There has been some fabulous fishing at Beanhill lately, with a variety of different methods succeeding. I had one fish on the dry fly yesterday, coming down to the lake just after dawn in a hard frost, to find fish rising everywhere.

It’s surprising how engrained that early morning habit seems to be, provided the weather is still. On the second cast with a size 18 Shuttlecock CDC, a rainbow broke the surface like a porpoise and engulfed the little fly on the way down.

Later in the day, I was sharing the lake with a couple of anglers from South Wales; one was taking fish with a damsel on an intermediate line – although I noticed he did better when he slowed up his retrieve – and the other was using the same fly but with a floating line, using an indicator to control the depth.

He bagged up when he found a shoal of rainbows close in under his feet, fishing facing the wind and allowing the fly to drift in tight against the sedges at the margin. I was fishing a Dawson’s Olive, making long searching casts with a clear intermediate line, including casts parallel with margins. Three different methods and we all did well.

Several of us encountered good out of season browns this week, both Scott Cameron and I taking fish around the 4.5 pound mark. Mine had been lying tight in to the sedges near the upper part of the lake, measured 23 inches, and gave me some anxious moments before it was netted.

As most of the browns stocked since 2002 are triploided, they remain in condition through the winter and I like to think are not affected too much by being caught and released. The browns stocked initially in 2001 are sexed fish, though, and a few of those are still showing up now and then.

There is an old cock fish I seem to catch at least once every year, colourful in green and dark gold with red spots and an outrageously hooked lower jaw now, and some quite impressive teeth. He’s getting to be a friend and we usually have a chat as I release him; I ask how he is and he tries to borrow money before kicking off.

This one has been a bit under 5 pounds for some time, and I have come to the conclusion that that is the maximum weight the lake’s food supply will normally produce in grown-on fish. As far as we know, there are no coarse fish except eels and sticklebacks in Beanhill, no crayfish or other high protein food source, so our fish are living mainly on insects, shrimps and snails.

For all that, the big browns behave very like pike, lurking close to cover and sometimes taking a fly with a short ambush rush. The fight is also a bit like a pike’s, jumping only rarely, but a lot of head-shaking and boring down into the weeds.

Fish along the edges of the sedge beds and the channels between the weed patches if you wanted to increase your chances of catching one of these solitary fish, and it might be worth concentrating on the upper part of the lake near the islands                       

Oliver Burch