It was a grim start to the working week with rain driving in on a strong west wind.  It feels much colder than of late.  However, the rain has now stopped, the sun has broken through and it's a tad warmer.  We still have a very strong west wind though.

My musings yesterday about the elusiveness of Ribble trout prompted a correspondent with a lifetimes experience of the river at Horton to confirm my observations - or lack of them.  The fish here really are difficult to see and you need a degree of faith to believe that the river hosts a good population of brown trout.  This does make fishing tricky as unless you can cast to a fish that you see rising (and many do) fly fishing here is very much a matter of seeking out likely lies and covering these with a pattern of casts.  This ability to read the river only can come with experience, trial and error and demands patience. 

It also seems to me as a very infrequent fisher that to keep a good fishing diary complete with diagrams, comment on conditions, fly life seen, artificials used, etc, etc would be of great benefit and these diaries would provide invaluable information about the state of the fishery helping to inform future actions aimed at maintaining and enhancing its viability.

It's a pity that the club web site is so static otherwise it would be quite possible to utilise this as a way of maintaining an on-line composite diary that all could contribute to.  I do know of a way of achieving this, but it would mean rebuilding the existing website using a content management system as the base program.  Not difficult, but potentially time consuming and only worth doing if it's likely to be used.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Ian