Walking down the beat to start at the bottom end we saw a couple of rises and a couple of likely looking pools, but the river was low and slow with a thick coating of a green slimy weed on the bottom. I know there river here also contains the american signal crayfish, so I was keeping my eyes peeled to spot a foreign invader.
The weather was scorching, and I soon regretted leaving the sunscreen in the car. However, onto the fishing....
Tough doesn't start to cover it! There were plenty of 1-2 inch fry keen to have a go at my dry fly, but nothing of any size spotted for the first hour. Nothing rising, nothing moving, nothing. I was starting to doubt there were any fish in the river when a reasonable trout shot past me - disturbed by my wading. This lifted the spirits, a little anyway!
It was only when I found a deep dark corner where the river flowed under a boulder and observed a trout darting out and snatching bugs from the foam line that passed near it that I began to regain some enthusiasm.
A tricky "bow and arrow" cast under a hawthorn with a black foam beetle landed me my first river Hamps trout - an 8 inch specimen.
The river here desperately needed some more water, so after fishing up to the upper limit, we called it a day and headed back across the Peak, stopping at Bakewell on the way for a chat with Peter.
The video is worth watching right until the end..... after all, I'm trying to capture the true essence of small stream trouting ;-)
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