Best Spring Beat!!!

Lars Terkildsen with a fish from Commonty

Well thats the spring season over and it's turned out quite good!! However, this has been the hardest spring I have ever had, the conditions have been difficult to say the least! We lost 9 days in February due to grue which was impossilble to fish in, March was the hottest on record with Aboyne breaking the highest temperature ever recorded in Scotland for  March, the river dropped to 7" on the gauge and we had a water temperature of 55F, April saw more settled conditions but fish were still hard to catch, lots of them had fungus on them due to the drop in water temperature.

                 Tony Wheeler playing a 19lber in the Village pool

May arrived and so did the snow!! The temperature dropped and it was like fishing in March! However, this gave the hills a much needed covering of snow which is still melting into the river. In all my years as a Ghillie I've never seen snow fall so late in May, this did the trick though as new fish entered the river and flew past the bottom beats and decided to stop at the Ballogie beats! Carlogie did very well and yesterday the rods fished as hard as they could to catch the 2 fish required to beat last years total. Unfortunatly they only managed to get 1 - well done to Neil McGown from East Haugh Hotel, Pitlochry for getting 1 from Alan's pool last night this fish brought the total catch for the month of may to 70 equaling last years total.

            Another nice fish caught by Andrew Williamson at Carlogie


After looking through the catch figures, Ballogie was the top beat on the river with a total catch of 136, Carlogie came 3rd with a total of 113, while Commonty almost managed to hit its 5 year average with a total of 44. While most beats struggled to catch fish, the Ballogie beats consistently caught fish all through the spring, I'm very proud of all my fishermen who battled some really atrocious weather and river conditions at times to achieve these numbers, It's also satisfiying to see fish being caught in some of the new pools we have made - Alan's pool and Fraser's pool have produced good numbers of fish but these pools are still to be further improved in the winter.

Commonty has had the largest fish at 25lbs
Below are the figures for all 3 beats, have a look at them it makes for some interesting reading!

Commonty Fish Catches

Salmon & Grilse

Year	'07	'08	'09	'10	'11	Average	'12
Feb	7	5	5	5	2	4.8	14
Mar	8	8	13	4	11	8.8	4
Apr	7	15	9	22	22	15.0	13
May	6	11	9	25	29	16.0	13
Jun	3	5	11	13	12	8.8	0
Jul	15	7	13	9	16	12.0	0
Aug	9	19	14	29	35	21.2	0
Sep	11	18	9	32	22	18.4	0
Oct	0	21	24	23	5	14.6	0
Total	66	109	107	162	154	119.6	44

Carlogie Fish Catches

Salmon & Grilse

Year	'07	'08	'09	'10	'11	Average	'12
Feb	8	8	7	6	6	7.0	7
Mar	17	12	8	9	15	12.2	14
Apr	13	25	20	15	55	25.6	22
May	14	56	33	49	70	44.4	70
Jun	2	16	42	23	45	25.6	0
Jul	15	11	34	23	40	24.6	0
Aug	42	39	36	50	48	43.0	0
Sep	28	40	31	49	49	39.4	0
Oct	0	23	49	46	58	35.2	0
Total	139	230	260	270	386	257.0	113

Ballogie Fish Catches

Salmon & Grilse

Year	'07	'08	'09	'10	'11	Average	'12
Feb	15	10	28	13	21	17.4	21
Mar	20	23	19	13	21	19.2	29
Apr	24	34	25	33	64	36.0	42
May	13	30	43	42	50	35.6	44
Jun	11	20	38	20	41	26.0	0
Jul	13	12	31	30	46	26.4	0
Aug	24	18	41	45	46	34.8	0
Sep	40	39	70	65	61	55.0	0
Oct	0	34	90	44	70	47.6	0
Total	160	220	385	305	420	298.0	136