Blog — rutland fishing

Having fished Rutland Water now for over 38 years, I sure know how moody the place can be, and how the slightest change in wind direction, cloud cover, and temperature change, can have you in heaven one minute, then what feels like hell the next !  On Wednesday, conditions were perfect, overcast, 21 degrees, and an 8mph wind, and as the book tells us, the fish were on song too, and plenty of them. We started our drift, just down from X Buoy, with our set ups being pretty similar. I was using a Flash Attack Tequila booby, and Tequila Fab(both...

  My latest Grafham adventure saw me set afloat with regular guided friend Gary. I had heard Grafham had been fishing well, therefore switched our planned Rutland trip, to Grafham instead - would it pay off? We started our day along the West bank, an area I had heard had been holding some good quality fish, feeding on the pin fry, and snails. This particular corner repeats this quality fishing each year, you just need to catch it at the right time when the fish move in. As word gets out, and boats park there for the day, it soon...

This last week I have fished Rutland twice and Grafham once, and what a difference the two fisheries are at at the moment. The fish at Rutland have been in two bands it would seem. There are those close to the margins, patrolling the weeds edges, and there are those further out, hitting wandering coarse fish shoals of fry. The two trips have to Rutland yielded 13 fish for me, and there has been a stand out fly catching almost off of my fish - the Black Mamba lure. My first day out was with Dave Anderson - his mission,...

Having fished Rutland for over 37 years, It is fair to say I have witnessed many of its mood swings, however its current mood is on a different scale, although there are ways to nick a few, if you are in the know! From hero to almost zero in a week - how can that be? I shared a boat with Shaun Jones just 10 days ago. The weather was what we anglers would describe as perfect, overcast, and light winds, though the sun did eventually break through. We headed to the dam wall, and was met with the odd...

The days of 30 fish + to the boat are fast diminishing, as normal reservoir fishing resumes at our biggest waters. The pre-season stocks are now well spread out across the water, and added stocks, with the warmer water in the margins are now, in most cases, moving right out into deeper water.  The fish are now feeding naturally on the abundant food sources, buzzers, shrimp, daphnia, pin fry, snails etc. There is a lot here for the fish to feed on, so the pulling of lures is naturally less effective, as a more natural fly approach is needed to...