April 2011 was a funny month. From 3-7th I was holed up in bed with a tummy bug caught in Blackpool Victoria Hospital as my father died; we buried him on the 14th. Then on 25th I became an Old Aged Pensioner, but still felt (mentally, though perhaps not physically) as if I was 35 instead of 65. And then the weather here, in north-west England …! The sun shone from a cloudless sky on most days. The 23rd was a notable exception: I went fishing the mid-Ribble in shorts and old walking shoes, and, consequently, cold gloom descended and I was chilled when I returned home. Total rainfall for the month here was 0.29 inches; we should have at least 1½ inches in April. So the rivers quickly reached summer level and then dropped another couple of inches. And the wind was mostly from the east; i.e. downstream, which is the worst for dry-fly fishing.

But we did have some good fly hatches, especially the grannom, that hatched in myriads on our Ribble and Hodder beats in the week before and a few days after father’s funeral. We have had big grannom hatches here for, I think I am correct, five years; ten years ago there were none as far as the trout and trout fishermen were concerned. There is much mumbo-jumbo talked when it comes to matching the grannom with artificial flies. All I will say is that if one uses a hackleless dry Brown Sedge (Caddis)in size 14 or 16 you will catch trout that are eating grannom, for the hackleless fly matches both the emerger (because its body rests on/in the surface film) and the egg-laying female (on the water). I fished days on both Ribble and Hodder. On the former I had one lovely brown trout, that was in excellent condition, which would have pulled the scales down to in excess of 2lb and another of similar length which was still a bit soft in the belly.

After the grannom things became tricky as the river levels fell and fly hatches became sparse in the day. Yet by the end of the month, on Ribble, Hodder and upper Aire I had clocked up hatches of olive upright, late March brown, brook dun, a few large dark olives, iron blue (Aire), large stoneflies and yellow sallys. 2011 also saw big hatches of hawthorn flies, and I saw several hit the water. But I caught no large trout, other than one on the Ribble close to 1½lb, that took two brook dun spinners and then my spent imitation, and two on the Aire that would have weighed a good pound. The Aire trout came from deep slow pools to a large (size 10) weighted Stonefly Nymph of my own design held a couple of feet down by a large Black Emerger, New Zealand dropper style.

Despite the generally windy conditions, we have had some good stillwater fishing for rainbow trout because of falling hawthorn flies and hatching black midges. On two afternoons, when the trout were on buzzers, I had some cracking fishing using a Black Suspender Buzzer (size 14), cast down-and-across the wind and let free-drift. Then my pal Alan had great success in a dreadful gale with Blue Zulu, and that fly caught me my only fish on a brief visit on 30th, also in a near gale. Why is Blue Zulu such a great fly?

And finally, on the only near-calm day I spent on a stillwater, hawthorn flies were falling in small numbers, and I caught on my black CdC dry.

As I write, the strong easterly wind continues to blow, bright sunshine is forecast for the coming week, and there is no rain in the offing. If that continues through May, things will be very hard. But at least my sun tan will get better and better.