Just When I Thought.....

 .......it couldn't get worse, it did.  Murphy the weather man was alive, well and kicking brutally throughout 2025.

I finished the last post, Stark Contrasts, on an optimistic note following disappointments on the Orkla and Tweed.  After all, who wouldn't be optimistic with the prospect of a week's fishing on the lovely Helmsdale in early September?  And surely the great Yorkshire drought would have to break at some point?

Helmsdale

Both hopes were cruelly dashed.  The week on the Helmsdale was a fruitless pastime of 'find a puddle among the boulders' and then try something extraordinary to provoke a potted fish into doing something daft.

Lower section, normally fished with a 13 footer
The water in the foreground is less than 18" deep
Grilse were getting this far from the estuary (around the corner)

Upper section
No fishable water

A fishable puddle at Suisgill
Prone casting rock (R) and fish location (L)

During the course of the week I found three puddles holding salmon, and moved fish in all three, but without achieving connection.  I assessed all three events as being a combination of boredom and curiosity, but not genuine taking interest.  In tiny pools with minimal gin-clear water and multitudinous rocks the fishing and watercraft demands were extreme.  Presentation had to be pinpoint accurate with zero disturbance or drag.  The rocks precluded standing off and working at range.  You had to sit down well away from the puddle, stay below the skyline, survey the scene, locate awake fish and decide the attack plan, which could take 45 minutes.  The approach then required high levels of fieldcraft: I hadn't done sustained crawling since giving up deer stalking in 2007.  I cursed myself for leaving my gardening knee pads (brilliant for close quarter trout fishing) at home for the damage to knees and waders alike, but despite the discomfort, the challenge was irresistible.  Faced with an otherwise hopeless quest you have to convert despair into motivation and enjoyment.

In two cases the fishing range was under 20 feet, which are familiar circumstances for a small river trout fisherman, albeit more normally tackled with a 7' #3 rather than a 9' 6" #7.  You have to stay under 30 degrees elevation from the fish, but even then, in strong light (if at all possible, never approach from the sunny side), it may perceive your diffused outline through the reflective underside of the surface.  And remember your rod!  You also need to learn some new tricks: reclining on your right side on the back-slope of a flat rock while side-casting into the breeze with your left hand with only 6' of line outside the tip ring to shoot enough line to allow stripping was a novel challenge.

The most successful fly solution was a hitched Sunray in the MCX colour scheme.  At my request Peter Nightingale had made side holes in the tubes to allow oblique presentation; otherwise a hot darning needle does the DIY job.  The leader had to be plain nylon for flotation rather than my usual fluorocarbon, with a light #12 double tied on a loose loop adjusted to present the hook level with the end of the wing.  In one larger and deeper pot I was able to try a Muddler and then an upstream small Snaelda fished drift-sink-and-draw.  Neither yielded a positive result, whereas the hitched Sunray moved fish in every case.  But the bottom line was that I blanked - again.

Four rods caught only one salmon in the week.  TTMN, fishing a normal fly entirely conventionally landed a good 15 lbs hen fish in the Suisgill pool in the gathering gloom 20 minutes before dinner on the Saturday evening.  This was hugely welcome and most appropriate because this was probably his swansong on his beloved Helmsdale after 40+ years.  Sometimes, however rare, Murphy can be just, kind and smiling.  However, now that TTMN has given up his weeks it is unlikely that I shall ever return to this beautiful place, a sad thought.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the new Suisgill ghillie Aaron Grant who has succeeded the legendary Donnie Sutherland.  Despite Donnie's departure I still fished his flies out of deference and well-placed fear: he turned up to inspect on the Thursday.  Throughout the week Aaron was unfailingly cheerful, positive and helpful.  Despite his tender years he knows his water and his stuff.  I wish him a long and happy tenure at Suisgill.

The UPS Comedy

Aaron was also incredibly obliging on a personal note amidst a comedy of errors.  Our host broke a section of his Vision Hero on the first day.  I emailed Guide Fly Fishing that evening and by 0900 the next morning a replacement was on its way (hurrah!) with UPS (oh, gloom!).  The UPS tracker said it would arrive on Wednesday night.  It moved rapidly to Inverness, where it stopped and then vanished.  I contacted the UPS service centre somewhere on the far side of the world from which I learnt nothing.  A call to their local office established that UPS don't deliver north of Inverness, where they sub-contract to a local firm, to whom they'd transferred the package earlier that day.  I called the sub-contractor: "we've got the parcel but don't know where it is".   My second call: "It's in Thurso (they'd driven past me to get there) and is coming back to Inverness (passing me again)".  "Could I collect it from Thurso? No".  "Could they drop it at their depot (??) in Helmsdale on the way past southwards?  No, it's unmanned (???).  When might it reach me at Suisgill?  We only deliver up there once per week, so it will be next week.  But I'll be gone by then so please return to the sender".  They delivered it to Suisgill in my absence on the Monday, stating that it had been handed over to me.  The good Aaron duly took charge of the parcel.

