I recently went on a solo mission to a couple of little known llyns in Mid-Wales. One of these I’d fished a couple of times a good few years ago. From memory it held trout, perch and rudd. Frank Ward (Lakes of Wales) describes this llyn as holding just trout, so these must be illegal introductions. Ward also mentions the llyn as being haunted by a dead fisherman, and that it wasn’t visited for many years by the locals as a result!
The other llyn was higher up in the Cambrian mountains, perhaps half an hour drive away from the first. I had never fished it, so I was quite excited to tick a new one off. Ward mentions that this lake was ‘destitute of fish’ – although I’d heard otherwise…. intention was to try both.
It was a grey overcast Mid-September morning, not much of a breeze . The sky was gloomy and rain threatened but never came. I was on the shore of the first llyn, I’d brought the float tube with me aiming to cover a lot of the lake. Conditions looked good and a few sedge skittered about in the rushes.
I spent a few hours paddling up and down the llyn, fishing all of the likely looking spots – of which there were many! I’d moved one fish (small?) but that was it. It really was slow going, it was like the lake simply hadn’t woken up, no rises no life…..
As I drifted off some lilly pads at the top end the water finally parted and a fish firmly took hold of the fly, just as I hung it near the surface. It plunged and bored, staying deep before it gave up. To my surprise it was a perch – I was expecting trout. It wasn’t a bad one, in good condition.
Fishing onward, I finally saw a singular rise in a shallow bay. Soon after I hooked a trout, about 10oz, that almost looked like a sewin. Another hour or two went by with nothing doing, I neared the place where I had started out and made a few ‘last casts’ – which netted me three moderately sized wild brownies in a row! All of them had the same sewin-like look about them.
I left the peaty waters of the mysteriously dour llyn behind and headed off to the next place, which was accessed through some very narrow single track roads. The final approach would involve a two mile walk through a forest, so I left the tube in the car and struck out on foot.
First glimpse of this llyn revealed a lovely sheet of water – shallow, gin clear and also very weedy. I saw a rise and waded out carefully, making a side arm cast under a pine tree. The line went tight and a good fish was on – a pure bar of gold that jumped high and then buried itself in the thick week, before shedding the hook.
So it held trout and good ones too! It looked like a good pound and a half, a great size for a llyn this high up. I fished for about an hour, working the weed free spots on the far bank. Two more fish hit the fly and came to hand, plus I bumped a few. No monsters, but lovely golden wild trout of about 11 inches.
Bizarrely, I noticed that there were hundreds of flying ants (of the red variety) all over the surface, yet no fish taking them! I’d only seen one rise, that first fish that was lost. How odd, maybe red ants taste bad? Never the less, it was a really nice llyn with a lot of potential – I will be returning next year.