30th August.

Fished a new beat on the River Monnow today with a good friend. The Monnow Valleys beat is available through Wye and Usk Foundation.
I arrived around 10 o'clock and decided to have a look over the beat to see what it was like. What I found was a really nice section of the river with a good mixture of water suitable for all sorts of fly fishing. The bottom of the beat is a bit slower and deeper but I bet it would be a great place to fish on a mayfly hatch. Access was quite difficult and we had to adopt a commando style approach to getting in and out of the river. We weren't put off by this and were further encouraged by the small, but reasonably steady, hatch of Small Dark Olives (Baetis scambus) and pale watery duns (Baetis fuscatus) coming off the water.

My friend is a confirmed dry fly fisherman and I love fly fishing with dry flies. So it seemed a good tactic for the day.
After a few casts with my first choice of fly, a Tups Indispensable, I decided to change fly to an SDO klinkerhammer or klinkhammer. This wasn't because the Tups was not rising fish, but because the fly was unbalanced and was spinning my tippet up into knots.

We fished through till late evening having a nice few fish each over the course of the day. Some where nice wild brown trout and some may have been fish stocked further up the river. One thing that was in absence over the day was the Grayling, which would have been nice as the Monnow can produce such fine specimens

Frank