Hello all.

A question for your learned minds.

Three of us fished the same brook yesterday. Until recently it had been cloudy due to run off from a quarry. But it was back clear again yesterday.

Amongst us we had 30 fish (99% grayling ranging in size from little finger to over two pound).

(I also saw a large trout attack and eat one of the smaller grayling - sight of a lifetime).

My question is this - we were all fishing different flies and in different styles (although all nymphing) and every fish took the top dropper (no matter what it was).

So anyone with a theory?

Alex

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"The quarry is not the point of the chase, but merely its pretext, and the chase, purportedly a means to an end, is actually the end itself."Pascal 1961

Hi Alex

Quite often Grayling will hold in mid-current as opposed to hugging the bottom. Maybe it just so happens that your top droppers were at the fish's height.

Alex

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You're a long time dead
Life is for living

Bloody Butcher

I thought of that - but all three of us would have had different lengths of leader/tippet and differently weighted nypmhs.

Alex

__________________
"The quarry is not the point of the chase, but merely its pretext, and the chase, purportedly a means to an end, is actually the end itself."Pascal 1961

Could it be that the action of the current on the rest of the leader caused the top driopper to behave in a particular way that attracted the fish?

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Old fishermen never die, they just smell that way.

The fish were probably just "looking up" i.e. feeding on stuff high in the water column. When I fish a trio (dry + 2 nymphs), some days you get a progression from: all fish on the point fly in the colder morning, switch to all fish taking the middle dropper by mid/late morning to a split between fish taking the middle dropper on the dry fly through the warmest part of the day (might be accompanies by a hatch). The fish are just following the most available/vulnerable stages of the food source.

I will let you know when I have worked out how 99% of 30 fish caught are grayling.

Interbreeding

__________________
"The quarry is not the point of the chase, but merely its pretext, and the chase, purportedly a means to an end, is actually the end itself."Pascal 1961