flyfischa

I was lucky enough to squeeze in a half day of fly fishing on Tal-y-Llyn Lake in Wales recently. My Ghillie for the day was Emyr Lewis, a very knowledgeable guide, just shy of the big 70. Our meeting the day earlier was one of those pure chance incidents, like it was meant to happen.

The fishing was ridiculous as we had to contend with 40+mph winds. We were the only boat out on the lake, I guess you could say we aren’t that bright. We persevered with a traditional 3 fly loch style rig, yours truly got into some unrecoverable tangles. Fishing some of Emyr’s own ties, very sparse and considered renditions of flies like the Harry Tom, Haul a Gwynt, Green Peter and various hoppers and daddy long legs.

I managed to convince Emyr to fish and we hooked and landed 3 small wild browns each, the biggest going to Emyr at about 10 inches. I think we were lucky to catch anything at all, a real credit to his knowledge and skill on the water.

I’m glad that I got to meet Emyr and that we braved the weather together. I will cherish our day spent on Tal-y-Llyn Lake together for a long time to come.

Emyr Lewis on Tal-y-Llyn Lake

Emyr opposite the hotel at Tal-y-Llyn Lake

Drifting Tal-y-Llyn Lake

Drifting Tal-y-Llyn Lake

My first fishing trip in London was to the Lower Itchen on beat 5 called ‘The Bends’.

We’re talking the Itchen here where upstream dry fly would be the appropriate etiquette.
I tried the prescribed Halfordian method without so much as a look from the fish, they were holding deep feeding on nymhs. I’m only human so must fess up that I resorted to catching my first Itchen/UK trout on bead head nymphs, cringe…

I caught four grayling,  four brown trout and probably missed as many due to early and late strikes.

Beat-5-The-Bends

Swan

Swan Family

Trout numbre one

Where I caught the next Trout

Trout number two

Yours truly, self portrait...

Fish number four

This July I got to fulfill two longterm dreams of mine. One was to get to meet my good friend Terje for the first time, the other was to fish his favourite river with him in Norway, the Rena.

Norway is stunning, coming to this beautiful sparsely populated country was a stark contrast to the London I left behind. The Rena is a big river by my usual standards, about 100mtrs wide on average with forestation down to the rivers edge.

Unfortunately the fishing was even tougher than usual. The river was high, rising up to 90cm, this made wading nearly impossible and fishing from the densely vegetated bank even harder. The rising and falling river meant that the usual prolific hatches didn’t occur. In 10 days of solid fishing I managed 2 trout, one of 1.1kg the other 700gms. Every fish was hard one and some days we didn’t get to cast at a single fish.

The highlight was a gorgeous 2.1kg brown caught by Terje, the master of the Rena.

I got to see a beautiful part of the world, to hang out with some cool people and learnt lots of new techniques from some of the best fly fishermen and tiers I’ve ever met.

I hope to someday return to the lovely Rena under more favourable conditions.

I had the opportunity to fish the famous Itchen at Abbots Worthy on the 28th August.
It’s a beautiful beat owned by Orvis. There were three of us in total and the fishing was tough, something I had been forewarned about.

We fishing nymphs for most of the day as the fish weren’t looking to the surface.
I managed to catch 3 Grayling and 7 browns, one of my friends caught 1 Grayling the other 3 Grayling and 4 Browns.

It was a fantastic sunny day, filled with great company, good food and wine, with some memorable fishing on a gorgeous stretch of the Itchen.

One of the local residents

Upstream of our cabin, on the Orvis beat on the Itchen.

Brown no. 5

Brown no. 7 (fish of the day)