With the first week of the kids summer holidays already showing signs of being ‘bored’, I tentatively offered my middle daughter, Katie, the chance to come fishing. I had a free afternoon and had wanted to try out the early evening rise at Farmoor reservoir.

After warnings on being patient and not scaring the fish, we arrived on a dull, relatively humid afternoon with an awkward northerly wind. We had decided to fish catch and release on Farmoor 1, as my daughter is not keen on dispatching fish and the trout are a decent size.

There didn’t seem to be much action on the top and given the warm conditions, I opted for a floating line with a long leader, bead-head hares ear on point and a single buzzer on the dropper. For the first couple of hours we changed the flies around a little but with the same deeper approach but to no avail. Katie was relatively happy having a go now and again but was starting to get bored. I suggested a change of location and asked her to study the water to see what may be hatching. She found a couple of lime green midges in the margins, so when we moved I changed to a small lime green buzzer suspended about a foot down under a daddy, new zealand style.

First cast and the line tightened up immediately and the fish on the end shot off into the middle of the reservoir, taking me down to my backing in short time. After ten minutes, I finally got him into the net, manned by the now very excited Katie. It was a lovely silvered rainbow of around 4-5lb. Now the little one was more interested.

I stuck to the approach and as dusk settled in had three takes to the daddy, none of which I managed to hook, being a little too quick on the take. Nevertheless, it was lovely to get some action on the top, even though there was nothing showing other than the takes. Perhaps a good lesson to learn – even though there was no action on the top, the trout were obviously high up in the water (I’d been fishing underneath them to start with) and happy to take something offered to them.