Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Best of the season so far

I had my best fish of the season at the weekend - this River Eden beauty was a tubby 19 1/2 inches (50cm) and weighed in at 3lbs 6ozs. These fish don't turn up too often on our local waters, I'm usually fortunate enough to get one each season so it will probably be my best of 2010 - but you never know.

The river is down to it's bones but it just goes to show that there is still some good fishing to be had. This beauty, like most of my other big river browns taken over the years, was caught on my favourite method, the upstream nymph.

As usual, the fish was safely returned after photographs and weighing.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Another catch up

The weather has been too good this year and consequently my Ullswater visits have been severely restricted - cloudless sunny skies and calm days may be good for the tourists but are definitely no good for us fishermen.


We were fortunate on what turned out to be our last visit to the lake - mayflies (Danica) were hatching and the fish turned on to them once the hatch got going. It turned out to be a strange sort of day, first we found rising fish and mayflies hatching but the fish hadn't turned onto them, small black adult buzzer imitations took the first few fish of the day and then they turned onto the larger mayflies and stayed on them for the rest of the day. Initially the fish were taking freshly hatched duns and later in the day they turned onto the egg laying spinners, but you had to find rising fish to get any offers, speculative searching of normally productive areas produced nothing.


With hot weather and a very low and weedy river I wasn't too sure if we'd get much sport for two clients on their first visit to the River Eden the week before last, but thankfully the fish didn't let us down and a combination of North country spiders, nymphs and dries tempted a few fish and both Davids got their strings pulled.







Sunday, June 27, 2010

Too busy working and fishing

The updates have suffered lately, I've been too busy working and fishing.

I've had three days at Rutland with three friends, we were hoping that our trip would coincide with the the cream of the top of the water buzzer and nymph fishing but unfortunately it didn't happen - the only thing that really produced was sinking lines and lures, mainly blobs. Either that or fishing on the rudder in the main basin with Di 4's or Di 5's and Sparklers - which produced limit bags for my friends.


A farewell shot of Rutland

Back home I tried a touch of urban angling - fishing the lower Petteril among the mattresses and shopping trolleys - something I've often thought of doing but have never got around to until recently.


Well, that itch has now been scratched, it produced a few small fish which is what I expected, I'm sure that there'll be better fish down there but negotiating my way past mattresses, shopping trolleys, sheets of plywood and all the other rubbish dumped in this part of the river by our city dwellers is not something that I'll be doing too often.


Sport on a very low River Eden has been very good considering that the river is down to it's bones after the driest spring on record. The conditions seem to be suiting the flylife with excellent hatches of all our local species and some very large falls of Black Gnats earlier in the month with literally thousands on the water on occasions - the Eden beauty below was rising steadingly to Black Gnats when it fell for my offering, and as with all my wild brown trout, it was quickly measured, photographed and returned.