Colourful Autumn

It's a great time of year to be walking down by the river, especially with the weather of the last couple of days. Leaves are changing colour and falling, fish are jumping everywhere and the perfect water makes me want to grab the fly rod again! Its good though to keep a check on the river during the close season rather than totally abandoning it. Since the water has gone down after the most recent flood the Bandon has looked absolutely brilliant. Over the last couple of days I've seen a couple of fresh and plenty coloured fish jumping, especially cock fish as they begin to get aggressive before spawning. Today I watched on as a big cock fish jumped twice in quick succession at the head of a pool, showing its advanced tartan colours, followed straight away by a lilac coloured hen fish in the same spot. Might there be some early spawning this year when we get the next frost? Whats also amazing though is to see the same fish in the same lies on the lower river, especially since some of them have been there over a month now and 3 floods have since passed! Encouraging to see was a pair of fresh sea trout at the end of a pool, a nice size to for the time of year going on for 2lbs. Although I've seen fresh sea trout at Christmas time before, I thought most would have gone up with the summer floods already, but they're still running.

I've always wanted to try and capture a salmon jumping over the weir in Bandon on a camera and I got lucky last week. Not many were showing while I was there, mostly trout, but I did manage 1 good snap of a fish on its upward migration. In the foreground is the fish pass which is monitored by CCTV. However, especially in high flow conditions, most of the salmon leap over the main weir itself, as can be seen here. The fish counter records a couple of thousand fish every year, but it is no true reflection of the total number of fish which pass the weir every year.

 



 

Sequence shots of a brown trout failing in its attempts to traverse the weir. There were loads trying and all failing, some of them not looking much bigger than fry/parr.

 

 

 

Fly tying has been slow lately but I did experiment with some new materials to conjur up a Park Shrimp of my own recipe.

For the tail I used finn raccoon body rather than arctic runner. The finn raccoon is also a very mobile material and a good sub for the runner. I have seen the pattern tied with a gold/black body and gold ribbing but I must get the pearl tinsel and incorporate that into a few of these flies also.Flies with pearl incorporated into them do very well for trout on the Bandon, the same might go for salar also!