We visited Lllyn Frongoch again this Easter, however, with Easter falling on April 1st this year, which is on the earlier side, when combined with the cold spring and hard winter made for tough fishing conditions. Spring was definitely underway but in this upland location was only just starting with snowdrops still flowering and the first few buds yet to break on the first few branches. Mornings were characterised by hard frosts or icy rain and yielded little return for hours of fishing invested. Evening sessions weren’t much better being very windy and squally and over the first few days yielded little return. It was too windy to boat fish, even with a drogue, so I had been concentrating on bank fishing. I setup with a sinking line to punch through the wind and get down into warmer water. While the wind made dropper knots an ongoing leader maintenance issue I persisted with a team of 3 flies, opting for classic loch flies in the first instance. As the blanked hours accumulated into days my fly selections changed through a selection of PTNs, diawl bachs and eventually started including lures. I am not a big fan of straining lakes with a team of lures but I am also not a fan of blanking for long periods either.
Things started to change when we got a few sunny spells which got the life in and around the lake moving. Small hatches of tiny black gnats were the first sign of life in the lake. While I much prefer to dry fly fish and the occasional rise at the surface was now visible, notably in the outlet bay which acts like a brown trout nursery, these were very small requiring flies of sizes smaller than 22. While I didn’t have a black gnat in that small a size a griffiths gnat did the trick and a few small browns were winkled out of the outlet bay.
While there were a few dung flies in evidence along parts of the bank and at times blown out onto the water they were not in numbers that suggested that dry flies were going to attract any interest but that didn’t stop me from giving it a go. While not my favoured style, I tackled up with a couple of wet flies, a black humungous on the point and a range of different flies on the dropper, including a bead headed Kate McClaren, olive holy grail, bead headed green montana and bead headed green cormorant.
The black humungous was given to me by the guide Mike Kreis at Loch Katrine last year where they couldn’t resist it. My thinking was, if they loved it in Scotland at a similar time of year then it may be a good pattern to try in Wales and this proved to be the case and was an absolute killer. Both the brownies and the rainbows loved it but only on one afternoon. The following day the fish all seemed to come to the dropper fly with the cormorant accounting for most of the fish. The final results (all released) were:
- Bead headed Kate McClaren – 1 rainbow
- Bead headed cormorant – 3 browns
- Olive holy grail – 2 rainbows
- Black humungous – 4 browns, 1 rainbow
- Griffiths gnat – 2 browns
Tight Lines
Greg