Feedback & Reports

Arrived at the river early (8am - early for me, anyway) to find the river up 3 inches overnight and very quiet. Apart from a nice 1.5lb fish caught in about 8 inches of water on a cdc olive emerger, that was about it until late morning when it got noticeably warmer. That seemed to trigger reasonable hatches of brook duns, olive uprights, BWOs, yellow mays and even a few true mayflies. The trout responded and a further 11 fish came to the cdc pattern with the inevitable similar number lost, the best being 18" (2.5lb). Strangely, the river went quite murky at around 3.30pm while it was dropping, which put the fish down even when some flies were still coming off.

12 Trout

A lovely day fishing the dry fly. I must try and contain my excitement whenever a trout rises to my fly. A lot more fish would have come to the net. Various olives hatching on and off most of the afternoon. Despite best efforts only landed 2. Thankyou to the owners for their kind gesture of goodwill on the day and allowing fishing on this scenic stretch of river.

2 Trout

1 Trout

1 Trout

1 Trout

It fished really well - 12 brown trout all on dry flies. Some scattered mayfly hatches at various times, including a lot of yellow mayfly but strangely those were ignored - mostly caught on smaller size 16 ad 18s of three classic patterns: Lunn's Particular, Grey Duster and a Greenwell's Glory variant. However for much of the day most of the fish weren't on the mayflies - there were large numbers of tiny black flies, probably reed smuts and they were hitting those hard. Caught four of them on a size 20 Black Gnat at those times, fished on a very long and fine leader. Downside of that was that I lost one bigger fish on the take, probably had a wind knot in the line as it was quite windy and they often needed long casts with trees around - checked the tippet occasionally but obviously not often enough! Still a great day's fishing and they were a good stamp of fish - all between 9 and 14" and in great condition, two thirds of them in the 12-14" range. Thanks for a lovely day out - great fishing on a beautiful stretch of river.

12 Trout

No salmon seen. 1 small trout, returned.

1 Trout

3 Trout

This is a really lovely beat with a good variety of water. The new owner was generous with his time talking about how the river was doing and where he has improved the access since I was last here a few years ago.
The glide at the bottom is very easy to wade and you can access the whole length of the beat. The island is trickier in places - you can get to it easily but fishing the main channel on the other side needs some roll casting and decent control as you can't always wade that far out from the foliage.

Fishing from just after noon until almost 7pm there was abundant insect life. There were fish rising all day in a slightly desultory manner and I spent most of the day slowly approaching each one only for the activity to stop as soon as I covered them; a mixture of clumsy casting and the wrong fly, I'm sure. Interestingly, I saw a reasonable number of large pale yellow upwings on the surface that were never taken so I assume everything was just sub surface. There was a frenetic 10 minutes around 2pm when the water was boiling, I had no idea what was hatching and got myself thoroughly tangled up in the excitement of trying three different flies.
After many changes I finally happened upon the right fly: a green-yellow quill body with CDC wings tempted a lovely fish of 11" at the very top end of the beat around half past five. Taking it back to the flats I had a few swirls and misses before a very strong 13" fish opposite the croy.

2 Trout