Hello from a new member,

This looks a great site and hope to visit regularly.

In my fly-fishing there’s just one area that is a long-standing problem and I hope there maybe someone here that’s experienced it and hopefully found a solution. The background first of all.

I fish for wild Brown Trout, the only fish species present, in a high moorland still water of about 65 acres. I’ve been fishing this water for more years than I care to remember, it’s an oligotrophic water barren of any underwater plant life and totally devoid of any visible insect life, caddis, beetles, boatmen etc. What on earth the fish feed on I’ve no idea as I never kill any fish returning them all unharmed, a very good fish may go 1lb the average being about 8 ozs. The fishing is almost entirely dry-fly, the usual thing for this kind of water, anything small and black, a 16’s would be the largest hook I ever use and successful flies are Knotted Midge and Black and Peacock. I tie all my own flies.

The problem. Quite often late in the evening the breeze will fall and the water will be flat and mirror smooth and when this happens fish will be rolling and rising all over the place but no way can I catch them and usually pack up and go home. They must be taking something just sub-surface but whatever it is it’s far too small to be seen by the naked eye. A surface fly even as small as a 24’s generates no interest, probably because in these conditions the leader however fine or treated refuses to sink and is clearly visible. I’ve tried pretty well every sort of sub-surface fly it’s possible to think of, nymphs emergers etc. and nothing works.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Oliver

i fish hill lochs, with dry flies when its calm enough, sounds similar, although i'd say this is often a productive time, smaller flies do help but if they are not cast right to a rising fish they do tend to get ignored, if its shallow water you need to get the fly very close to the rise without showing it the line and if its refused dont cast at it again for a while, target another rise and come back,
bet you tried all this though

Hi' Oliver, and welcome to the FFF.
As you reckon there is no insect life in the lake/tarn, and it is oligitrophic, there would be very little for anything to feed upon sub-surface. For daphnia to be present, there would have to be some algae, which is the basic food form of fresh water fisheries.
As your trout rise, but are difficult to attract to the fly, and nothing appears to be visible on the surface, there are limited possibilities to explain what is going on.
If there is some silt in the lake, you should have midges, and as they can be very small indeed, rises to buzzers or even adults is a possibility. Another possibility is small terrestrial beetles. Then, as the fish appear to be right in the surface film with their noses, it is very likely that the fish have a tiny window at the time they display this feeding behaviour in calms. It is possible that a targeted fish will not have your fly in its window at a distance of a centimetre or two, which Zoomer's observation implies; leaving the dry fly or flies out there among a group of cruisers should mean that one will see them.
I once read a tip regarding fish that were hard to cover accurately. It was, basically, the presentation of a team of three tiny dries only about a foot apart. Casting them in a calm should not be too big a problem, and I suppose it is meant to give the impression of a little localised hatch, or fall, of tiny insects.
To be fair, I have not tried this method, it is just something I pass on. Is there any algae in the shallows? Last bit of advice; kill a fish and have a look at the stomach contents. There is nothing to be ashamed of in killing a trout or two. After all, that was once the prime reason/excuse for fishing, and according to the late Hugh Falkus, whose interest in conservation could not be doubted, the only acceptable reason for hooking and playing a trout was to put it on the table, provided it was of keepable size. I kill a few trout each season, and my conscience doesn't bother me. A lot die every year of old age, what's the problem?? Killing a few would probably benefit the remainder. Hope that helps. TerryC

Thanks for that Zoomer looks like you and I have arrived at very much the same techniques in our fishing. Yes, line visibility is a big problem and so is line wake when skating the fly along the surface trying to induce a take. To alleviate this as much as possible I join my 12ft tapered leaders to the fly line using the Perfect Join, very fiddly but well worth the effort, and then 3 or four feet of 2lb tippet joined using a tiny silver ring.

Hiya Terry. Thanks for the welcome and your comments. I’ve only seen algae very very rarely and never seen Daphnia at all and I am familiar with them from my tropical fish days. Silt there is aplenty and tiny midges too, too damn many in fact! Other insects present are the larger gnats, Daddy Longlegs, small green beetles off the Heather, a long bodied, about 9mm, brown beetle, Ladybirds and the yellowish Cow Dung fly.

I’ve tried multiple flies and to be frank never had a single success with it and as regards not killing fish its not because I’m squeamish in any way, far from it, my reluctance is due to other reasons. First of all I don’t eat fish ever, secondly those who have killed one or two say they taste of nothing but peat and they’re pretty well inedible and never repeat the exercise, and mainly because they’re such beautifully coloured fish. I think the Herons and Cormorants and Grebes do enough already to keep the numbers down and the Osprey, which visited regularly until a couple of years ago, took its share too.

Oliver