Sandy had an appointment at the school in Torrington, so I got her to drop me off at the river for an hours fly fishing.
We are very lucky in Torrington, we have free fishing on the Torridge for nearly a couple of miles where the river flows past the commons. It is the old commoner's right to free fishing for paying your rates to Torrington Council. The fishing is basically brown trout, with the sea trout numbers dramatically down on those caught historically. Sadly, the trawlers come right up to the shore now and catch the sea trout which loiter about the mouth of the river. They stand little chance and the numbers caught drop every year. The salmon were also drastically down, but with the habitat improvement, careful rearing of fry, coupled with the number of netsmen in the estuary being down from 14 to 2 (I think) the salmon numbers do seem to be slowly increasing and we live in hope that it will continue. There are also dace and gudgeon as well as minnows, loach, bullheads etc.
Anyway, I clambered down and watched the surface. I like dry fly fishing. I do not think it is more skillful than wet fly, in fact I think nymph fishing is probably the most skilled if done correctly, but I just like the challenge of casting to an individual fish.
Anyway, after learning to cast again, and trying to get the fly to gently land on the water, I managed three takes, all from dace and they are so quick that they had released the fly and were miles away before my reflexes said strike. I don't know how I have caught them in the past. Still that's a challenge for the future. I took a couple of shots so that you can see that we live in such beautiful surroundings. As I was taking the photo of the riffle, I turned to my left to see a dog fox sitting on the bank watching me about 10' away. As I turned to try to get a photo it disappeared into the undergrowth, so didn't manage the shot; sorry.