After thinking last season, at one point, that Loch Leven was to close as a fishery, me and Dougie went for a day session in September and had a great day's sport.

So tomorrow I'm there with another mate for another day session. Does anyone have any up-to-date information on how it's been fishing? I've read the report on the Loch Leven website, which is a bit scant.

I'll report back on how the day turned out.

Bill

Interested to know how you got on.

Also, what is the 'book-ahead' period just now at Leven .....can you get a boat at 2 days notice, or a weeks notice, or a months notice etc ?

Cheers

I'll post a report tomorrow night (Friday 20th July)

I booked the 20th session on the 18th. I don't really know if this was the norm for availability.

Bill

I don't know what is normal there either, but when I went on a Sunday evening a couple of weeks ago there was only one other boat out.

Fished well on sunday night in good conditions, including a 6lb 12oz brownie. I was out on monday night, poor night, sunny with breeze then went flat calm with caenis, wind picked up for last half hour and a few fish caught. Snatchers and traditionals size 12 on surface lines. Had moved fish earlier on DI 3 and 5 but even if hooked they were quickly off again.
Person I was fishing with was out both nights, he had 8 on sunday, 1 on monday all in deeper water around south deeps/st serfs.
If nothing happening near surface, go deeper, steady traditional leven retrieve and you will move fish if at right depth but wont catch them all!

We had a difficult day at Loch leven, mainly due to the quite cold, strong wind, coming from the North East in the morning and shifting to the East in the afternoon.

We took location advice from the office and were advised about the areas around St Serfs (I completely ignored the advice about flies as you could have filled a lure box with the suggestions and I'm just not into that). I particularly hate fishing the St Serfs drifts (it's a personal thing) but my partner Tom was keen. Anyway we struggled to get into decent drifts there due to the wind and after a couple of hours we decided to seek a bit of shelter behind Castle Island.

During our first drift we saw a couple of fish rising and changed to floating lines and dry flies. Almost immediately I rose two, jagged one and Tom had one on for a few seconds before it got off. The rise ended soon after we arrived

At around 3.00pm I wanted to go to my favourite area from past visits, which hardly ever gets a mention in reports, but I've had great success there on many occasions. It's a large expanse of shallow water, averaging about 5 feet, with a very sandy bottom over most of it. The wind was now coming from the East and on our first drift, using dry flies, I rose one, hooked another and lost it and brought one of about 1.5Lbs to the boat. Tom also rose a couple, lost two and brought a similar fish to the boat. By the way, we both had made a stupid assumption that nets were supplied with the boats and neither of us bothered to bring one. So both fish were released whilst still in the water. There was quite a hatch coming off and the large buzzer shown below was struggling at the surface to finalise its flying form and the movie link below shows it's final struggle before Tom lifted it from the water.

We both then changed to buzzers and I had a Bibio with jungle cock cheeks on the bob, with 2 black buzzers below. On my second cast with this set up, when I was just about to lift the bob out of the water, a very large brown came right out of the water at speed and turned down sharply with my Bibio and broke me. I don't want to speculate on the size but I was stunned for a moment or two - Oh bother I murmured quietly

Next time we'll be going back to this spot from the outset.

A difficult but very enjoyable day.

Bill



Give the buzzer movie a few seconds to load after clicking the link below.

http://s196.photobucket.com/albums/a...t=f316751e.flv

Was the water still the coulor of pea soup bill ??

It wasn't too bad Colin. Visibility was certainly more than a metre. It was also very warm.