Week Ending Friday 13th September · By Ray French

Autumn stocking begins with 3,000 Rainbows in this week

Each Summer, late July and August stocking is suspended due to the water temperature and the resultant lack of Trout activity. This season has been no exception with sport being noticeably difficult during this period and was still slow over the weekend

However, this week heralds the first of the Autumn / Winter stocking programme and 3,000 prime Trout were piped into the main Basin on Sunday evening

These Trout have been showing themselves in the main bowl this week but not as yet feeding as such. They have been jumping horizontally and moving fast, rather than straight up and and flopping back. This suggests they are staying relatively high in the water and possibly a few got a tad stressed from the journey. But given the drop in night time temperatures now I see no reason to believe this new batch will go down to the depths of the resident Trout and should instead settle quickly and remain up. Some cloud cover would help to that end

Yes, last week the majority of resident Trout were shown by a visiting Film crew to be still down with scanners and digital software showing them to be static on the bottom hugging Bewl's original river beds and pipelines in deep water. But again, with air temperature and the water cooling daily September usually see's them stirring and moving up, the new stock should encourage that

At least John T and I took advantage of the stocking this week and managed to catch a couple on Wednesday morning up by the Aqua Park which was nice. They were not far down taking a Booby at about 3ft. We fished drifting out from the Playground, the wind was a brisk North Westerly and cold even in the bright sun

Summary

Apparently the stocked fished went left and right from the concrete apron and some hung about for a while before moving off so they seem to have spread well. I suspect the couple we had were of the few that 'hung about'. We are in September now and those Trout lying deep will be on the move up and looking for food. As I said earlier, some cloud cover would help greatly with that but again this week the sun has dominated the South East. At least the water is now good and clear in most parts, especially away from the areas of exposed banks buffeted by the wind