Feedback & Reports

A beautiful day fishing a beautiful beat. We had to cope with a stiff upstream wind but the fish were rising steadily throughout the day. We concentrated on Lady Alexandra's Catch fishing the dry and swinging traditional spiders, catching fish to just under the pound mark. I was joined by my 15 year old nephew who managed to catch a few brownies and two out of season grayling using spiders. He loved it. We also saw two double-figure salmon leap from the top of the run too! We will be back.

12 Trout, 2 Grayling

Dry and wet fly. Water clear, mid-height, many small brookies. Strong sunlight. Low weed level. Access difficult without wading.

Amazing day on a brilliant beat. Cloudy and bright, water very slightly coloured. Incredible hatches. Mayfly and Yellow dun coming off for most of the day. It became cooler with a shower towards 6.30pm. First fish caught at about 12noon on a Mayfly nymph. Caught fish regularly thereafter proceeding up the beat; mayfly nymph in the rougher water produced more fish including a magnificent wild brown trout that was 16 inches and deep, also a fair sized grayling. Dry flies accounted for the rest - (including one trout with a blue mark on its belly - stocked?) para Adams, a CDC yellow dun (a la Davie McPhail) doing the damage and then towards the end of the my own Mayfly pattern took three more.

14 Trout, 1 Grayling

I found this beat hard work as all the easy access is where fishing is prohibited leaving a lot of undergrowth and quite a bit of barbed wire to battle through. One trout on a shrimp pattern and a salmon parr on a PTN.

1 Trout, 1 Other

What a lovely river! Had a wonderful afternoon. Sunny spells and a bit windy. Lots of insect life including mayfly. But surprisingly very little in the way of fish rising. Had one trout come up to inspect my fly but no takes. But who cares?

This is a very long beat and took us over 7 hours to complete. The fishing was tough and nowhere near as productive as on previous visits. The water level was very low. We caught one very good trout on a small nymph, but could not work out any pattern from the 7 fish we landed. Never the less, we will still fish this beat again in the future. There are good fish in it. It is a long walk back down the road to the Crown Inn and the Butty Bach was just what we needed when we eventually arrived back.

7 Trout

This is a really good beat with several very attractive pools which I remembered fondly from a previous visit. There were freely rising fish all the way up and mayfly patterns worked well. We caught a few salmon parr as well as a very nice grayling and 16 trout was a great reward for a relatively short session.

16 Trout, 1 Grayling, 4 Other

Gusts of wind and slightly coloured water made things tricky, but I was determined to cover as much surface of this lovely beat as possible with dry flies. Caught two small but beautiful brown trout on the lower part. Twice during the afternoon, during lulls in the wind, the river almost started boiling with hatching flies. Not much surface feeding activity to go with it though. I retreated happy to the Hay festival and cocktails at Groucho Club :)

2 Trout

In the morning, at the tail of Blue Pool (on the bend), massive quantities of fly swarming: gnats and sedges mostly, then the wind got its act together and cleared the air! Although there were rises, the fish were playing hard to get, until late afternoon, when three fish were taken in quick succession, on a dry Adams, close into the far bank....best fish was 1.5lbs. We saw 2 salmon jump out, one in Blue Pool, and a large fish in Chain Pool, near the top end.

3 Trout

No fish this time. Cold and windy lots of leaves on water. Nice day out thanks.