Nice Grayling from an English river

[FunkyFlyTying]

I have not had much time to fish these last few weeks with fishing shows etc but when my good buddy Pete called to see if i wanted to get out for the day i jumped at the chance.
Our rivers have suffered from to much water this year and the river has been high and coloured for some time and i have to say when i arrived i was not sure if the river would fish very well.
However i had a few new flies i wanted to try along with a new french leader set up that would suit where we were fishing so it was a good excuses to get fishing.
I was testing some new "sunrise" lens Costa's as well which worked perfectly in the very dull conditions.
Fishing was hard with the fish just not in the usual lies and not feeding.
Pete had a very nice out of season brown trout and a couple of small Grayling and i had hooked a small Grayling too.
The french leader set up was working a treat showing the smallest bumps as the 3mm tungsten beaded fly bounced along the bottom of the river bed.
The indicator twitched to the right and dipped slightly and i lifted in to a good fish that moved downstream and stayed deep.
When we first saw the fish we both thought i could be the magical 3lb + Grayling but the more i fought it the smaller it became.
We just managed to squeeze the fish in to the net and after a quick picture slipped it back.
It took quite a while to get the fish ready to swim off and it was great to see if finally drift of strongly to the deeps of the pool.
It was a fish over 2lb which is not a common fish on my local river so i was over the moon.
A very hansom male fish with a great big dorsal fin.

T

 

[mcnerney]

Congrats on the great looking Grayling! We have Grayling here in a local lake, but I have only been up there once, had a couple hits on dries, but missed both of them then got run off the lake with a big thunderstorm and haven't made it back there, but I sure would like to get up there before winter sets in.......just too much good water around here to explore.

Larry

 

[Liphookedau]

A Nice Fat Grayling,The ones I've caught have been a Slimmer version.
We caught them mainly whilst Fishing for Rainbows around The Spawning Salmon in Alaska & were using Beads, which I'm not a great lover of.
Even though they give a bit of a battle the ones I caught didn't Fight like a Rainbow or Brown,however they were great fun as I hadn't caught them before.
Brian.

 

[theboz]

Gorgeous Grayling! On my bucket list! Nice looking spot as well!

 

[williamhj]

Nice fish! Looks like a great spot to spend a day.

 

[il_wi_fishing]

a healthy fish by any standards, kudos

wish i wouldn't have to travel as far to bump in to one of those

 

[jpbfly]

Nice Thymallus:thumbsup:I spent forty five minutes trying to catch one which was feeding last saturday...don't know how many dries or nymphs I tied to my tippet...I finally gave up

 

[gatortransplant]

Definitely a football of a grayling! I still need to add one to my species list, the hope is that we will get a chance to fish for them next year in Sweden. They're very pretty fish for sure.

 

[FunkyFlyTying]

Thanks for the nice comments.
it was a very fat Grayling indeed which is where the weight comes from.
Interestingly we sem to have two different strains of grayling on my local river.
The type in the above picture which have lots of dark spots and the type below which have very very few spots and a strong yellow strip along there belly.
This one was caught just a few yards from the fish i caught on the same day.

I would dearly love to catch Arctic Grayling at some point and have seen some wonderful photos of fish caught by my friend Pete Cockwill in the UK when fishing in Alaska.

 

[thorsten]

Congratulation for this really nice grayling. We also have some graylings here in our river but since we have got too much cormorants the populations decreased very much

 

[creeker]

What's that strange predominant color on the banks and trees? All our plant life is brown......

Beautiful fish and location. One day, I'd love to visit one of the chalk streams there.

 

[flyfisher45]

Beautiful fish and a beautiful place to fish

 

[FunkyFlyTying]

Thanks for all the nice replies.
My local river is call ed River Tone and its one of the must underrated rivers in the Westcountry which is just the way i like it.
We saw some nice salmon below a weir as well which is great news because the river is not known for its Salmon run.