Friday 21 August 2020

Catching up and Catching fish!

A Private Sanctuary
With all that's been going on in the Covid world I thought an update on the fishing throughout July and August is in order to take our minds off all those rules and regulations we now need to follow. The good thing about fishing is that it affords us the opportunity to disappear into the countryside and temporarily forget what's going on in the world around us, (at least in the short term that is) which is exactly what Andrew is doing in the picture on the right!

Playing a nice Trout
Since my last blog we have had a good mix of success stories and a few steady away days with plenty of trout being caught and several salmon too, including a few lost fish along the way, (as always) but at least the opportunities have been there, and the
In the Net!
quality of the trout this season has been exceptional at times too as you can see from the specimen shown laying on the stones below, and with some days producing numbers of trout into double figures, what more could we ask for!

A real Specimen
That said, as we entered July and into August, the numbers of trout caught did diminish slightly (not uncommon) but we still encountered some great sport along the way. 

However, the hotter, brighter days we encountered did make things a little more difficult, especially with the salmon fishing, but not without some success and I remember one particular day with low clear water conditions and the sun shining down the pool (not great conditions, especially for salmon)
Hot sunny day Grilse
providing us with a very fresh Grilse and three further chances of good fish too. I've learned many times over the years, there's nothing set in stone, and therefore "never say never" as the salmon most certainly don't read the so called rule books!

The lower river especially continued to produce some good salmon, but these fish soon headed upstream once we received the first lift of water. That said, fish were beginning to settle in again down there until this recent bought of rain arrived which is now lifting the river once again.
Flatty on a Tube
This is no bad thing for the rest of the river though and hopefully we will now see some further catches upstream, but maybe not like these couple of oddities shown in the pictures on the left and below, both caught on the fly. 

A large rogue Rainbow
August can often see a slow down regarding the trout fishing, but catches can return with a vengeance in September before the season finishes on the 30th
, however, given the fact that many sessions had to be cancelled earlier in the year, due to the current Covid situation, my diary is now almost full until the end of the season (as you will see from my online calendar) as many sessions were rolled over to later in the season, and with the last day of the Salmon season being October 14th, apologies to those of you who were still planning to book in this year and only have a small number of days left to choose from.

Let's hope the rest of the season continues in a positive vein and I will keep you all up to speed as to what happens next as we do our best to make sure it does!