Well another season comes to an end with the last few days bringing lovely sunshine and the ideal weather to go fishing and enjoy all the autumn colours but with all the heavy rain and floods in mid September it definitely put paid to any decent back end fishing. I had caught a couple of dark fish on the Lee but was trying to organize the closing day on one of the prime fisheries with a few lads but like everything else planning and doing are too different things. I ended up on the Lee for the last day and even though it was a beautiful autumn day it was fairly uneventful except for the odd coloured salmon plucking at the fly more in curiosity than anger. I must admit that i had fished on the Monday evening prior to the closing day and had just started fly fishing down beat 1 with my switch fly rod when i got a good pull at the fly but the fish didn't stay, checking the fly to make sure it was fishing well i then recast exactly on the same line as the take and straight away the fish took the loop and moved off very slowly downstream. Having very little strain on the line i automatically thought it was a grilse and started filming the fight but then things changed dramatically and the line started heading upstream with a few strong head shakes and suddenly the fish grew in size from a grilse to a fresh 17 / 18 lb bar of silver jumping and cartwheeling across the river. It was a great short fight with a very abrupt end when the fish buried itself in heavy weed and left my size 15 White shrimp fly in a clump of dirty weed. Luckily i got the fly back but while playing the fish a few thoughts ran through my head, having seen this beautiful bar of silver i thought this will make a great end of season video and secondly i might take it home..........well as they say don't count your chickens until they hatch rang no screamed through my mind when the fish dropped the fly and a few colourful words thrown in for good measure. But in all honesty it would have gone back to full fill its journey, as long as i can remember i have never killed a fish in the last month of the season never mind on the last day but it would have made a great video with all the beautiful autumn colours but instead all i have are some nice photo's to end this piece, but if you want to see the fish i will put up the few seconds of spectacular jumps it made soon at the end of this piece. For all those interested in sea trout fishing at night i have two video's coming out soon with some great specimens caught at night on the fly, also there will be two video's on how to improve your salmon fly fishing with my Scandi and Switch rod techniques which will only be available to my subscribers on youtube and followers on this blog... so follow the blog.
Here is a photo of the Lee in mid September in full brown flood, this heavy water pulled most of the fish up and above the dam leaving very little residents to fish for.
Here is the Hero to Zero video of me hooking and losing a big salmon during the last days of the salmon season.
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