Horsburgh beat

[Tyke]

Well I'm now back home in South Wales having packed up, changed & left the river at 6pm & in my house by 1.20 am - so now taking a minute to unwind before hitting the sack.

Firstly thanks to all for the comments & hints, & a particular thanks to Kenny who came to find me & offered great advice regarding the beat - we also had a general blether about fishing, shooting, the area in general & run timings + their shifts in recent years.

I was genuinely impressed by how nice the pools were, OK, I was there at close to optimum height for the beat (but unfortunately it was slowly lifting during the day), however the fly fished beautifully on the pools I fished & it was really nice fishing water.

I didn't catch, well no salmon or sea trout, but I did manage a brownie of about a pound which absolutely mullered my fly at last light as I was hand-lining back & made me think that I was in for a few seconds!

An enjoyable day though & it is always good to try a new beat; this is one I would happily fish again.

Regards, Tyke.

[rs2ford]

Well I'm now back home in South Wales having packed up, changed & left the river at 6pm & in my house by 1.20 am - so now taking a minute to unwind before hitting the sack.

Firstly thanks to all for the comments & hints, & a particular thanks to Kenny who came to find me & offered great advice regarding the beat - we also had a general blether about fishing, shooting, the area in general & run timings + their shifts in recent years.

I was genuinely impressed by how nice the pools were, OK, I was there at close to optimum height for the beat (but unfortunately it was slowly lifting during the day), however the fly fished beautifully on the pools I fished & it was really nice fishing water.

I didn't catch, well no salmon or sea trout, but I did manage a brownie of about a pound which absolutely mullered my fly at last light as I was hand-lining back & made me think that I was in for a few seconds!

An enjoyable day though & it is always good to try a new beat; this is one I would happily fish again.

Regards, Tyke.

Glad you enjoyed your day at Horsbrugh as it is a lovely beat to fish, as is Cardrona on the opposite bank. Kenny is a top bloke with great knowledge of the beat and is always willing to help.

Cheers Diarmid

[charlieH]

Charlie can you start the thread with the Ghillies theory please?

Sorry, I was away in Yorkshire over the weekend and not really online much. And it seems that Rennie has started the thread in the meanwhile - although it's now gone off in a slightly different direction, so perhaps it's better for me to respond on this one.

In his opening post on that thread Rennie wrote:

A pal and I had a conversation with them on flee size in general and they came out with a few interesting facts.
The longer a fish is in fresh water, the more it will forget the feeding response it has when in the sea and that lingers when it first enters a river.We all know fresh fish will happily take big bright often flashy flies.A second fact was after being in a good while some fish will revert to a feeding response they had as a Parr/Smolt and will take smaller darker flies and frequently in a "Nymphy" type fashion.

And this is pretty much the same as the theory I heard. Basically, it suggests that when salmon first enter the river, they are sea fish, and their residual feeding instinct is programmed to the food items they have been eating for the previous year or two in salt water. So they tend to be attracted to larger flies. The longer they spend in fresh water, the more they revert to being freshwater fish (as they were for the first two years of their life), and the feeding instinct similarly reverts to reflect what they ate when they were river fish.

I confess that sometimes I think there is far too much theorising and over-analysis about exactly why salmon take this or that fly, or why one fly will or won't work better than another. The fact is that we don't even know why a salmon takes a fly (or bait) at all (my own feeling is that there may well be more than one trigger, and although feeding instinct is probably one, other things such as curiosity and aggression may also stimulate takes at different times). And I'm sure many of us will have seen situations where two people, fishing in the same way, have taken fish from the same beat at the same time on very different flies (to say nothing of the question of different styles of presentation, like stripping a long winged fly). But having said that, I think the sea fish/river fish theory does offer a reasonably plausible explanation for the fact that fly sizes do often seem to get smaller as you go further upriver.

[Rustic1]

Very interesting