Hi, Old McDonald, welcome to the forum. I'm just being curious but what make is your Canadian fibreglass rod?
All the best in getting to Orkney, there's some of the best and most varied trout fishing I've ever enjoyed there. Long, hard winters though!
It is an Algonquin-Blanchard Model 710. From what I have seen on the internet I think I could get my £3/7/6d back plus a little interest. I would never sell it though. A few years after buying it I met my wife and she has used it as her one and only rod on small and large rivers and stillwaters, invariably using her favourite Garden Fly - one of the reasons I have done so little fly fishing in the last 50-odd years, we need to be where she can ply her craft. We honeymooned on Rannoch Moor in 1971 and she caught quite a few small brownies for the kitchen. Never looked back.
We have had temperatures down to minus 3.5ºC this week and a max of 5.4º yesterday. The winters in Orkney are a lot less severe than we had on our hill farm in Northumberland, and probably do not last any longer. We did have the consolation of a few hundred yards of the River Rede, a tributary of the N.Tyne. Good trout, but few salmon in those days and I never caught one. There is an old poem "It must be Spring in Redesdale if the frost will lift by Noon. The weather it says February, but the calendar says June."
Hello McDonald,
If they have Trout fishing on the Azores, That's where I would go to retire.
At least it would be a lot warmer than Orkney.
Up there they might have long winter nights like Norway.
There is some in the lakes on São Miguel but there are far too many people on the island for our liking. We decided that Pico is where we would be and I had accepted I would be sea fishing and gardening for the rest of my days. I have not done any sea fishing since living not far from the Pacific Coast of NSW, Australia between 1990 and '92 and have a beach caster that has never been used. Full-time farming does not leave a lot of leisure time. Covid has us re-thinking the future.
You are right about temperatures - presently around 16º down to 12 or so overnight on Pico. The long winter nights of the far north do not bother us. We farmed on the Black Isle north of Inverness before coming here.
