RH Fly Fishing

  Bri and I were successful with a 2020 bid for fishing the Leconfield FFC waters around Petworth, but a number of factors conspired to prevent us utilising one lot: a day for two rods on the River Rother. We aren’t blaming Covid alone, bad weather intervened twice, and the last time we came close, my own health let us down. Anyroadup, we had a date, and were both looking forward to this particular tantalus with great expectations. Came the day, came the meet. Below us, a wide pool featuring an Archimedes screw right next door to the fish pass where sea trout run. Our host, the estate’s Mr. Andrew Thompson, expressed mixed feelings: the screw generates electricity which is a help to the local economy, but he feels it may be situated too close to the pass, already difficult for fish to negotiate, but there’s the added risk of some being mutilated in the machinery. To stop us brooding on this conundrum he then told us about the twenty-one-pound-something British record Barbel that ...

  Bri and me on the Meon   Thanks to the wonder that is the annual Wild Trout Trust auction, Bri and I have some chunks of river fishing coming up in Wales, West Sussex and Yorkshire. Readers may have spotted that most of our fishing is small stillwaters, so to try and get some semblance of river competence we thought we would start on the River Meon, one of my club’s beats where I can use a guest ticket. Full of enthusiasm we decided to fish up the beat together, taking turns to ‘have a go’, so we set up a ten foot nymphing rod with a NZ indicator, and a eight-and-a-half footer to cover dries or downstream wets, etc., in case the need arose. The river was in great nick, carrying a tinge from the thunder storm’s rain two days previously; this day was cloudy and sunny alternately, and quite warm. The first stretch produced nothing, and we moved stealthily up to the next. Brian would have walked past the shallow gravel run below a deeper, eddying bend, but I insisted he giv...

   Traffic was light and Whytee pulled into the car park a few minutes before nine; when signing-in on the catch return sheet it revealed that Foggy, the Inspector, the Professor, and new member Daisy, had already done so. It appeared Jackdaw was here to, [turns out he came with Foggy], unable to fish yet following his stroke, but keen to just be around fishing again. Moneypenny arrived last, so a slightly better turnout.  The Met Office forecast gave “cloudy all day” but Whytee was only on the third fly change, fishing ‘Birch’, the really deep one, when the first drops of rain fell. The Inspector related he’d had plenty of activity in his first fifteen minutes, and Foggy had just dropped one of maybe four pounds, but this pond was not showing much movement otherwise. As Whytee was about to move away the Professor managed to drop a fish, down at the deep end [35 feet apparently]. Later, fishing the same spot, he was snapped off by a fish, but acknowledged later it could...