‘It is late summer and the undeniable stresses of extended periods of extremely hot weather in my part of Southern England have reduced the coarse fishing season so far to just a handful of sporadic weeks. The regular closure of my waters, both running and still, due to low oxygen levels, high water temperatures or algal blooms have come on top of two blown-out winters where the incessant rain has led to raging floods and erosion of banks from November to February’
I wonder if we will have to become more adapted to a wet season and dry season and all the constraints which go with it in future? My sparse diary entries offered little excitement over the last few months as a result, so in this edition I delve further back to the early spring… a time when the thought of spending lengthy days behind closed curtains, seeking out air-conditioned supermarket aisles and running fans for twenty-hours were unimaginable.
It feels good to string up a fly rod again. The predictably unpredictable winter rains and subsequent flooding had set aside any hope of finding grayling enjoyable and it took until the final week of the coarse fishing season for the river to fine down enough to locate a sizeable chub, a shade under six pounds, with which to end my hiatus.
All Fools’ Day signals the start of the trout season. The ‘fools’ in question were those slow on the uptake of the calendar change from the Julian to Gregorian, the New Year now starting on January 1st and no longer around the spring equinox (late March to April 1st). In France, one theory suggests the victims of pranks and jokes are called ‘Poisson d’Avril’ (April Fish) and children would traditionally pin paper fish to their backs symbolizing how easily caught they were. It is rare that the trout of April are as gullible. Most fish are looking down still rather than skyward at our dry fly offerings but every year our anticipation gets the better of us, and we optimistically tie on some such confection in the hopes it will drift enticingly over a yet unseen plump wild brownie. Seldom does such activity muster them from the depths so early.
From late morning to early afternoon there is a brief window where large dark and medium olives will make a brief struggle to the surface, casting off their nymphal shucks in the hope of taking flight and delivering the next progeny. Most will get off to a good start before something in the piscine brain switches on and the effort of a dash north is repaid by a tasty morsel.
Today the sky is unimaginably blue and punctuated sporadicallyby white cloud columns. The promise of fair weather and the warmth of the unhindered sun feel good. The work put in on the brook either side of the main spawning time is rewarding.
With new steps cut into the bank at the crossing-point making safer entry and exit and the strimming has been judicious through the swathes of eager nettles, leaving enough patches to support the butterfly populations while deferring the inevitable numbing prickles for a few weeks. Orange tips and brimstones flicker through the ancient woodland as I make my way to the bottom of my elected beat.
At my feet, some of the native bluebells are already beginning to turn to seed and the pathway I am following is flanked by greater stitchwort and a few primroses. The delicate wood anemone, that indicator species of an old and undisturbed place, is believed to grow so slowly; it may take one hundred years to spread their rhizomes just six feet.
The air is filled with the sound of birdsong, chiffchaffs, territorial robins, the effervescent great and blue tits and of course the unseen, but always heard, Wrens. Sedge warblers are making their preparations for nesting sites, flitting back and forth across the narrow water ahead of me. More distant is the familiar drumming of a woodpecker, a family of which successfully bred in the hole of a fallen bankside beech. Quite the racket they made when summoning their foraging parents. We are wonderfully blessed too that kingfishers have made their home in the high left bank over several seasons, undetected by the marauding mink. We have participated in an eradication project of this hunter in the last two years so hopefully the bird families are that little bit safer now.
For me, these early ventures are as much about absorbing my surroundings and seeking out the wonders of the natural world around as they are about the actual fishing. Today I determine not to trawl the bottom with heavy weighted nymphs but instead flick a spider pattern, searching the top of the water column. It is extremely unlikely to be successful while the water is still so cold but it lends a softness, a slowness to proceedings. I am finding my casting rhythm again, without haste and with minimal disturbance when the timing goes wrong.
A little beyond the bend, where the badgers have their ancient latrine, I spot a rise. Just at the tail of a new bank revetment that we created in early March to narrow the width and increase the flow, a fish has taken up station. The backfill of twigs and branches will have provided sanctuary for pin fry and no doubt an opportunist predator or protective parent has made it their own. I watch and wait again, and some time passes before another subsurface swirl tells me the occupier is still there. If I overcast it I am sure it will be spooked, so two or three casts will either prompt a response or not.
Nothing comes from on the snipe-and-purple-spider pattern so I switch to an un-weighted pheasant tail nymph which will go a few inches deeper. Still nothing, so I rest the fish and sink into my surroundings once more, eyes fixed on the spot, but all other senses alert to the environment around me. Somewhere a blackbird is starting its mid-afternoon song and a fox shouts its three note “yap-yap-yap” as it seeks out its mate.
A more confident swirl appears again, so a third change of fly to an emerger pattern is made, oiled and fished in the surface. One cast is enough and the jagging tug of that first trout generates an electric current back to my brain. The tiny brook rod bucks and springs and the spotted flank flash of the indignant quarry can be seen as it grudgingly makes its way towards me. At eight inches it is no monster, but a truly wild fish and certainly never caught before.
And so, one fish has proved enough today but being out in an English spring, in a world of wonder, has provided so much more.
Writing & Images David Chalcraft Summer 2026
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