t been used in more than a season, and still had the glued-in leader butt I once eulogised over to anyone who would listen. It really is a nice setup, so smooth and with excellent turnover. As usual I overestimated the required leader length, ending up with something that could be used to measure swimming pools. Something like 20′, which is really a little obscene.

With my lewd leader I thus marched off up to the next run. During the lengthy process of switching over my setup I had noticed a single, solitary rise in a small bit of creased water where a tiny burn flowed into the main river. With no more sign of life forthcoming I began short casts from the back of the run, slowly working up towards the burn. Third or fourth cast in and there was a wonderful, savage take to my fly. It was the kind of take that reminded me of the cutthroat trout in the west of Canada a few seasons back. Eager and willing. The fish now connected to Old stiffy quickly demonstrated that stiffness is a relative term, which is both reassuring and disturbing at the same time. It was the first fish I’ve hooked on the rod that actually made me feel like there was going to be a fight involved. There was.

The trout jumped out the water maniacally, showing the same eagerness to reach for the sky as she’d shown for my floating fly. I had that glorious, stomach churning feeling as I realised that this was probably my fish of the season, and I’d better not cock up. She quickly decided that the fast riffley run downstream looked like a good spot for a picnic, and bolted off. I had foolishly thought that a bit of sneakiness with side pressure and a ready net might forego any complications, and was left with one hand on the rod, one clutching my net and the other… flailing for the fly line. That’s three hands, which is what it felt like.

I performed that kind of half-shuffle, half-long jump motion required to pursue a fish downstream through thigh-high water, whilst waving my rod about quite a lot and repeatedly muttering “don’t come off, please don’t come off…”. In the quieter water beyond the riffle I started to apply some strong pressure, which caused the fish to jump again. There seems to be no better time for a fish to throw a hook than during a jump, so I eased off a little. By now I’d seen the trout quite clearly through the water (did I mention it was clear?) and she was a beauty. A more controlled application of side pressure brought her to the surface, and with a couple of desperate reaches with the net she was in.

As it happened I had chosen this day to take along my new net, one of those nice Maclean weigh-nets from New Zealand. The idea of a weigh-net is actually quite funny for most of the fishing I do, what with micro-parr and the odd half-pounder signifying a good day at the moment. But I had got a good deal on it, so plumped up the cash in an act not far from self-mockery. The beauty with a weigh net, over the more conventional Salter scales that you manually hook onto the net at the opportune moment, is that the reading you get doesn’t have to be adjusted for the weight of the net. It’s already calibrated. So what you see, for one God-foresaken time, is what you get. In this case that was exactly 2.5lb of golden, gorgeous trout.

A few moments for a photo session and I eased her (I’m pretty sure it was a female; she was certainly very pretty and slightly feminine in a Lara Croft kind of way) into the flow. A couple of moments and she pushed forward and quickly disappeared into the background of the rocky riverbed. Unquestionably my fish of the season, and unquestionably the nicest feeling I can remember for quite a long time.

After all that I had to phone someone, so it was my dad and brother who got the first telling. They were sitting down to a lovely curry at the time, which eased the reception of the fact that I was having amazing fishing and they weren’t. There’s an amazing rush of excitement after a trout like that which is hard to explain to folks who don’t fish. It’s a kind of head spinning rush of joy which seems to far outweigh the material fact of the capture. Even if the trout was quite big, even if it was beautiful, why does it feel so incredibly, soul-burstingly satisfying?

I fished on up the run with nothing to show for it. Nothing except for the whopping great grin on my face from that trout, of course. I slowly started to sink back into something like a regular fishing mode, and began to appreciate the reason that Old stiffy is so highly regarded in the trout world. She really does turn over leaders like the All Blacks against England. Loops unroll quickly, smoothly and with pin-prick accuracy. Even a fairly moderate breeze doesn’t seem to be a great problem. There’s still no question that when fishing dries I feel more at home with my slightly noodly 3 weight, but in all honesty it wasn’t too bad. And it certainly makes fishing the streamers a little less comical. Perhaps I just need to accept that fishing dries and streamers requires quite a lot of compromise on both parts. I think that a stiffish 5 weight like this is probably as close to the useful middle ground as can be had.

After an hour or so of fishless fishing, I crawled out the river and walked up past some moderately interested cows to a long flat. There were fewer trees, but oddly enough a couple of fish rose almost immediately. There had been no sign of any hatch all day, so I wasn’t sure what had brought them up. The rises were gentle though, so I put up a little CDC thing. Eventually I got a solid take, which turned out to be a very feisty grayling (are grayling ever not feisty?). A clean 1lb and a quarter, according to my what-you-see-is-what-you-get-net. He (I think it was a he, the dorsal was pretty long and he looked pissed off) was slipped back with a bit of a splash on my camera, and I decided it was time to trundle back to the car. I don’t know how many more days I’m doing to get on the river this season, but I hope this one will give me a little smile when the going is rough. It will certainly be a long time before I forget the enthusiasm of that take from the beautiful brownie; a bit of cutthroat hope in a big dark cave.

