Champagne for 1st Salmon

Friday 1st March, 2019

The 2019 salmon and trout season opens on Sunday! If the end of a five month break isn’t motivation enough, Pol Roger have kindly donated a bottle of champagne for each for the anglers who catch the first salmon on both rivers.

If you catch an early season Wye or Usk salmon, first check here to see if anyone has beaten you to it. If not, please send us details of your catch by email or call us on 01874 711 714. Kelts and parr are not included of course and the fish must be caught using a legal method. We will need the name of a witness or a photo but please ensure you stick to the correct catch and release guidelines.

Where the first fish will come from is difficult to predict. The Wye is usually the first river to register and quite often, the fish comes from the Ross area. With the current low water conditions, this could again be the case. Fresh salmon were seen moving through just upstream of Ross this week.

There is some quite heavy rain forecast this weekend so come Sunday, weather and river conditions could be entirely different for the off. Looking beyond the weekend, the forecast suggests that salmon and trout anglers will be faced with more normal March conditions than the record-breaking temperatures of February. Water temperatures are still cold and no significant large dark olive or March brown hatches have been reported yet, so trout anglers in particular might have to fish deep.

Our thanks to Pol Roger once again for sponsoring the first fish prize.

Usk Fish Eating Birds Survey

At 9.30am on Sunday 10^th March the Foundation is enlisting the help of as many Usk owners and anglers as possible to carry out a one-hour fish eating bird survey on their beats. We need to know numbers of these birds to determine whether they are contributing to the decline in juvenile salmon numbers in the Usk catchment, as recorded in our electrofishing surveys in recent years.

It is important that as much of the river as possible is covered. If you are able to carry out a survey on your fishery (or someone else can on your behalf), please let Chris Gurney at the Foundation know in advance by email or by calling him on 01874 711 714.

Please note that surveys must start at 9.30am and last no more than one hour to avoid duplicate counting. Recording and species identification information can be found on the Foundation’s website here. The information will be collated and made available shortly after the survey is complete. Another Usk survey will be carried out in September.

Upper Usk fishing for sale

Approximately 420 yards of attractive single bank fishing on the river downstream of Sennybridge is up for sale, the full details of which can be requested from the vendor Stewart Harverson by email or by contacting him on 07866 583 643.

New Usk Season Rods & Day Tickets

Flexible season rods are now available for the Chainbridge fishery on the lower Usk. Rods can access the beat on almost any day of their choice using the Fishing Passports self-booking system. In addition to this a ‘mini’ rod is available, enabling 5 days to be booked in advance at a discounted rate. Please call us on 01874 712 074 for more information.

Also on the Usk, the Abergavenny Town Water will soon be available for both day tickets and season rods via the Fishing Passport site. Elsewhere, flexible and set day per week season rods are still available on several Wye & Usk fisheries – please see here for more details.

LAFA Newsletter

The Lugg and Arrow Fisheries Association (LAFA) has published their spring newsletter, which can be viewed here. This gives the latest news from this part of the Wye catchment. They also have a brand new website here.

All the best from WUF.