I decided that this weekend my club waters on the upper River Wye was to play host for my fly fishing. I got to the river around 11.00am on Saturday and I had planned to experiment with a short line - upstream spider set up. When I got to the river the wind direction/strength put paid to any method fished upstream so I settled for fishing a team of spiders across and down, trying to maintain as much 'dead drift' as possible.
Fish came instantly and it was obvious from the start that something had triggered these fish into feeding mode.
Although the river was low I targeted the deeper waters that still maintained plenty of flow and the fish were queuing up to be first to my spiders.
I found that the favoured fly was a bead head Greenwells pattern so I added another in place of the Snipe & Purple which out the three was the least productive. This resulted in an occurrence that I can only remember happening once before and today it happened four times...that being the catching of 2 fish at the same time!
At the conclusion of the day (7.30pm)I had taken fish mostly on spiders but also later on the dry fly and nymph with a good number of hard fighting Grayling making up the numbers (biggest 14").
Sundays session (3 hours) saw the river in much the same mode but the wind strength was considerably less enabling me to fish upstream as I had planned the day before, taking many fish again. This is a fantastic way of fishing enabling you to search out lots of water very quickly and catching fish right under your feet.
A valuable lesson was further instilled in me that if you're not in the water then you're not gonna catch anything, what looked like being a hard river turned out to produce one of my most memorable weekends on the river bank.