Aware that my host was due to fish the Tweed within a fortnight, I called Guide Fly Fishing to discuss a plan.  They cheerfully volunteered to send another section to my home address, timed to coincide with my return, whence I could post it to my host at home in Oxfordshire.  UPS delivered it to Suisgill the following week (you'd have difficulty making this up).  Aaron now had two rod sections, which he taped together and posted via Royal Mail, arriving in Yorkshire 48 hours later.  I had the greatest difficulty persuading him to accept repayment or any compensation for his efforts and inconvenience.  Meanwhile Guide posted a third section to me at home, which reached my host in good time for his Tweed trip.

In a long lifetime of fishing I have enjoyed unfailingly good service from the tackle trade.  But nothing has ever approached the cheerful heroism and forbearance of Liam the customer service lead at Guide Fly Fishing recounted here.  I know it's been a bit long and detailed, but he's a one man clinching argument for investing in Vision or Sage equipment.

Autumn on the Ure

Back in February I had booked six double rod days on Thoresby, spread in pairs across the last week of September and the first fortnight of October.  I made the heroic assumption that even if the summer was dry, there ought to be some water by the time of the Autumn Equinox.  There was, but it was too little, too late.  The first rain came on the 15th, followed by another lift a week later.  But it was woefully insufficient to clear the lower Ouse and then permit a run through to the upper Ure.  My September guest had come all the way from Wiltshire, so we fished half a day and abandoned the second altogether.  There were no fish present.  By early October the water had fallen away completely, so I cancelled to spare my guests wasted shorter trips.  HMCX came up from Bath for the final two-day block and our annual father and son bonding fishing and stay at the Redmire Village Pub (previously the Bolton Arms).  More rain and a moderate lift gave us at least some water, but there were still no fish.  We saw one lonely traveller of about 6 lbs appear on Day 2, before HMCX departed home at lunchtime. I fished on for a couple of hours to pay my respect to the fishing gods but without hope or expectation, while testing a demonstrator Vision XO Graphene 14' 2".  It was a depressing end to an appalling season - a total blank, the first since the great drought and heatwave of 2003.  The impact on my fishing morale was such that it has taken me two months to muster the motivation to write anything.

HMCX fishing the tail of Frodle Dub
historically a good bet at this time of year

Deep Concern

After two consecutive blank seasons on the Ure, with the majority of my guests' days cancelled, I have growing concern over the change in weather patterns we observed in the past decade.  In the 10 years to 2014 we had a normal spread of conditions: 3 dry hot years (2003, 5, 9), 2 very wet (2007, 12), and 5 about average.  There was nothing in that spread that gave any hint of what was to come after 2014.  Seven of the 10 succeeding years have been hot and dry throughout the salmon season.  Only one (2017) had above average rainfall.  The temperature levels have climbed unbelievably: 2016 broke all records until being far exceeded in three of the past 5 years.  In 2025 we had just 25 mm of rain in the Vale of York between 1st March and 15th September - 7.5% of average.  Tributary becks ran dry, Aysgarth Falls stopped flowing and across North Yorkshire aquifers are perilously depleted.   Pollution levels, especially the E Coli counts associated with cow excrement, reached record levels, leading to a ban on bathing.  This was unremitting gloom.

However, the biggest problem was far downstream.  While the flow in the Ouse through York dwindled to previously unrecorded levels, the output from the Naburn water treatment plant serving 300,000 people continued undiminished and thus occupying an increasing proportion of downstream water.  With a growing supply problem and dry reservoirs in the West Riding, Yorkshire water increased abstraction at Kilgram, and then in August secured a licence to take a further 60,000 tons per day from below Boroughbridge.  The combination of dramatically reduced flow, the increased proportion of treated water and exceptionally high temperatures, may have created a static plug of de-oxygenated water at the head of the tide between Selby and Goole.  Once the dissolved oxygen count falls below 5 ppm, salmon can't swim through it.

This factor played a major part in the extinction of salmon in the Ouse system in the 1950s.  From the early 1980s the water quality started to improve as a result of de-industrialisation in York and Selby, better standards applied at Naburn and stricter environmental regulations.  

After the unusually hot summer of 1995 salmon were able to run freely throughout the spring, summer and autumn.  The hot drought year of 2003 is a visible exception.  By 2010 the dissolved oxygen count was so good that the EA suspended measurement.

