Those of you who have been reading this blog over the last many months will feel that it seems preoccupied with the weather! And you would be 100% correct. I left you at the end of April with our rivers very low: one report stated that then the Ribble was as low as it was after the end of the 1976 summer, the hottest, driest summer of the 20th century. And the March-April drought brought with it, besides very low flows, strong, cool easterlies that are the death of dry-fly fishing. But then things changed. The easterly winds were replaced by westerlies, and with the westerlies came rain. Not lot, but enough to get the flows back. Ribble and Hodder were often well over a foot up from mid-May, and the Aire a few important inches.

Let me start with the stillwater rainbow trout fishing. This provided some great fishing early in the month, and I think the highlight was a day on Barnsfold Water, in the hills of central Lancashire. The morning was very slow, because where I chose to fish was exposed to the strong cold breeze. Geoff had a fish, and Alan and I had a couple of offers. Geoff suggested I join him for coffee and as we headed coffeewards to Geoff’s car a couple of departing anglers told us that there were a few fish feeding at the surface in the one quiet corner. There were, but we could not see what they were eating: hatching buzzers, I thought. So we tried a variety of size 14 flies for nothing, and then I turned to a small size 16 Black Magic, a North Country wet fly with a black thread abdomen, peacock herl thorax and a couple of turns of a short-fibred black hen hackle. I had a fish first cast, a lovely rainbow of close to the two-pound mark. I kept that fish and the second for autopsy and to eat (Frank Casson’s trout are superb on the table!). Their guts contained minute (3mm long) black buzzers, and the fish would look at nothing bigger in the artificial line. Lure-strippers failed completely. Who says that stocked rainbow trout are stupid?!

Some of you will have read about Jack Norris in my book, The Floating Fly. Jack, who died many years ago now, was a great dry fly fisherman and he fished Barnsfold many times. Indeed, the photograph of him in that book was taken by Geoff at Barnsfold on the fly I will next describe. As we were trying to catch more of these minute-buzzer-obsessed trout, Geoff said that he wished he had some of Jack’s titchy Wonderwing Black Midges. I said that I had one in the corner of a box, somewhere. I found it: a small size 18, black thread body, black wonderwing, short-fibred black cock hackle. I tied it on and cast it out, and a big trout took immediately and zoomed away. Eventually, just as it was almost ready for the net, the hook hold gave way and the fly came back in tatters. "Moral victory!" said I. "We must tie some more of those," said Geoff.

The River Aire rises in the magnificent limestone scenery of Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. I have fished its headwaters for almost forty years and now also fish a little further downstream close to the village of Gargrave. Further downstream and, in years gone by, the Aire was a polluted water as it flowed through Bingley, Shipley and Leeds. Today the water quality has slowly been improved, and the River Aire Trust has just been formed, the aim of which is to improve the entire river and its environs.

One day Geoff and I had on the river started out as a major trial. The Met. Office, who give out weather forecasts, indicated that the day would be mostly dry, with only the chance of a shower in the afternoon, cloudy with sunny intervals. We got to the river at 11am, it started to rain heavily at 11.05, and a very strong wind hurtled downstream. Needless to say, there were no fly on the water and at 1pm we sat on the bank, had an early wet lunch and talked to the river bailiff. There was a lull at 1.20 and, to our great relief a Mayfly dun hatched, and then another. For the next two and a half hours the weather switched from not too bad, to strong wind and rain. And when it was not too bad quite a nice trickle of Mayflies drifted downstream and the majority were grabbed by brown trout. So I ended what seemed at one time to be a likely waste of time with 11 trout, the best a good pound and a half. There were also lots of small trout in evidence, with augers well for the future. The flies? Size 10 Green Wulff and Grey Wulff and my own CdC Mayfly Dun. On another visit I caught one of the finest wild brown trout that it is possible to catch. It was 17¼” long and would probably have pulled the scales down to at least 3lb. Everything about it was perfection; its overall coloration and its magnificent white-edged fins. A cock fish, almost certainly, that would have spawned last autumn and survived the winter because of the very low temperatures that dropped its metabolic rate to near zero. Such is one advantage of a bitterly cold winter. I had another fish of 15in and two of 13in in similar condition.

Sea trout? No sign in the Hodder. I reckon it is usually about June 6 before they reach us there.