Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i Trout & Salmon

ON MAY 25 I attended the Atlantic Salmon Trust’s (AST) 50th Anniversary Scientific Symposium and Gala Dinner. It was a lavish affair, hosted by recently appointed AST president Earl Percy at his family’s London residence. Special guests included keynote speaker and AST patron His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and His Majesty The King of Norway, who have for many years championed Atlantic salmon. At the Trust’s 50th Anniversary Dinner, attended by 500 people, The Prince of Wales’s heartfelt and informed speech focused on the worrying decline of Atlantic salmon stocks. “Our greatest concern is that today a very small proportion of salmon smolts leaving their rivers return as adult salmon,” he said. “Thirty years ago, one in four would make it back. Today, it is only one in…

Edward Barder rods are built using grade A Tonkin bamboo, which is tempered by hand over an open flame. This process helps to drive out any excess moisture and increases the strength and durability of the all-important power fibres. The proprietary tapers are precisely milled to deliver fine tips for crisp casting, a robust middle and the signature swelled butt that helps direct the stroke. The handle is turned from champagne grade Flor cork and mounted above the Provencal olive wood reel seat. Blued ferrules and rings are whipped on with fine silk and an engraved butt cap is added. Every rod is varnished by hand, and supplied with two mirrored tips (numbered and with different-coloured tippings) olive wood ferrule stoppers, a tailored rod bag and handmade leather case. The…

WEATHER CAN RUIN a fishing break. Through a long, cold, fishless winter I dream about May and early June. The reality can fall very far short of the images painted in my mind. It would appear that, in Scotland at least, early summer can be plagued with what anglers call “tourist weather” - cloudless skies and cold, dry, biting east winds. While these conditions are great for the walking, touring holidaymaker, they are anathema to the fly-fisher. The culprit would appear to be a recurring weather set, which involves an early-summer massive high-pressure system that locates across Scandinavia, and draws Continental winds across the North Sea and blocks Atlantic low-pressure systems from spreading cloud and rain (arguably ideal fishing weather) from putting in an appearance. Perhaps this has always been…

AT THEIR HEART, rivers are simply water flowing downhill under gravity, but their movement through the landscape carves out water courses of astounding variability, as different as the mighty Tweed, the chalky Test and the tumbling Tamar. I find it fascinating. One type of river I’ve encountered a handful of times is a bi-modal stream, which alternates between cascading sections of riffles and rocks, and wide lakes. In my experience, these rivers run through harsh landscapes scattered with clumps of silver birch, their banks crowded with heather and gorse. I have encountered them in northern Scandinavia, Scotland and most recently in the west of Ireland, where the Ballynahinch River flows from Ballynahinch Lake and runs into the Atlantic off Galway, near loughs Corrib and Mask. The Ballynahinch catchment has a…

“ SCANDALOUS” AND “perverse” are words that might be used to describe post-war dredging, but the Angling Trust (AT) has used them to illustrate recent flood defence work by Environment Agency (EA) contractors and landowners in six counties. Initial evidence of “wanton-like” vandalism was uncovered on Lincolnshire’s River Idle and a Thames tributary, the River Mole. It has seen essential large woody debris ripped out, while bank-stabilising trees, a home to precious wildlife, have been torn away, as though a hurricane coursed the waterway. The AT quickly alerted 68,000 anglers and a staggering 10,000 engaged with its thread on Facebook, leading to the uncovering of fresh environmental degradation in Yorkshire, Hampshire, Warwickshire and Kent. The flood defence budget in England far exceeds income from rod licences, but is being used…

SEA-LICE GAME CHANGER Our federation, as one of the founding members of the North Atlantic Salmon Fund (NASF), has not just campaigned for many years to protect our wild Atlantic salmon in their feeding grounds, but also to end the infestation of our migrating smolts from sea-lice emanating from the open-sea salmon farm cages. The recent NASCO conference in Sweden welcomed updated reports on the new Norwegian road map measures announced as a watershed event in May at the 10th annual Hardangerfjord seminar on fish farming. It was encouraging to attend and hear the new assurances by the industry leaders in Norway that there will be no more farmed salmon production growth until there are zero escapees and sea-lice. We now hope companies like Marine Harvest extend this assurance to…

