ARRGHH!!! Strong winds and bright sunshine - the worst fishing conditions!

When will this spell of strong, cold, North Easterly winds stop?  Coupled with constant bright sunshine, this has to be the worst conditions for trout fishing.
The Chew and Blagdon trout hate these conditions and when I was at Rutland Water last week, their trout responded by going off the feed.
The last 2 days on Chew have been very tricky, with deep fished nymphs the only way we could catch during the sunny, windy weather.  As soon as the winds dropped for a while, Herons Green came back on and the fish started to feed on the almost instant buzzer hatches.

Still, we must not complain - the opening month has been amazing, thanks in a big way to the light winds and warm air temperatures - I suppose we were due for a change.  The forecasters predict lighter winds as we approach the weekend and I fully expect the Bristol water trout to respond by feeding on the buzzer and daphnia and coming much closer to the surface again.

Just have a look at the size of the bloodworm and buzzer present in one of my Chew trout yesterday - if you look carefully, you will also see Hoglice and even Shrimp - these show how deep the fish have recently gone.

Pike action improving, but lots of smaller fish

The pike fishing with fly on Chew has started to improve, with lots of follows and many smaller fish.  However, Seb Shelton recently had a 27lb 8oz fish and one of my clients; Andrew Cadman, caught this cracking 24lb beauty.

Predation

I am keeping count of the marked trout I am catching this season and so far, it is very few.  Just 3 pike marked fish and 13 cormorant marked trout from around 150 landed (and many returned).  Most of the cormorants have left for the coast to breed and the pike are obviously feeding primarily on the many roach that I have already seen this season.

Birds

The Swifts arrived at Chew on Friday and by Saturday, there were hundreds chasing the buzzers!  I still haven't seen a house martin on Chew, but saw loads at Rutland last week.  No less than 14 buzzards were on a thermal above Chew last week and I think I spotted my first Hobby last week.  At times, there are more than a dozen Shelduck feeding on the buzzers at Chew.