Bri and me on the Meon

 

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 give it a try, the true RH bank channel is a run about a foot deep… voila!  The first little brownie scrapped all the way to the net. Onto that deeper bend. I encouraged him to fish through it, and once he was around the corner I put a wet through the depths, with plenty of upstream line mends to buy the leader time to sink; when I finally got it right the little rod took on a savage curve, and I fought a good lump of a fish in the fast water. It came to the net after some anxious moments, a bronzed Chub, easily two-and-a-half pounds!

 Onwards, forever onwards! We took turns, analysing what we could see ahead and where to cast, soon my turn for one of those feisty little browns. Wild brownies are absolute gems; we did see one stocker ahead of us, probably two pounds, swimming slowly into a deeper pool from a shallow riffle. Obviously we fished that pool extensively, but it produced nothing. Next up, a steady glide brought Bri the biggest trout of the day, probably one pound, but staggeringly pretty with some of those blue tints on its head. I readied the camera for a trophy pic, Bri raised the fish from the water, above his net, and it flipped back into the water before I pressed the button. I apologised in anglo-saxon.

 The odd mayfly was coming off, but to give the right perspective I suppose we spotted maybe twenty in all the four hours we fished; certainly they were being ignored save for one spot where we saw a fish rise two or three times. On went a wally-wing Mayfly, Bri made the casts, but the fish rose to the fly just once, and was promptly missed. That was the end of the dry fly action. I did try to get a picture of one of the mayflys, but got it wrong, as you can see!

 Later I got one around three quarters of a pound, we both had four to eight ounce fish too. In all Brian managed four wildies, I had five plus the Chub. Each swim brought different problems, and four hours was enough for Brian as the marauding trees and sneaky, delinquent bankside brambles, cow parsley, et al, pounced at every opportunity. I was content to re-rig, provide flies and tippet, but he felt enough was enough, yet looking forward greatly to the next river session; this sort of paradox is quite common in fly fishing.