Skenfrith beat newly available throught the Wye and Usk Foundation booking office.

This is a classic piece of Monnow fly fishing water. It has some nice long glides perfect for dry fly fishing or a bit of early season upstream spider fishing.

I arrived at the parking and started to get my waders on just as a hail storm started!!

Hmm!! Might be a tough day I thought to myself. I had only just arrived at the waters edge and already I had experienced all four seasons.

The river itself was a little coloured and racing through faster than would have been ideal due to the extra water it was carrying.

I set up a ten-ish foot leader with three droppers and tied on a combination of a GRHE nymph on point, a rainbow and black on the middle and a small peacock and black on the top dropper. I had a bit of a prospect around the edges of the riffles out of the way of the raging currents.

A Brown trout caught on a north country spider. Black and Peacock

This was the first to fall to my Black and Peacock. The action was a little slow in the early part of the day due to the water being very cold. As the day progressed it did warm up a bit and the pace of the river slowed somewhat.

I was down near the bottom of the beat when a few fish started to rise. Ha ha !! on with the dries, but what are they taking?? There was a little bit of everything hatching, a few Olives some Midges and Smuts and a few Grannom.

So what to put on? Ah yes, the ubiquitous little black number, only this one is by Hans van Klinken rather than Coco Chanel and, as ever, it came up trumps.

A brown trout caught while fly fishng on the River Monnow Fly used, Klinkhammer

As the day’s fishing was drawing to an end, I was walking back in “one last cast” mode when up ahead I heard the sloop of a fish sipping down ’spents’.

“One last cast!!”, I think.

Cast, nice drift, bump, missed the take. You know the sort of thing; line goes tight, feel the fish, line goes slack, exclamation of ‘Drat’ or some such thing!!

And I think “One Last Cast!!”

So out goes the cast right next to the roots trailing into the river from the bank, drifts along nicely again, bump and lift into the roots. “Drat” I exclaim once more. I have a good old wiggle and tug but it does not come free so I move upstream of the place it is caught to give it a good yank to get it free. Just as I yank to break the tippet a nice brown trout of about 13 inches leaps on to the black and peacock on my top dropper and breaks off my middle dropper and point fly which stay attached to the snag.

The trout however stays attached to my leader and I managed to net it after a bit of a tussle.

These are the moments that justify One Last Cast!

Frank