The moving of house has seriously impeded my angling, and maintenance of the website, but now things are improving, garden under control, and house more or less sorted out.

Recently I have been reading fly fishing books, in particular Sawyer's book on nymping. I have to say that I'm intriqued with his method using the Pheasant Tail nymph. I have several of these flies in my flybox, and never had much luck with them before. However, I must not have been doing it properly I suppose.

Anyway, this trip to the Laver (2 Bridges section) I decided to try the method out.

I walked all the way down to the triple arch bridge and worked my way back upstream. I started off using my newly finalised RN, but with little reception by the trout. By the time I'd got to the Sluice Pool, I had only caught a small fish. The Sluice Pool had quite a few feeding fish in, and I decided that the lazy waters were a fine place to start off with trying out the Pheasant Tail nymph method. I kept my leader in the same construction as with the RN method, and lightly flipped the nymph into the waters adjacent to the 1st tree on the deeper water bank. On my second cast, as I let the nymph sink down to the bottom, and tweak some movement into it, my cast drew under, yet there was no surface disturbance to tell me a fish had moved in the proximity of my fly. I lifted my rod to strike, and sure enough there was a fish on! I unhooked the fish, which was neatly hooked in the apex of the upper jaw, and carried on casting.

I caught 5 fish in 10 minutes in this pool, and each was very similar in method: cast drawing under being the only indication of a bite. The water is too dark to see into, and the fish don't disturb the surface at all.

I was obviously extremely pleased with this new discovery, and eventually caught 7 in total for the morning on the PT. I caught 3 on my RN as well.

The PT is extremely difficult to use in the faster water, as the leader becomes very difficult to see.

I had to switch back over to the RN method, as my leader started sinking badly beyond the Lunch Pool.