Fly Fishing - Low River Grayling Hunting - Day 48

4th October 2015

With the close season in affect myself and Mike were on our way to my usual grayling river, there had been no rain all week and upon arrival it was very shallow.  The morning was brisk and cold and a light mist hung around the air.

Using lighter nymphs the first run produced a couple of fish for us, but we was catching snags more, and trees. alot of flies were lost throughout the day which is a danger of nymphing but is always more prominent when the river level is so low.  We reached a wier and fished that whole area, expecting fish due to it's depth but it only produced 1 each, mine being a very young grayling, a good sign though.

Moving on to my usual stretch i caught a trout early on but nothing for a while till we hit deep, slowish water, more snags hiding down there and a few more flies lost. could do with a good rake out this river! A couple of fish here till we continued on our way.

The slow pool produced nothing but the second weir did, a hard fighting small grayling. The long stretch above it to the bridge where i got the 16/17 inch grayling led me into another decent grayling but it pinged off the hook to my despair.

We continued our way up, i caught an even smaller grayling who didn't want a picture unfortunatly, and only caught 1 or 2 more fish later on. One trout took me under a snag in a deep pool and it took a 3 minute operation to get the snag out of the deep pool via wading stick and free the trout.

We had some food and a brew before deciding to head off to a section where we thought there'd be a little more water in. it did have! obviously extra water here would of been great to but it had some nice pooled areas and we bagged just over half a dozen between us.

We ended the day with a total of 22, 5 trout for myself and 2 for Mike, which equates to a point deduction as they are out of season, and 8 grayling for myself and 7 for Mike, so the scores ended with Mike on 5 points myself on 3.

It was a good day, very hard fishing, but shows we are capable of bagging a few with no water. Hoping there will be some decent conditions next time we go!