New net finally christened.

It has been slow on my fishing front due to the imminent arrival of my third son as I could not travel very far and now of course he has arrived which causes additional fishing difficulties. If you are a pal on Facebook you will have seen the photos.

However, the planets aligned and today I somehow managed to wing a session on my Highland river. I had wanted to fish the Kelvin however it has been fully blown out for trout by the rain. I stopped off at the Sea Pool and spoke to a salmon fisher before heading Northwards. If this rain keeps up it looks like we will have a bumper Salmon season as lots of fish have been taken already.

Even with the amount of rain this river still remains clear even when in spate although there was evidence of bigger water..

Even though the forecast was for 15 degrees and no wind it was actually about 12 with wind and some showers. The trout did not seem to mind and were rising confidently to pretty much everything but my flies. The first pool I put 4 trout down and the second a few more. This river is spooky and requires stealth, if you have fannied up casting to a fish you do not seem to get a second chance.

I moved down the river to a nice deep hole with a longing tongue, I have caught some trout from here before..

I had some moderate success in that I pricked a few trout in this pool, birds were swooping around however i could not work out what flies were hatching. I was using a dry and dropper with the dropper maybe an inch under the surface. Finally a trout took the dropper as if it was a dry fly. I knew it was a good trout by the bend in my rod and the pull it gave me – no jumping for this brute.

Finally it came to my virgin net – fishing buddy Alex always says if you buy a big net you will catch big fish or something like that and I was glad that it was going to fit my bigger net just right.

Plans for the next couple of weeks include some LRF and hopefully some Kelvin action!