River Test 16th June Upper Beat First Weed Cut

If you have read the previous blog entry you will know my sad news.  The funeral was yesterday and was a demonstration of just how well liked my mother was and how much she will be missed.  So today was a good day, happy memories and a feeling of calm that follows the ritual of the funeral and burial a day that was celebratory and not in anyway morose, sad yes but uplifting and joyful.

This was the first day after the end of the Mayfly which is traditionally known as Duffers Fortnight when the fishing is allegedly easy as all the activity is on the surface.  Following the Mayfly the river has a short back and sides, the verges are trimmed and the weed in the river is cut back.  In the past, and I mean the long distant past, the River Test and The Itchen were nothing more than a series of interconnected channels that went through meadows.  Over millennia man started to channel the water and hence we now have a river system.

The rivers were all controlled by a series of weirs, sluices and hatches to control the flow.  In water meadows that were controlled this way the farmers could flood the meadows in spring which would spread nutrients and raise the temperature of the soil and hence promote early growth  so cattle and sheep could be fed.  A very small part of the River Test was navigable and used in the 16th and 17th centuries unlike The River Itchen which was navigable along a large part.  I digress, the point is that the river has to be constantly managed to maintain flow.  If the river was allowed to do its own thing it would quickly become overgrown in the summer and the flow would be interrupted with large parts becoming nothing more than a spring fed marsh.

The weed cut is normally a difficult time to fish as you have to cast a fly to a fish avoiding the huge amounts of weed coming down river, that combined with the fact that the normal gin clear spring fed water has been churned up to the colour of weak tea.  However this year due to the very cold winter and the corresponding coldish spring, bar a few decent days has resulted in very little weed growth.  Large parts of the river still seemed not to have recovered from the winter and that combined with the voracious appetite of the resident swans which, whilst being nice to look at, are verging on being a pest.  A group of swans is known as a bevy, lamentation, herd or wedge.  (check this site out - I never knew there was a noun for a group of trout!!! Animal Group Names ).  This lamentation of swans (see what I did there) is a mass of adolescent swans, last years cygnets and like to use the river as an aircraft carrier.  One minute your happily fishing away, next thing you have 10 incoming teenage swans to disturb the peace and of course the fishing as I can't imagine if you were a trout that you would be happy about a 30lb bird landing on top of you...

With the wind, the colouring of the water and the trout suffering from a serious hangover following the Mayfly gorging of the last two weeks the fishing was very tough.  I managed to winkle out the only fish that I had seen rising, taken on a smallish Grey Wulff but that was the only fish I saw rise the whole length of the carrier I was on.  At times like these it's best to return to the pub and sit out the afternoon and wait for the evening.  It's no guarantee there will be a hatch but it was sunny and if the wind dropped we could be in luck.

Returning to the river at 5ish the wind was starting to drop and small hatches of sedge and olives were occurring,  By 7.30pm there were huge bunches of olives and sedges and a few, very late, Mayfly were starting to land on the water to lay eggs.  These Mayfly were in sufficient numbers to turn a few trout on to them and I hook and lost two and landed another 2 in very quick succession.  Meanwhile Guy was over on the main carrier and having great success with sedge and hooking fish after fish, quickly reaching his 4 fish limit and a number that came short, hooked and subsequently got off.  It was a spectacular hours fishing, definitely worth waiting for.  Just after 9.00pm we packed up, very content that the gamble of staying late had paid off.

The end of yet another great day on the Test.  It's also the time of year when the seasons start to change again as we move into summer.  The last of the blossom from the Elder trees signifies that spring is finally over and the wonderful array of spring greens starts to merge into one shade.  The fishing gets harder - either early in the morning or for a brief but frenetic hour or so before dusk.  As I write this we have reached the longest day, it's sad to think the days get shorter from now on.  I am going to make sure I enjoy each day before the leaves start to turn again - we have the whole of the summer to look forward to...