‘Twas a slow month’s fishing in August this year. The lack of rain combined with the long warm spells meant low water levels and a couple of fishing closures, so as not to overly stress the fish. Last year we had a few downpours to top up the river, but this year the river dropped to its lowest level in 3 years.
Fortunately we have a couple of beats that hold deep water, no matter what; ranging from knee high to over 6 feet deep in places. These continued to produce fish throughout the month, though not in the numbers we might have hoped.
We had far fewer days out on the river, but both guests and staff enjoyed some magical summer evenings and normally managed to have a catch a few fish, recording 103 brown trout for the month. We were however able to add a couple more sea trout on the board!
August Flies and Fishing
The unstoppable combo of sedge and nymph, fished klink and dink style that had worked so well in July, switched off at the start of August as quickly as it had switched on at the beginning of July.
To be fair, the black nymph continued to perform, and overall we had more fish taken below the surface than on it.
Rising fish were few and far between, but if you could get a cast above one in time, you could normally entice it to take with a mayfly or terrestrial imitation.
There wasn’t an abundance of insect life on the surface, but certainly enough to keep more fish rising than we saw. Perhaps it was the warmer water making them sluggish, but it did force anglers to cycle through the fly boxes trying everything from large stripped streamers to size 22 gnat patterns, and everything in between.
Some anglers found success with spider patterns, although not with any consistency and small GRHE’s produced a few fish aw well.
The two sea trout caught early in the month were both on black nymphs.
Buglife
There was another notable drop in the number of hatches and general number of flies on water. Warmer evenings still saw caddis and mays in fair numbers, but even they were present, we didn’t see the rises we’d expect.
As mentioned before, we’ve had our entomology hats on recently with the goal of identifying the different species of invertebrates in the river, starting with the mayfly and caddisflies.
We have nine species of mayfly that we’ve identified with 95% certainly and half a dozen we’ve narrowed down to a few possibilities. Season over season we’ll get better, but on a very positive note, several of the species we have are extremely sensitive to pollution. We’ll be keeping a particularly close eye on these as they can be an important indicator of rivers health.
Pale Wateries, Yellow May, and Pale Evening mayflies made up a lot of the small light coloured flies we were seeing in August, although we had limited success with pale yellow mayfly imitations. BWO patterns in brown olive and rusty reds produced a few fish and we saw a smaller number of the large Green Drakes this month. Our caddis identification is trailing the mays, but the increase in the number of Black Silverhorns was notable, but again matching patterns produced only a few fish.
Looking under rocks, digging in the gravel and doing kick samples revealed a lot of immature mayfly nymphs from a wide range of species as well as many species of caddisfly. While we haven’t properly studied the species keys for stoneflies in the river, we noticed a lot more stonefly nymphs than we normally see. Hopefully this bodes well for hatches in the early part of next summer, or even later this year.
Back at the beginning of the month, we had the Westcountry Rivers Trust spend a morning with us on Home Beat doing some electro fishing. Electro fishing is conducted in the area every couple of years or so to monitor fish stocks.
I believe that generally the results were positive, although the figures need to be seen in the context of all of the other data gathered. The researchers did seem pleased by the number and size of the salmon parr found.
Earlier this year we hosted and participated in an event for training local enthusiasts to measure water quality and we are always happy to support initiatives that aim to sustain local rivers and habitat, so that we can all enjoy them for many years.
As we head into September, there has been a notable change in the weather, with rain showers becoming more regular. We’re hoping for a rise in the river to allow the salmon to move more easily to their spawning grounds and to generally refresh the river.
We were also delighted to see the 10 page article about the hotel and fishing on the River Taw in the September edition of Trout & Salmon magazine. We’re very grateful to the whole team over at Trout & Salmon for all the work that has obviously gone into the article and for their tireless efforts to inform, educate and entertain anglers for more than 75 years.
As always, we hope that you can get away and join us for some fishing. Fishing can be added to any stay on an ad hoc basis and we have two packages. Our Fishing Break is a Dinner Bed & Breakfast package that includes fishing for £159/night, while our Ultimate Fishing Package combines a stay in our Luxury Treehouse with fishing. Both can be booked online or by contacting the hotel.
August Fly Fishing Gallery
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