The Novar Fishings Partnership 2010 Newsletter incorporating the 2009 Season Report is now available to download as a pdf file from the Guest Zone.

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The total catch return for the Novar Fishings for the 2009 season is 395 salmon & grilse - another excellent year! This brings our 5-year average for the period up to and including 2009 up to 377. The Catch Returns section has been updated with new tables & graphs showing catches by month, and catch & release statistics.

A new 2009 photo gallery has been added to this site. In addition lots of new photos of pools have been added to the individual beat description pages.

It was a mild and wet month on the Alness with a total of 7 spates. Catches were excellent with over 170 salmon & grilse landed, the last sea-liced fish caught on the 26th.

The first and last weeks of the month produced the biggest spates and the best catches. Grabbing the accolades in the first week were Nick FitzGerald and Peter Hukins who between them landed 23 fish, both achieving a Novar Fishings Grand Slam, catching at least one fish off each of the six rotating beats during the week – outstanding! Other anglers achieving success that week included Mike Allen from Tain and Andrew Dunn from Evanton who had 3 apiece for their day on Beat 1, John Cameron from Dingwall and Alan Shearer from Orkney shared 9 fish for their 4 days, Roger Evans’ party had 8 fish and Sam and Adam Hatfield also shared 8 fish.

In the second week, Ronald Munro Ferguson accounted for 4 in one day, and Tom Jardine landed 3 for his 2 days of fishing. Wayne Ranhosky from the US caught 3 for his week including a fish of around 11 lbs. The third week was also relatively quiet, the highlight being a first salmon for Stefan Trobos from Austria who quickly claimed his second and third!

In the last week, 7 anglers managed to land 3 or more fish in a day. Amongst them, Graham Shepherd from Wick had 4 fish including a sea-liced grilse weighing in at 5lbs from Beat 6 and later in the week also landed a 14lbs coloured cock fish. Graham’s fishing partner Sandip Datta caught 3 fish from Beat 5, David Hook from Gloucestershire caught 3 from Beat 4 and local Paul Houlden caught 4 fish from Beat 2.

There were also 7 ‘first salmon’ caught on Novar. Congratulations go to Chris Phillips, Andrew Monaghan, Tara Hurn, Mel Scott from Portugal, August Smidth (age 9) from Denmark, and Stefan Trobos and Paul Lorenz from Austria.

Early counts suggest the total catch for the Novar beats for 2009 to be around 390.
 

The Novar beats recorded 94 salmon & grilse in September, which although a good total, was a little lower than catches for the past few years. Although there were spates at the beginning and end of the month, there was no appreciable rainfall in the catchment between the 5th and 28th and consequently the fishing for much of the month was slow.

Ironically, the two most successful anglers caught their fish in the slower weeks. Andrew Goodge topped the catches with 8 fish during the second week, only missing out on Beat 5, and Mick Spencer from London caught 7 fish during the third week, all on a Collie Dog variant.

Seven anglers managed to land their ‘first salmon’ on the Novar beats during the month - James Parker, Anne Parker and husband Roddy Neilson, Tim Allen, Bill Little, Jim Henderson and ‘Paulie’ Collins.
 

Overall August  was a good month on Novar with 105 salmon & grilse caught. The month started slowly however and catches grew week by week. This was partly as a result of better water in the second half of the month, with small spates on the 15th and 20th and a full spate on the 28th, but it did also appear that the main grilse runs were a little later than in recent years, a trend observed throughout Scotland.

Amongst the more successful visiting anglers, during the third week Nick Foster-Brown from Hertfordshire caught 7 fish up to 8 lbs for his week and Jimmy Keogh from Ireland caught 5 grilse for his 5 days fishing. In the last week of the month John Cameron from Dingwall and Alan Shearer from Orkney caught 5 apiece for their 3 days fishing, and Derwent Campbell caught 3 including a 13 lbs salmon on the 29th which took 35 minutes to land in high water.

Derwent Campbell

There were also 7 ‘first salmon’ caught during the month – Felicity Campbell, Ian Talbot, Vicky Talbot, Brian Lindley, Chris Casey, Andrew Gibbons and Toby Mathers all notched their first fish.

The first salmon of the season from the Novar beats was  caught on 11th May by Nick Munro Ferguson - a 12lbs+ springer: