Don's Mayfly Nymph Does It!

I took the afternoon off today as it was a lovely morning and reasonably warm. I went down to the lunch hut again around 1330 to meet Derek. Nobody was in the pool above the hut so as it was not the hatching time yet I started with a mayfly nymph. The one that was featured in  June's Trout and Salmon article about fishing on the Derbyshire Wye with Don Stazicker. I have known and fished with Don a long time and what he doesn't know about fly fishing isn't worth knowing! Anyway I had tied up a few of the nymphs, they don't look much out of the water but once they are wet well I recommend you to try them. I started at the bottom of the pool, some mayfly were coming off but still not the clouds we usually see on the Derwent, fish were rising here and there and so I started just upstream nymphing blindly. On my second cast a solid take resulted in a lovely fat brown which was quickly released, then within another couple of casts a second followed. I could not believe it! I fished up the pool and took a couple of rainbows but when I came out at 1400 I had landed 10 trout all to the same nymph. Derek had arrived so we decided to go down to Max's bench pool where I got in at the bottom. I covered a rise with the nymph and was immediately taken by another brown. This was turning out to be a red letter day! A few more fish were now rising to mayflies which were taking their time to fly off so I put on a dry mayfly, a 1-up-1-down which has done well for me in the past. I covered a couple of risers before a rainbow took and turned out to be a lovely wild one. I continued up the pool and ended up taking another 5 fish. The main hatch of mayfly started around 1600 and lasted about an hour before the temperature dropped, too much to carry on as I had had a really good day landing 12 browns and 6 rainbows.