After my triumphant start last week on the local Canterbury CDAA trout pool at Fordwich I thought I’d give it another go this week. With every great triumph comes an almighty fall. I got nothing. Missed a few takes though and saw quite a few trout on the surface. One problem was the amount of small course fish nibbling at the flies. It made it hard to tell when a take was a real trout although on this day not many where!
The was a huge amount of natural food in the lake and you could see spent buzzer cases floating on the water along with buzzers emerging and flying off in to the sky. The fish were coming up for something and at a guess I’d say it was for the buzzers but I didn’t seem to have anything in my fly box that they liked.
Being a catch and release pool with lots of natural food I reckon the trout in here are pretty clued up and so unnatural patterns will either spook them or drive them into a frenzied attack. I’ve decided to air on the natural looking flies for now until they prove me wrong. To make up a small hole in my fly box I decided to look around for some good emerging buzzer patterns. I came across lots using foam floats to make them sit in the ager nicely but I didn’t have any decent foam. I tried to tie a few with what I had and they sit in the water well but look a bit rough and ready. You never know though, the trout might love them!
A while ago one of our chickens got taken by a fox and all that was left was a pile of feathers on the grass. Not wanting to waste them I stuck them in an envelope and popped them in my fly tying bag. I’ve not really known what to do with them until now. I was looking at CDC emerged patterns and realised that a lot of the feathers I had were from that part of the chicken, the rear end where the CDC comes from (although real CDC comes from ducks). Its the fine fluffy feathers that give the buoyancy and as they looked similar to CDC I thought I’d use them to tie up a few floating emerged buzzer patterns to try next week.
There’s also something nice about using poor old Darth Vaders (I didn’t name the chickens!) feathers. Maybe they’ll bring me a bit of better luck next time.