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.