Pete Tyjas makes a road trip in search of moorland trout and hits a hatch that he wasn't expecting or was prepared for.
“God dammit” I curse. The midges were really starting to piss me off. The sky was ominous, the temperatures were warm and conditions perfect for my first proper experience in the UK of swarms of these tiny flies doing their best to find any area of exposed skin to chow down on.
I had something similar on a small, funky stream close to the South Platte in Colorado. The bites were more severe but the numbers of flies were nothing like the squadrons circling me right now.
The dark sky meant a change of fly needed my sunnies taking off which of course exposed more skin for the midges and when I put them back on they were trapped inside.
It was just about the only hatch I wasn’t prepared for.
I couldn’t take much more and decided I would wait things out in the car. Two of my friends were wearing Buffs that offered slightly more protection but I could tell by their body language they felt the same as me.
Our cries must have been heard, but not by any sort of fishing god as the language was too blasphemous for any sort of religious intervention. It was more likely just good luck. The wind picked up a little and then a little bit more and the midges disappeared. It was time to start fishing properly.
It was a new river, a moorland stream. I am no stranger to moorland streams but this one was different. Shallow, wide and with large boulders that created small pockets and runs.
Dry fly, I am told, is the method of many fishing here and so that is how I started. I missed the first few takes from small fish but it told me where I should be fishing, just off the flow and in the glides.
My friends were ahead and fished from the bank and I watched as one of them hooked into a fish, brought it in, admired it and quickly put it back. They leap- frogged each other just a few yards apart.
I decided to wade out a little farther and work water that had seen no attention. Being only 2 or 3ft deep it was easy and I used the rocks that jutted out from the water to help me with my balance in the faster runs.
I fished a duo of dries, a caddis on a short dropper and a quill bodied parachute on the point. If they were like the moorland trout I know back home then the pattern isn’t always that important. In these food deprived moorland streams the trout will give most flies the time of day and I’d tied the quill pattern a while back and thought it looked neat but had never gotten round to using it. Now seemed like a good time.
I had a long rod and just a short amount of line out of the rod tip and worked the flies into spots I thought, no hoped, there might be some fish. Keeping the rod high gave me the all-important drag free drift over a few feet of these tiny pools before I moved to the next pool.
Takes would be quick and the good strong coffee I’d had with breakfast meant I was dialled in to the speed of them pretty quickly. It didn’t mean I hit every one but I was pretty pleased with my landed to missed fish ratio.
The trout on this stream are not like the brown trout we picture in our mind's eye. They are dark and menacing their colour matching their surroundings perfectly.
Walking up the river I felt my way through the pools with my feet and thought about the crevices I was finding. These must be home to some of the better sized fish and so the quill bodied dry was placed back in the fly box in a newly promoted position in the “must use more often” area and replaced with a 2.5mm tungsten nymph.
Sometimes these hunches pay off but not always. I am always quick to ring the changes if they are needed but they weren’t in this case. One of the things I did notice was how the nymph was anchoring the dry in the turbulent water and as long as I kept it floating good and high the fish were much more interested than previously.
I came to a pool that was maybe 7ft or so in length and mid river some 25 feet from the bank. As so many of the pools did, it screamed fish, really screamed fish, in a high pitched, hard to ignore way.
First cast and a fish took the caddis. It was a standard 6 or 7 inch fish for the river but on the 3rd or 4th cast the dry dipped and I struck. It felt a better fish and when I saw it head upstream I knew it was a little better than those I’d been catching.
Moorland trout are the best I know at fighting dirty and this was no exception. It headed for just about every rock in the pool trying to wrap my leader, leapt a few times and was just plain difficult.
The commotion brought one of my pals downstream who watched me net the fish, congratulated me and took a picture. I hadn’t noticed the rain until now.
We walked and fished and having caught what I felt was a respectable amount of fish I wanted to try some things out and so snipped off the nymph and replaced it with the same dry caddis I had on the dropper. I left the new fly to get a little damp and noticed that the takes were fewer to the new fly compared to the well maintained one on my dropper.
There is nothing scientific in this of course, it might have just been they saw the dropper fly first and hit that in pockets that were only small but it felt as though I was doing my guide bit and had thought things through a little.
I sat on a rock for a while and watched a buddy fish for a bit. He quickly worked the water dropping his fly into every little spot, sometimes with a sudden erruption from the water as a trout slashed at the fly and at other times not.
The rain picked up a little more and so did the wind. I didn’t really care as it meant the midges had gone for the day.
Pete Tyjas is a fly fishing guide based in Devon