Satisfaction
Its been hard to try and get out fishing over the past month or so due to work, but what i have managed to do is start to try and tie some of my own Nymphs for trout, grayling, chub and i mean Try.
There is so much more to this Nymph tying malarky than i have ever thought, its so much different to tying pike, Bass, Wrasse flies. With tying nymphs everything is so small or so fine, small hooks small threads, fine threads. A then the tying materials there is so many different types, so many colours in dubbing, so many different types of dubbing, so many different types of tinsel, so many different colours of tinsel and it goes on and on and on.
I started to just try and get the feeling of how to start to tie this type of fly. Trying to learn how much dubbing, how much tinsel, how much hackle and how big and quantity of hackle is needed. Trying to copy various nymph patterns i know of and copying nymphs which have been given to me. You tube is a great place to start to get tutorials of top fly tyres and fishermen (lewis Hendrie, Ben Bangham) who know what they are talking about. Does every fly pattern need to be exact to what i am copying ? or will adaptations to the type of fly be ok.
above and below two of my own creations
One thing i have noticed about catching chub on flies is that they will go for most flies with orange, pink and black and on the surface anything fluffy. Grayling seem to go for pink and purple but this is a fish that catching is relativity new to me. Trout i have caught since i was able to hold a rod and the colours brown, black, purple and more of the modern colours including UV.
After 3 weeks of tying nymph and all far from perfect but probably good enough for fishing it was time to hit the water. The plan was to head up to Somerset and catch grayling chub and maybe the odd trout but with two days of rain putting and end to that idea, with too much colour and water in the river. So i was given advice by a friend to head off up to dartmoor to catch some trout on the River Dart but he had advised me to use the dry flies, sedge patterns to be exact and if all that fails try nymphs. With myself only having a limited selection of sedges he offered to loan me a box of his.
So off up on to the moor the river had a lovely colour to it a whiskey colour perfect for fishing it was slightly overcast all looking good. Starting off with sedges fished for 40 mins with only a couple of rises and one hook up to show for my efforts so i changed to a dry on the dropper and a black nymph with a olive brown thorax. Straight away the change was an instant success i managed a small brownie.
I continued to catch on the nymph the the sedge was showing no interest at all. trying a grey klinkhammer on the dropper it too had no trout interested in it. so i put a indicator on and change to two nymphs and again instant success.
So it proves that my trout nymphs work or the fish were just starving what about the grayling and chub nymphs. Nothing like catching on your own creations total satisfaction.
Crazy hooks by Matt Pickup 