A Fair Cop

As we headed through Mid Wales early on Sunday morning I thought my luck was in as I was kindly asked to accompany an attractive young lady to share the front seat of her car!

 It took her no time at all to get down to business and she soon got out her...ballpoint pen and her pad of fixed penalty speeding forms! yep you guessed it...whilst heavy in conversation with travelling/fishing companion Nick I totally failed to keep a check on my speed through a 30mph zone and was duly nabbed by the lady in blue.

Not the best start to the day but I was still looking forward to spending the next few hours in pursuit of some grayling.

The Wye tributary we fished was still running a little high and carrying slightly more colour than we would have like but as long as the last couple of days of heavy frost hadn't shocked them too much we still anticipated finding a few feeding fish.

Well it was certainly a slow start and likely looking spots yielded nothing, but a little further upstream Nick latched into a good fish which certainly tested out his recently built 11' 3wt rod. We had both opted to fish variations of long rod - short line nymphing, switching between heavily/medium weighted tungsten flies to enable us to get down to the riverbed quick in the stronger than normal flows.

The day continued with us both taking the odd fish as we progressed upstream and we finished with a handful a Grayling each but they were all quality fish with most measuring over 35cms.

It seems like this was the first days fishing this winter where the air and water temperatures made me feel glad I'd doubled up on my thermal layers, but fortunately we seem to have so far escaped the Arctic conditions which virtually wiped out last years winter grayling fishing.