Photo of the moment (111)
This little fellow took a nymph in quick water on Stoneycroft farm, a place I have been hanging out at a lot lately.
24 March 2020
This little fellow took a nymph in quick water on Stoneycroft farm, a place I have been hanging out at a lot lately.
“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
A friend made a valid point the other day. It seems obvious now, but consider this: When you fish a stillwater, there is a very good chance that for at least a portion of the day, you will stand there, or sit there in your float tube, and think about work, or some domestic trouble. Now think back to the last day you spent on a river or stream. You scrambled up banks and slid down into the water, and waded over uneven rocks, and slipped and slithered , and hiked, and focused and cast and watched the dry fly
“Often enough, the best position for a trout to see and catch these active nymphs is near the river bed” …….. ”It is useless to try to tempt such a fish with an artificial nymph fished just below the surface, or to cast a dry fly over him” The words of Frank Sawyer, from the book Frank Sawyer, Man of the Riverside, compiled by Sidney Vines. Frank Sawyer was famous for, amongst other things, The Pheasant Tail Nymph, which you can watch the man himself tying in this link. Sawyer’s book “Keeper of the Stream was first published in 1952.
The donkey launched itself up onto the river bank and made its way to near the small circle of rocks that was our fireplace, where it stopped and awaited the unloading of the bundle of sehalahala from its back. The sky was darkening somewhat more than the progression of the afternoon suggested it should, and it was cool. It would be wet, and the evening fire would be warranted, and whether or not we were high enough to source leholo or lekhapo, sehalahala is best for wet conditions. So said Martin the muleteer, and we were not about to argue
