Spring fishing trip to a Fishmaster destination - World famous Spey River in Northeastern Scotland. We fished at Lower Wester Elchies lovely and variable beat close Aberlour. The spring in Scotland had been quite cold this year but still the conditions for fishing were good. There had been good amount of fresh snow on the Cairngorn mountais this spring, the water level was during this 2 week period between 2 foot 6 inches and 4 foot 1 inch according to LWE gauge.

In other words the water level was a bit over normal this time of year and the water temperature varied between 4 and 7 degrees which is bit lower than normal. The weather was quite windy and mixed between nice and sunny and cloudy almost every day, day time temperatures rising up to 10 degrees celsius but the nights were still chilly, the temperature dropped close to zero degrees.

The first landed fish of our party was caught by our Finnish guest Mr Panu Korhonen who caught a nice 15 pound springer from tail of Millford pool with Willie Gunn tube fly. Mr Frode Olderkjaer from Norway caught a sea liced 10 pounder salmon at the tail of Millford as well.

Mr Olderkjaer caught another 2 springers, one at Millford and another at Sandy Hole. He also caught one fresh seatrout of 2 lbs. I myself succeeded to land and release a 7 lb springer, again at Millford pool. The most effective flies were tube flies with yellow and black, in quite big sizes this time. We used intermediate or medium sinker fly lines most of the time and they seemed to be working well in these conditions.

We saw quite often salmon jumping or rolling on the surface and had now and then pulls that kept the fishermen's interest in high level. Unfortunately we lost many fish, for some reason the salmon were taking very carefully and thus lot of them were lost. Our accomodation was in nice and well equipped house close the Spey river and Lower Wester Elchies beat.

Jouni Rauha

Information about Fishmaster trips to Spey >>