A Visit to Roadford

Jon Perry with a nice Roadford brownie



Strictly speaking, this blog is supposed to be about fly fishing at Burrator. However, this week, Thursday 30th May to be precise, Jon & Peter decided to have a bit of a change and to take a boat out at Roadford. For any of you who don't know it, compared to Burrator, Roadford, near Broadwoodwidger, off the A30 part way between Okehampton and Bodmin, is a massive water; more than 700 acres in fact. This being the case SWLT have taken the very sensible step of providing boats with petrol outboard engines, and it was one of these we rented for the day.

The outboard engine (a very nice and new looking 4HP Mariner Four Stroke) allowed us to search the lake with some degree of efficiency and safety. When, at one stage, it got a bit windy and quite choppy were able to make our way to a safe sheltered area with ease; one pull of the starter rope, the engine fired immediately to life, and off we went. Basically we worked our way across to the eastern side of the lake and found a couple of bays that we could fish by drifting diagonally into the bank, motoring out,  and then drifting in again, so that we were able to proceed in a zig-zag fashion, fishing over the front 'loch style' as they say.

Peter Macconnell with his best fish of the day



In the end we had fifteen brown trout, with the best going about two and a half pounds. Several were over a pound and there were some smaller ones of half a pound or less. The thing is though, these are not stocked fish in the normal sense in which we think about trout stocking of reservoirs. There is a naturally occuring head of brownies in the water and these are supplemented, from time to time, with fingerlings from the hatchery. So there are no takeable sized fish introduced. In our brief visit we noticed that this seemed to produce a much more natural stock pattern in terms of sizes. There is not that artificially large proportion of bigger fish that ones sees at rainbow trout fisheries. On the day we chose to release all the fish we caught, but it is permissable for each angler to take up to four fish, over ten inches.

Jon doing a bit of impromptu 'fish snuggling'.

The fly patterns that seemed to work were sedge imitations; Sedgehog, Green Peter, etc., fished more or less at the surface, on a pulled retrieve.