Andy Murray (holding the fish) and Chris Henshaw enjoy a June moment on the NFC's lower E beats.
For rods used to the UK’s 10.5-month-long salmon-fishing year the Gaula season is not the longest. But those three months of world-class fly-fishing from June 1 to August 31 bring the chance for British game-anglers of some notable highlights.
One of course is to connect via a 15ft fly rod with one of the Gaula’s solid Atlantic salmon, weighing anything from a 5lb Continue reading
If you fish the waters of the River Nith, and drink in the Buccleuch and Queensberry Hotel in Thornhill, and are male, you will have seen this.
It’s not as though you will have missed it, for Miss Georgina Ballantine stares out at you – no challenges you – from a framed photograph above the urinals in the Gents.
With the result that just as you’re going about your business in Continue reading
It’s wild out there. Winds touched 70mph again overnight and this is Cambridgeshire. But there’s an even wilder world out there, just travel north a bit and that doesn’t just mean Scotland. A bit further than that, south and very far north of the Arctic circle where the polar bears nestle in their ice caves and beneath the ice the salmon feed in the abundant waters of the north Atlantic. Ocean tides swirl around the granite outcrops of the Faroes, Greenland, the Barents Continue reading
You know who you are. You love to fish, then you take it all further – sometimes much further – to fish somewhere really stunning, really special. As you reach your salmon river and stand on the bank of the home pool on that first evening, you know it is worth the commitment, the risk, the faith.
Friendships – eye contact, a smile, a clap on the back, a hi-5. There is nothing like that connection between those who know what they love and move heaven and earth to get back there each year. The sight of a familiar face with which to share the adventure confirms what you already knew: that it’s all worth it.
Well you know how it is – not me exactly but part of my forearm/wrist. And one of my hands, but that’s on the back cover. Yes it was ‘that’ perfect Varzuga springer again, expertly photographed by Roxtons’ Kola camp manager Jess James in May of this year – and now reproduced in beautiful gloss full colour on the cover of the Sportfish winter 2011/12 catalogue. Continue reading
The Gaula.
Anyone? Let me make a start. Well the Tweed has to go in there so let’s get that out of the way. Then there is obviously the most prolific Atlantic salmon river in the world, Kola jewel, the Varzuga. Other Russian rivers that have to make it are the Varzina and the Yokanga. Sport-fishing jewel the River Gaula is in the team Continue reading
Sport not food: a rod-caught Atlantic salmon, barbless fly removed, is kept in the water before its swift return.
It’s easy sometimes to forget what a serious and life-sustaining business fishing – and the associated health or otherwise of world fish stocks – is for many millions of people in the world.
Around 45 million people (at least 6 million of them women), according to a United Nations report launched yesterday, fish for a living and are threatened by overfishing and climate change.
I – and readers of this blog overwhelmingly – fish for sport, but I am not being entirely flippant with my blog tag-line ‘Born to fish, forced to work and fish’ as many times my Continue reading
Gaula filmmaker Daniel Göz shoots the release of a Gaula fish in August.
All right, I’m running out of excuses for that tardy end of season report. Truth is I’ve been busy busy busy. Born to fish, forced to work and fish. Only problem with busy busy busy is it foiled my last-ditch Continue reading
A Park Shrimp tube-fly so gnarled by salmon’s teeth it had lost much of its original teardrop profile but something about it spoke to me quietly and insistently on the Gaula this summer. “Try me,” it said. And so I did.
Fished on a long leader of 19lb fluorocarbon to an intermediate shooting head, the fly swam perfectly through the holding spots at a nice, even depth. Continue reading
The annual conservation auction held by NASF/ Reddvillaksen.no 14 days ago has raised a record £90,000 (800,000 NOK) for Orri Vigfusson’s salmon conservation organisation.
And it was a UK rod who clinched the showpiece lot ‘after a hard battle’: a two-day salmon adventure fishing on the eyewateringly exclusive River Alta. The final price? 170,000 NOK, or about £18,000. Continue reading
