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Text of the page (random words):
m him i watched for ten minutes or so as he fed from her both of them oblivious of the disaster that had come so close but for the intervention of an heroic fly fisherman seeing that my work here was done i decided to move elsewhere for the remainder of the afternoon the club had announced some new water on the comedicly named river dikler the previous day so i decided to give it a try it is a lovely looking stretch but with very little cover the fish were not giving their positions away so i made searching casts with the hitherto reliable pink head grhe but with no success then out of the corner of my eye in a very tricky lie beneath one of the few trees on the beat i spotted the first rise of the season it was a sippy affair and i was not sure it was a rise at all thinking that perhaps it had been something blown from the tree by the still boisterous breeze however i waited and watched and sure enough after a couple of minutes something sucked something invisible from the film i hastily tied on a dry ghre and made a complete balls up of the cast scagging a dead reed just upstream and to the left of the fish i managed to pull gently free but no more rises came i moved on i took and hour or so working my way up to the top end of the beat and still had caught nothing or seen anything that remotely betrayed the presence of trout worse a couple of anglers were making their way across the field to the river i scurried hurriedly back downstream to where i had seen the fish rising creeping up to a position downstream of the tree i noticed two duns riding down towards the spot where the fish had previously shown itself a flash of pale yellow an ostentations splash and only one dun remained as i was frantically securing a kite s imperial to the tippet the blighter noisily took another i started to count and waited for the fish to rise a third time 40 seconds i counted to 35 and cast this time it hit the spot the trout took it and put up a bit of a stink it must be said i decided to take it having returned all my fish last season took a pic and sauntered happily back home to dinner with chips and mushy peas i ve booked tomorrow off too woo hoo posted by retiarius at 13 48 no comments thursday 5 march 2015 loading the correct amount of backing on your fly reel and a tip for greys streamlite owners with pawl issues at this is the time of year with the dawn of a new game season a few tantalising weeks distant fly fishers are wont to untie the old rod bags assemble the cane carbon or glass and give it a preparatory flex in the back garden reels are liberated from their pouches and inspected cleaned and oiled in anticipation periodically though during these otherwise happy preparations the sad realisation dawns that alas the purchase and installation of a new line can be put off no longer the putting on of new line is fraught with myriad anxieties of course first there are the knots the arbour knot to connect the backing to the spool the nail knot that connects the backing to the fly line anglers tie these knots so rarely relative to the common knots tied unthinkingly during the course of day to day fishing that they find themselves having to refer to various tomes or online tutorials to steer them through the loathsome process i am no different last week while checking that i d got the nail knot correctly done i couldn t help but notice that a lot of questions on the forums related to calculating the correct amount of backing line to load onto the spool here s a method shown to me a few years ago by the helpful chap in the orvis shop at burford it works perfectly well for small arbour reels all my reels are of this type i don t see why it wouldn t do for large arbour models as well 1 take the fly line from the packaging and take the spool apart as shown below remove the fly line from the spool but don t take the cable ties off the fly line at this point 2 tie the backing to the fly reel spool arbour using an arbour knot 3 wind on what you estimate or what the instructions supplied with the reel recommend to be the correct the amount of backing for the type of line you are fitting e g double taper weight forward etc do not cut the backing line yet 4 when you think the amount of backing is about right carefully pick up the fly line and push the opposing sides together so that the hank of line is doubled 5 slot the doubled hank onto the spool as shown below 6 you have the correct amount of backing when the distance from the fly line to the edge of the spool is the same as what you d want when the line is wound on so make adjustments to the amount of backing until this is achieved note it may appear from the illustration that there is no backing on the spool there is it s just that a very small amount is required for the double taper line i m putting on this hardy featherweight and it is not visible in the picture 7 cut the backing tie it to the fly line using a nail knot and wind the line onto the reel spool piece of cake a useful tip for owners of greys streamlite reels i have owned one of these canny little reels for ages 3 4wt model in fact it gets used for the majority of my river fishing i love it it balances my 8 4wt streamflex a prince among rods perfectly the streamlite has an adjustable click check but both the pawl and ratchet are plastic a spare pawl is supplied with the reel the first pawl lasted about six or seven seasons before it started to wear and was replaced with the spare this lasted one week i suspect this was because the reel became submerged while i unhooked a grayling during an extremely cold new year s day session on the coln when i resumed casting and drew line from the reel the end of the frozen pawl simply snapped off needless to say this resulted in highly annoying overrun issues as i pulled line from the reel i searched online for a solution and noted that several other anglers had experienced issues with the plastic ratchet pawl arrangement and not because they had allowed the reel to freeze either it appears that the use of plastic for these crucial parts is a bit of a design flaw the upshot was that i called customer service at hardy greys see the hardy greys website for contact details in the hope of obtaining some more pawls i was informed that for a nominal fee 26 50 they will retro fit the streamlite reel with a metal ratchet and pawl i entered into the agreement readily and within a week my reel was back with the new parts fitted it works like a dream and sounds much better than before it only begs the obvious question why don t they make em like that in the first place cost presumably anyway i recommend the upgrade regard it as well worth the fee and commend hardy greys on the efficiency of the turnaround posted by retiarius at 15 24 no comments saturday 21 february 2015 the gentleman of the stream finally after spending the entire winter in pursuit of a decent grayling worthy of a post of its own i am able to present this gentleman of the stream not by any means a particularly pretty fish i ll grant you he carries the battle scars and curmudgeonly air of a grayling that has loved and lost he represents nonetheless a clunker in my book in my estimation a very good two pounds having snaffled the proffered nymph he yawed this way and that with his head upstream before deciding to do one in the opposite direction i found myself running dementedly downstream in hot pursuit as he took a lot of line