After a pretty epic 2023 of catches, the 24 season had a lot to live up too. With the river being predominantly a late spring to back end system, myself and the boys do not start guiding until late April onwards, I like people to have a chance to connect to fish when ever they fish with us.
May was a little bit quiet with a few fish hooked and lost, a number were seen throughout the system moving but they had other things on their mind as usual. June started in Style with my guest’s landing some beautiful sea lice’d salmon. With the warmer water temperatures small flys were doing the damage, and along with the king of fish we managed some specimen sea trout, which again were late running this year.
As the previous year we had a wet July, this was great for the fishing, with water temps down and water heights up, myself and guests had some great action. The sea trout numbers were not as the previous 2 years but they still kept us entertained with their acrobatics.
August was the start of some of the most insane fishing i have ever had as a guide, Im actually struggling to think of a day that we didn’t land a fish. The sea trout were making a stronger appearance but the numbers as salmon we were connecting with were spectacular. It was by far one of the best grilse runs i have ever seen on the Tyne, giving us days with multiple hook ups and landed fish. I was fortunate to land 3 beautiful Small salmon during a filming session with fulling mill, each fish was absolutely as fresh as they come and a great showcase of how good the fishing can be.
The month of September is always prolific on the river, with cooler water temperatures and higher concentration of fish throughout all of the river system, it’s a very popular month to fish. The Tyne fished amazing in September with guests constantly having bent rods with a lot of first ever fish being landed. My hosted trip to the Deveron was spectacular, between 6 rods we managed to hook 31 fish, landing a total of 21 salmon and 1 sea trout over the 6 days. It was a very special week as my Wife Gina came over for a week from Florida to join us on the trip. Even tho it was a drastic climate change, we actually had frosts, she put in a lot of hard work and managed her first ever salmon on the fly. The month had too many achievements by guests to write about them all, but one that stands out is a weekend my good friends Keith and Simon joined me. In between some filming I squeezed in with Robson green, the boys managed to land 9 salmon to 17lb, and 1 sea trout during a hectic few days.
The good fishing continued throughout October, even when others were struggling we kept plugging away and managed some great catches. It was a very wet month, with water levels continuously fluctuating, this was great for keeping the fish moving, but meant they were not holding in certain areas, especially further down the system. Having the option to move around between the north and south Tyne was a god send, this is the great thing about warden as we have both the North and South Tyne to fish. A couple of highlights for October included guest Mark Jhonstone landing his first ever salmon, a beautiful fly caught hen fish around 14/15lb right at the end of his trip. Another guest, 10 year old Oliver absolutely smashed it out the park again with his biggest salmon to date, another great conditioned hen fish around 14lb caught in really tough conditions.
The season for me as a whole couldn’t of gone any better, guests landed some incredible fish and most importantly they had fun doing it. The numbers for the season finished with 153 fish hooked, and landing a total of 113 in 123 days of angling.