Le Tour.....

For folk who live outside North Yorkshire and follow the blog you may not have heard that the Tour De France has rolled into the Dales for the Grand Depart tomorrow.

 Everywhere you look is decked out with banana coloured bicycles, they are literally everywhere, on roof top's, on railings,  in shop windows, even hanging from trees combined with  logo's and flags which is nice to see and although it brings a lot of tourism and money into the region which I'm all for, its going to be a nightmare with traffic, road closures, and biggest pet hate of mine already as I parked up last night...... rubbish left at people's backsides.
If your coming to the region then respect it and take your rubbish home, and the thing is the race hasn't even started yet!

With the amount of road closures and increase in cars and tourists I thought it best to get a few hours fishing in last night before the region comes to a standstill, so headed up the Dale for a few hours last night.

I wasn't expecting much as the rivers are merely a speck of their true form, they are empty of water and in desperate need of rain, which I'm told is happening over the weekend, but probably not in the degree we need to make any difference.

After almost an hour of seeing no fish moving at all, I thought I spotted a small rise in a piece of moving water...which there isn't much of at present so cast in the general direction and sure enough this wee boy came up and took the fly.

You can see from the picture the amount of sediment which is covering the riverbed at present, making it slippery as hell.

I never saw another fish in the area so decided to walk downstream for a considerable distance past all the still water to see if there was any water moving over the old mill, and when I got there even that was desperate and virtually at a standstill, but decided to sit for an hour or so and see if anything would materialise.
About 20 minutes of watching the water I saw a solitary fish moving around in the shallows and it seemed to be sucking food from just below the film of the surface so I strategically cast the flies in its path and it shot towards them like a rocket taking the fly virtually as it hit the water.

I heard a few shotguns going off not too far away, obviously somebody out after some sort of game in the evening, I thought nothing of it and sat for another 40 minutes or so and saw nothing so started heading back up the river, as I walked along the small path running along the side of the river I came across tonight's tea, a freshly shot pheasant, still warm, obviously the guns earlier had got it but missed where the bird came down, so after a quick pluck....I said PLUCK!! for some of the Scottish folk I now who would think something else, the bird was de-feathered and cleaned out and will hit the roasting tin tonight with some new potatoes.

I got back to the car just as daylight was starting to fade and got this shot of the foot bridge before finally calling it a day.

Now a weekend of traffic delays, queue's and lots of cyclists......I cant wait!!!!! & for my American blogger friends Happy Independence Day, Hope you have a good one.