I managed to slip up to Grafham yesterday afternoon expecting to fish into the evening, going for the late evening rise.
But as soon as I arrived ( 2.00pm) at the natural bank where I decided to try first, I could instantly see fish moving!! So first up I put on the usual killer shrimp, epoxy buzzer and on the top dropper a CDC shuttlecock buzzer, but I soon realised that with my fluro carbon leader my point fly was fishing too deep and snagging bottom in the relatively shallow depth. So with fish still moving on the surface I changed the point fly and put on a small foamed backed daddy, in effect set up a washing line with the buzzer on the middle dropper.
Now I was fishing correctly I picked up a cracking 3 1/2-4lb fish on the CDC buzzer which stripped line off well into the backing. I now started to cast to rising fish picking them off with the Daddy or slowly retrieving and having fish splash at the surface flies or hitting the buzzer hard.
Luckily it stayed more or less overcast with a tiny ripple and the fish just kept taking on the surface. There was so much food in the water with shrimp, fry, sedge, tiny flies and buzzer everywhere but I’ve never seen so many damsel flies. Interestingly most of them were mating as in the picture below and clearly the fish were switched onto them.
I landed 9 and kept 4 for just over 13lbs which I will hopefully cold smoke.
I decided to stop fishing at 5.30 as the evening just started to brighten up but happy with a cracking 3 1/2 hour fishing.
As a post note, when gutting the fish all the big ones had loads of snail in them as well, no wonder Grafham fish fight so hard !!!!
