On 21st April I paid my first visit this year to Farmoor II which proved to be a ‘red letter’ day . The weather was cloudy, the temperature approximately 10 degrees with a North Westerly wind blowing at approximately 12 mph .

My old fishing pal Doug and I were setting up our rods in the bay in front of the boats and we saw some fish rising . Could we be in for a good day ahead? Having seen this activity, we decided that it had to be a floating line and I chose a tequila blob on the point with a black buzzer and red diawl bach on the droppers. Having recently fished a competition at Elinor, which Charles Jardine won with a tequila blob, I thought “What is good for Charles will be OK for me!”

We drifted down the left hand side of the reservoir and within ten minutes I had hooked and, unfortunately, lost 3 fish! The method had to be, keep the flies in the top foot or so.  I ginked up the blob and retrieved it very slowly. By lunch time we managed to net 10 fish ( five each). Most were taken on the blob and sometimes we both had fish on at the same time, so a good thing we had two landing nets on the boat!

After lunch, we tried the opposite side of the reservoir, but found the wind too much to cope with. I only had one fish on and lost it. We moved back to calmer waters and saw fish were feeding on the surface so I tried a cdc buzzer with no success. I reverted back to a blob on the point with cruncher and diawl bach on the droppers. This did the trick and the next two hours brought another ten fish to the boat taken on the droppers. The hook ups were much more successful on the droppers. I think that the blob was the attractor and the fish were taking buzzers; hence the diawl bach and cruncher were taking the fish.

We called it a day at 5.30pm with 20 fish to the boat and I was lucky to have had fourteen of them, the biggest being about 3.5 lb. This was my best day on Farmoor to date .
Incidentally there were many fish being caught off the bank throughout the day.