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When to move up to fishing Grafham!

3K views 51 replies 15 participants last post by  bobmiddlepoint 
#1 ·
Hi everyone,

I have been fly fishing since last August, and really enjoying it.

Thinking about it, I was wondering when I should move up from fishing my local lake to a reservoir.

Never fished from a boat, or on a reservoir, so just wondering what people thought.

I don't mind too much if the first couple of times I don't actually catch anything, although a fish or two would be nice!

Hanningfield Reservoir is only thirty minutes from me, so not much of a problem getting there.

Grafham Water is also on my list, but that is further away from me.

What are the pitfalls of fishing a reservoir over my local lake?

So what do you think?

Russ
 
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#2 ·
I believe Hanningfield is any method these days so maybe not a good idea to be competing with swimfeeders hurtling through the air.

The dam at Grafham is a reliable location and is fishable along its whole length. Go on the Grafham water website to get a feeling for the various bank hotspots. Contact the rangers as well. They'll give you up to date information.

The pitfalls are that the thing is a heck of a lot bigger and if you choose your location and get it wrong you might have to walk back to the car and drive right round the reservoir to the better location. Apart from that it's just a matter of scale, and the fish will fight harder too.
 
#6 ·
If you want to fish Grafham and other reservoirs I would suggest joining Invicta FFC - some very experienced and regular reservoir anglers who are in the main very happy to help and advise, and also have club days out on the reservoirs where they will match a novice with a veteran. For £18 per year, a wealth of advice and help.
Check out the website.

Peter.
 
#8 ·
Boat fishing can be great sport but you are right to be a bit wary if you have never fished from a boat before.
Probably best to go out with someone who has a bit of experience of boat fishing - they will keep you right about the various do's and dont's and hopefully boat etiquette.
It can be daunting going from a 5 acre pool to a 500 acre reservoir, look for features like bays, islands or anywhere that takes your fancy and try drifts along these places.
One thing to remember is that if you are fishing from a drifting boat you are covering a lot of water so you don,t always need to cast 30 yards, you will be drifting over that fish that rose 50 yds away soon enough.
Also remember to hang your flies at the end of the retrieve - you will get a lot more offers if you do.

hope you enjoy it
 
#9 ·
The big difference is that the fish for the most part will not be freshly stocked and will have moved on to natural food and you will need to adapt your techniques and fly choice to reflect this. In the small stillwaters the majority of fish are caught within a week of being stocked and so never really eat natural food so lures do well but you'll find their effectiveness a bit more limited on places like Grafham.
 
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#14 ·
Same for Thames.

they are proposing to withdraw useable abstraction licences from both the main producers of restocking trout by the end of March this year. It's unclear if there will be a phase in period or not. If both farms are closed it will be the end of 80%+ of Anglian Water stock fish, all of Thames, Bewl, Hanningfield and Draycote and many smaller fisheries will be affected too. It is hard to imagine how any of that production can be replaced and it's most likely that stock fish will at least triple, maybe more, in price and be unobtainable in large quantities.
 
#18 ·
there are a large number of farms under threat of revocation, actual or defacto, and amoung them are the 2 main producers of restocking trout in England and the only 2 farms capable of supplying the quantity of quality fish required by the large providers of stocked Stillwater fishing. Some of you might remember when Thames started stocking fish from a table farm a few years ago. It nearly destroyed Farmoor's reputation. They now stock only quality fish but that will be near impossible in the future if the EA get their way. The quality of fishing and the reasonable prices anglers have become used to will be history, just at a time when we desperately need to recruit more anylers.
 
#21 ·
Perhaps. There is precious little evidence of any measurable negative impact from the two farms I'm talking about. It seems a very disproportionate thing to potentially destroy stocked Stillwater trout fishing accross the Midlands, South, South West and Wales.
 
#29 ·
you'd imagine wrong. The discharge water is cleaned before being returned and has to meet extremely stringent criteria, unlike sewerage works.
But you could imagine how many who care for the rivers would be skeptical of this given how poorly the environmental regulations regarding other branches of farming are enforced.

For much of the last ten years I've lived next to two commercial salmon smolt rearing units in freshwater. Both of these were in Scotland not England. One had filters to remove solids yet nothing to strip out dissolved pollutants and thus the loch it emptied into was visibly enriched and had sewage fungus around the farm outlet. The other had no treatment at all.

I'm struggling to think of anything that looked like a sewage treatment works on the outlet of any English fish farm I ever saw. Maybe things have improved in recent years?

As for pumping the water back to the point of abstraction we all know that isn't going to happen as it will cost money. This leaves potential issues with both upstream and downstream migration. I know of one fish farm on Exmoor (yours) that operated a times with no smolt screen on the inlet... just saying.

Andy
 
#30 ·
Give it a go. None of them are notably difficult most of the time and the fish tend to be in better condition than the ones in small 'ponds'.

As a beginner look where the others go. Or the side the wind is blowing towards as that's where small edible things get blown.

That's what I do, I don't have much expertise beyond the southern chalkstreams and I only visit such places about once a year. I catch as many fish as most of the others.
 
#33 ·
you'd imagine wrong. The discharge water is cleaned before being returned and has to meet extremely stringent criteria, unlike sewerage works.

escapes do happen but most farmed trout are rainbows which don't interbreed and nearly all die fairly quickly. They are ill equipped to survive in the wild. There have been several surveys on stomach contents of escaped rainbows and they contain effectively nothing. They are a nuisance to anglers, but imagine how much more of a nuisance it is to the poor farmer. Damaged, however seems a gross exaggeration.

I guess if you have access to good wild trout fishing it's tough luck on the peasants who rely on stocked trout fishing on reservoirs.
 
#42 · (Edited)
there are a large number of farms under threat of revocation, actual or defacto, and amoung them are the 2 main producers of restocking trout in England and the only 2 farms capable of supplying the quantity of quality fish required by the large providers of stocked Stillwater fishing. Some of you might remember when Thames started stocking fish from a table farm a few years ago. It nearly destroyed Farmoor's reputation. They now stock only quality fish but that will be near impossible in the future if the EA get their way. The quality of fishing and the reasonable prices anglers have become used to will be history, just at a time when we desperately need to recruit more anylers.
Less abstraction?

About b****dy time too. It's ruining many of the 'natural' lakes and rivers just so people can catch stockies.

"Don't intefere with MY entertainment just because it's an easy target, attack dairy and other farming instead, you can pick the farmers off one by one. And you won't be surrounded by hundreds of whingeing anglers."
 
#49 ·
The environmental regulations in a Spain are very different to the U.K. therefore your example is completely irrelevant.

It was a scientific study, not a regulatory exercise and, as such, a valid and relevant contribution. Are you saying the science was wrong?
 
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