Indicator nymphing and dry fly fishing with the Echo River Glass rod on La Petite Amblève in Belgium

In this video I revisit the small Amblève with a fiberglass rod. I have fished with this setup already for two days in Luxembourg (two weeks earlier), and also here on the Petite Amblève last Friday. Each of these days delivered a salmonoid trifecta with at least one brown trout, rainbow trout, and grayling in the net! (Of course on none of them was I recording a video).

A week later (19th of September, 2025) I decided to go back South of Malmedy to see if the last warm day of the summer (with more than 25 degrees Celsius) would bring a nice insect hatch (in contrast with a week earlier, when surface activity was completely absent).

The morning started very slow (but beautiful), so I tried my best catching trout with a nymph under an indicator during the first half of the day. In the middle of the afternoon a few opportunistic fish already rose for my yarn indicator, so towards the end of the first section, I switched to dry flies, which turned out to be the winning technique for the rest of the day. The fish became the most active in the last two hours of the day, where I doubled the day's totals to end up with 16 fish (10 on the dry fly).

Except for one brownie around 27-28 cm the larger fish were not present this day (while a week earlier I caught a ~42 cm brown too), and unfortunately I did not see any grayling or rainbows either this time. Still, it was a very nice day, and fishing with a glass rod is fun (but I would not recommend it on larger rivers).

Setup for the day:

Echo River Glass 7'6" #4 rod
Orvis Battenkill Click Reel (II)
SA Amplitude Smooth Trout (WF-4-F) fly line
5X Vision Nano Mono Leader (9')

The nymph I used was - as usual - the first one from this video:    • Top 3 Nymphs for Grayling and Trout (Hare'...   while the dry flies were a CDC and elk hair caddis or a CDC mayfly (all size 14).

Timeline:

00:00 Morning lights in Bellevaux
00:04 The first trout (nymph under a foam indicator)
00:41 You lose some
00:51 Nymphing under a yarn indicator (easier casting)
02:34 The biggest trout of the day
05:38 Switching to dry flies
06:37 My favourite pool on this section
08:09 Fishing the section starting from the confluence with the Warche
10:26 Getting close to Bellevaux again
11:04 Back at the starting point, almost 10 hours later, for 4 more fish
13:32 An unorthodox catch