Another catch up

The weather has been too good this year and consequently my Ullswater visits have been severely restricted - cloudless sunny skies and calm days may be good for the tourists but are definitely no good for us fishermen.

We were fortunate on what turned out to be our last visit to the lake - mayflies (Danica) were hatching and the fish turned on to them once the hatch got going. It turned out to be a strange sort of day, first we found rising fish and mayflies hatching but the fish hadn't turned onto them, small black adult buzzer imitations took the first few fish of the day and then they turned onto the larger mayflies and stayed on them for the rest of the day. Initially the fish were taking freshly hatched duns and later in the day they turned onto the egg laying spinners, but you had to find rising fish to get any offers, speculative searching of normally productive areas produced nothing.

With hot weather and a very low and weedy river I wasn't too sure if we'd get much sport for two clients on their first visit to the River Eden the week before last, but thankfully the fish didn't let us down and a combination of North country spiders, nymphs and dries tempted a few fish and both Davids got their strings pulled.