On Thursday I managed to sneak a few hours at one of my oldest haunts, a place where one glorious May afternoon saw the capture of my largest brownie. It’s also a place not far from where the Spring Submariner lived last year, and my thoughts were of running into one of his relatives. I parked the car and walked close to the pool, stringing up the slightly stiffer 4 weight rod in place of my usual 3 weight matchstick.

Upon arriving, however, I experienced one of those strange, uncontrollable magnetic attractions to walk, walk.. I walked past some really nice water, all the while thinking “that looks nice, I’ll just get in down at the next pool..”. But I kept walking and musing and ho-huming in the bright 11am sunshine. No fish seemed to be showing, and something about the next run drew my attention.

I finally arrived at the run, glorious and full of small seams, rolling boulder-rounded water and a final silky flat. Straight away there was a rise in a seam near the head of the pool. I waited for several minutes, creeping up to the bank edge on hands and knees and peering in to the lightly Jura-stained water. Another fish rose in another seam. Hairs stood up on my neck for the first time this season: finally some trout at the surface, feeding and making me smile. I wondered why the fish in this pool were back from Barbados. Looking around it became pretty obvious, as the sun flitted down from behind a huge wall of trees: shade! The whole pool was bathed in shadow, creating that wonderful kind of crisp spring light that tells of warmer days to come, but reminds you of the cooler days not long past. Perhaps it was just the sheer intensity of the May sun that had caused all the problems on the other rivers, and the real secret was to hunt shade first, and then trout.

A few olives and the odd brook dun were coming off, though I felt that I was actually at the tail end of the morning rise. I should have spent less time in the village shop getting my ham salad baguette made up and more time making like my father’s wind and down to the river. As I glanced downstream I spotted another couple of rises in the rolling water of the mid-run. They looked like better fish, but I opted to try for the wee rise in the head of the run and purposefully tied on a deer hair emerger in a scruffy size 14. After a bit of wonky casting in the stiffening south-easterly he rose nicely to my fly, and a quick tussle later he was in the net and sparkling in that shadow-light.

I waded back to the near bank and started to skulk very slowly down the edge of the river. I felt a little naughty as this kind of wading seems to be universally heralded as the ultimate in fish-spooking, but again that magnetic draw made it hard to concentrate on anything other than the twinkling river surface. Then there was one of those rises that really makes the hair on the back of your neck wake up. Fins and tails wafted in the surface as the fish sipped emegers. In my experience only the better fish ever rise like this, so I immediately got out of the river and took a huge detour downstream by a potato field and slipped in at the head of the next pool.

Wading slowly across to be well under the shade of the trees I saw another couple of rises, which suggested at least three good fish in the run. It was one of those slightly confusing situations where you aren’t sure if there’s one fish or ten, and you’re afraid to wade any further in case you spook any of them. It’s also difficult to judge where to cast, so in the end I spent a long time waiting up to my waist in the water until something rose just a couple of rod lengths away. I speedily covered the rise (DHE no. 14 again..) and had an instant, swirling take. I struck and he bolted off across the river, jumping clear of the water and twisting between rocks. At first I thought he was foul-hooked as he really made a meal of things, jigging around and dancing merrily. He eventually slid over my net and looked truly fantastic in the last moments of the morning. He wasn’t a real leviathan at 16″, but after a long winter without any grayling or trout, El Beautio was like a shark and really made my day.

I quickly phoned my dad to break the news. He was fishing for carp, bream and roach down in Cambridgeshire with my uncle, and it turned out he’d had a great morning too. Nine fish including a nice bream against my uncle’s blank. Bizarre really, as my uncle is a fine fisherman and often helps my dad get set up at the start of a day. I munched away on my (rather superb) baguette, followed by a delicious slice of tiffin, and eyed the pool for further action.

Nothing much seemed to be happening. Perhaps the capture of El Beautio had spooked the pool, but I actually think I was lucky to catch the tail end of the hatch and rise. After half an hour of pondering, a couple of splashy rises suggested things might be happening again. I crept back into the river from under the trees and assumed position in the lee of a particularly large branch.

A fish rose in the water ahead of me, right in the middle of the river. After neither my DHE nor DHS turned up any interest, I started to get confused. I tried a small dirty duster but that didn’t work either. When my usual absolute-winner-super-duper-never-fail CDC dry didn’t produce I got desperate. The fish kept rising occasionally, but my staple dries seemed to be useless. I dug around in my box of lesser-used flies and my gaze was quickly attracted by an old badger-hackled red tag. As I moistened the knot I became oddly confident that the fish was actually munching terrestrial bugs, and so the old fly might in fact be a perfect choice. Second cast down and the fish aggressively took the fly. Despite his slightly disappointing size, it was a pretty satisfying conclusion to the days events and I headed off back upstream and towards home.

In other news, I found out during proceedings that it is in fact possible to cast a size 6 long shank woolly bugger on a stiffish 4 weight rod, even if you look like an Olympic javelin thrower doing it. Watch this space..