April Tradition

To mark the opening of each fishing season I take my family for a picnic lunch beside the same secret and free to fish river. I'm not really one for routine but I like this tradition.

My family has grown by one since last year's picnic and now four arms are needed to marshall two curious boys. Of course it means that my fishing time has been reduced even further, but these trips aren't really about fishing. I hope that over time a soft introduction will spark an interest in my boys in fishing and nature. 

April is a wonderful time to experience the awakening natural world after months of dark and cold. It's quite invigorating to feel the sun's warmth on the skin and to witness the return of green life.

There was light snow in previous Aprils but my sense is that the turn of the season has arrived a little sooner this year. The trees seem to have taken leaf earlier and I paused to watch iron blue beetles tear apart the young growth of a hazel. I wondered if the trout would take falling beetles, but it seemed too soon for surface feeding. There wasn't the merest hint of a rising trout, as there almost never is at the start of April.

There was a great deal of rain this past winter and whilst nettles remain modest and brambles bare I could make out where great big desposits of fine, golden silt had been left by floods. The river was higher and more turbid than usual and flowed as one moving seam, without the character which a lower volume imbues.

This is an exacting place to wear out the rust of the winter months. My nymphs were attracted to the magnets of tree branches and unseen snags on the riverbed and I had lost three or four before a little trout took one, shuddering furiously into the air, its efforts rewarded by freedom.

With my family just upstream I launched my duo of nymphs into an attractive swirl where the malleable river was checked by a large alder. I used a heavy nymph with a flash of pink, and a much smaller nymph tied truck-and-trailer style six inches away. There was no response from the main seam but my nymphs caught the attention of a trout from the slack body of the pool. Mission accomplished.

I joined my family to eat a scotch egg and pork pie for lunch. I ate whilst holding my youngest child who was distracted by an orange tip butterfly flitting between flowers. After lunch I flicked my nymphs into the nearest pool and caught another trout, which I showed to my boys. My eldest child touched it but complained that it was slimy.

Just upstream was the best pool in this stretch of river, but when I approached it, my heart sank. Another angler was standing in the river. In the years I have fished this river I have never seen another angler - something which has always mystified me. Having a place to your own for so long tends to engender proprietary instincts. Later, when I expressed my disappointment to Mrs River Beat, she commented that the other angler was probably just as disappointed to see me, too!

I may or may not return to this river this season, but look forward to my visit in April next year. I wonder what changes the next year will see in?