A midsummer night's dream

Gethin Jones joins Stuart Llewellyn of the Llanrwst Anglers Club on a night-time foray in for sea-trout on the wonderful River Conwy

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I often wonder who dreamed up the idea of casting a fly into a river in pitch darkness to catch a fish that doesn’t eat anything while it’s in fresh water. I’m sure it didn’t come out of thin air, of course. Anglers will have noticed, perhaps counter-intuitively, that they caught more fish the darker it got and so the sport of night fishing for sea-trout developed. Growing up in north-west Wales means I’ve been aware of seatrout, or sewin as they’re known here, since I was a lad. Rainy September mornings would witness empty seats on the school bus as fishing pals headed for the banks of the Dwyfor in preference to the rigours of double geography with Mr Parry.

Fishing the river in flood with either a lure or worm, depending on the colour of the water, was undoubtedly productive, yielding many a good fish. However, the wise old hands we’d meet by the riverside insisted that night fishing with a fly was the most effective form of fishing, particularly for sewin. To our young minds this was wizardry akin to the  alchemist’s dream of turning base metal into gold, but the old boys knew exactly how to extract bars of silver from those deep, dark pools in the silent dead of night.

Tweed-clad anglers