This is the time of year which often shows even the best angler exactly what he’s been failing to catch all season…
When I walked downriver the following afternoon, the trout were still there: two big fish cruising the daylight shallows like nuclear submarines, with their grey backs half out of water and clear wakes veeing off their dorsal and adipose fins…
Under an arc-chrome shower of birch leaves, out there on the shallows, the early stages of a clean gravel redd were already plain to see. A three- or four-pound hen trout can shift an impressive mound of flints, eroded knobs of slag, even half bricks or lumps of concrete, several feet downstream, and since watching this happen for the first time, I’ve speculated whether our platonic ideal of a feature-filled humped-and-hollowed river bed is partly created by salmonids at spawning time.
Our latest instalment of The Urbantrout Diaries has just been published in collaboration with Flyfishing.co.uk: please click through to read and enjoy!
(Photo: Lysanne Horrox)
