April 1st

After years of fishing the River Frome I am still very much learning it’s rhythm and when is the optimum time to fish.

April 1st arrived to a very wet,  misty and windy morning, this was after weeks of amazingly calm warm weather. So not the best weather to dash out in the hope of  hatching grannom and rising fish.

It wasn’t until after midday that conditions improved and I felt it was time for me to head to the river. When I arrived it was still raining, misty and generally not very pleasant at all.  After tackling up,  I wandered over to a bridge and looked upstream – there were grannom everywhere and fish rising!!

Fishing a GRHE it wasn’t long before I landed my first trout of the season, then another, so it continued until the sun broke through the cloud and all action stopped dead.. How long the grannom had been hatching I will never know, but I do know, I wish I had got to the river a lot earlier!

Jim’s Report

Never mind the weather, it is the first of April so the chance to go fishing again could not be missed.

I arrived on the water at 0900 and it was all very quiet. The river was slightly coloured and the surface of the water was quite rough and dark with the gusts of a strong southerly wind and an overcast sky. A fine misty rain was carried in the wind and it was not a good morning for the dry fly so I tied on a Greenwell nymph and got some casting practice placing it in likely spots when the gusts of wind would allow.

After 2 hours of flogging the water the first fish turned up, a grayling. This was a bit ironic as I went fishing for grayling half a dozen times during the winter and caught absolutely nothing but the odd trout. My competence at grayling fishing is pretty well nonexistent.

At around 1130 I noticed that the grannom were becoming a bit more numerous and by midday there were some really good hatches in places. Better still, after not seeing a rise for the first three hours, trout started to pop up here and there. In fact, in some spots, a really good rise was underway. The wind had moderated and the clearing sky allowed some warmth to reach the river and stir grannom and trout into action.

Following a quick change to the dry fly, three decent fish came to the net before I got so hungry that I packed up to go home for lunch. As usual I was fishing a size 16 winged Greenwell. One day I must try something else. I met one other member and John A.

Cheers,
Jim