May Long Weekend Fly Fishing – Part 1

Colin, my 14 year old son arrived from Ottawa on Friday night to spend the weekend with me. Our plan was to head out to the Grand River near Elora and try to get him into some brown trout.

So today, we headed first to Guelph where I needed to pick up some things from Ray Collesso at Hook, Line & Sinker (see my review of the shop here). There has been quite a bit of rain over the past week and a half, and I’d heard the Grand was pretty much blown out today.

Ray was his usual awesome self – I highly recommend his store! After some discussion and my purchases, Colin and I headed to the Grand – and sure enough, the water level and flow rate of the river were way to high for safe fishing. No one else was on the river, either. According to the Grand River Conservation Authority website, the flow rate of the river at the Shand Damn just upstream was about 20 cubic metres per second.

A wee bit disappointed, but we decided to head over to Belfountain to try the Credit River. There is a section of water that is catch and release, barbless fly only, that I’d never fished before. The water looked beautiful but for the first hour, nothing was rising and nothing would take our nymphs that we were flogging the water with. Then, suddenly, lasting about 15 minutes, there was a feeding period where we saw very small fish rising – and we had a couple of hits by a couple of those very small fish.

Then that was that, and as darkness approached, we decided it best to head back to the car. Maybe better luck tomorrow? The weather forecast is not looking good though.