and not a little of my dignity it will no doubt come as small consolation to him but i tweaked my back in the process he was however worth the pain posted by retiarius at 16 28 no comments friday 14 november 2014 the magic fly and the grayling the final couple of weeks of the trout season can be a frantic time fish begin to move with renewed vigour as the water temperature drops levels rise food becomes more abundant and spawning approaches these changes bring with them the promise of good sport and indeed end of season fishing can match late spring for excitement when this happens the end can be abrupt just as things are hotting up after the languid months of summer the season ends as suddenly as it began and the curtain comes down on another year s trout fishing the opportunity to focus on a new quarry through the rest of autumn and deep into winter is a welcome one i love grayling and grayling fishing but they and it can be frustrating as well as exiting i d say that grayling are far less predictable than brown trout which tend in the main to station themselves in fairly obvious lies furthermore it is usually the case that the better fish can be found in the better lies so once a certain degree of watercraft has been attained it is often relatively simple to locate the quarry it is true that grayling have predictable behaviour patterns but they are far more likely than trout to dispense with these altogether and adopt an entirely different lifestyle seemingly on a whim and often en masse the key to successful autumn and winter grayling fishing then lies in the ability to locate fish grayling can be tricky for a variety of reasons unlike trout they rarely lie close to the surface unless they are feeding in shallow water which the better fish tend not to do even when they are found in shallow clear lies they can be devilishly difficult to discern i have experienced enough times when wading the sudden flight of sizeable grayling almost from beneath my feet to know this their beautiful ambiguous impossible to describe colouring renders them almost invisible against a variety of backgrounds the grayling s outline too so recognisable when viewed side on in pictures is altogether more cryptic when viewed from above through water they are shape shifters to make matters trickier still as autumn morphs into winter grayling tend increasingly to shoal together so that in a given stretch most fish are concentrated into as few as two or three holding areas clearly under these circumstances location becomes an absolute prerequisite in the rivers where i fish for them grayling begin to appear more and more as september draws to a close indeed on the last day this season on the coln i caught four decent grayling in successive casts from a tiny pool no bigger than five yards by ten while trying for a large and very visible brown trout with an olive gold head nymph until i caught them i had no idea that any other fish were in the pool let alone four of them each one more surprising than the last the point is that grayling often pop up unannounced in unexpected places and are often not noticed at all on some rivers i fish the teme comes to mind grayling seem to be present in abundant quantities throughout the entirety of the coarse and game seasons on others e g the coln they are conspicuous by their absence until late summer when they begin to emerge from where i know not in increasing numbers a few weeks back i fished a stretch of the coln that was new to me the club has rights for grayling from autumn to spring but the beat is not available during the game season it was an incredibly warm and sunny day for the time of year and the river was clear and low lower apparently than normal summer levels this being my initial visit i treated it as a fact finding mission my primary aim being to glean information about the river and the likeliest fish holding spots if i caught anything it would be a bonus there were a lot of trout visible some very big ones among them but of course they were off limits so moving gingerly up the bank i cast to places that my rudimentary watercraft told me were probably deeper than average thinking this to be as good a plan as any given the grayling s penchant for deep pools and holes they are after all bottom feeders essentially i began with a heavily wired ptn and when no interest was forthcoming switched to a small 16 gold head olive nymph i was rewarded shortly thereafter when i hooked and landed a half pound grayling from a deepish pool beneath one of the many small weirs that characterise this beat something much bigger was moving in the pool however and although i cast a few times at whatever was snaffling nymphs and causing the surface disturbance i saw it failed to answer my offer i decided to return to the car and replace the 10ft 4wt outfit i d been using with my trusty 8ft 4wt streamflex i can cast a far tighter loop with it than the floppy ten footer and there were some tricky casts beneath the far bank herbage that i had tried and failed i felt to exploit fully back at the car i got chatting to a fellow brother of the angle who gave me some useful advice and a fly to try discretion prevents me from revealing the pattern one which i had not seen before but suffice to say it was markedly more colourful than the nymphs in my box red being particularly prominent with renewed confidence i sallied forth with the new fly hitched firmly to my tippet and sure enough caught more than a few grayling annoyingly and entirely by accident i also caught a clunking three and a half pound brown trout which would comfortably have romped into the winner s enclosure as fish of the season had it counted surely this was a magic fly the next evening i feverishly tied up a dozen nymphs to the same pattern i had a day off in the coming week and intended to revisit the coln this time forearmed with some knowledge of the beat and with the magic fly in my box conditions were perfect still unseasonably warm but heavily overcast and almost windless the light was such that sighting the leader and its dipping point on the surface was simplicity itself i progressed upstream fishing the magic fly and once more i was rewarded with many lovely grayling mostly half a pound apiece but an astonishingly hard fighting pounder came to the net as well regular readers of this blog will know me as a conservative type of chap when it comes to flies and fishing the flies in my box by and large are traditional patterns in various shades of brown grey dun and black the amber grayling nymph described in the last post was strictly a one off aberration designed for a very specific purpose and in any case was conceived and tied when i was drunk further evidence of my ambivalence towards the modern and colourful can be read about in the depressing account of a soulless but educative spiritually at least afternoon hauling an orange fritz for crying out loud through the white horses of a north pennine reservoir in a gale yes it has rightly and oft been said that when it comes to flies old retiarius is a very much a traditionalist and possibly a curmudgeon too but have i been too conservative i ask myself my success with the magic fly has taught me that grayling really do favour a gaudier offering on occasion i might even argue after a few drams and enough provocation that highly coloured nymphs are an aid to provoking takes from grayling over those of trout who knows it is perhaps enough to relate that since the magic fly experience ...