Welcome to the latest fishing report.
There’s no doubt that after the almost tropical (warm and wet) autumn, winter has arrived with an icy, finger-numbing crackle. The Dales is stunningly beautiful in this weather, with a hoar frost coating the trees. Thankfully the temperature of the spring water feeding the lakes means that they avoid becoming fully iced over and are always fishable in places in even the coldest of cold snaps.
Since the clear-out in mid November we’ve seen the lakes fishing well, with a great number of fish being landed on every type of fly, although the majority of fish seem to be lurking in the top layers of water with fisherman having great sport on the dry’s. There’s been plenty of specimen fish caught last month or so with the biggest being 17lb 9oz and 21lb 2oz (the latter on the Any Method).
A renewed plea to either book online or call us in advance of your visit (leave a message on the phone if no-one is available). We are starting to see a few anglers turning up without any form of booking, which leads to the risk of driving a long way to find that we might not be open. We’re happy to help anyone who wants to get set up on Castbooker but needs some support.
We are looking forward to seeing you all soon, tight lines and wet nets.
The lowdown
Updated 17 December 2022
Water temperature and condition: Avg 5.1c, some weed in areas of the top lake, otherwise clear.
Rod average across all ticket types: 6.7
Most fish caught by an individual angler: last month it was Ray Moyes landing 35 fish in total.
Best fish: 17lb 9oz rainbow caught by Liam Gowers on a Diawl bach, a 4lb brown caught by Ray Moyes on a pale green ecstasy blob, and a 3lb blue caught by Ron Ward on a white snakelet.
Stocking details: We are currently stocking an average of 60 fish a week.
Catch returns: Catch return cards are really important to let us know how the lakes are fishing and how much restocking we need to do, so please complete them and post them into the box on the green hut
Top tactics and flies
Updated 17 December 2022
During the colder season the fish can change quite dramatically as to what they’re interested in due to many reasons such as water pressure, insect life, oxygen supply etc. so make sure to bring a decent variety of flies. The tactics that have been preforming well so far have been static flies (drys and flies under a bung/float) throughout the top layers of water. The most successful flies over the past couple of months seem to be buzzers in various patterns fished static, but on the other hand there’s been a number of fish landed with small lures and snake flies being retrieved at pace and twitched slowly. We’d advise fishing floating line on our waters as it can be shallow on some pegs where Intermediate line or sinking won’t be as effective, as most fish seem to be in the top water layers.
Top flies for this period: buzzers, crunchers, snakes, apps/bloodworm, blobs.
Other information
Booking your ticket – Please remember to book online or call us in advance of your visit (leave a message on the phone if no-one is available). Anglers turning up without any form of booking run the risk of driving a long way to find that we might not be open – a few were caught out by the Monday closing because they had overlooked the signage or hadn’t checked the website. Extreme winter weather – ie deep snow – might mean that staff can’t get in and so we are unable to open. that’s why it’s always best to pre-book – bookings are flexible so we can always change the date of your visit.
Current opening times – To check our current opening times please click here.
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