Mayfly Hatch On — Will They Still Take Lures?

There’s a question that’s been nagging me for weeks. When the mayfly hatch is on and trout are keyed in on the natural — when every drift downstream brings another splashy rise — will they still take a lure? Or are you wasting your time?

Saturday afternoon I went to find out. Bristol Avon, Somerford Fishing Association waters. 3pm to 8:30pm, into the evening rise. The short answer is yes, they will. The longer answer is more interesting — and it ended with a broken rod, a belly-crawl on a high bank, and a genuine technical discovery about how soft plastics work when fish are switched on to insects.

The Setup

I started with the same BFS outfit I’d been dialling in over the last few sessions — Purelure Trota TA-472ULFC paired with the Kingdom Micro Monster Pro baitcaster, #0.6 braid to 0.20mm fluorocarbon leader.

It lasted exactly one cast.

I’ll come back to that. The backup outfit that saved the session was my spinning setup: a Purelure Titanium TH-532XULS-F — 1.6m, extra-ultralight, with a solid titanium tip — paired with a Shimano Nasci 500. Light, sensitive, and effectively unbreakable in the way the carbon Trota isn’t. After the rod break it became the rod for the rest of the session, and as it turned out, the perfect tool for what came next.

The Water

The Avon was carrying decent flow, water clear but not crystal — that early-summer green you get when the weed is thickening and the light is high. Sunny with cloud breaks. Air temperature 18°C in the afternoon, dropping to 13°C as the evening came in.

The mayfly were already up when I arrived at 3pm — big duns drifting downstream in good numbers, the occasional clumsy splash as a fish came up to one. The proper rise didn’t kick off until around 6 or 7, but the bugs had been on the water for hours. A classic May afternoon on a southern river — and exactly the conditions where most lure anglers would put the rod back in the boot and go home.

What Happened

First swim, first cast. A spot I’d walked past plenty of times, always seen fish, never caught one. The minnow landed where I wanted it, started its sink — and a proper fish hit. Big enough to take line, working downstream, the rod bent into a fight I hadn’t quite expected on the opening cast of the day.

Then I realised the problem. I’d packed the wrong net. I’d planned to wade, so I’d brought my fly fishing net with the short handle — useless on a high bank. My telescopic Savage Gear Street Fishing net was in the car, fifteen minutes away.

So I knelt down. Then I lay down on my belly to reach the fish from the bank — and I’ll say this, I was lucky. The nettles along that bank had been strimmed that morning. Proper full-blown UK riverbank, normally chest-high stingers, freshly cut down to ankle level. I noted it as good fortune when I arrived. I had no idea how grateful I’d be for it ten minutes later.

With the fish thrashing in the surface film and me huffing and puffing and trying to net it one-handed while keeping tension on the rod — at some point in the chaos I touched the rod tip while it was loaded.

It snapped instantly.

Net the fish. Release the fish. Sit down. Look at the broken tip. The Trota is a beautiful rod — fast action, ultra-light, you feel everything through it. And I’d just snapped the top section because I broke the first rule of playing fish: never touch the rod tip while it’s under load. Fast-action tips concentrate stress in the top third of the blank. Any sideways pressure from a hand and that’s it — gone. Beginner mistake at fifteen years of lure fishing in. The lesson is older than I am: pack the right net for the water you’re actually going to fish, not the water you planned to fish. And keep your hands off the tip.

Back at the car I picked up the Titanium spinning rod and the telescopic net — both of which I’d need for the rest of the session. The longer handle would prove its worth more than once.

I started again, this time working upstream, fishing a 5cm Rapala Countdown-style sinking minnow — natural silver belly, olive back, the right size for the river, the right size for the fish that live in it. The pattern was reliable: first cast in a fresh swim would produce, sometimes the second, and then the swim was burned.

That continued until around 5pm, when a strong fish hit the minnow and fought hard before throwing the hook just short of the bank. After that — nothing. I worked through the rest of the swim with the minnow, then changed lures: different profiles, different colours, hard baits across the spectrum. The swim was dead.

And yet, two metres away from where I’d hooked that fish, trout were rising. I could see them — confident, repeated, working the surface for mayfly. The fish were there. They were feeding. They just weren’t feeding on anything I’d shown them.

The session changers — Caddis Larvae & Stone Fly in Treacle

That’s when I changed tactics. I waded out a little further and a little deeper, switched outfits, and tied on the soft plastics I’d brought specifically to test the hatch question — Maverick Tackle Caddis Larvae 56mm and Stone Fly 51mm, both in the Treacle colourway. I’d poured them just before lunch that day and they weren’t fully cured when I bagged them up — slightly tackier than they should be, soft to the touch. Field testing in the most literal sense.

Rigged weightless on a size 8 EWG hook, total weight including the hook: 1.35g. Properly finesse. The kind of weight where you’re not casting so much as flicking it.

The technique was simple in concept and very specific in execution. Cast upstream. Mend the line. Let the lure drift with the current, riding the surface tension. After a few seconds the surface tension breaks and the lure starts to sink — and that’s when I’d add a gentle twitch, the slightest reel-in, pulling it up the water column a touch. That’s when the takes came.

The fish that wouldn’t look at the minnow ate the soft plastic immediately. Same fish. Same swim. Different lure, different category of food entirely.

By 8:30pm I had eight fish landed — four on minnows, four on the soft plastics. That split tells a story. The minnows did their job as reactive prospecting baits — first cast, fresh swim, fish on. The soft plastics did something the minnows couldn’t — they kept producing on pressured, feeding fish that had locked onto the hatch.

Why the Soft Plastics Worked During the Hatch

This is the bit that matters for how I design lures going forward.

A trout keyed in on a mayfly hatch isn’t refusing other food — it’s pattern-matching. The fish has decided that the thing it’s eating is small, slow-moving, and arriving on or near the surface from upstream. A 5cm sinking minnow doesn’t match that pattern in any dimension. It’s bigger than the food, it’s moving wrong, it’s coming from the wrong direction. It can still trigger a reaction strike on the first pass — predator instinct overrides everything for a moment — but it doesn’t fit the template, and after one or two looks the fish refuses it.

The Caddis Larvae and the Stone Fly, drifted weightless and dead, fit the template. They’re the right size. They’re moving with the current, not against it. They sink and rise the way a stunned or drowning insect does. The trout doesn’t need to switch out of feeding mode to take them — they slot directly into the existing pattern.

That’s the actual lesson from this session, and it’s a more useful piece of information than “trout will still take lures during a hatch.”

Going home — underwater release

What I Took Away

I filmed the rod break and explained the mistake on camera — that clip is coming to the channel and Reels in the next few days. There’s also some underwater release footage from this session I’ll be sharing soon.