Mayfly Improvisation

After my last outing to the Wharfe a week ago, and having seen a few rises, I decided I didn't have enough dry flies tied up and seeing as its May I decided to try my hand at some Mayflies for the first time. These are a hybrid of Peter Gathercole's CDC Drake from from Fly tying for Beginners, and the CDC Mayfly in issue 5 of eat-sleep-fish.co.uk.

 With a little improvisation I tied this on Partridge Kilnkhammer hooks with a cream spectrablend body, brown thread for the markings, deer hair tail, CDC wing and furnace hackle (underside trimmed away).

With these tied up and a Monday off work I headed out to the river hoping to get some use out of the four I tied.

 The pool heading upstream from this photo holds some fish, I have seen them but I am yet to net any! I am sure there are fish downstream (below) but it needs some more water as it was very static.

Anyways, I fished for 4 hours, saw a few rises of dark olives, but unfortunately no fish and didn't get to try out my freshly tied Mayflies....Luckily my weekend schedule is free for all of May so I'm sure I'll get the chance!

Hope everyone else is having better luck than me at the beginning of the season!

Wanted: Wading staff...

Went up to Buckden again for an outing last weekend, haven't been out for a while due to work load, and Saturday looked like good weather with the river levels dropping off, so decided a venture was in order.

Had high hopes for the day, which in retrospect bodes very badly...

Most of the time I only ever wade up to my knees at Buckden, but today I ventured further into a deeper pool which looked promising. After fishing straight across and slowly moving down for about 20 minutes I failed to notice the edge of the pool, and slipped off up to my neck in water, thoroughly soaking everything inside my waders...in retrospect I should've called it a day there but I travelled a distance to fish and decided to carry on, despite being freezing! A few failed attempts to dry some of my clothes in the brief sunny spells while freezing in the wind also didn't put me off. It might next time.

Anyways, fished the rest of the day with no luck. Question for any readers: It was reasonably windy this day, and I was fishing a klinkhammer with nymph patterns under, but for some reason I just could not get the klink to sit right in the water. I tried the New Zealand dropper style and having the nymph attached on a dropper about 3 inches above the klink, but neither worked. Any suggestions would be great! Also, any suggestions on where to get a decent wading staff would be appreciated...