The 30th. of April is a national holiday in the Netherlands to celebrate the birthday of the queen.
We use it to go fishing in Germany at one of our favorite haunts which is the Möhne river run by
the fishing store Flyfishing Europe formerly known as Flyfishing Brinkhoff.
Since Queensday fell on a Saturday this year we decided to skip work and fish the Möhne on Friday

My friends and I live near the German border so to reach the river only requires a drive about an hour plus.
We arrived just before the opening of the store and first stocked up on flytying gear before we got our
licenses and headed for the river.
At the store they directed us to the upstream part of the river where we curiously had never fished even
though we had visited the river for years.

The upstream stetch looked good, it even was wadable which is not always the case at the Möhne river since the
banks are usually high and are formed of slippery clay.
It was low water and in this case that was good, even now some of the pools where so deep that
I hardly stayed dry. 
I opted to fish with the streamer, on my first retrieve I already had two trout chasing the fly so fish where
stacked in this section.

I hooked and lost a lot of fish on this day.
Not the big monsters that this river was famous for (haven’t seen them for a long time now) but regular size fish.
There where a lot of brook trout around so I figured the fish had been stocked recently especially since I
spotted a whole group of them in one place.

I fished the river and caught rainbow trout, brown trout and brooktrout.
Furthermore I spotted one koi carp, a pike and a quite hefty chub.

At the end of the day the weather suddenly changed and clouds rolled in.
Suddenly it started to blow which was a sign for me to scramble back to
the car as lightning was immenent.
The first impact was too close for comfort so we sheltered in the car to
see if the weather would improve.
With dusk knocking on the door we moved to a more easily fished stretch of the river
and started to fish when we determined it would be safe to do so.
We where just halfway wnen lightning struck the nearby hillside so it was back running
to the car.

We waited half an hour and had a third go at the river.
The thunderclouds where gone, it only poured for a while.
I fished the last hour with a streamer and had many hits but only managed a last
brook trout and one rainbow trout.
A very good day for us at the river.