Sandy hasn't been well for the last 3 weeks so I haven't been able to get out of the house and have gone stir crazy, so when she said she felt good enough for me to have an hour off I shot down to the River Torridge with the fly rod kept in the car for just such an emergency.
I dropped in to one of the "Town Water" stretches which are free to locals for a bit of dry fly fishing. Although we have had sharp showers of late, they didn't seem to have affected the Torridge too much; it was about 9" up on what I expected but with a slight tint, it seemed just perfect, especially when I saw a couple of rises which is unusual for the Torridge. I quickly tied on a brown dry fly and crept up and covered the fish without any response, so I switched to a black fly and wham! first cast this beautiful brown trout took - the picture doesn't do the colours justice, it was a big fat pretty fish.
My fly had been mushed so I tied on another, stalked up to the trees and quickly had another of around 11", just an inch shorter than the one in the picture. I thought that I was lucky and decided to get back to Sandy and make sure she was OK. Two nice trout in about 40 minutes, very good for an enthusiastic but unskilled fly fisherman like me.