Sunday 19 February 2012

Riverfly Monitoring and Fishing benefits.

Just finished doing the monitoring on the two sites on our local beck.  This is something fairly new for me and can see it paying dividends in my fishing .This is a stream that I have known for very many years but even after two months I am getting a far greater understanding of what is in the beck and therefore what I should imitate.  For example I had not appreciated how many caseless caddis the river holds as the more visible cased variety had been more apparent.


A nymph that I thought I would see a lot more of in the stream  but has only put in an appearence with two individuals so far is the heptagenid  nymph.  This fellow appeared this month.  A lovely tasty mouthful for a trout .  But outnumbered 50 to 1 by the Baetis nymphs ....




I even took the net and tray and had a quick sampling session on another river I fish I couldnt beleive the numbers of a smallish tube cased caddis I found ,  I now have an artifical planned for them.  I can see the net is going to get a permanent place in the car boot..

3 comments:

Matthew Eastham said...

Fair play to you for taking on the monitoring. I wish morte anglers would take an interest and contribute.
The hepta/baetis imbalance is to be expected this time of year as the dominant mature species at the moment is the large dark olive, and the summer ecdyonurids/heptagenias will still be very small won't show up in samples too readily. You probably will not find any blue winged olive nymphs until May.

M

Becks and Brown Trout said...

Matt

Interesting and am learning all the time. Certainly beats looking at pictures in books.

Andy

The Jassid Man said...

Very interesting indeed! A friend of mine and I did some checking in our favorite stream back in the 80'ties and found a lot of green stone fly nymphs. This stream otherwise has a very nice population of Heptagenia sulphurea or yellow may fly. This is my favorite mayfly. It's so bright yellow in this stream that you can just stand there and watch them for a long time. We didn't have any net by then but I've always wanted one. Let's see what happens this coming season.

Have fun monitoring your stream,
M.O.

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