With the Dee and the Goyt still running very high, I headed back to the fast dropping River Wye in Derbyshire for a decent early season Brown Trout.

 

There’d been a huge drop in temperature since my last visit and the mild spring-like conditions that I enjoyed on Tuesday were replaced by a gnarly, bitterly cold upstream wind that made both casting and take detection difficult.

Today though, I had arranged for Chiara and myself to share a rod which meant that whoever wasn’t fishing could take cover in the well appointed fishing hut.

 

The winter can be tough on Trout. They use up a lot of energy spawning and as there is generally less food around during the winter, they tend to lose condition and body weight.

In the spring however, insects again become plentiful and the Trout gorge themselves on the available food.
They are also slightly less wary as they have had fewer predators (ie anglers) to deal with during the closed season. This can produce some good but very lean early season fish.

 

For a brief period today the fish, and in particular the ‘stockies’, were very active. I would wager though that many of those caught today will be virtually impossible to tempt during the summer months.

Still, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!