The great drought of 2015/16 is over and the countryside is looking as good as ever. Things that looked dead 14 months ago, have sprung to life with a new found vigor. Spring is passed and summer is here. It was a remarkably warm winter, which has been followed by a remarkably cold spring with rain and snow in both October and November. December has not been much warmer either.

The trout in some of my favourite local streams were seemingly wiped out in the drought and so I have fished very little over the last year or so. With a young family fishing time has been limited, but it’s been no less rewarding and fun teaching Ollie about the joys of the outdoors.

Yesterday Jen and I took a few mates on a hike to one of our favourite places. It’s difficult to get to and it’s well off the beaten track from a hiking perspective. It also used to be one of my favourite brown trout streams, but in my previous two visits earlier in the year I hadn’t even seen a fish. I had wrongly assumed that they had died out in the drought.

The discovery that the fish were still there was almost as exciting as discovering them in the first place! What was even more encouraging was that I caught one young fish and lost another young fish. The age of those fish means they were likely born a year and a half ago, at the height of the drought.

Maybe I need to revisit a few other streams that I thought had suffered a complete wipe out? Mother nature never ceases to amaze me.

Reposted from my personal blog:  “A Stream Beyond“