The Lady of the Stream: Grayling in Autumn

When the trout season closes and the leaves begin to come down, we are not finished with the river. The grayling, Thymallus thymallus, the lady of the stream, comes into her own just as everything else winds down. She feeds through frost and low sun, and gives us a reason to be on the water in the quietest months of the year. But she is a different animal from the trout, and we do better by her when we stop fishing as though she were one.

A fish of the cold months

Grayling spawn in spring, over gravel, from about March into May, which is why in England and Wales they share the coarse fish close season on rivers, 15 March to 15 June. By October they have had a whole summer to recover and are in their best condition: deep in the flank, hard-fighting, the big dorsal fin flushed with red and violet. The genus name comes from the faint scent of thyme that a freshly caught fish is said to carry. We have never been quite sure we can smell it, but we keep checking.

Where the shoals lie

Grayling are shoal fish. Find one and you have usually found twenty, graded roughly by size, with the largest often at the head or lying a little apart. They prefer steady, even-paced glides over clean gravel, knee to waist deep, and avoid both the turbulent pocket water that trout love and the dead slack. In early autumn, with the water still at 10–12°C, they spread across the runs and the tails of riffles. As it drops toward 5°C they gather in the deeper, slower water and hold tight to the bed.

So we fish for them by searching. A dozen careful drifts through a likely glide, each one a little further out, and if nothing comes we take five paces and begin again. When we do find them, we stay put.

How they feed

A grayling’s mouth is small and set underneath, built for picking from the gravel. Most of its food is taken within a hand’s width of the riverbed: freshwater shrimp, caddis larvae, small olive nymphs. So in autumn and winter the fly has to get down quickly and travel at the speed of the bottom current, which is slower than the surface. Small, slim, heavy patterns do this best.

• The bug. A size 14 or 16 Killer Bug, the pattern Frank Sawyer tied for the Avon grayling from copper wire and a pinkish-fawn darning wool. Fish it upstream on a 9–10 ft leader with a 5X (0.15 mm) tippet and lift it gently as it reaches the fish.
• The shrimp. A pink shrimp with a 3 mm tungsten bead, size 12–14, for deeper or faster glides. Pink has no obvious natural model, yet grayling take it readily, especially in cold, slightly coloured water.
• The pair. Where rules allow two flies, put the heavy one on the point and a small, plain nymph on a dropper 50 cm above it. The second fly often does the catching.
• The dry. A Red Tag or a Griffith’s Gnat, size 16–20, on 6X (0.13 mm), for mild afternoons.

They do still rise. Between about noon and three, on a soft day, a trickle of olives or a fall of midges can bring a whole shoal to the surface. The rises are small and dimpling. We cast a little further upstream than we would for a trout, a metre and a half or two, because the fish sees the fly from the bottom and from far off, and drifts back under it before deciding. Any drag in that long inspection and she turns away.

Striking and playing

Takes on the nymph are subtle: a pause in the leader, a slight slide sideways, a straightening of a curve that was there a moment before. We lift into anything that looks different, with a smooth raise of the rod and not a snatch. Grayling have soft mouths and twist hard in the current, setting that great sail of a fin across the flow, so hook holds fail if we bully them. Rod low and to the side, steady pressure, and steer the fish out of the main current and down below the shoal.

Find one grayling and you have usually found twenty. Take three or four, and leave the rest their glide.

Handle with extra care

Grayling are more fragile than trout out of water, and they fight to the point of collapse. We unhook them in the net without lifting, on barbless hooks, and hold them upright facing a gentle current until they go of their own accord. That can take a minute or more, far longer than a trout of the same size, and a fish let go too soon will roll over and drift. We never keep several in a net for a photograph.

And we rest the shoal. The same twenty fish will be in the same glide next week and, if the river stays kind, next month. After three or four from one place we move on, leave the rest undisturbed, and walk the bank looking for the next pale shapes over the gravel.

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