Tackle Tactics » Tips-Techniques » Adrian-Webbs-Trout-Tips » Dasher River Browns
Dasher River Browns
By Adrian (meppstas) Webb
When I got up this morning, I thought it was time to give the Dasher River a go and see if it would give up a few brown trout. It had been eleven days since I had last fished this little river and it had given up two trout. The Dasher is only a short drive from home as well and I have access to a long stretch of it on private property, which is a bonus.
When I arrived, I could see it was running at a nice medium height and a medium tannin colour, which was how I like it. I was at my starting point on the riverbank by 10:15am and my lure of choice was the #0 Mepps Aglia Micropigment brown inline spinner. Why that lure? Simply because it was the one that was already set up on the Okuma Celilo Finesse trout rod, so I thought I'd give it a go.
It didn't take long before I was onto my first fish. On the very first cast and retrieve into a dark, narrow, deep pocket of water a trout came out of nowhere and took the spinner. It pulled hard and made several leaps from this narrow pocket of water as I eased it toward the flat, rocky riverbank where I was standing. This was a beautifully coloured brown and a solid one at that too. A lovely 310g trout to catch first up.
The next run of water was a wide, shallow one and it was here that I caught a small brown on the first cast and retrieve. With two trout caught and released in five minutes, it doesn't get any better than that. Another cast and retrieve back into the same stretch of water resulted in another trout having a go at the spinner. Unfortunately, this fish missed taking the treble hooks.
I was feeling quite confident of having a good session here today. Could this be a double figure catch today? I was hoping that it would end that way. The river from here on varied, with narrow and wide shallow runs, along with a few knee-deep stretches thrown in. With most of the runs being on the shallow side, I felt the #0 Aglia brown spinner was going to be a little on the heavy side and bottom bounce on a regular basis, so I changed over to a #00 Mepps Gold Aglia Mouche Rouge spinner.
After having several hits and misses on this spinner, finally a trout was hooked and landed. This was only a small fish, taken in a shallow, fast water run. As I continued fishing my way upstream, I had the odd hit from trout, without hooking any of them. So, a lure change was had. This time I went for a plain Gold #00 Mepps Aglia. This little Aglia spinner was one where I had placed a Black Fury sticker on the gold blade. This is something that I've done over the years with the small Aglia Gold and Copper spinners.
From here on the fishing slowed down and the trout were nowhere to be seen. I felt that the reason for this was that I was fishing in open water by now, so there wasn't a lot of cover along this stretch of river. It wasn't until I moved into a shaded area that I caught my fourth trout of the spin session. Just a small brown that was picked up in a flat water, next to a high and well protected riverbank.
From here on I didn't see another trout, until thirty minutes later when I was nearing the area where I had parked the car. I was fishing a shallow, wide stretch of water, when a medium size trout took the spinner. This was the second reasonable size trout so far, the other one being the first trout I had caught two hours earlier. That was it, my day was done here now. Even though there was still plenty of river ahead of me that I could have fished, I decided to leave that for another day. What I thought may have been a double figure day didn't happen, which was a little disappointing... but that's trout fishing for you.
Adrian (meppstas)
Equipment Used on this Trip:
Okuma Celilo Finesse Spin Rods - ULS 1-3kg trout rod
Okuma ITX Carbon Spin Reels - ITX-1000
Platypus Pulse Mono Premium Monofilament Line - 4lb
Mepps Fluo Micropigments Inline Spinner
Mepps Aglia Inline Spinner