salmo the leaper!

I haven't managed to get out fishing for a couple of weeks now what with one thing or another, not that i'm complaining, there's a long winter ahead to chase the grayling. Yesterday I was out with my pal Mike for a day trip with our camera's in Perthshire, by chance our first stop was the Buchanty spout on the river almond, where you can watch the salmon leap. We had a good laugh trying get some pics of them, most of the time the salmon were long gone by the time I had pressed the shutter release, I think Mike may have had more success but here's some of my mostly out of focus efforts anyway!

   

the river Almond upstream from the falls

after a much needed bridie from the butchers in Dunkeld we visited the birks of Aberfeldy, stunning at this time of year.

if the weather plays ball this week it might be Perthshire again at weekend for a bit of trotting  on the Tay.  

Surfs up!

Yesterday afternoon we made a late decision to try out an East Lothian beach for flounders , this beach has the added pull of throwing up the occasional turbot, some big ones too but we have still to encounter a decent sized one. We arrived about an hour before low tide and fished the first hour down, the conditions looked rough  but i don't think they were as bad as it looked.  The surfers were out in force enjoying themselves and we even found scaling down to 2oz leads was managing to roll to our liking on the bottom. . I lost a flounder right at the edge, it then went quiet until the tide turned when Brian was the first to take a fish , a wee fellae but nice to see .

He then took the next again .

Whilst returning flounder no.2 , Brian walked into my lines , I thought it was him  but it was infact a take as when he walked away the rod was still nodding , and i landed my first of the day .

 

 It wasn't busy sport but I had another and Brian had  another Brace, one of them a good sized fish.

Brian decided he'd had enough, frustratingly i had a lot of bites not coming to anything , i then had a bite on my right hand rod , which had a small flounder , while i did that my other rod rattled , which brian picked up and reeled in   to find a double shot of flounder. The gully i was fishing seeemed to have come to life, but darkness was almost upon us and bellies were rumbling .

Not the busiest of flounder sesssions , but not bad either. looking forward to giving it another go and with a bit of luck perhaps a turbot will grace our hooks?

drawing to a close

With the season drawing to a close tomorrow I spent a final afternoon on my favourite local burn, some pictures.

A Tumble in the Jungle

Decided on one last trip to a local river yesterday. I hadn't fished it since late May, mainly because I find getting from pool to pool a real task when the undergrowth gets going also take in consideration the damage inflicted on waders with brambles and partly also because it's slow flat pools are perhaps more suited to early to mid season dry fly tactics.

My fears were justified , getting from pool to pool was a real task in the deep areas where you had to leave the river, I basically had to grasp a bunch of nettles and haul my self out the water and up the banking , my hands are still stinging. On another occasion I was trying to get past a junk yard stretch of the river which is full of Japanese knot weed forcing my way through I took a tumble down the banking , luckily my reaction was to let go off the rod at the top of the brae and also I stopped short of the river.

The fishing though was fantastic!Barely a rising trout to be seen all day , but in any piece of water with any defined current ,  even wee short shallow runs in the tails of pools , fish were to be had mainly to a wire nymph but a few took the dry.

A shallow dub  behind a  bush  which held  fish

 A few good fish were willing to take too , the best I landed was 1 3/4lb which put up a great fight , also   had good number in and just over the pound mark , and a few lost that may  have been bigger fish?

Even the minnows were hungry

1lb 12oz

the rivers were up this morning and with exceptionally heavy rain forecast for tonight , I've a sneaking suspicion that's going to be the last outing of the 2013 trout season, still there's plenty of other types of fish to go for during the winter season. Looking forward to it already.