The weather was superb, I’d made our packed lunch the night before, and despite sleeping in we managed to fit in time for a  hearty breakfast and a skim read of the Sunday Times. Sunday bliss! My mood plummeted somewhat when I got to the car and found I had a puncture. Bastard!

Wheel changed, we drove up the A1 then over onto the A168/A19 to Nether Silton which is a quaint little hamlet on the Western edge of the  N.Yorks Moors. This is the starting point for this 8 mile route. After a mile of country lane a long steady pull  takes you up through a plantation (Silton Forest) before reaching the moor. The view below I really liked, it was HDR in real life – nature had effortlessly achieved the ‘look’ that is so very much en vogue these days.

The views kept surprising us, I think the clear, crisp winter air and low sun really set everything off nicely.

The path carries on climbing  up to the top of the moor on Black Hambleton, along ‘Hambleton Street’ (where we ducked down into a ‘bomb-hole’ to have lunch out of the sub-zero wind!) which allows you to look back down onto your starting point and a lot further beyond, especially on a day like this.

The descent off the moor, down to Nab farm, is a bit steep in places and would make a wicked downhill section for mountain biking –  an idea which I’m giving serious thought to as this route takes in part of the National Cycle Network.  I have an Orange hardtail that spends too much time on tarmac and not enough off-road!

Once past Nab farm it’s back onto the road to hook back into Nether Silton. One last photo to show off those awesome winter colours back on the hillside…

…then plot up in the Gold Cup in Nether Silton for a good pint of Theakston’s Best.

The full route details can be found here http://www.walkingenglishman.com/northyorkshire07.htm

The awesome GPS unit I use to avoid getting lost on my walks (as well as always having a paper map)  can be purchased here. It’s not the smallest but that’s because it has a big screen (for a GPS unit).

Adventurer 3500 mapping handheld GPS unit – GB 1:50000

It ships with a full GB Landranger but you can buy chunks of 1:25,000 as and when you need them. As I said in an earlier post, I’m only recommending kit that I like and can vouch for.

Normal fishing blog posts will resume shortly, I hope, with a planned mission to Stocks in a couple of weeks or so! Never been before but I hear good things about this place, including how well it fished early season. Can anyone recommend good patterns /techniques for early season Stocks? Is it gonna be a low down dirt dog-nobbler type affair? Comments welcome!.

To be fair, all I managed was  2 hours up at Beaverdyke in increasingly piss-poor conditions so my chances were not brilliant. But as always, it proved to be an interesting and worthwhile excursion for several reasons.

1) A note from a walker who enjoyed her 70th birthday in our beloved fishing hut! We do have problems with non-members wandering down to the reservoir and pissing us off but on this occasion I can’t really begrudge her such a simple pleasure!

2) A dead stickleback floating in the margins (no photo). Not good for the stickleback, but interesting to inspect!

3) 2 roe deer a matter of yards away from me (no photo because they somehow construed my un-slinging a camera as a threat – imagine that!)

4) The misplaced expectation my line was gonna go tight!

5) Another hurdle negotiated – fishing (and blanking) without needing a cigarette. Soon I’ll be cornering smokers on the bank and telling then how disgusting their habit is and how awesome I am for stopping smoking. Ugh.

6) The foot long Italian BMT I took with me for lunch.

If any of you have been up to Beaverdyke recently, let me know how you’ve got on!

The Adams type thingy works really well at Beaverdyke when the fish are taking buzzers as they’re (presumably) wriggling around in the surface trying to embark upon a brief but exciting life of sex and flying.

The olive variant is yet to be used in anger as I’ve never tied this pattern before ( I invented it tonight!) but I know it will catch fish when the time is right. But Lordy, the 1:1 macro lens pulls no punches, you can see every flaw and short cut I’ve taken during tying!

I like to think those rogue hackle fibres that don’t splay out in sequence with the rest will actually add to the appeal of my emergers – making my buzzers look more like a vulnerable insect.

The lens I often use for close-up work is one of these, the older Sigma 105mm (Canon fit) Macro lens, which appears to be considerably cheaper than the new version!

Sigma 105mm f2.8 EX DG Macro Canon Fit Lens

Yeah okay, okay you got me I’ve signed up for that Amazon thingy whereby if you follow a link off my page to Amazon and then buy it, I get a tiny percentage. But I won’t be posting links to shite, honest! Only stuff I use myself, or would want to use myself! I figured it’s about time I try recoup something for the hours and hours I put into this labour of love

Yes, this is still a flyfishing blog but I’ve not done any fishing so until I do, all I can do us tell you about other shit I’ve been up to.

