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July Fishing Report Devon River Taw

The Fox & Hounds Team
August 5, 2025

Mid-summer fly fishing on the River Taw

Beautiful summer evenings on the river marked the start of July, but as the month progressed and water temperatures continued to rise, we decided to suspend fishing for about 10 days to protect the fish from exhaustion.

We had a little bit of rain in the post-heatwave days which must have brought up the salmon and sea trout, as there have been several around. We’ve seen a couple of fish jumping in the the 24-28″ range and we’ve had our most successful sea trout fishing in recent years.

We’ve caught 8 sea tout in July, mostly around 13-15″ and one just under 18″. These beautiful, hard-fighting fish are a treat to catch and jump spectacularly all the way to the net. While we had spent considerable time offering a wide range of sea trout and salmon flies, in the end all of the sea trout caught have either come up for a sedge pattern, or taken a suspended black nymph. On the brown trout side, we returned 118 fish, many of which continue to be much larger than in recent years.

We were able to take advantage of the break in fishing to spend a bit of time on bank grooming and paths, especially on Home. Up at the top, at Bridge Pool, we came across the big guy pictured below, enjoying a respite from the heat, in the shade of a tree.

July Flies & Fishing

For July, Tom and I had gone through a slightly different process to come up with a common pool of 6 flies for our light-hearted competition. Until the very start of July, we hadn’t caught a single fish on sedge pattern, despite the heavy presence of caddis flies on the river. Tom tried out a small, size 16 fly with a wing of less than 10mm and suddenly everything changed. Needless to say the pattern made it into our July selection and along with a black nymph and a few others.

Despite a reasonable showing on the water of summer mayflies, 80% of the fish we caught in July were on either the elk hair caddis or beaded black nymph suspended below it, klink and dink style. There were a few small hatches of BWOs and anglers picked up a few fish on olive and red-brown mayfly imitations.

The most exciting and surprising part of the month were the sea trout. After weeks of targeting them, we just started catching them on brown trout set up described above. The first couple took the black nymph, then we had several come up for the elk hair caddis. While we’ve seen several large fish jump 3 feet out of the water, most of the sea trout we’ve been catching have been much smaller. These younger fish apparently tend to stay in schools, and we’ve been finding them holding in the deeper waters of Church and Chenson Beats, but we’ve seen them rising and jumping on all of the beats.

The best time on the water has been early morning and dusk. As we’re not generally early risers, we’ve left the early starts to guests and fished until we can no longer see to change a fly, and sometimes later. All but one of the sea trout have been during the day, but the hour or so before dark has been when the action really starts.

Buglife

We now have a veritable library of books on entomology and more specifically on Mayflies and the keys to their identification. It’s now become something of an obsession to try to identify every species of invertebrate on our beats.

It turns out that this is actually quite difficult to do and that identifying the difference between one mayfly species and another often comes down to counting the number of free segments in their feet, or the shape of their claws in the nymphs.

Our favourite identification key is the one that defines the shape and position of the teeth on the mandibles for species of the Baetis genus. Since we don’t want to kill any mayfly and we don’t know any of any decent mayfly orthodontists in the area, we may need to be content with 95% certainty for some species!

For matching the hatch and identifying possible food sources, we don’t really need know the species, but some species are more sensitive to pollution and can be a good indicator of the health of our river. Knowing the species can also help to predict what’s likely to be hatching, or around, in any given month, supporting our empirical findings and helping to improve our fly selection. Plus it adds another dimension to fly fishing for the more compulsively-oriented anglers amongst us!

Amazon has been delivering a steady supply of nets, jars, lights, magnifying glasses, together with the books and as our knowledge and confidence grows, we’ll put start a little guide to the invertebrates of the River Taw and flies to match.

In the meantime, in addition to Elk Hair Caddis and black nymph, a selection of smaller dry may patterns may serve you well, including brown-olive, rusty-red, olive and yellow. Hopefully Tom and I will manage to get our fly selection for August together in the next day or so, as part of our ongoing Tom vs Matt competition.

We hope that you get the chance to 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.

Be sure to check out the September edition of Trout & Salmon magazine, which should be out soon. Editor Andrew Flitcroft and photographer Peter Gathercole spent a weekend with us in April staying in the Treehouse and fishing the Taw. We’re very much looking forward to seeing the wonderful 10 page feature article they’ve put together!