The morning was hot and humid with a strong breeze, an unusual combination. The sun was beating down from a cloudless sky and I knew that it would be a waste of time fishing until the evening.

The sun had dropped behind the treeline and the wind had eased as I opened the gate. I guided the Defender down the steep, badly rutted and boulder strewn track to the floor of the Tavy valley. One of the mature oaks had fallen leaving a shallow scar in the bedrock, a casualty of the heavy rain and high winds.

The water rushed past the rocks making deep clunking sounds as the bigger stones moved around in their hollows. There was a distinct absence of fly life, no clouds of midges, no upwing flies. A buzzard greeted me and a kingfisher did an about turn as it saw me. A young dipper passed several times as I set up my rod. There were no fish rising and I decided to stick with a weighted nymph all evening.

The first deep pool took about thirty minutes to cover. The swirling leaves occasionally snagged the fly raising my heart rate for a few seconds. I saw a fish rise twice in the tail of the pool and anticipated a take. I missed. That fish triggered a memory of a previous visit when the trout were feeding in the glides and the deep pools were unproductive. I decided to concentrate on the slower, shallow water.

I hooked and landed a trout from midstream and another, better fish, from slightly deeper water further out. I moved downstream focusing on the glides, picking out sandy patches and boulders. I had three fish in quick succession, two of which put a good bend in the rod. The plan was working.

Down a long, wide, shallow stretch of water I repeated the process and the total crept up to seven trout ! That was enough. I’d only covered about two hundred yards of river and had caught fish from most of the glides and riffles.

There could be several reasons why the trout were in the shallower water; sea trout occupied the deeper pools, following several spates the trout were hungry and looking for food or the evening light enticed them out of deeper water. Who knows ?