Feedback & Reports

Fished the lower beat in a lovely valley. Tricky wading. Cold and rainy day. No rises, no flies, no fish.

Different day, weather wise from Saturday but the river obviously still low. There were a couple of fish showing iat the bottom of beat 3 probably residents, certainly not takers. Lots of surface activity with the trout and a few Mayfly coming off.
A bit of a gripe. I started fishing the bottom of beat 6, fishing the run behind the bottom crib when a dark coloured Fourtrack appeared on my bank, parked up below me at the top of the run unloaded four kids and the driver, They all got out and had a merry old time skimming and throwing stones in. They stayed for about 15 minutes until it started raining, Why there? They had the whole river to choose from. They could obviously see me fishing and I was working my way down to that run. I take it ,it must have been one of the farmers but its not a good advert for the water and not the kind of thing I would expect as a paying guest. The canoes, well, that's another story.....

It was really cold and starting to rain when I arrived. I expected a tough day as the rain got heavier and seemingly the temperature dropped further. Surprisingly though,I had a productive day (by my standards), catching 10 trout, all on a blue-winged olive. Most were in the 8 - 10" range but two were in excess of 15" and lovely fish. This is a nice beat with good access. I will return.

10 Trout

9 Trout

No water in the rivers on any of the beats covered by this passport. Only very small fish seen and caught.

2 Trout

My first time on the Rectory - and what a lovely beat it is; plenty of streamy water, loads of long flats and some fun pocket water. After a diary error, I had to frantically replan and only made it to the hut around 1130. With blanket grey cloud, intermittent rain and a gusty breeze, things didn't look promising but a few small rising fish in the pool in front of the hut and a decent looking salmon topping in the Rectory Stream put me in a good mood.
I spent a couple of hours covering the bottom of the beat up to the Rectory Pot. The fast water is very "trouty" and every cast feels like it's covering fish, so I spent longer than I perhaps should have done for no reward. At the deep fast run below Rectory Pool I switched to a heavy weighted black magic nymph and had a hard fighting brownie of 14".
After that the wind died off for a spell, the rain paused and suddenly there were pale yellow and brown upwings and the fish were on the surface. I fished all the way round to New Catch with dries - yellow Comparaduns, pale evening dun, parachute adam's - and had 7 trout from 7-16", with a brief pause to throw a minnow pattern across the neck of the Rectory which resulted in two trout around 10".

By this time it was 7pm so I skipped over the flats and fished under the bridge quickly, losing one on an Adam's. Finishing just before 8pm I headed back to the hut but couldn't resist a couple more casts to the last few rises of the day in the pool directly in front of the hut; these led to a couple of tiny chub not much bigger than the fly!

All in all, a really excellent day despite unpleasant conditions. I'll certainly be back to this beat.

10 Trout, 2 Chub

Dull drizzling day and relatively cold. Nothing moving. No fish caught.
I have to face it that I enjoy wild stream fishing more in principle than practice , may well be something to do with my barbed wire management and lack of close presentation skills ! Maybe another day

Perch

4 Other

Plenty of fly life although very few fish taking off surface - 1 trout 14" on nymph fished Euro style

1 Trout

No fish caught no fish seen - Only fished top half and stopped after 2 hours due to wind and heavy rain.