Once again my tackle store come workshop has become a victim to my untidy nature and I have been having trouble just moving about in there, let alone looking for things. It was time to call in my tidy up expert Tayler Clark who happened to be on Easter holidy from college. He came to stay for four days and expressed an interest in learning to fly fish.
We could not fish the rivers due to the close season, so I took him to Moorhen Trout Fishery which is set in the beautiful Meon valley in Hampshire. This is not the type of fly fishing that I usually do, being a still water but is the ideal place to take a beginner. The banks are kept well cut, there are not too many trees to catch the beginner’s back cast and these places are usually well stocked.
On Thursday morning we arrived at the fishery to find the staff very helpful and I began Tayler’s first casting lesson on a large lawned area beside the lodge. I have been coaching Tayler for nearly eight years and he is already an accomplished caster with a fixed spool reel and coarse tackle but he found fly casting a very steep learning curve. However, within thirty minutes or so he had grasped the basics and was ready for a fly with a hook instead of the piece of wool he had been practicing with.
On the lake he struggled with his timing as all beginners do but was soon casting a long enough line to fish with and we worked on the finer points of his technique and his timing throughout the day. Unfortuately the fish did not cooperate, probably due to my inexperience in fly choice but he did get two takes and a couple of follows which were enough to generate enthusiasm for this branch of our sport. His casting improved by leaps and bounds through out the session and as we packed up at the end of the day we were discussing what to do the next day, the owner told Tayler that as he had not caught he now had a £10 credit towards his next ticket. This made his mind up and he wanted to come back in the following morning.
I telephoned Keith Dipper a friend of mine who is a fly fishing coach and asked him if he would come the next day to polish Tayler’s casting and try and make sure he caught a fish.
On Friday morning we picked Keith up at his home beside the river Itchen in Winchester and drove to Moorhen once more. I paid for all the tickets since we were partially using Keiths coaching skills and I decided to fish as well. Tayler must have been practicing in his sleep or at least thinking hard about what he had learnt the day before because his casting was much improved apart from the occasional lapse of concentration. Keith was very surprised that he had only touched a fly rod for the first time the day before.
Small black buzzers were the going fly and Tayler caught his first trout under Keith’s guidance, it weighed two and a quarter pounds and my warnings about the speed of these rainbow trout had not prepared him for the vigorous fight.
His second trout was four ounces bigger.
I was fishing with a lighter five weight outfit as I do not own the same range of fly fishing tackle as I do coarse tackle and this four pound rainbow took quite a while to bank.
When I add these two days to another good day at Marsh Farm it was a pretty good week.
A three pound six ounce Crucian carp caught at Marsh Farm it was one of two caught both over three pounds on a size twenty hook to two pound line.
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