Everything is possible in April… since trout season began on 1.April, the weather has shown us everything it has to give. Cold nights, and ice covering everything on sunrise, the days a mix of sun and storm and rain and snow… days to celebrate a BBQ in the garden and days to better crawl back into bed.
The evenings are beautiful occasionally, and there is nothing like a spring sun setting under a heavy sky. These moments are wonderful, the light, the air, the silence… and the peace of mind it gives you.
The trout are moody as the weather… for short periods of time, heaven has red dots and there is a fish on almost every cast. And then it is all over again, and not a single fin shows up for hours… Luckily, the trout are not very picky in spring and you just have to take your time, keep on casting, and sooner or later it will happen. Black woolly buggers are usually a good choice, but so are baitfish patterns in natural colors.
In winter I had bought some wonderful tying material for salmon flies from Mawill Lüdenbach at flyonly-shop.de . I wondered if trout would like “dirty banana” and “ginger” as well, since their bigger cousin seemed to love those colors…? And I tied up some simple trout streamers using a golden bead head, some ginger hackle and dirty banana fox. With great sucess!
A somewhat special moment was roughly a week ago, when amidst the wind and rain, with temperatures just above zero, a great hatch of small mayflies took place. I have never witnessed such a strong hatch this early in the year… and fish were immediately on the surface. I tied on one of my smaller grey-brown universal patterns, and quickly hooked up! After two fish I had to realize that the rising fish were mostly small graylings, so I stopped fishing and stepped back to enjoy the spectacle.
