Beanhill Lake Report

I had a punter ring up to delay some scheduled fishing lessons the other day “…until we get some good weather.” “Fair enough,” I told him, “but you could be missing something.”  I found myself wondering whether he would expect to shoot pheasants during his summer holidays. June this year, through the wind and rain, has provided some remarkable fishing on still waters.  This time last year, we were already into the mid-summer drought and worried about water temperatures. Cool temperatures, rain and cloud have kept fish lively and feeding. And even if the local rivers are still high and muddy, some of us are hoping against hope that they are filling up with salmon and sea trout which will be in a taking mood as the floods finally recede. At Beanhill, the midges seem to have been hatching almost continuously in huge quantities as if it was still April or May. There was no mayfly hatch this year to speak of, except a few from the stream, not many olives yet, the damsels visible, but still fewer than you would expect for June, and sedges have not shown in large numbers, but midge feeding trout seem to be moving and rising everywhere. Buzzers are a good approach, certainly, under an indicator if you want to suspend them below the surface, and the regulars have done well with a Claret Buzzer in size 14, when the fish were a little deeper. But to miss the opportunity to use dries or emergers when the fish are on top seems a great waste, and we have been having some of the best dry fly fishing I can remember.

A Grizzle Emerger in size 14 or 16, fished on a fine degreased leader and a soft actioned rod seems to produce a very high ratio of takes. And this is exactly what I was doing on my last midday session, with several head and tail rising rainbows already netted, when I realised that something different was going on at the head of the lake. Several large browns came crashing out of the water and I got the idea that the low-flying mated pairs of adult damsel flies now skimming the surface might have been the object of attention. I don’t have a fly which imitates damsels in pairs, but I do have an ethafoam pattern in electric blue, nearly 2 inches long including the abdomen, with backswept wings made of blue dun hackle tips, which imitates the male. A couple of these live in the fly box year on year, but they occasionally have their day when they get properly chewed. It’s a minor tactic, like imitating falls of ants, but it’s certainly well worth being prepared. The first retrieve back with the big fly along the surface produced a slammer of a take from a brown trout of around 3 pounds. A few casts later, it happened again, only this brownie was a little larger. I would like to write that a third brown followed those into the net to make it a hat trick – it’s not often you can point to a technique which will reliably sort out one species from the other – but number three was in fact a rainbow, which engulfed the fly in a slightly more hesitant manner. I ended up the session with 9 fish, to the Blue Damsel, Grizzle Emerger, and including one to a Claret Hopper.

Oliver Burch

1 July 2007