THE TRUSTED OLD double spey is a reasonably effective cast in calm conditions, but is particularly suitable when the wind is blowing down the river. The double spey is based on the sustained-anchor concept of forming the D-loop from the line’s grip on the water. The casting cycle starts with the rod tip pointing downstream and the fly-line straight and under tension. With the downstream hand uppermost on the rod, the rod tip is swept up river, which then lays the line out in front of your position. Like all forms of spey-casting, this movement should be done with a smooth increase of speed to ensure the fly-line is completely under tension during this initial phase of the cast. Once the fly-line, leader and fly have been re-positioned, the second…

“When food is in the surface layers, fly colour can be vitally important” Tail Mandarin flank fibres Rib Medium Mirage Body Orange or scarlet seal fur Body hackle Ginger or honey furnace hen Shoulder hackle Mandarin flank Head/front hackle Furnace hen Thread Burnt orange or red UTC WHEN IT COMES to summer fly colours, I’m a big fan of red. Other colours will have their time and place, and reds are no guarantee of success, but ginger through to orange, scarlet, red, vermillion and claret feature heavily in my summer wet- and dry-flies and are never far from my leader. High summer brings regular servings of big chunks of meat, not only in your back garden, but on our lochs and lakes, too, and when it’s swilling around in the…

“I find it difficult to resist adding a rib – but on this fly it doesn’t feel right” THE BLACK SHEEP is a classic clear-water pattern from Iceland. It has a little something for everyone: blue, black, yellow and silver. While it’s commonly accepted that the fly was devised by American fisher Joe Hubert, there is some dispute and while Hubert named the fly and came up with the Sheep variants series, the Icelandic guide Halli Stefánsson says he is the creator. He and Joe fished together in Iceland in the 1970s, but according to an interview that Halli gave to the website anglingiceland.is, Joe wasn’t a fly-tyer. Halli said, “What happened was that I was fishing on the Norðurá along with my usual friends from America. Joe was one.…

4 lb trout “almost guaranteed” at Blagdon England & Wales BORDER ESK THE LONGTOWN Bridge fishings produced some salmon, and the odd sea-trout, during May. On the Cauldron beat Colin Hudson had a 13 lb salmon on fly, and upstream on Irvine House Mid beat, Mike Orr caught a 9 lb salmon in the Boat pool. A few sea-trout are present on the Canonbie beat. Jackie Allan landed three and lost a couple more. Other members have also caught fish but not reported them. There are always openings for new members. E-mail iain.blackett@tiscali.co.uk or phone 013873 71301. – BORDER ROD. BRISTOL WATERS CHEW HAS remained tough as cold north-easterly winds have dominated the weather. Most days the air is at least a couple of degrees lower than the water temperature.…

Rawson & Perrin Rawson & Perrin hand-planed fly-rods are made using the finest A-grade Chinese Tonkin bamboo with techniques and tapers developed through years of experience. All rods are made with great care and patience to critical tolerances and with great precision. The Monarch range is a collection of hollow-built, fast, modern tapers designed to cover most of the general uses for fly-rods in the UK (6 ft 3 wt, £900; 7 ft 4 wt, £925; 8 ft 5 wt £950). The bamboo is selected to match the purpose of the rod and is tempered and coloured to the customer’s request. Handles are made from the finest flor-grade cork and hand-shaped to the customer’s desired style. Blued nickel silver ferrules, rings and a hardwood reel seat are added before the…

ICELAND, A LAND of mountains, ice, hot springs and fly-fishing. It was April 17 and I was there for three days’ fishing with my pal Andy Majerus at Lake Thingvallavatn. After being picked up by our Frontiers guide, Bjarni Jónsson, it was little more than an hour’s drive to the lake. As the road wound on, frequent snow showers flashing over the lake reminded me of home on a February day. There was the most amazing light, almost black as the showers peaked, and then beautiful sunshine. Hundreds of wading birds performed a pipe-and-whistle symphony to accompany the extraordinary landscape. At one of the two main fishing areas we met Joey, the main guide from Ion, the hotel that runs the fishery. The wind was so strong I could hardly…

