Fishing The UK, Fly Fishing in Devon, Exeter, South West

As well as fishing I am very interested in cars. I purchased a Lotus Elise 111s a few years ago and although it was fantastic to drive (and look at)  the practicality of a two seater sports car was not exactly great and so I decided (forced) to part with it. My intention was to replace the Lotus with something a little more practical and fun but after looking around for a month I couldn’t decide on what to buy.

I started to look for something extremely cheap in the meantime and it was at this time I saw a Red Alfa Romeo 155 V6 in the car park at the goodwood festival of speed. Later that day I saw a touring car version of the very same car and it got me thinking. After I got home I started to look through the car ad’s and soon learned that they were very cheap (a really good one can be had for £1500) and found one on ebay for £800. 4 days later the I was the owner of an Alfa Romeo 155 2.0 T-Spark Super.

The car had a rediculous amount of history and made interesting reading. One owner had the heater matrix replaced 3 times costing almost £750 along with some other eye opening bills for other items that had failed on the car. During the time I owned the car it never let me down and apart from the normal servicing and replacement of wear and tear items it was extremely cheap to run.

To me the Alfa Romeo had as the french say a certain  ‘I know not what’. The design of the car looked kind of awkward but somehow worked and it had that air of style lacking from non Italian cars. The engine liked to be revved and although it wasn’t warp speed fast it was fun to drive and had just enough power when you needed it.

The honeymoon ended after almost 2 years of ownership when I managed to buckle one of the wheels driving to Kennick Reservoir. The wheel went down one of those huge pot-holes and managed to bend the inner rim just enough for the air in the tyre to escape. The alloy wheels were rather rare Alfa Romeo Speedlines in black so finding a replacement would cost more than the car was worth. I couldn’t find anywhere to get the wheel repaired so ended up buying a new car.

I eventually found someone who was able to straighten the wheel but know I no longer needed the Alfa. I ended up giving it away to a friend of mine, fingers crossed it will continue to serve him as well as it did me.

pic 1. Alfa Romeo 155

Kennick Reservoir is without a doubt one of the best trout fisheries in Devon. I will make a post about the fishery in more detail at a later date but all you really need to know is that it offers fin perfect rainbow trout in a spectacularly beautiful setting for an extremely reasonable price.

I have fished Kennick around 15 times this year and have had on average 2-3 fish each visit. For some reason I found that the more unusual fly patterns (traditionalists stop reading) have been extremely reliable and effective in all conditions. On one visit I managed to catch 6 and lose another 6 in 1 hour and 20 minutes using a sunburst goldhead blob. So for my own amusement I decided to purchase a large selection of the most awful looking flies I could find and see what I could catch.

Armed with this spectacular selection and a 6wt Greys GRXi rod and reel I set off to see what I could catch.

pic 1. Hideous Fly Selection

I started off by ripping a sunburst goldhead blob back across the shallows on a sinking line, after 4 casts I hooked into something solid. I knew it was larger than average because of the way it remained deep and kept making powerful lunges stripping off line faster than I could put it back on. After 10 minutes the fish was mine, it was a beautiful conditioned  6lb rainbow.

pic 2. 6lb Rainbow Trout caught on a sunburst goldhead blob

Over the next hour I tried the black blob, orange blob, blood worm with marabou tail, and the different coloured gold woolly bugger style patterns. They were not very productive at all with the exception of the yellow goldhead wooly bugger which recieved a few plucks.

The last fly to try was the odd looking Red Apps Beaded Bloodworm pattern. I fished this on a floating line with a 9ft leader, casting it out and letting it slowly sink then occasionally using a very long pull of the line to raise the fly up a few feet and then let it fall back down again. On my first cast I hooked into a fish on the drop, and from that point on I couldn’t stop catching. In total I managed to land another 5 fish and lose 4.

pic 3. 2lb Rainbow caught on a Red Apps Beaded Bloodworm

So in conclusion what does this all mean and what have I unscientifically proven? On the day the sunburst blob produced the largest fish and the Red Apps Beaded Bloodworm pattern landed the greatest number of fish. What was also interesting is that the yellow goldhead woolly bugger recieved a few plucks and based on what colours I have used before at Kennick I am convinced yellow has the edge on other colours (in terms of consistency).

pic 4. Sunburst Goldhead Blob and Red Apps Beaded Bloodworm

I revisited Kennick on another ocassion where I was failing to catch anything although the conditions appeared to be pretty much perfect. I reached for the Sunburst Goldhead Blob and the Red Apps Beaded Bloodworm patterns both of which caught on first casts. Give these two patterns a try if you are struggling at Kennick and let me know how you get on.

I guess if you are reading this then you have somehow managed to stumble upon my blog in it’s extremely early stages or you are so engrossed in what I have to say you are looking through the archives!

I want to welcome you to my blog and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it. I would like to make it very clear that my grasp of the written English language is not that great, so my ramblings are more than likely to be riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.

I am by no means a fishing expert, but I think it is important to share my experiences with others in the hope we might all learn something about the never ending journey of angling.

I am hoping to regularly update this blog with product reviews, techniques, experiences, fishing reports and anything else I can think of that is fishing related.

Thank you for reading

James