Beanhill Lake Report

Beanhill Lake has continued to give excellent sport, mainly from fish feeding at or just below the surface. I took a good bag of rainbows the other afternoon just by fishing a light Claret Buzzer and watching for takes on the drop and the regular angler at the top of the lake seemed to have his rod bent most of the time.

For the last week, the rivers have been up and down – strictly up when I have managed to book a day’s salmon fishing, and I have been washed off twice. Work is certainly the curse of the spate river fisherman when days off have to be booked in advance. But for those who were able to get to the river on the right days, results have been nothing short of spectacular. During the week ending to 14 July, more than 60 salmon were taken in the upper river as far as Newbridge, and fish have been reported right up in the Irfon and other major tributaries already. Amazingly, this result puts the Wye ahead of the “big four” Scottish salmon rivers for the same week and the Usk has being doing well also. As both rivers for weeks now have effectively been escalators of flood water running into the Bristol Channel, the lesson would seem to be that the fish are there, if there is only water for them to run.

This certainly makes a welcome relief from all the doom and gloom we have been hearing about salmon stocks lately, while we worry about global warming, over-fishing off Greenland, mixed stock netting off Ireland, abstraction, acidification of spawning streams, sheep-dip and all the other concerns  . It’s worth remembering that, historically, even the great salmon rivers like the Wye have always had their ups and downs. Older anglers today tend to remember the glory days of salmon fishing on the Wye as those of Robert Pashley and the like, lasting from the twenties right through to the sixties and seventies. But it’s worth noting that the 1949-50 edition of Where To Fish (produced in those days by the Field magazine and a really serious attempt to list all Britain’s viable fishing) had this to say about the Wye: “About 40 to 50 years ago this river, owing to over-netting and other misuse, had deteriorated so much that it hardly paid the netting interests to operate. Netting in the estuary was stopped about 1904. Owing to careful conservation and the control of the nets the river today produces a larger rod catch of salmon than any other English or Welsh river and is an outstanding example of the benefit of the proper control of commercial fishing”. Well, it seems to me that we’ve been here before, and that what was recovered once could be recovered again, whether commercial fishing or some of the other factors which we still don’t understand fully were really to blame, either in 1904 or 2004.            

Oliver Burch

15/7/07