Decided to give the trout a rest tonight and go out for a couple of hours at the dam. I went up for the evening ticket and started at beat 1 fishing with my 10ft switch fly rod, a floating line, 4 inches per second sink versileader and ally's hot orange sprimp fly in size 15 double. Second cast I hooked and landed a fresh sea liced salmon of about 7 lbs which I quickly released after taking scale samples etc. Moving down river I hooked and lost a second fish estimated about 10lbs again on the same fly. I had to leave and head home for a couple of hours but arrived back after 7.30 and again went up to beat 1. There were a couple of anglers fishing it down in front of me so I waited till they had moved on and set about fishing down. I hooked and lost a small fish, a very short take and it just rolled off the fly and it was gone. Recasting I moved on down further and again hooked a better fish, this time it was serious. The fished screamed up river leaving my line in its wake, scaring other salmon into the air. It went completely beserk cartwheeling and fighting very erratically but I was able to keep up with it and eventually get it in. I needed 3 attempts to beach the fish on the grass as it was so powerful that it kept ploughing back out through some weeds. I took out the hook which was under its tongue and set about releasing the fish, one of the anglers was filming the release for me when I noticed blood coming from its gills underwater. On close inspection the fish was bleeding under the tongue so I had to take the fish as they will bleed out and won't survive from a cut like that. I had just received my brown tag and unfortunately had to use it today. There were a few fish showing on beat 1 and beat 4 so there are some in residence and nice water for the fly. Short video will follow showing scale samples being taken from 7lb fish. The samples were also taken from the harvested fish.
The full video of the fishing session will be up soon. I have a post running at the moment on Facebook under MrKingfisher3 where I'm doing an hour evening sessions fly fishing for trout with dry fly, if anybody is interested just check out the post it's up to date on the flies that I am using and catching with on the Lee River, its all catch and release.
