A Full Day with 3 Friends

Today I had taken the whole day off as I was meeting 3 guests. A couple are only novices to this game so I was eager for them to feel the pull of a fly caught trout. We met up around 11 and went down to the hut at Beeley. I showed them the couple of pools by the hut as these are good for beginners to cover fish. The odd fish was showing and as I had done so well on the mayfly nymph the previous day I advised the same. Before we had all tackled up Mark took his first river brownie, result number 1! Tony, the experience fly man was off upstream and Leon came down to the pool where Mark had taken his trout. There wasn't much rising, I was very disappointed as I really wanted to show them how good the Derwent is. We met up for lunch and Tony had taken a few trout and a stonking chub.

After lunch we walked downstream to Max's bench but there was somebody already in the pool so I took Mark and Leon to the pool below. I was showing Mark the various lies and then some fish started moving in a back eddy taking duns off the top so I switched his fly to a dry mayfly. It wasn't long before he had a take and landed a lovely wild brownie.





I could see Mark was really in the zone and so left him to see how Leon was doing. Unfortunately Leon hadn't managed a fish yet. There was just so little moving. We noticed Mark take another couple of fish, there was no stopping him now! We tried several different flies but blank. I went up into the next pool up and saw Mark take another to the mayfly, a nice rainbow. We met up for a bite to eat and then decided to go down to the cricket pitch afterwards. Tony went down to the stump pool where he took another fish. Mark worked his way up towards Bar Brook and I took Leon up to where I was yesterday. I was determined he was going to catch. We started off with a mayfly dry and a few fish had a slash at it but nothing developed. I switched to a small olive fsn and within a couple of casts he was into his first fish, result 2! You can see by the grin that he was buzzing! Another convert to the 'gentle art'. We continued at the confluence and within a short time he was into his 2nd fish, this time one of the blue strain of rainbows which have been put in.

We finished about 2030 as the temperature had certainly dropped by now and what few fish were moving had more or less ceased. I am glad the guys caught and I am sure now that we have a couple more converts to river fly fishing. A great day.