A friend I’ve not seen for some considerable time decided to organise a walking mission for the last Sunday in January, and that worked out just fine for me seeing as I’m trying to get outdoors as much as possible to keep fit and stave off the the crushing misery of winter. We eventually settled on a classic Dales route from Horton in Ribblesdale to Pen Y Ghent in the Dales.  Meeting at the legendary Pen Y Ghent cafe proved fruit(cake)less as it was shut despite the healthy amount of Sunday walkers in the environs

It didn’t take long before we hit the snowline and the scenery looked fantastic with a liberal coating of the white stuff.

It was a steady walk up but relatively easy going as long as you stayed off the icy bits of the path which were tricky to navigate.

We stopped at the Pennine Way ‘crossroads’ for a quick cup of tea then set off on the final section up to the summit, and this is where the walk got a little dicey! The rocky scramble on Pen Y Ghent that I’m sure many of you have taken gets very dodgy when all the rocks are covered in ice and it’s a case of working out the easiest route you can without going arse over tit and off the edge!

The summit was in the cloud and snow had drifted up against the dry stone wall. We stopped for a few photos and a hastily eaten sandwich and another cup of tea.

The descent back down into Horton is straightforward, the picture below was taken looking back at the Southern flank of Pen Y Ghent. Grand!

Before taking the final leg back to the car park we stopped off at the famous Hull Pot to stand around peering into its depths. 60ft deep and yet, looking at photos in the local pub, sometimes gets full to the brim with water (or watter as we say oooop North yer bastards).

And then we all went home for tea, as they say!

I hope to have some fishing activities to report on soon but in the meantime I hope you continue to enjoy the other random nonsense I’m posting

It was sporadically snowing so visibility wasn’t too good but I got a few pictures, enough to keep my hand in ready for the big airshows in summer.

Not really fishing weather at the moment but I needed to get out and enjoy a bit of the great outdoors (and walk off last night’s curry) so I did a moderate walk in the Dales. Helps keep me sane and also try clear 20+ years worth of crap off my lungs seeing as I’ve packed in the fags.

We started off in Malham and walked up to Gordale scar but couldn’t get up over the waterfalls as they had too much water running through, so schlepped up the side of the hill back at the mouth.

The view from this side of the scar was pretty impressive and made up for the annoyance of an unplanned diversion.

The route then took us up to the tarn which looked extremely cold, windy and inhospitable and yet still managed to cause a stirring in my fishing loins. I know how big the fish are in there! The tarn that is, not my loins…

A steady descent brings you down past Malham Cove which is  a bloody awesome spectacle, I’d forgotten how impressive it is, especially when you stand on the lip and peer over it!

The route was about 8 and a half miles (including detour) which is bang on for a Sunday afternoon filler. The original route I planned which takes you up the  waterfalls is shown below if you fancy it.

Myself and Stu have invested considerable time, effort and money over the festive season to move the site over to new hosting and into a format where all content is managed via WordPress. This means I no longer have to submit new content for the ‘main site’ to Stu for uploading into HTML or whatever the hell it was he did. I can do it all myself AND readers can now comment on the fishery reviews in the same way as you can comment on the blog.

The latter is particularly useful because a lot of the fishery reviews were done several years ago when Stu still had hair, and I wasn’t going grey. A lot has changed since then, and I’m hoping readers will submit recent information, reports etc to scarify things up a bit.

What does 2012 have in store? Well, another trip to Assynt is booked in for June so there will, of course, be an Assynt 2012 blog to follow and hopefully a few more weekend missions into the Lakes and Scotland. I’ve packed in smoking now so need to get out and do more hill walking to keep fit and stop the inevitable slide into morbid obesity.

Tight Lines!

Bob

Mist on the field

Despite a roiling internal array, from the previous night’s curry and booze, I managed 2 hours on my club stretch of the Wharfe this Saturday. The river was lower than I anticipated and was running quite clear.

I put up a team of three on my 9ft  #6 rod – Tungsten GRHE on point, Greenwell Spider middle and a fur bodied spider on top, God knows what it’s called! I fished a short line again, down and across and had some considerable success.

I landed 8 small grayling and lost several more.  I look forward to seeing them again in a few years time! This is assuming they manage to avoid the herons, mink, poachers, goosanders and cormorants. I myself only just managed to avoid the countless dog turds on the riverbank. Nobody wants dogshit on their felt soled wading boots.

Are you a dog owner? Please, tell me why you think it’s ok to leave dogshit on the riverbank or indeed anywhere else other than your own back garden. You FILTHY BASTARDS!

That’s a grand total of 10 flies over 2 nights, it’s a long time since I’ve been that productive!