Yesterday was a beautiful day to be on the river – quite cold in the morning but with bright skies and a relatively benign wind, it felt more like June than mid May.
It is hard to comprehend but the river here at Lower has now fallen 8-10 feet since we first landed on Saturday afternoon. What is even harder to comprehend is that we probably still need it to fall a further 3-4 feet before we really see the river as we would expect in the opening week.
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| Tony C at Clarks |
The water is not only falling but it is clearing rapidly and most importantly, we are beginning to see stretches of water that we can get in and fish rather than finding the odd spot in amongst the trees.
Whilst we only landed 2 fish at Lower we started to see a lot more and rather counter-intuitively, it was encouraging to see a seal at Beach - the bottom of our beat – knowing that it wouldn’t have bothered to come up river without something to chase.
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| Gareth C with a lovely fresh fish |
Perhaps the most important information from yesterday was the fishing at Middle. I went up there for dinner in stunning sunshine and saw the first Arctic Terns of the year – a sure sign that spring is here.
The rods there were clearly having a great time which is not surprising given that they had landed 57 for the day. They all had similar tales of quiet periods followed by intense bursts of activity which is just as we would hope as it means that the fresh fish are running in pods and the run is just building.
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| Lucy from Kitza getting ready for a boat trip |
Clarks, Peartiha and Birthday were the most productive pools and now that the ice has gone from Bear, quite a few fish were caught from there as well.
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| Simon R on Bear |
This morning is again bright and I know that at least 5 fish have been landed on the home pools of Middle before breakfast. It feels like our turn to catch the fish that are clearly running past us and with this dropping river, our chances are improving hourly.
Charlie White
