Compliments of the Season


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Summer long ago

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It’s a long time since I was sixteen, but one thing is still so vivid in my memory. My older brother was travelling, post uni, and my parents had taken me on a holiday to the west coast of Scotland, where they intended to tour from a base in a lonely, rented farmhouse right on the coast. Given the choice, I had elected to go fishing rather than suffer all that mileage in the back seat of the car every day. Plenty of small but obliging brown trout kept me fully occupied in the tiny pools and riffles of the burn as it cascaded down toward the sea. My supply of flies began to dwindle, but they were all scrounged from adults anyway, I still had plenty in hand for fishing the whole length of tumbling burn until I reached the first of four tidal pools down on the rocky shore, where I hoped I might encounter a sea-trout for the first time. By the third day, there I was, carefully casting my way along the first of those pools, when a soft, lilting Scottish voice nearly made me jump out
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Read all about it! No fake news here

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  The Wild Trout Trust auction is one way you can get onto first class fishing, and like today’s trip, it’s also how you can get yourself some prime time with an exceptionally knowledgeable guide! This particular Lot gave my buddy and I two day-rods on the River Yealm. This urgent, tumbling river drains off Dartmoor, and once formed into a proper river runs seven miles to the sea. A century ago it was a well-known Sea-trout and Salmon fishery, and although there still are silver visitors, most of the fishing is for truly wild Brown Trout, usually six to eight inches, with the odd bigger one turning up. I was guided by Geoff Stephens, while my buddy Brian was guided by Paul Kenyon, whose name may be familiar to you. Both of these inestimable gents have probably forgotten more about fishing wild rivers than I will ever learn, and both know the Yealm like the back of their own hands. They are also acquainted with many of the ‘top’ fly fishers, past and present, work with Snowbee from time
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Tempest

  The lough, aided and abetted by the unpredicted, freakish weather we sometimes encounter nowadays (thank you global warming), had seemed against me for five long days. Today would be my last chance, but when I met Michael at the boat, he looked gloomier than ever. “The forecast is dreadful” he said “if you hadn’t had such a terrible, hard week, I’d have called today off. But … we can give it a bit of a go until it breaks, which is supposed to be after lunch. We’d better go now, so”.   On about the sixth drift, the overcast sky blackened, the wind strengthened, and began to whip up white horses. Michael looked anxiously about as he rowed. The rain started, heavily, and soon became almost horizontal as the wind blew even harder; we could no longer make out the mountains. Michael said “I don’t like the look of this, make this your last cast”. I did as bidden, starting to work the flies back but halfway through the retrieve there was a two-hundred-decibel roll of thunder accompan
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