With a couple of hours to spare over the Easter weekend, I decided to try out a new venue: Frensham Trout Fishery. Its a strange little fishery, nestled into a little valley in the Hampshire countryside, just south of Farnham. The fishery is made up of six, small lakes, or rather I should say ponds as most of them are too small to have more than one or two people fishing at a time.

After getting up at the crack of dawn, I was stood on the side of the larger water by 8am on a beautiful spring morning. The bright sun was shining down and it looked like it was going to get warm so I was aiming to make the most of an early start.

I was delighted to see the odd top and tail but it wasn’t enough to warrant trying some top of the water action. As the water was crystal clear, I decided to start off with a single, small, black nymph. However, within twenty minutes (and no takes) the rises started to increase so I switched to a CDC emerger, thinking they might be taking hatching buzzers. With the water being so small, I was able to cast easily at rising trout but quickly saw a take an interest but turn their noses up at my fly. I tried a Klinkhammer and a small black dry fly but the rises suddenly dried up.

I switched to a recently tied flashback black buzzer and immediately hooked a reasonable but rather lacklustre rainbow. As the morning warmed up, so did the action but other anglers had caught on a range of buzzers and damsels, especially one guy with three on a blue-flash damsel.

Unfortunately, I had to cut my session short but an interesting venue which I will try again, although I suspect better for early mornings in the spring, and possibly autumn, before the small waters heat up too much.