Wuddy Hell

In between refereeing my son's football and a family party I managed to sneak ninety minutes on the Alyn at Worm's Wood. I've never fished this stretch before and it has the reputation of being rather wild.

I took only the Iwana with me and set up a with one of Simon's custom Tenkara leaders. On the end of which went a simple duo rig. Size 14 olive parachute and a size 16 ptn. With Grayling season over, I didn't really want to nail things onto the bottom. I covered the first couple of pools and receive no interest.
When I reached the upstream end of the horse field there was a fish rising sporadically directly across from me. The fish refused to show when the duo or the solitary dry were passed through its path. Therefore decided to have one last cover with a small partridge spider tied 12 inches below the dry. This resulted in the fish (a brown) swirling in the vicinity of the spider. I struck but nothing and fish put down.

Wandering slowly into the wood I made speculative casts but couldn't move anything else initially. About 50m into the wood I tip toed my way into a nice glide. I stopped and surveyed the scene. Was that a small rise in front of me? Maybe?
Quickly tied on a size 20 olive parachute and first cover, this little monster slowly moved up and sipped the olive down.

My first brown of the season, at 12 inches. Rather battle scarred too. Check out the scarring above the anal fin, and chomped tail. Maybe a stocked fish...

This was my first dry fly outing with the Tenkara. What did I learn?

Simon's custom furle casts beautifully and coupled with the Tenkara, very few, if any false casts are needed. Important on overgrowb areas.

One thing I did get rather paranoid about was lining fish with the florescent green leader. I compensated for this by carefully positioning myself to give an across and only slightly upstream cast. The Tenkara length can be utilised to keep as much line off the water as possible.
Another area to work on is getting the tippet part of the cast to collapse to enable maximising drag free drifts. I started with level length of 2lbs mono to the fly, but found this was often collapsing too much, thus staying in close proximity to the end of the custom furle. The resolution this time was by attaching 3-4 foot of 5lbs mono, then upto 3 foot of 1.7lbs tippet. The heavy mono kept the collapsing thinner gauge section away from the furled leader tip.
A chat with Simon about this me thinks...perhaps using a lighter olive leader or could he splice in a clear mono tip section?