Finavon Castle Bulletin

These bulletin blogs represent news about Finavon and the South Esk, and my views as a riparian owner. They are not the views of any other organisation, nor are they designed to promote the interests of any individual or organisation other than Finavon Castle Water and factors affecting the fishery. Tony Andrews

In fact we have been seeing sea trout for over a month, but the cold weather has not attracted fishers onto the river at dusk with the result that fishing effort for these early running fish was almost zero. Saturday 2 June was a bit warmer and the river was still fining down after last week’s freshet, with a touch of peaty colouring. 5 of these sea trout (up to 3 lbs) came from Milton Beat, where Willows and Volcano both held small  shoals. There are still salmon in the pools, most notably in Tyndals where there are some fish in the 12lbs to 15lbs category. The last fish from Tyndals was a 5lbs slightly coloured salmon which most of us would put down as a grilse, more because of its size than any other reason. On the same day Colin Gibb caught a 5lbs fish at Inshewan, scales of which revealed it to be a 2SW salmon. These small fish are becoming commonplace in the late spring in recent years, suggesting perhaps that their feeding areas at sea have a lesser abundance of nutritious prey species than the areas providing food for the early running spring salmon of February, March and early April.

Tyndals is our most reliable spring pool. This 7lbs salmon was one of 8 salmon to come from Tyndals in the early weeks of the 2012 season. To fish Tyndals effectively you need to wade the river, which is not always inviting in the cold, heavy waters of an Angus ‘spring’. Hence the pool is under fished and this one, in a spring snow melt, was caught and returned using a 2.5″ Rapala which we occasionally allow in such conditions.

We need more water (not too much) and a rise in ambient temperature. If we get both my guess is that sea trout will start running the river in good numbers, with the run peaking in the last week of June or the first week of July. The Finavon sea trout syndicate began their sea trout fishing season tonight (4/6)  and I wish them ‘tight lines’.

I will try to get another update from the Montrose MSS team on Wednesday.

TA on 5/6/2012

Saturday the 21st of May proved to be eventful, despite the low water. Whilst it wasn’t quite summer low conditions, the river was only 2″ above that level which gave us the impression that we might be returning to a ‘difficult’ period of persuading fish to take the fly. As it happened we were wrong and three nice salmon to 11 lbs were caught, two of them in  the late evening. The pools producing these fish were Tollmuir (Bogardo Beat), Tyndals (Milton Beat) and Melgund (Indies Beat). One of the features of this spring is how spread out over the four beats the catches of salmon have been. Normally Milton Beat is the highest scoring beat at this time of year, but the 2011 season has seen a welcome return to form of the lower beats, which means that rods fishing the four beats on rotation all have a good chance of a fish.

7lbs salmon 21 May

This salmon, estimated to weigh 7lbs, was caught in Tollmuir Pool on 21 May

I’m not going to get too excited yet about the numbers of early-running fish this year, although I hear that George Pullar’s nets at Montrose are doing very well. Where I think there are really encouraging signs is in the quality of the MSW fish caught this spring. All our fish, with the exception of the terribly wounded one I caught back in March, have been in tip-top condition. I guess that Professor Chris Tod of the Scottish Oceans Institute at St Andrews University would grade them at something like 0.95 on his condition scale, which is pretty good, if not excellent. Clearly these early returning MSW fish have been dining well, wherever it is that they have been feeding (probably somewhere northwest of Iceland, or even as far away as the Greenland fjords)!

The photograph above of the view looking down Tyndals was taken at 1230 on Sunday 22 May. Compare this picture with the one of the same view taken in the early morning on Saturday.

Prospects for our sea trout. There has been some rain and a lot of topping-up showers over the last two days, with the result that we have a nice little spate running as I write this at 1600 on the afternoon of Sunday 22 May. I said in  a previous blog that the ideal time for a spring spate is the first weekend in May. So it is, but the third weekend will do just as nicely! What we don’t want is another whacking great lift in the river just as the main shoals of sea trout are entering the river. Ideally these incoming sea trout should be filtering into the pools in stages, establishing shoals in the famous pools from Cortachy down to Kinnaird. Usually the middle to upper river – Kintrockat, Careston, Finavon, Inshewan and Cortachy/Downie Park – benefit from a steady filling up of the river in threse conditions. If we get a spate in (say) mid June or early July the shoals will tend to move quickly into the upper river, leaving only the rearguard in the lower middle river. In such conditions it is usually Cortachy that does well, although I concede that Cortachy and Downie Park are the only beats in the last few years that have been consistently well fished by night anglers who really know what they are doing. That will change in 2011 because Finavon now has four syndicates fishing throughout the sea trout season (mid June to mid August), and these fishermen are all-night anglers with experience of night sea trout fishing. It remains to be seen if we catch more fish!

8 lbs sea trout from Finavon Castle Water

As a reminder to people who love sea trout fishing at Finavon, here is an 8lbs fish caught by Derek Strachan in 2010

Yesterday I had to be in Edinburgh, which meant that I missed a day of action at FCW. Although only two salmon were caught, both by FCW ghillie Moray Macfarlane (about which more laterin this blog), other rods saw fish, lost fish and suffered the usual range of tweaks and bumps from spring salmon not quite in the mood to engulf the fly. The water is clear and a very pale amber in colour but there is still sufficient water – a bulge around the sides of the ‘armchair rock’  in the centre of our webcam – to keep fish moving upstream, with the very occasional one taking the fly.

10 lbs salmon

Moray Macfarlane’s two fish came from Frank’s Stream (10 lbs) and Tollmuir Pool (13 lbs). Of course Moray knows the water well, especially the lower two beats (Indies and Bogardo), and the best time to fish each pool. His approach to the Tollmuir Pool was from the right (S) bank and, after fishing down the stream, he hooked the fish in the main part of the pool opposite the big boulder, which is the main lie. He was fishing with one of Pete’s flies tied for Finavon following a discussion with me about the Finavon Whisp. My argument was that, because I am a poor exponent of the fly tying art, the same effect as a Finavon Whisp could be achieved by considerably reducing the amount of dressing on Pete’s Cascades and their variants. The result was a collection of beautifully tied flies commissioned specially for FCW. When Moray saw them he began to salivate (!), and immediately commissioned some for himself! Both his Tollmuir salmon and the Frank’s Stream one were caught on a Finavon Cascade lightly tied by Pete on silver Salar doubles (size 10).

Unless there is more rain I suspect that the fishing will become more difficult, but the weather forecast gives grounds for optimism. Whether we get rain or not the prospects for South Esk sea trout runs are starting to look very good indeed, especially now that there will be no deliberate killing of sea trout by the Usan nets. However, if we are to see more late spring MSW salmon, we will need more water.

 TA