Friday 19 June 2015

The Champagne Shrimp

One of regular guests, Ian S, is both an excellent fisher and a canny designer of flies. Last year he introduced the Percy Special to Varzuga with great success. This year his new fly is called The Champagne Shrimp. In my view it is just a variant of the Percy Special, in his view a masterful new creation crafted after hours of deep thought.

The Champagne Shrimp
Well, whatever the creativity behind it, it works – very well – and rare copies of the Champagne Shrimp are much in demand at the moment. Unusually Ian did not top the leader boarder yesterday, Gregoire was top rod with seven salmon, and our total for the day of 48 was pretty evenly spread amongst the team. A much better days fishing overall, the wind was down for once and it felt much more settled and calm.

Harry P at Pic-Nic
Sadly that cannot be said of this morning – we have a strong upstream wind again and there was quite careful consideration of the beat map at breakfast as we tried to work out where the most sheltered pools would be. Ian and Chris had both caught salmon before tucking into their scrambled eggs which at least gave us hope that even in the wind we should have another pretty good day.

Bear Pool yesterday
Richard G and his team over at Kitza yesterday had 26 salmon, and up at Pana they landed 41. The water height is still steady, no sign of it dropping – yet. And with little sun this week the water temperature remains at 11⁰C. A very steady river just now and I think that accounted for our improvement in numbers landed yesterday.
The Middle Camp guests
This week seems to have flown by, tomorrow we depart for Murmansk and in the evening there will be the Saturday evening rush to get into waders and down to the river. The cooks know the form; you do not plan soufflé on first night.

More news on Sunday!

Christopher Robinson