This year has been outstanding: Be it asp, pike, perch or rainbow – I broke many of my personal records this year… most of them unexpected or unplanned. Never had I believed if anyone had told me last year, that I would catch a pike of almost 20lbs.
But one fish, one record, I truly prepared for… the 50cm for grayling! The 50cm is for grayling probably the mark which is 40cm for perch, 60cm for browntrout and 100cm for pike, it is a mark that you either reach occasionally by chance or by persevearance and preparation: I decided to follow the second path and beginning in last winter, I tried different patterns of nymphs, adjusted the tying, tested again, over and over. I tried different leader-strengths, -lengths and presentation techniques… and learned! For example, that you don’t have to fish as fine as everyone says: you can easily fish 0.16 up to 0.20 tippet, at least in fall, when graylings are feeding actively.
Fall is in general the best time to hunt for big graylings in my mind. Not only because of their feeding behavior, but also, because they are easy to spot in the ginclear water, and because the angler still has some coverage by the vegetation.
And after I had fished for grayling some days already, tried different spots and caught some nice ones between 45 and 48cm, it happened today:
I walked along a new section of the stream and I had lost a nice fish already when I spottet a large fish over light sandy ground. I immidiately knew that this was a 50+ fish, as it was the biggest I had seen for years. The spot was not easy to fish: a lot of wood in and along the water, a steep bank… I made a short cast downstream, fed some more meters of line, and then by a motion of my wrist, I flicked the line upstream. The leader passed over the grayling, but not the line. The nymph began to drift towards the grayling, it rose, and inhaled the nymph with a turn of its head… and WEEEEEW, it was ON!
After a fight that felt much longer than it probably was, I netted this beautiful fish and measured well over 54cm!!! A GIANT, maybe a catch-of-a-lifetime?
