Red Ribbed Pheasant Tail Nymph

Flashback Pheasant Tail Nymph

Doubling up under the Dry Fly. Early season Dry Dropper on The Blackwater Co Cork.

So I headed down South today to meet up with a friend and my fishing buddy David O Donovan for the first time this year and we had planned to fish some rivers in County Cork. After some breakfast and a catch up, we decided to head to the Blackwater for a cast and went out past Mallow. We have had bit of a regression weather wise of late and the morning frost was still around as we began to set up. The river wasn't high but it was still pushing on and the cold air made it feel like a February morning rather than early to mid April heading to the river.

Dave's choice of method was his trusted wet flies that he is renowned for fishing and I set up a nymphing rod and a dry dropper set up.
If you want to get some insight to Dave fishing wets here is a link to a post he co-wrote on wets last year and worth the read: https://peterdriver.blogspot.com/2018/01/wet-fly-spider-fishing-productive.html

My Best Nymph on the Euro-nymphing Rig 

We both began in the same beat, with Dave moving down stream sweeping the water with his favorite Kelly green wet fly line and a cast of wet flies; he had a beaded wet on the point to get the flies down to the fish. For me I began to fish the sides of a run with the dry dropper; with limited success only picking up a pair of browns. I switched over to the nymphing rod and fished a little further out and met some better fish but it still wasn't prolific fishing by any means. The fish were stuck to the bottom and were not interested to move to far for a snack. After fishing the first run and picking up some 11 or 12 trout I moved to a glide down stream where Dave had fished the wets already. He had picked off a few trout with the wet fly but he had a lot of plucks

and takes with only a few transferring to the net. It looked cracking water, knee high and a a nice flow on it, once began to dry dropper the section I realized the flow was pushing through a bit too much and my nymph under the dry was not getting down. Now while I could have put up a heavier nymph to try get deeper, but this would have resulted in drowning the dry as I was already fishing a 3mm bead and to go 3.5mm or 4mm I wouldn't have had a long enough drift on the rig to cover the water needed to get a take. So I put up a second nymph on the rig and it was like switching on the light. With a second nymph under the dry it helped to anchor the nymphs better in the water with out dragging down the dry and allowed the point nymph to get where I needed to have it for longer drifts, and hense I began to meet a lot of fish. It can be a bit tricky fishing two nymphs under the dry as there is always the good chance of a tangle with two nymphs and a large dry moving through the air on a cast, but taking your time, have nice open loops and it will help to combat this.

My set up was an 11 foot 2 weight Syndicate pipeline rod and my trusted lever action reel with a 9 for aggressive tapered leader. From here I had .10 Shogun tippet to my size 10 klink dry

My best nymph under the dry on the point 

fly with a bright orange post around 18 inches and then 2.5 feet to my first nymphs with a 2.5mm beads followed with a 3mm copper beaded Pheasant Tail that done most of the catching, this nymph has been catching quite well lately and make sure and check out my youtube channel where ill post the tying in the coming days. The top nymph also caught a few as it was fishing higher up in the water table for any fish that might be looking up as the day warmed up.

It was a good days fishing and it is always a good day when to figure something out like that, no matter what your catch was. Hopefully the weather will turn and we will see a return to some warmer weather soon. But it was nice to get out with a good friend on the water for a cast and a good catch up.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this post and enjoy the 2019 season. If you would like to stock up your boxes for this coming year make sure and contact me through Facebook or email. If you have any questions or queries please feel free to contact me. Also make sure and check out my website www.piscari-fly.com for all your tungsten beads, flies, Dohiku barbless hooks, Tommi-fly products,the amazing Syndicate Fly Rods, Reels, leaders and much more. Thanks for reading.
Also check out my new YouTube channel for all my latest tying and hot tips.