A quick look out of the window can sometimes be the snap decision that makes you decide not to go fishing but Andy Tucker comes at this from a different angle.
I spend too much time on an online fly fishing forum and a typical question that comes up often, especially from newcomers, would be "Its been raining and the wind's in the North, is it worth fishing?" Or “The weather forecast says the pressure will drop tomorrow, is it worth trying". The quick answer to both is yes, it's always worth trying as a bad day fishing is still better than a good day doing most other things.
The proper answer is a bit more detailed, the main problem is trout don’t know they should obey rules. They don’t know that weather is supposed to affect their behaviour. So what they do doesn’t always follow logic and they certainly don’t read books. For example In 2010 one of the rivers I fish was enjoying a wonderful early hatch of mayflies. I had visited the river a week before and had enjoyed one of the finest evenings of dry fly fishing I have been lucky enough to have. A balmy summer evening and a clear river were perfect for dry fly and the fish responded by the book; the fishing was superb. A week on and the weather had changed big style. For a few days we had experienced lots of rain and the temperature had dropped and I was thinking hard on where to fish. Should I risk that river again knowing that it would be a shadow of the week before? Eventually I decided I would. Arriving at the river I could see it was almost a foot up on the week before and carrying quite a lot of colour. There was also a cold downstream wind . I cursed myself. I knew it, I should have fished one of the upland becks logic told me that higher up the valley the water would have had more chance to run off and I would have been more sheltered. But as I was there I decided to give it an hour then maybe move on.
At that point I decided to look in the catch return book that lives in a lock up box attached to a tree. Not much to see there; nobody had fished the beat for four days. So I set off upstream and noticed that although coloured it wasn’t exactly chocolate….and then I saw the first rise. The rest is history The mayfly hatch was patchy but still going, the fish however rose even better than the week before, very freely in fact, perhaps because the coloured water gave them confidence or they couldn’t see the fly for as long? I was frankly surprised they could see the fly at all. The reasons remain with the fish but what was certain was that on that day logic says the fish ignored all the traditional rules with gay abandon. Or if you look at it another way, I had in my favour an undisturbed river, fish that felt safer due to the coloured water, flies that could not be examined for too long so feeding was aggressive. It depends how you look at it.
So next time you doubt, you should go try and think what advantages the conditions give you. I will guarantee that bad conditions for anglers doesn’t always mean bad conditions for angling and being the first person back fishing when the water has been rested for a few days can give you a real edge.
To enjoy more from Andy please be sure to have a look at his excellent blog .