Fly Fishing For Trout - Farmoor Reservoir
Welcome to the reel… and welcome to Farmoor reservoir. This is the first, hopefully of many videos of my fishing exploits, purely for entertainment purposes. You might learn something useful along the way, I know I probably will.
So it’s May and for my Dad’s birthday we’ve taken a trip to Farmoor, my Dad has fished here a couple of times before and enjoyed success and we fished it together earlier in the year last year during all the storms. We arrived and were greeted by crazy winds and 3 foot high waves and were close to turning around and heading home. Luckily we persisted, found the most sheltered corner of F1, the smaller catch and release reservoir, and caught quite a few fish and my Dad lost a nice brown and landed this nice Rainbow.
Anyway to today, I’d been doing a bit of research into reservoir tactics, had all these ideas of fishing teams of 3 flies and tied a box full of buzzers, crunchers, blobs etc. to try and it wasn’t long before both me and my old man’s lack of casting practise showed, that and dealing with the strong winds early in the day and we were spending more time untangling our leaders. My Dad stuck the whole day out with droppers on his leader but I dropped down to one dropper then a single buzzer as I figured I was better off fishing one fly well than 2 or 3 flies barely at all.
My thinking paid off as I had a take… although short lived. After that I thought that was probably my chance gone for a while so I turned the camera off and hooked into decent fish. It stayed well deep and made a few strong deep runs, I was thinking this could be a brown over 4 or 5 pounds and then… it was gone.
I checked my hook and my leader and thought I’d get a different shot with the camera, within a couple of casts I was in again, this time a more modest sized but equally hard fighting rainbow. But once again my luck was out and it came loose (If I’ve learnt anything from fishing this place and hard scrapping trout it is to trust the strength of my tackle and put on a bit more pressure, keep the hook set and get the fish in as quickly as you can within reason, although somewhere between scrapping with these fish one of my rod joints worked it’s way loose and mid cast I got a crack in the end of one of the sections. I had some tape in a first aid kit which was enough of a bodge to keep it casting well enough for the rest of the day and I can repair it at home. You’ll notice later the white tape on my rod.
Unfortunately that was pretty much it for the day, we didn’t see much in the way of surface activity and my dad didn’t get the birthday gift he was hoping for of catching a fish, just one hooked and lost. I did see this monster pike though sat in the margins and attempted to get some footage of it, looked like it could have gone 20 pounds and is probably the biggest pike I’ve ever seen apart from mine and my Dad’s PB fish from the River Kennet which both were pushing 20.
We carried on until late afternoon and by that point were both pretty done in. We’d heard some of the other guys fishing had mixed results, some in the same boat as us with nothing on the bank to one young lad who’d taken about a dozen fish. We’ll definitely be back, hopefully a bit more experienced and with luck on our side. Thanks for watching, tight lines and I’ll see you in the next one.