Fishing: Debut of hydropsyche larvae is foiled by murky waters of the Itchen

The grayling fishing I was meant to do on the Itchen in Hampshire, nearly two weeks ago now, did not go quite as planned. I'd packed a fine winter picnic and dressed in enough layers to cushion me from a fifty foot fall. I was ready. Sadly however, the river was not. When first I caught sight of it I thought: "That's a canal with a bit of turbulence"; but it was actually the Itchen, a normally super-clear chalkstream. Because the rain had caused the river to lap over the banks, all sorts of soil and mud had been dragged in which had made the water heavily coloured. In places it was also impossible to see where the bank ended and the river began. Fishing was cancelled.

Because I'd planned to have my breakfast by the riverbank, I was now so hungry that I was beginning to get ratty. So I had no choice other than to pull into the car parking lot of a gardening centre and eat there. This was not the day I'd envisaged, which had involved a crisp, clear morning and crunchiness underfoot. It started to rain; it rained all the way home.

The disappointment was deeper still because the day before I'd tied my first proper fly (not counting the Ally's Shrimp made under Ally's tutelage and the anarchic Punky Buzzer): a Hydropsyche Larva to fish for the grayling with, which I was very keen to try out. These are very commonly-found caddis larvae, very popular with trout and grayling – they're the Kelloggs Cornflakes of the caddis world: a larder staple. The hydropsyche needs clean fast flowing water and looks, to me anyway, a bit like a mermaid with a forked feathery sort of tail. My boyfriend set me up with his second fly-tying vice, which he later told me he never used as it was "crap".

I was following an Oliver Edward's pattern that involves using nymph skin (although I've not managed to find any that imparts that true "juicy" quality Oliver talks about). This looks like strips of a surgical glove which is actually what I tried to emulate it with, with littlesuccess. In the end I went back to manufactured nymph skin which gave an okay result. Oliver's pattern uses ostrich herl feathers to give the nymphie a real 'frill' of gills which look like the hairy 'skirts' of a centipede. And it calls for golden pheasant tail feathers for the legs. It was at the leg stage that I started to stick my lower lip out. It looked so easy, and I am very nimble but the 'legs' kept moving about as I tried to secure them and I started to think that Oliver is some sort of freak for being able to tie flies with such precision. There were meant to be three pairs of legs and my larvae would have ended up with only two as my patience couldn't bear another set; but my boyfriend kindly added another. Anyway, in the end I'd made a very passable hydropsyche larva fly, which I'd hoped to let loose on the Itchen. But it was not to be.

The hydropsyche is used in Czech Nymphing. This took the fishing world by storm in the 1990s. At the World Fly Fishing Championships on the River Dee in Wales in 1990 the Czech and Polish teams wiped the bank with other competitors using their fast sinking, woven nymph patterns. Six years later the competition was held in the Czech Republic and the British team had a Czech guide who introduced them to what has now become known as Czech Nymphing. It' s a method of fishing that involves repeating the mantra "fish can be caught at my feet" over and over. You don't cast very much line out at all (Oliver, who is an expert at this recommends one to three feet beyond the rod tip). The rod tip is kept up so that the fly line is kept off the water and there's no retrieving. It's cast, track and then either recast or strike if a fish is on. Typically you'd have three nymphs on with the weighted one in the middle. The whole point of it is so you can catch fish that are on or near the river bed, in fast water (however it doesn't have to be deep water, you can also be very successful in fast, shallow parts of the river too so don't over look them).

However, although my little hydropsyche could have coped with the speed and depth of the Itchen that day, it didn't have a hope of being seen in the soupy coloured water. So it never got to paddle those painstakingly positioned six little legs, after all.