Yes we know it holds 'salmon' - but what about the 'trout' of the River Lune?
Oddly, many stretches of the River Lune are seriously neglected by trout fishing enthusiasts yet prove to be most popular with the salmon and sea trout brigade. This is strange as the whole system is brilliant for large trout and affords the naturalist angler with the opportunity to catch perhaps his/her best wild specimen.
Silver waters on the beautiful River Lune - the home of magnificent wild trout
After seeing it with my own eyes over many seasons, I genuinely believe that many 'wannabe' trouters have originally made the big mistake of using too much heavy gear like large ungainly reservoir rods, overtly thick fly lines and terribly over-dressed flies when attempting to catch these crafty spate stream trout so they have possibly been put off due to this error. Many of these disenchanted anglers then choose to sign up to the 'Chuck it and chance it' game of chasing migratory fish with flashy spinners, worms or huge so-called 'flies' that look more like something off your granny's Xmas tree or even resort to the 'charms' of hunting down rainbows in man-made stocked lakes. Alternatively, I have had the very good fortune over the years to have helped one or two truly nature-loving anglers get into the highly addictive yet minority cult of the dry fly - people who were initially in grave danger of resorting to the clumsier angling games as mentioned above instead of the great finesse of the tiny 'imitative' dry fly. Sadly many of today's anglers have little feasible notion that fly fishing is 'supposed' to be about imitating the quarry's diet and this ancient skill seemingly belongs to only a few devoted anglers who have the inherent passion and desire to study their prey in such detail.
My son Kyle is also now a keen naturalist with interests in plant life and insects etc. He is pictured here with a nice Lune trout that he caught on a dry fly which weighed in at 1lb 5oz. It would be nice to see more youngsters take up the noble art of the naturalistic fly fisher.
Kyle actually started his fly-fishing career when he was about seven years old, higher up stream on the Yorkshire spate rivers
Budding dry fly expert at seventeen years old? The lad casting upstream to rising fish on the Lune