FISHING AND ACCOMMODATION A FULL day of unguided salmon fishing costs €110; a half-day is €90. The hotel has guides that are available for €200 per day or €180 per half-day for one rod; €270 a day or €250 a half-day for two rods. Room rates vary depending on season, but start at €185 for a double room per night. Most guests at Ballynahinch tend to fish the hotel water for a day or two as part of a wider trip to other rivers on the Ireland’s west coast. Contact: Ballynahinch Castle Hotel, Recess, Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland. Tel: +353 95 31006. E-mail: info@ballynahinch-castle.com Book in the UK through Fly Odyssey. Tel: 01621 743 711. Web: www.flyodyssey.co.uk GETTING THERE We flew to Shannon airport and the hotel arranged…

YOU’RE TIRED AT the end of another tough week, and as you break down your rod the bits of electrical tape you used to secure the sections fall into the grass beneath the rod rest. Never mind, the gillie will pick them up. He has to earn his tip. That old nylon line you bundled up and stuffed into your fishing vest to dispose of later - where did it go? Could that be the tangle another fisherman has just come across on the water’s edge? Why should he go around tidying up after others, he asks himself. It’s not his mess. Oh well, he shrugs, he can snip it into little bits. It’s the least he can do. Those bits will break down in the environment, won’t they? It’s…

REACH FOR A FLOATER Riffle-hitching works best when the fish are on the take in the upper metre of the water column. When you are instinctively reaching for the full floating line, it’s time to fish the hitch. It’s also the first method I will try when the water is low and clear and the fish are easily spooked. AVOID WIND AND SUN Strong winds, whether upstream or down, can catch a fly-line like a sail during its swing across a pool, causing a loss of tension and making it difficult to form the essential riffle or V-wake with the surface fly. Bright days with glare are bad news. Salmon and sea-trout will be less likely to attack a surface fly and watching the fly can be difficult, straining your…

“In low water and particularly in late summer when the fish have seen it all before it’s hard to overstate the importance of stealth and great presentation” VERY FEW SALMON anglers use singlehanded rods in the UK, which is a great shame. Lochs and spate streams are usually the extent of things, whereas in Ireland there seems to be a greater appreciation and in North America the roots run deep. There are many good arguments for double-handers and their place in the first team is assured. The real question is: should we make room for both? Can’t many of the limitations levelled at small rods be reversed and aimed at long rods, if the conditions dictate? As summer advances, it’s the right time to think again about singlehanded rods…

Q MY LOCAL reservoir’s fishery has closed because the owner couldn’t make ends meet. You’ve previously written about a water taken over by your club and I wondered how it’s become successful? Mark O’Connell, by e-mail A I ASSUME your fishery would have succeeded if the owner had not needed to earn a living from it. If that’s the case, I think a group of volunteers should be able to run it successfully. We are fortunate at The Watch (in the Scottish Borders) because we lease the water from the water authority, who are responsible for the maintenance of the dam, and poaching is almost unheard of (the only way into the reservoir is past the gamekeeper’s house). Our only “poachers” are otters, ospreys and, unfortunately, cormorants. After paying for…

PREPARE FOR COMFORT VISION SCOUT WADERS £449.99 Vision has entered the premium wader market with its 37.5 Technology, which it says delivers improved breathability – ideal for the summer months. Putting on a pair of waders creates a microclimate around your body, being active and increasing your body temperature leads to sweating which increases the humidity inside the waders. The fabric in Scout waders provides 800 per cent more surface area and removes moisture by responding to your body heat. We have tried the waders, fishing for several days in a row, and found them to be excellent. When walking the bank in warm conditions you can feel the waders working to evaporate moisture from your skin. The Scouts have a NoSeam cut, which creates a slightly curved shape and…

 “ HOW IS THE castinggoing?” “The fish have been surging upstream in great squadrons behind our backs, thumbing their fishy noses, gesturing with their fishy fins…” It’s going pretty well, actually. The new rod is a technical wonder of carbon and graphene, beautifully balanced and with an immensely powerful action that is, at the same time, exquisitely delicate in its delivery. The reel is a feat of engineering to challenge the Mir space station with an ergonomically designed braking system that is self-adjusting and fully automated. All I have to do is choose the noise I want it to make. And the line? My dears, the line! A flat-bellied, forward-tapered, aqua-dynamic cutting-edge, multi-tip, air-splitting wonderweave. It’d self-launch, I shouldn’t wonder, if I left it to its own devices. And I…