I had wished to write this section with the help of real current data drawn from the new 'Open Government' data sets available on .Gov.  However, after an hour of frustrated searching and digging I was unable to locate and extract anything of the necessary currency and granularity.  I wanted monthly averages at Boothferry Bridge for the decade 2016-25.  All I could locate was pan-year averages for 2016-19, which are no use whatsoever.  The advice on the site was that if I wanted more detail I should submit a FOI request to the EA, which of course was what you had to do before the Open Government initiative.

Consequently, I have to fall back on the reasonable assumption that the combination of the longest recorded drought, the lowest prolonged flows and the highest average temperature may have recreated the devastating oxygen block; and that these conditions may have prevailed in other recent years.  If that is indeed correct, then we face potentially incalculable impacts on the Ure's salmon population.  The salmon surprised us with the speed of their recovery - from post-extinction to good fishable surplus in a decade - and we can only hope that they can do so again.  Butcher's no escaping the inference of two blank seasons on a beat that previously gave me up to 28 salmon in a season.  I am deeply concerned.

Minor Tackle Points

Vision Rivermaniac 9' 6" #7 (Medium)

The discolouration of the cork is blood
from my fall on the Guinard  in
July 2024

This is the second season that I have used the medium action Rivermaniac for short-range single-handed salmon work.  I find the action delightful for overhead, Spey, Roll and ad-hoc casting with the Rio #7 Single Handed Spey line.  Unlike still water fishing you aren't striving for distance, so the softer tip isn't a handicap and certainly doesn't prevent you from landing the fly accurately and quietly.  And it's a definite advantage in creating ad-hoc casts (as per the Helmsdale above).

It's my fall back and go to rod for smaller rivers and low water, of which I've seen too much recently.  I also find hitching with a high rod tip much easier with a single hander than a double.

The reel is the budget Hero #7, which is well made and very tough.  My fall on the Gruinard left no significant damage to the heavy green powder coating, but I had to replace the handle that had taken the brunt of the impact.  The spool and spindle remained entirely true.  It's a great workhorse with a lovely handle and an impressive drag.

The best design feature is something I first encountered on the Rulla (tested 2015 but now sadly out of production).  You can see the red backing - a true salmon's worth - nestling in the concave section below the main arbor.  This gives you the double advantage of large capacity in a smaller reel, in a simple bit of elegant design.

On the question of backing, the salmon doesn't know what size of reel you're using, and nor may you only catch small fish with a single hander.  So be prepared: there's 125 yards on there.

Vision XO Graphene 14' 2" #9

I borrowed the demonstrator from Guide Fly Fishing and took it up to the Ure for two days in early October.  The relatively low water on Thoresby and the strong downstream breeze weren't ideal for testing, so I didn't get it out until the afternoon of the second day after HMCX had gone home.  I matched it with a Danielsson Control #9/13 and a Rio Scandi 37g head, which balanced exactly.

I'd had a few casts about 5 years ago with the non-Graphene 14' 2" and didn't immediately warm to it, so I came into this test with a degree of prejudice.

Flesh Dub in autumn
(earlier photo)

Frodle Dub was nowhere near big enough, so I went down to Flesh Dub for more room.  Even with left hand Double Spey and Snake Roll, the head of the pool was too narrow when wading far enough out to form a good D-loop to explore the rod's capabilities.  At short range it felt a little flat and dull. For reference, with an oblique cast around 50 degrees, bank to bank is 38 yards.  I tried a couple of casts at a very shallow angle before going down to the tail onto the ledge between the trees.  There I had the room to form the biggest possible D-loop (which this rod needs) and more distance in front.

So it's a left handed Double Spey, with three generous loops of runner in the fingers of the right hand, a good full low sweep to get maximum momentum into the D, a nice high stop, and the fly lands 10' up the far bank: quite remarkable.  The addition of Graphene has done something special to this rod: it's a through action and loads really deeply in classic Vision style.  The recovery at the stop in the forward cast is extraordinary.  Combining those two potentially conflicting characteristics without apparent compromise is a serious achievement.  

I wouldn't wish to draw too many firm conclusions from such a short test by someone who isn't a first-class caster.  I should have loved to explore the right handed casts, but the wind didn't allow it.  Next season I shall try to borrow it again for use on the Tweed, where there are also opportunities for sinking and other lines.  But its remarkable performance has certainly whetted my appetite for further exploration.  If you get a chance to try one, grab the opportunity because you too may feel some magic.

Happy Christmas

I apologise for there being no MCX Christmas Stocking this year.  My motivation didn't recover in time and there seemed to be a dearth of interesting items to recommend.

Nevertheless I wish everyone the happiest Christmas and everything good in 2026.  Above all I wish for a a nice plain average year's weather in a break from the past decade's dreadful trend.  A bit of normal would be a wonderful gift.

Just One Week is now heading for the milestone of 400,000 page reads since its inception. I am most grateful for your continued readership and support.