Old School Fly Does the Business
Chris Plumb looks back at a days fly fishing on Draycote, where the trout were hungry for a classic fly.
I hadn't been fly fishing since June, so Mike and I managed to fit in a day on Draycote on a boat and hopefully the fish would be feeding on fry. The advice from the wardens was that fish had been caught over the aerators, so that's where we headed.
To be fair, we were struggling a bit, apart from Mike losing a really good fish at the net on a pink blob. Mike was using an intermediate line with a blob and a snake, and I was on a floater with a daddy and floating foam fry on an Edge Fluorocarbon Pure leader of 0.25 diameter / 7.6lb breaking strain.
A nearby boat had had one fish and told us that they were getting follows on a white minkie. So with no more ado, I opened my lure box and selected one which had to be 30 years old, crushed the barb and put it on the point with a pink blob on the dropper. Second cast, I had a rainbow of about 2 1/2 lbs on the minkie. Here’s a picture of the fly that did the damage, the top fly is straight out of the box and the lower fly is what it looks like when it’s been in the water.
Third cast right on top of the boils and the force of the turbulent water was sinking the floating line by about a metre, I had a savage take, and fish on! The rod hooped over like a bicycle wheel, and I was fighting a very decent fish AND the force of the aerator water flow, but the Edge Fluorocarbon Pure did its job. I eventually netted a nice, well conditioned rainbow with a deep body and a tail like a shovel, which both my boat partner and the warden estimated to be a good 7lbs.
Mike took a picture for me, and I rested the fish in the landing net until it recovered and was ready to swim away. We then had a bit of a quiet spell until we overheard some lure anglers telling another boat that their sonar was showing a lot of trout ten feet down. So out came the heavy gear, very fast sinking fly line with a 4ft leader of Edge Fluorocarbon Pure 0.30 diameter / 9.6lb breaking strain and a Rutland tube fly with a size 4 single barbless hook. Two fish in two casts, and then it went quiet again! This turned out to be how the day went, with takes coming in ones and twos mostly on the minkie, and then a quiet spell - not unusual for this time of year.
We called it a day at 3.30. I’d had my best trout of the season, and in these modern times of snakes, blobs, and poppers etc. it was nice to catch trout on an old faithful fly at the back end of the season!
