Truttablog

Conspiring for big Trout

“But the purposeful conspiring for big trout has at least the thrill of anticipation and, if successful, the satisfaction of any job consummated according to design. On the prowl for a three-pounder you become a specialist; you have renounced the easier rewards of small ones for the rare chance of a whopper. The thing has the gambling appeal of any long shot. Swinging a big streamer into the twilight shallows is one of the headier adventures of trout fishing. It is a grand way to end a day of finicky maneuvers with dry flies. It caps a day of

8 February 2020

Photo of the moment (110)

I was fishing this stillwater over the Christmas break, and I looked down and saw this one dragonfly shuck. Then I started noticing more, and more. There were dozens. I wish I had been there to witness the hatch !

15 January 2020

Dog Days

As I sit here at my desk, the cuckoo is lamenting “Meitjie, meitjie, meitjie” . That would be the Classless Cuckoo, with a gap in his front teeth, and flashing a ‘hang loose’ hand signal, as our family legend has it. You will know it as the Klaas’s Cuckoo, and tell me that they don’t have front teeth. Either way, they often sound out their call of the jilted lover as the sun emerges after a few days of cool and rain. With that rain, and coolness, us flyfishers are all thinking of heading to the hills to get on

12 January 2020

Showing off a little

7 January 2020

Photo of the moment (109)

In the morning, coffee is king….

1 January 2020

Cricket, Cards and Chords

I was impressed recently, by Alison Graham-Smith , a Lead Advisor on conservation and Land Management for ‘Natural England’ in Hampshire, who had read Harry Plunket Greene’s book “Where the bright waters meet”. I was all the more impressed because she is not a fly fisher. I asked her how she had come to read the book, and why. In her reply she explained that it was important as a conservationist to have read the history and the descriptions of Hampshire, before she could claim to be equipped to restore that environment. Mark, Alison and Sam : Catchment sensitive farming

27 December 2019

Treasure

“I had been wrong to think of trout as treasure, and so to think of fishing as some sort of treasure hunt. It is an analogy that does both the trout and the process of catching them an injustice, for treasure can be tawdry or vulgar or downright ugly. Treasure can be a monument to the unhappy partnership of inordinate wealth and appallingly bad taste. Treasure is often treasure merely in terms of value in dollars or pound notes. But a brown trout is neither tawdry nor vulgar nor ugly. And his beauty is in perfect taste and quite beyond

26 December 2019

Photo of the moment (108)

11 December 2019

You name it

There are so many flies out there, that everything one invents has invariably been done before. There was this one inspired by a friend of Fran Better’s Dad….one Eddie Lawrence of the Green Drake Club, who gave it to him, and which he passed on to Fran who refined it and named it as the “Haystack”. (Info from HERE) . Then it was sort of copied in Al Caucci’s Compara Dun, and Bob Wyatt used a similar concept when he did his DHE (Deer Hair Emerger). I like and use the DHE. (also called the Berg Emerger as created

26 November 2019

A Podcast with Pete

On my recent visit to the UK, I met up with Pete Tyjas. I used to write for Pete’s online magazine “Eat Sleep Fish”, and since he has moved to a print offering (Fly Culture Magazine) I have written for that too. Pete also wrote a “blurb” for the back of my book back in 2015. Not having met in person before, I was looking forward to meeting him. We met at the Fox and Hounds hotel in Devon where Pete holes up. He seems to be part of the crew there. He fetched me coffee from the kitchen and

17 November 2019