Tackle Tactics » Tips-Techniques » Adrian-Webbs-Trout-Tips » Browns & Cows 1-10-2018
Browns & Cows 1-10-2018
Spin session yields a few small trout. 1-10-18
It's been a week since my last trip to a river, due to crappy weather and high river levels and I was overdue for a spin session in a river. Today was one of our better days, with mainly clear blue skies and a West North Westerly breeze blowing, so it was good enough to go and wet a Mepps spinner.
Firstly I went and checked out a small river near home, only to find that there had been a lot of cattle in the river. Walking along it for around a kilometre without spotting a single trout, I headed back to the car to try another river. I headed on over to the Mersey River to find it was still running a little high and for some reason or another it wasn't all that clear either. Anyway, knowing this area so well I headed to a section of river where it was safe enough to cross over and hop in for a spin session. I thought I would try a new Mepps #1 Aglia Furia to start with and hopefully pick up a trout or two.
After spending some fifteen minutes fishing the main stream, without any signs of a trout, I moved into a nice back water to see if that would give up a trout. Actually, this back water has always fished well for me each time I've fished it, in fact it gave up my best river rainbow trout (720gm) back in November 2009.
There was some good flow in the back water which allowed me to cast and drift the Aglia spinner, which was soon taken by my first trout of the session. It was a rainbow trout that made several leaps and a couple of runs before I had it in the net. Nothing to rave on about, the rainbow came in at 340 grams. A little further up the back water run and I picked up a small brown trout, before heading back into the main stream. It was in the first long run that I fished where I hooked two more brown trout?of which just the one made it into the net.
That was it for the following fifty metres or so, when I caught another small brown trout and I mean small in a big way. It would only have gone around 180 grams if that. How it managed to take the treble hooks really amazed me. I didn't bother taking a photo of it as I wanted to get it back in the river as quick as possible. I always like to get any trout I catch back in the water as fast as possible and try not to handle them too much as not to stress them out. Especially the rainbow trout?because they stress very quickly and will go belly up in no time at all if handled for too long. That little brown was my last fish of the session because the wind really picked up, so I called it a day.
All fish were released for another day and hopefully to grow much bigger. With the air and water temps on the rise the trout fishing should start to fire up very soon. The session today only lasted one and a half hours, so it wasn't all that bad, just a shame the browns were all little fish.
I can't believe that I've only had the ten trips to the rivers so far for the trout season and just forty trout being caught and released, all due to the poor weather we've had since the start of the trout season. Still, after checking my records for the same time last season I had fourteen trips to the second of October for eighty six trout being caught and released. I've certainly got some catching up to do on the scorecard that's for sure!
Cheers,
Adrian (meppstas) Webb