Too Many Flies?…14th May

May 15, 2018

I recently congratulated a client on how quickly he appeared to have mastered the art of ‘The Fishing Excuse’. He’d just returned from a less than fruitful trip and was citing water temperature as a contributing factor, which of course it is.

 

He was both consoled and commended. I went on to explain that it is the responsibility of every serious angler to ensure that he or she has a whole host of such excuses that can be drawn upon at any time. The more elaborate the better!

 

I have myself have confidently alluded to factors such as wind direction, atmospheric pressure and the ‘wrong kind of light’! Today I may have discovered yet another excellent way to explain my lack of success… Too many flies!

 

This afternoons hatch was huge, I can’t recall seeing one of this magnitude on any river I’ve fished. That said, I only saw one fish rise all afternoon…but there could well be a good reason (excuse) for that.

 

You’ll see from the video that the flies are all making their way upstream. Flies like their eggs to develop in the exact area where they themselves hatched. To ensure that the eggs settle in the right spot, they fly upstream to lay them and allow the current to carry them back down to the desired site.

 

So, back to today’s excuse. It stands to reason that if there are that many flies in the air, the water has to be teaming with them! Each one of those maturing flies has had to swim up from the river bed as larvae in order to hatch. In this larval stage, they are extremely vulnerable and millions are picked off by the hungry fish that respond to the sudden increase in activity and food.

 

These mass hatches must offer fish the opportunity to gorge themselves and so by the time I got there, they were quite obviously full!

 

Excuse # 83, complete!

 

Small nymphs to ‘match the hatch’
Tiny, but fortunately still hungry!

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