Isle of Lewis Trout Fishing - a full day out 

Thank you Joe, it is easy to get reasonable sound when it is very calm but if you've watched any of the other videos you will soon see that it goes badly wrong in the wind! I'm mostly just using the GoPro as don't want to carry a lot of gear or spend a lot of time away from the fishing so that very much limits what can be done in terms of producing a "good" video. My plan was that the videos would just be my holiday snaps and I didn't really expect people to view them so capturing the day out, rather than absolute quality, was the only intention.

Thank you David, I've watched some of them a few times myself during this lockdown and am not at all sure I will get any fishing this year but if I do then hopefully there will be more video.

Thank you Larry, it is an amazing place in a very many ways. When it comes to casting one thing to keep in mind is that it is said to be the most windy place on earth. If you find yourself on the wrong side of a loch or river on a windy day you might as well give up and go home :-)

@@caorach3354 You are so kind to give me such a reply. I enjoy your videos very much. I live in the headwaters of the Sacramento river. Rainbow trout country. Please continue to fish and post your videos.

@@oldmanofcotati Hi Larry, I took a look at some photos of the Sacramento upper river and it does look much more dramatic and completely different from my fishing. In part that is what makes fishing so interesting. We get quite a lot of rain, though amazingly not as much as the West coast of mainland Scotland but very little frost or snow but a lot of wind. As you can see our landscape is pretty flat, the last ice age saw to that. Lewis is mostly made up of Lewissian Gneiss but recent science seems to indicate that it actually drifted across the Atlantic from somewhere in north America and it is one of the oldest rocks on earth. Unfortunately our fishing season is closed now and with COVID and travel restrictions I don't know when I will be fishing again but keep the fingers crossed for more videos next season.

@@caorach3354 The beauty of Scotland can not be matched nor surpassed.

It is a fantastic wee river and when the sea trout are running the sport is great plus I love mixing it with a day at some of the trout lochs out the moor as well, makes for a great day out.

@@caorach3354 Yes the two lochs adjoining out at the end of moor road can produce some action. My family's peats used to be out that way but now we do our cutting at the end of new street

I think the Gress club have those two lochs as part of their lease now and they are hoping to clear up the burn and try to get the salmon running to them again, plus put a boat on them. I did hear rumours of electrofishing finding some salmon parr in the burn so it is possible a few salmon are already running up there, fingers crossed. With all the current restrictions I may not be fishing this season as my life is complicated but I'm really going to miss my days up the river and out the moor for trout.

@@caorach3354 hopefully you can get out later in the season. And hopefully without the midge! As a boy I'd fish the grass and those lochs all summer

Hi Steve, for sea trout then it is almost always a Soldier Palmer, Donegal Blue or a Silver Stoat. For brown trout then I mess about a bit but a Blue Zulu, Soldier Palmer, Black Pennell, Goat's Toe, Connemara Black, and Donegal Blue are all often on the cast. Other people have other preferences and do at least as well as I do so there are no hard and fast rules but those get you started.

No, I'm very boring and only fish on Lewis. However we have hundreds, some say 2000, trout lochs here so there is no shortage in variation. I'm trying to fish as many as I can but some require a good walk but it is always a great day out.

Hi Conor, the line is a Rio Versatip, it is a 7 weight. It is a nice line but they have become seriously expensive and I think are now about £180ish!! I've got to say it is a very handy line as you can have everything from a floater through to a fast sink tip so it saves on carrying extra spools or reels and this is great if you like to cover reasonable distances. Changing the tip is also easier than changing a reel or spool I suspect. The other thing I've found with the Rio lines is that they are not especially hard wearing and I've got through 3 of them in 5 years so they become an expensive overhead. With the heavier tips on them they can sometimes "collapse" a bit when casting but I'm sure a lot of this is down to my bad technique and with some work I could sort it out. Our rivers, although relatively small, tend to run in quite deep peaty channels so in high water there can be a serious weight of water pushing down the channel and being able to quickly change to a sink tip can be the difference between being able to fish or having to quit so for that reason the line is worthwhile for me but the cost and relatively short life need to be kept in mind.

Like all similar places if it goes flat calm then the midges can be bad but a suitable repellent and/or headnet pretty much solves the problem. Lewis is said to be the most windy inhabited place on earth so days with bad midges are rare. For some reason 2019 seemed to go really easy with the midges - on some really calm days throughout the summer I was in forestry in North Antrim and while I got a few midges it was nothing to cause serious problems, however on previous years they've murdered me in there.

The moor is a very interesting place, it is mostly ombrotrophic peatland which means the plants get all their nutrients from the sky as they have no access to minerals or mineral soil from below. It certainly requires some common sense to walk on it and there are lots of holes and soft bits that people can vanish into but, thankfully, disappearances are extremely rare. However having to walk around all the wet and dodgy bits can add a considerable distance to any planned route.

your making me homesick born and bred in Glasgow but miss lewis moors so much😷👍