So after finally feeling better after a bout of man flu, i headed over to farmoor 2 Yesterday. Didn't arrive until 11am but was lucky to catch a fish on my first cast.....orange booby at range.

Thought it was going to turn out to be a good day afterall.....

4 hours later and neither myself or Rich (rich6x on here) had even had a sniff!! I snared one more at the death but 3 takes all day was hardly inspiring stuff...

We watched the boats catching pretty consistantly all day so decided to copy them and have another go today.

Arrived at Farmoor for just after 10am to find the place totally frozen over. We were asured by the rangers that it was so thin that it would soon be gone, esspecially if a few boats got onto the water.....so out we went.

After motoring through the ice it became apparent that all was not as it seemed. That ice was pretty thick and with the air temp' being no higher than 1-2 deg' then it was obvious that we wouldn't be fishing 95% of the ressie.

We motored over towards the causeway and found one fishable strip of water. It was reasonably long but only around 20-30 feet wide. We made our first casts....i didn't hold out any hope......but on my second retrieve...i was in!!! And so it continued, we ended up catching quite a few between us all on very deeply fish boobies.

At around 2pm a sudden gust of wind pushed one huge sheet of ice over our little channel.....as we watched our only fishable water disapear before our very eyes, we managed to get one last cast in each......real shame as leading up to the ice movement, the fish had really turned on and i'd actually had 3 in 3 casts! So there we were, sat surrounded by ice with our flies directly underneath the frozen surface.......surely we couldn't get a fish from under there??? Oh yes we did! I was the first to battle a fish through the ice and soon after, Rich was into his own! Can't believe the ice didn't cut through the leader but i was able to get my fish through the ice and safely into the net....with an awful lot of ice!

We then tried to use the boat to create some fishable water but without success.......a couple more pulls and that was our day over.

From what looked to be impossible conditions came a thoroughly enjoyable day and some very 'different' fishing experiances! Thanks to Rich....i would have never gone out if it wasn't for him.

hello such a long way for you to fish farmoor 2 even though you seemed to enjoy your fishing did you not complain to the rangers for saying what they did and was not realy the case,kind regards flyfishy61

One of the rangers was at the boat dock when we returned and did appologise. He said that it was far worse than he thought.....fair play to him. If he hadn't mentioned it then i would have for sure. It did look very thin from the bank......

I saw you guys and another lone boat angler in that strip of clear water about 1.30pm as I drove away from F1. F2 was clear along most of the causeway until about 30 yds out but noone fishing that.

I got there about 8.30am to fish F1 and was told most of the clear water was over on the west bank. I parked up and had a walk around west and north bank but only two very small fishable spots and both had 10-15 yds of ice between them and the bank. Got a spot cleared and 15 mins later had a nice 3lb rainbow take a slow twitched blob on intermediate. Helpfully this fish went for a few runs and broke up some of the ice. Had a fair number of missed takes and follows and landed 2 more rainbows and a blue before packing up at 1pm, biggest fish was a stunner of a 5lber.

Pic of F2 below was taken just before 9am looking east from F1 car park, a super smooth and massive sheet of ice.

great day out chicken fish
thanks 4 all your advice.
pleasure to fish with u

thankyou to reply and hope you can fish there again soon when our weather is kinder to us fisherman and ladies of course. regards flyfishy61