Like London Buses

You wait for ages for new blog item, then two come along at once.

This one's from Nigel though, as I wasn't involved in the latest habitat improvements,

but hats off to Peter, Paul, Andy, Chris and Nigel for finding a way to keep cool, and all without doughnuts too.

You may recognise this as the bit around the bend, up from the Tractor Bridge, where a tree had fallen in, and good use was made of it for a new deflector and some brash berms. This was the offending tree, followed by its new function.

In case you're thinking that this is all introducing more snags to lose your flies on, here's a short piece by Nigel, suggesting otherwise:

A tree had fallen across the river last week, also covering the path, on Beat 3c upstream of the Tractor Bridge. Chris, Paul, Peter, Andy and myself arrived on a warm but not too hot Thursday morning to clear the path and make use of the timber to fix the main trunk as a deflector and install a couple of brash berms. These will hopefully enhance the habitat for fish and invertebrates including the provision of a refuge for fry. It was hard work but we managed to complete it, helped by cold drinks and standing in the river to cool down.

During the morning we discussed how we had never fished one of the habitat improvements on the day it was installed to determine whether it had an immediate impact. So on Thursday evening I went back to the river to carry out this onerous task and cast a fly in the area just downstream off the newly installed tree trunk. On the second cast I managed to hook and land a brown trout (see the photo below) using my favourite fly, the Black Pheasant-Tailed Nymph (with a silver bead). While playing that fish I noticed that another trout had bolted from underneath the first berm that we had installed, where it had obviously been hiding, out to the main flow. I thought it was worth another cast and so gave it a go, landing another brown trout the very next cast using the same fly.

I’m not sure what all that proves, although I seem to recall somebody once saying “if you build it they will come”.

Nigel Francis