I love fly fishing and was asked by a good friend if I could take him and his two sons out and show them the basics. I made the plans to take them to a small fishery about 3 miles outside Newton Stewart called Jack’s loch. The fishery is stocked with good quality rainbow trout with an average weight off 2lb making it a great place to take someone that is new to the sport.

We all arrived at Jack’s Pond at about 10 am, but there was one small problem, the weather. There was a strong south westerly wind hitting highs of 35mph, along with the heavy rain showers, which made it a little harder to show them how to cast, but we did our best.

As I got the rods and tackle out I thought it would be best to set up my 9 foot, 5-weight sk8 for the youngest boy, who was “7 and a BIT”, as he kept telling me. For the 12 year old and the dad I decided on my 10 foot 7 weight sk8, both rods were fitted with sk4 reels and floating lines.

My dad thought it would be best to teach Graham [the dad] and show him what to do, while I showed the two boys. They both were mad keen and we had to flip a coin to see who went first and the eldest won. He got the hang of casting a 10 yard line straight away and within minutes he was into his first ever fish on a fly rod, shortly followed by his younger brother and then his dad.

As the day went on I got the chance for a few casts while the boys had lunch. I started hitting fish every cast just a bit further than the boys were managing to cast, so once they had finished, I started to cast the rods for them and they started pulling in the fish. As the rain and wind picked up we called it a day. With a total of 12 fish between the three of them, they were over the moon and the best rod of the day was the 12-year-old boy with 6 fish hooked and landed.

As usual there’s always one monster that gets away and is told many a time and it happened to the youngest boy on his second cast just as his fly hit the water a fish about 5lb took it, he had it on for about 10 minutes, but since he didn’t know what to do it fell off. He was gutted and I was also, but he ended up getting three to make up for the one that got away.

It was a great day of teaching and learning.  Everyone had a great day and we are already making plans for another outing with the boys and yet again the Sonik outfits did the job great again with the 9 foot handling 2lb rainbow trout superbly.