The highlight of the season has been the superb brown trout fishing in May, June and July with several fish over 2lb coming to the net. Anglers have reported catching up to 20 fish in a day. Most have been caught on a dry fly: Adams, Grey Wolf and GRHE have all fished well.
There seems to have been an improved run of sea trout this year with most of the fish being caught on the middle river beats. As many sea trout have been caught on a dry fly in the daytime as by those rods fishing after dark.
The salmon fishing has again been disappointing. For the whole of March and April the river was in spate and too high to fish. Since then, the river has been too low to encourage fish to move out of the estuary into fresh water. With so few anglers fishing for salmon, catches do not give a true reflection of the number of fish in the system. Let’s hope a spate will encourage a late run to provide some good September fishing.
All being well, providing the EA gives us the go ahead we will be operating the hatchery again this winter. With salmon stocks so low the success of our hatchery is more important than ever.