No new fish to report since yesterday.  The dry spell looks likely to continue for some time as the upper river slowly drops away and the possibility that beats below Monmouth may get to fish at some stage.  Still looks to be considerable colour though even now.

Looks like 9 from the Wye 3 from the Severn and none yet from the Usk   Well its a start!!

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Times like this it makes one wonder just how much affect have the loss of other fishing methods had on  the reduced the rod catch on the Wye.  I understood in the past that for various reasons  only 10 to 15% of the fish in the river were said to actually get caught.  This was often reflected in the huge amount of spawning that went on at the end of the season despite rod catches of 6/7000 plus all the ones that never got reported, those poached or netted too.

Obviously not every salmon is willing to take a fly but worm and shrimp in particular are, as we know very effective. One can fish the worm in coloured water that prevents other methods being used and the shrimp, float fished or otherwise can be equally as deadly.

I remember a week a good few years ago when a guest arrived for a weeks fishing,  River was low and  had been hard fished with only one fish to show for the week.  The guest wanted another fish or two to take home so on the last afternoon we decided to try a float fished shrimp.  To a coarse fisherman this was meat and drink so we went to a deep gutter with undercut ledge where  the fish, if any would lay tucked in beneath them .In a couple of hours we had six fish which we never knew were even there.    They never looked at a fly and never showed themselves the whole week.   Doubt they would have been caught otherwise.

Now?  Well we can only speculate what might be if those methods returned/  Thats all this is - speculation - and not a recall for those methods on the river.