September Blog

September 2009 was the best illustration of how day-to-day variations of weather and longer lasting weather systems can affect fishing for salmon and sea trout.

1. The month began with three days of heavy rain, which put the Ribble/Hodder system up by between four and six feet and the Derwent (Cumbrian) by five feet. On the fourth the Ribble had fallen to one foot six inches, and despite light showers it continued to fall very slowly. This is always ideal, especially when the fall coincides with biggish tides (that day was Full Moon); the latter encourages fish to move in from the sea, and the high but falling water of the river encourages them to run quickly. I visited the river and managed to hook one salmon that let go after only a few seconds, and a second that remained attached to my Orange Mallard Shrimp. It was bright silver hen and weighed 12-pounds. On the fifth the river had dropped another three inches and I fished from noon to four oíclock when rain started to fall. Half way through the afternoon a motley cock grilse swallowed the fly and I released it with the fly in its throat. I think that this is the best way to release badly hooked salmon, for, providing the gills have not been damaged, the hook should not prevent the fish surviving and spawning. Note too that, by using fine wire salmon fly hooks, the hook is likely to rust away after a few days (a Partridge dry fly hook goes from a similarly hooked trout in about eight days, as we have found on the Aire from several fish).

2. Rheumatoid arthritis runs in my family; it has resulted in my brother Philip having greatly to curtail basket-weaving (some of you will remember the creels he produced at several shows in the 1990s). After those two sessions my hand, wrist and elbow joints were feeling a bit sore. So I visited the medic, who sent me on the ninth for X-rays and blood tests. I have been too busy to return for the results!

3. On the twelfth I took the ferry from Oban to Lochboisdale in South Uist and, with my pal Jo and gillie Ian Kennedy, enjoyed a weekís sea trout fishing there. The fourteenth was spent on Loch Roag on a warm, sunny day, with banks of cloud and with the water flat or with a light ripple. Jo had a fish on a wet fly (Blue Nun)and we had five others on a dry Cork-bodied Daddy-long-legs. Nothing large, the biggest 3lb 2oz. Note: Ian and our host Wegg stole all my Cork-bodied Daddies just before I left, so I will be tying them on the Fly-Fishing & Fly-Tying stand at Fly Fair in November!

4. The next day (fifteenth) we fished Loch Lower Kildonan, but in a freezing northerly wind. We flogged the water hard, for three miniscule brown trout.

5. The sixteenth saw a return to warm, sunny conditions with a light north-westerly breeze and only slight ripple on the surface of Loch Fada, for me the finest sea trout loch in the Universe. We started out with the sun hidden behind thin cloud, and then the cloud vanished. Not a fish moved, so we went ashore from noon to two oíclock and nattered/sunbathed/slept. Then the cloud returned, we went afishing and caught fish only for the relatively short time the sun wasnít out. The result was four nice sea trout, plus brownies and herling, on wet fly and the old Cork-bodied Daddy-long-legs.

6. The seventeenth was a funny old day on Loch Roag (see 3. above), with a bitterly cold southwesterly wind. The sea trout were more or less reluctant to move (we saw less than a handful leaping from the water, and I rose only two to the wet fly). Funniest of all was what seemed to have been a good concentration of salmon (grilse) along the rocky north shore. In one drift of barely twenty minutes I had five ëhave a goí at my fly. One followed my fly for about ten yards, right to the side of the boat, and other lunged at the fly with its mouth wide open at the surface, rather in the style of Jaws! After this drift I took over the oars and we repeated the drift, Ian getting two similar offers from the grilse. The great highlight of this day was a 2lb 3oz slob trout. These trout feed in the tidal stream below the loch (that itself is brackish) and over the white sandy Atlantic beaches, and are camouflaged a bright sandy-orange with black spots.

7. Eighteenth and nineteenth were in near-gale force southwesterlies, with stronger squalls. School Loch yielded four small sea trout to Camasunary Killer and Fada two fish for Jo, the best pulling the scales down to 7lbs. So hard were condition on School, that Ian had a break for a couple of hours and took us to fish the stream from School to the ocean. The stream is only a few hundred yards long, and as it flows across the beach is does so in a series of nice pools. So I started at the top of the shore and spey-cast my way down to the sea. Magic! I caught about a dozen typical brown trout: very dark brown fish with dull red spots. And I had two slob trout, looking just like the Roag fish, but smaller (one was about nine inches long, the other twelve).

8. Myles Archibald (my senior editor at publisher HarperCollins) spent the following week on North Uist. Gales and cold weather made the loch fishing there very difficult, he reported, but the fishing in the sea lochs for feeding sea trout had been magnificent.

9. I returned to north-west England to find the rivers low, and falling ever lower. After those first few wet days, England had been held firmly in the grip of a drought, and overall the September of 2009 was the driest since 1997. So on the Ribble/Hodder salmon was out and grayling in. I had an afternoon on the Hodder where, during a good hatch of blue-winged olives and pale wateries, I caught six lovely grayling on a size 16 dry Sturdyís Fancy. Five days later, with the rivers even lower, I had three large grayling (around the 2lb-mark) and found three large shoals of ëshotsí (small grayling) in barely a quater of a mile of the Ribble. I also caught two nice brown trout ëunder the far bankí on good old Sturdyís Fancy. Those were my last wild brown trout of the season, that ended the following day, the 30th.

10. Our best chance of a salmon should be the Derwent, we reasoned, for in droughts its level is maintained by the outfalls from Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite. So, on the twenty-sixth, Geoff, Philip and I zoomed up the M6 only to find that the river was at 8' on the gauge, which is dead low. Not a salmon had been caught that week, but we went through the motion. I did raise a fish to an Orange Hackle Shrimp tied on a size 16 treble; but seeing its brown colour I was glad it didnít connect. Then I tried a Snake Fly and had four brown trout, one a belter at over 2lbs. After that Geoff and I turned to gathering Sloes, and the next day I purchased a quantity of Tescoís own, cheap gin. A pound and a half of sloes (freeze them for twelve hours first), to every litre of gin, plus 6oz of sugar (add extra later...you can add sugar but you cannot take it away) and a couple of drops of almond extract. Keep until Christmas before bottling.

11. I am writing this on the first of October. Little rain is forecast and a big high pressure system is dominating the weather. This month will be salmon fishing when we get some rain, and a few days with the grayling. And wildfowling we .... have 30,000 pink-footed geese on the estuary, and the wigeon are just starting to arrive.

Malcolm Greenhalgh