Fly Fishing for Rainbow and Brown Trout at Lough Mahon lakes.

         
Putting away the dry fly rod due to the strong gusting winds i started with a Di3 sinking fly line and a three fly cast of a Humungus lure on point a Blood red blob on mid dropper and a Cormorant on the top dropper, taking a lot of weed on the sinking line i decided to change over to a floating line and quickly started taking trout. The up and down action of the weighted Humungus combined with a very slow figure of eight retrieve took a lot of trout, but i had to change the retrieve on numerous occasions due to the trout just nipping at the lures and letting go with lightening speed. The strong wind kept bowing the floating line and pulling the lures down the lake faster than i wanted to retrieve and  this meant that the trout could feel the line well before i could feel the fish thus making me lose a number of good trout. To combat this i would mend a loop of line up into the wind on the last  cast just like an upstream mend on a river and this allowed me to fish the lures slowly without the wind causing a bow on the line. The majority of the brown trout took the blood red blod and the rainbows had no problem taking the humungus lure, while fishing the lower lake i took some trout in and around the island but in looking back maybe changing back over to the Di3 sinking line would have proved better due to the deeper water in the big lake.

Going back up to the top lake i decided to give the dry fly a go as the wind had just dropped off and caught a few nice trout on a black Klinkhammer size 14, but as is normal just as things were getting interesting on the dries the wind kicked back up gusting to 60km per hour and that put paid to my dry fly fishing. I was very tempted to fish a large floating Chernobyl Ant in the wave and pull it back against the wave making a very life like movement as it has worked for me on numerous stocked lakes and can be very exciting to see trout coming up and attacking such a large fly. All in all a good days fishing when weather conditions were tough.