“Those dark months when my fishing rods would have gone up to roost on their hooks in the spare bedroom” AT THE BEGINNING of last August I asked myself whether I was, as I have occasionally heard it said, fished-out: not of course permanently, which would be a fate too dreadful to contemplate (especially as it was a fate that for something like three seasons I thought had actually befallen me): not permanently to be sure but just for a week or two or perhaps for no more than a few days. And if, just for the time being, I had lost my hunger for trout, then in search of the reason for this very serious but almost certainly temporary disorder I needed to look back no further than July.…

“I could just reach the twig with the fly. I looked down. I was standing on Philip’s rod” IT WAS A sunny day in the first week of April. I have been bitten by a sunny day in the first week of April so often and so thoroughly that you might think I’d learn. But I don’t. Besides, I had a Wye and Usk Wild Stream season permit burning a hole in my waders. Do you know how that feels? The Wye & Usk Fishing Passport now has 280 beats on its books, from salmon and sea-trout on the Western Cleddau in the west, to the mountain llyns of Snowdonia in the north and, in the south-east, some little streams that thread the Forest of Dean. None of which, you’ll…

E.U. FUND RESEARCH INTO SALMON D.N.A. THE GAME AND Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) is to lead a five-year multi-million-pound project to discover why salmon and sea-trout die in estuaries and coastal waters. SAMARCH (SAlmonid MAnagement Round the Channel) is funded by the EU and has ten partner organisations - five in France and five in the UK, including the Environment Agency, Salmon and Trout Conservation, the University of Essex and Bournemouth University. The project will use fish-monitoring facilities on rivers including the Frome and Tamar. To determine where salmonid losses are greatest, it will employ DNA analysis to map areas in the English Channel that are important for sea-trout, improve our understanding of the ratio of male and female salmon that go to sea, and use historical salmon-scale collections to…

NEARLY 200 SPECIES represent the sedge (or caddis-flies) family throughout the British Isles, making it one of the largest river-fly groups that anglers encounter. To the uninitiated their diversity is bewildering and even experts find it hard to get to grips with the many species and their habits. This needn’t necessarily bother us as fly-fishers (although it is fascinating) because to fish well we have only to concern ourselves with the sedge on our local patch. So rather than recite Latin names, we’re better off searching beneath a submerged stone to determine if a healthy population of cased caddis exists. Incidentally, for most UK fishers, if not biologists, a caddis is the insect larva, and a sedge is the adult fly. KNOW THE HATCH We need to understand the underwater…

Not all trout lines are suitable for spey and roll casting. The good news is that for the cost of a new line you can transform a strong reservoir trout outfit into a really useful salmon set-up. Avoid lines designed for long-range overhead casting. At short range, their front tapers tend to be too light and this makes roll and spey-type casts tricky. I would suggest trying your existing lines locally and then if results are poor, consider buying a purpose-made line. A modern 10 ft seven- or eight-weight rod should perform well with lines in the 17g-19g (260-290 grains) head weight range. As ever, it’s worth checking the recommendations for your specific rod on its maker’s website. ALL-ROUND LINES ■ Rio Intouch Single-handed Spey 7 wt, 16.8 gr ■…

Q While fishing in warm and difficult conditions I decided to try a Sunray Shadow. It prompted several splashy rises, but nothing connected. The gillie told me to change, so I went back to a size 12 Cascade, without success. What else could I have tried – gillie allowing? Graham Nash, via e-mail A THE FISH might not have been disinhibited enough to take firmly, whatever was offered, but it would have been good for you to be allowed to find out for yourself. Let’s imagine the gillie had a dentist’s appointment… I have to say that when a Sunray swims in at the fishing hut door, fishing sense often jumps out the window. Or rather, we forget all those fishy rules we normally operate by. What size of Sunray…

FIND INSPIRATION ON HOUSE POOL It was under the Marmion Oak, at the head of the House pool on the Tweed at Ashiestiel, that Sir Walter Scott wrote Marmion. He lived at Ashiestiel from 1804, also writing The Lady of the Lake and part of Waverley there; it was his favourite home and some think he might have remained had he been able to buy it, rather than purchasing Abbotsford in 1812. Now the house, its farm and the fishing are to be sold. Overlooking the river at Clovenfords, five miles from Galashiels and nine from Melrose in the Borders, Ashiestiel was originally a 17th century peel tower. It was enlarged and completed in the 19th century and completely refurbished in 2011. There are four reception rooms, seven bedrooms, seven…