The storms and thundery showers that plagued most of Yorkshire yesterday passed us by.  Despite some distant rumbles of thunder during the afternoon and a very threatening sky all we got was a little rain about tea time.  Consequently the river is still bare bones and hardly fishable on most beats.  The Hon Sec did bring a guest up on Sunday and had some success fishing from Tay Bridge up stream on dry fly, but it was meagre reward for four hours work.

Wednesday is forecast to see some more persistent precipitation so conditions may be better later this week.

The cygnets seem to be thriving at the Tarn and are growing fast.  It will be some considerable time yet before they are big enough to be safe from predators so we watch, wait and live in hope. 

The draw down up at Ling Ghyll went well yesterday with not a single crayfish found in the ponds once they were drained.  Clearly the dams are working as designed and preventing the creatures from migrating down to the falls.  The real test will come when we get a spate that over tops the dams with violent water.  The chance is that the crayfish will hunker down when a spate comes so it's likely that even after a flood few of them will be found in the ponds.  We shall see.

After re reading Frank Sawyer I'm going to experiment again with fly boards to see if I can increase the population of olives on the river.  Getting a good hatch of fly is clearly the key to encouraging brown trout to rise to a dry fly and those of you who fish the river regularly will know that our wild fish are rather desultory surface feeders.  My guess is that it's because we don't get big hatches of upwinged flies to tempt the fish to the surface that we so rarely get the chance to cast to a rising fish.  Fly boards together with the judicious planting of ranunculus in some of the sheltered reaches may help to increase the volume of fly hatch.  It seems that Sawyer adapted the original idea developed by Lunn and instead of using floating boards he placed stone slabs in shallow areas of his river with enough space under them to allow the female olive to lay her eggs.  These slabs may work better in this river prone as it is to spates which washed away my last experiments with floating fly boards.  We have slate aplenty kicking around Horton since the quarry at Helwith Bridge used to produce the stuff so a few pieces in likely spots are worth experimenting with.

Whilst on the subject of flies do take a look a the Riverfly category in the picture gallery on Angli Vespers where the Hon Sec has posted a photo he took on Sunday of what I believe are olive eggs.  We would like a second opinion.

Ian