Over on his Facebook page, Team Wychwood consultant Glen Pointon has been following up all those early season recce missions with some serious big fish fighting patrols into the urban badlands.
Naturally, we’re all about spreading the urban river fishing love (with suitable caveats against hotspotting, for obvious reasons) – so Glen has given us the go-ahead to share his fishing report here on Urbantrout.
After reading this, if you need much more inspiration for getting out there on your own urban fly-fishing adventures this season, may we respectfully suggest you’re already kinda dead from the neck up…?
My ventures out recently have seen me on my local River Dove, and it’s been nice getting back to matching the hatch with dries. Stalking trout can be hard work so being on a trout river has helped me get my eye in…
But back on my urban River Trent, I had told a few close friends of a fish I had only seen a handful of times – known in my own little world as ‘Black Tail’ for obvious reasons. I was targeting a 2lb fish last year, and every now and again ‘Black Tail’ would enter the fold and bully the whole pool apart.
This fish looked massive in the water. It was one of those fish that would shock you by its sheer length and depth. But it would only show in dropping water after a flood, I had no idea where it fed or its bolt hole was, but it would turn up now and again.
Today on a dropping tinged river, while ready to cast at a rising fish I saw an olive get nailed under a deep glide under of over hang. I popped my head above the balsam and there she was…
It always amazes me that huge trout will feed on such small olives but they do now and again and if it happens the rewards are massive. My own version of Gwilym Hughes’ Cul de Canon was selected as this has caught me more fish on emerging olive hatches than any other fly I’ve ever used.
After putting two casts in a tree I was lucky not to have spooked the fish, but the colour in the river was helping me massively. When you see the head poke out calmly over your fly, there is nothing like it in fishing for me. But when all hell breaks lose my nerves are shot to hell!
10 whole minutes it took to land this massive trout, and how I did I will never know because it shot downstream so fast my rod ended up pointing at the fish as the speed took me by surprise. I would bank my life on this fish has never seen a fly, this is not a river where you can rock up having a chance of a trophy. This is the River Trent, you have to put the hours in.
My best English wild trout, hell yeah. I noticed that Steve Cullen and Howard Croston were saying the other day there is nothing anywhere in the world like early season trout fishing in the UK… I totally agree.
(Photo: Glen Pointon)
