Winter Grayling By Nick Fisher

Winter Grayling

By Nick Fisher

The first time I seriously attempted to catch some big eating-sized grayling, I just couldn’t help but catch trout after trout after trout. The trout season was closed and I’d bought myself a day’s winter grayling fishing on the River Kennet. Being closed season meant the club water allowed coarse fishing techniques to target the grayling, perch and pike in the river, and encourage ‘maggot-drowners’ like myself to strap on a centre pin reel, break out my best fat-bellied balsa wood grayling float, and have a crack at trotting a pair of maggots, or a single fat caster, down through the deeper swims.

If you’ve never tried trotting, or ‘long-trotting’ a chubby float down a chalkstream river in winter time, then you’re in for a rare and fin-bristling treat. There are so many joys incorporated in fishing an out of season fly-only river with a fat float and maggots, that it’s hard to know where to start. For kick-off, there’s the sheer fact that you’re being allowed to do something, just because it’s closed-season, which you’d never be allowed to do for all the rest of the year. Sort of like being allowed to drive a combine harvester down Oxford Street, naked.

Then there’s the beautiful accessibility of a winter river which is relatively inaccessible for so much of the rest of the year. The brambles, Himalayan balsam and hook snatching overhanging willows, have all died away, leaving a clear path to swing your rod and to see along vast stretches, past bends and twists, which in the summer months would be obscured by foliage.

But, the real thrill, is not knowing what species of fish is going to suck on your maggot and tug on your string. On southern chalk streams, I’ve caught a whole catalogue of fish on trotted maggot, from sea trout to carp and from eels to catfish. It’s quite amazing the range of species that can gather in even what appears to be one of the most transparent of fisheries, with visibility all the way to the river bed for most of the year. And yet still, there are odd and alien finned things lurking, things which can only be winkled out with a tasty bait like a maggot or worm.

On my Kennet grayling hunt, nearly every maggot that got eaten, was eaten by vast silver flanked rainbow trout. As I said, I couldn’t help catch them. Ironically, the way to catch the big Kennet grayling actually turned out to be with a large weighted nymph on a fly rod. The method that worked best was to fish with a bite indicator tied to the join of the fly line and leader, to make gentle bites instantly recognisable, and most of all, to concentrate on the deepest and slowest pools. On all the faster water the grayling, who are traditionally supposed to love gravel bottoms, were invariably beaten to my bait by the voracious bully-boy rainbows.

I once followed an electro fishing team along the Frome, a river famous for its massive grayling, which still holds the British record, for largest rod caught specimen of 4lb 3oz. A fish caught downstream of Dorchester in 1989. The electro fishing team were hired by the local angling club to remove pike, but unlike many other rivers, any grayling were all returned safe and sound. The electro fishing equipment turned up most of the big grayling from the deeper slower pools. The biggest fish of all seemed to be found lying hard to the bottom on deep bends, where the river current was probably at its weakest.

Grayling have down slung mouths and swivelling eyes which means they’re perfectly equipped to feed from the bottom, although they can feed in mid water and also they’re more than capable of taking floating flies off the top. They are in fact better equipped than trout to feed in all depths of a river. And grayling can happily survive and thrive in fast flowing murky deep rivers in the depth of a hard winter, when most trout would starve.

It’s the grayling’s ability to survive through all manner of hardship, that first made them so unpopular with the purist wild trout brigade. Grayling lay up to three times as many eggs as trout, they can out-compete brown trout for feed. And they’ll happily supplement their diet by eating trout eggs and fry, when needs must. So, not surprisingly the protectors of the native wild brown trout see grayling as a threat.

These days grayling are rarely persecuted in chalk stream rivers however, most sensible anglers would now enjoy the thrill of catching grayling just as much, if not more, than catching wild brownies. So their presence in rivers is tolerated and even encouraged.

One of the best things about grayling is, apart from their stunning elegance and beauty in the water; with their single huge sail like fin, is that they’re delicious to eat. This time of year they’re plump and wide bellied, but I also love to catch them in early spring too, before the trout season’s kicked off, when there’s fresh wild garlic leaves just sprouting from the ground. A whole baked grayling or a fried fillet speckled with thinly sliced wild garlic leaves and a generous knob of butter, can put a chin-dripping grin on the face of both fluff flicker or maggot drowner alike.

Sort of like being allowed to drive a combine harvester down Oxford Street, naked.