Trout for lunch!

One of my goals on moving to Devon has been to learn to fly fish on the local rivers. Although I have done some fly fishing before on lakes and chalk streams, I really had no idea about how to go about this. The rivers here are all very "natural" and wading is almost essential. I was fortunate to find a chap locally (Paul Kenyon) who teaches fly fishing and does guiding on the local rivers. I had a session with him on Wednesday last week on one of the local still water fisheries to practice some of the casting techniques prior to moving onto the rivers. I used the new fly rod (# 5, for the technically minded) that I had bought two years ago and never had out of the bag. This did the job very well and I picked up lots of new techniques. When Paul had got me doing things more his way than my old way, the piece of wool on the end of the line was replaced by a fly and we started fishing. The fish in the lake were pretty stupid (some had gone for the wool, earlier!) and I soon had a trio of nice Brown trout on he bank. The two smaller ones were filleted and these went into the hot smoker that Diane had bought me for Christmas last year. I think the smoking technique still needs to be refined a bit, yet, but the result was pretty good and it made us a nice lunch. The largest fish went in to the freezer for another day. I am hoping to have a go on one of the local rivers with Paul during May, once I have got myself kitted up with some new waders.