It’s been a cold, wet May so the first chance I got with a bit of warmth and the sun out, I decided to try an evening session on the Avon. There had been reports of sporadic Mayfly hatches but it had not yet got into full swing.

I got to my beat around 6pm and spent the first half an hour walking it slowly, checking out the hatches and any action. There were definitely some mayfly’s coming off but also a few olives and quite a lot of cinnamon sedges.

It seems to take the trout a while to get fully into a mayfly hatch so I started with a mayfly emerger pattern which I hoped offered an easier target than the adult flying mayfly. There were sporadic rises and I managed to cover one which took the emerger with gusto, a lovely wild brown brown to kick off the evening.

I wondered down the beat casting at a few rises with no luck and entered a wooded section. It was interesting to note that the insect life dropped off substantially and there was no sign of rising fish, so I looped around back the start of the beat.

As the sun dropped the number of rises picked up. I tried a couple of adult mayfly patterns with just one refusal to note. Whilst there were still some mayfly’s around, there were a lot more sedges and the rises seemed more ‘slashy’. I picked through my box and dug out a red/brown bodied sedge which seemed to represent the naturals. In the next thirty minutes, before the light went, I picked up two decent sized brown trout and a good sized grayling, all coming to the sedge.

Compared to last year, the river seems to be about two weeks behind. The mayflys are hatching but not yet in great numbers and the trout are only just starting to switch onto them.