I thought I'd put a post up for brown trout fans. I fished Roadford and Fernworthy at the weekend with mixed results, but I was very surprised with the quality and size of fish at Roadford. It's far from easy and I was very lucky, but I'm keen to try and master the place.

Fishing and things..: Fernworthy, Roadford and the Exe

Big, virtually wild trout - if only the place itself weren't so enormous. Maybe that's the reason it doesn't get fished a great deal.

Has anybody had success there recently?

Hi Worsle,

Thanks for putting up a post on Roadford.

I was down there for a first visit a couple of weekends ago with low expectations having read loads of negative reports. We were looking for some proper top of the water traditional loch style fishing for brownies, dibbling the dropper etc. and that's exactly what we got.

My boat partner lost a fish in the bay you caught yours on the first drift, a real clonker. In all we must have raised a dozen fish each all of an excellent average size, some well above 2lbs. We landed and release 6 and lost a couple more.

For anyone thinking of going down I would check what sailing activities are planned for their chosen day and avoid weekends and holidays. Fortunatley we did have an electric motor and a couple of batteries (both of which were dead by the time we came back in at the end of the day). It's a big lake even though half of it is an out of bounds nature reserve.

Jon

Jon great to hear you got into some decent fish there, sounds like you had a pretty good day. Did you stick on the western side or head across? Also, did you come across any sign of the perch that are so maligned? Having seen a 3 1/4 lb fish in the catch reports I put a teal, blue and silver on the dropper just in case!

Yes we stuck to the western shore, although closer examination of the catch reports showed some good fish coming off around an inlet over the other side. Would definitely give that a go next time. No sign of any perch to our boat, but we were concentrating on top of the water tactics.

Jon

Fished Roadford again yesterday and due to a mix up with the boat bookings, ended up sharing a boat for the day with talin on here (Ian), who I'd met in the lodge 5 mins before - a fine boat partner he was to!

Unfortunately neither of us could do any good fishing and we were hard at it all day. We briefly hooked a small fish but lost it, there was no sign of anything bigger.

Conditions were bright but not a disaster and a decent westerly breeze picked up in the afternoon. No obvious reason why we couldn't catch and we tried everything

Still it was good to meet Ian, good luck with the season ticket fella!

Hi Phil, thanks for the kind words, it was a beautiful day and i must confess i look like i have spent 3 minutes in a microwave today (really bad sunburn, occupational hazard due to being ginger!).
It was good to meet you and to be honest it did me a bit of good to learn about boat drifts etc from you having done very little boat fishing myself.
The only good fish we saw was a cracking eel of probably 4lb+ in the shallow water by the boat jetty.
All in all a nice dry day with good company so although no fish, not a bad day.

I had another go at Roadford today. What a difference a day makes! I caught 8 trout ranging from 1.5lb to 3.5lb on a Bibio and an emerger on the dropper. I would post a picture of the 3.5lb fish but i dont know how to do it.

fished fernworthy when in the marines back in 2000 nice big water stuffed with fish. it fished well right into dark with small shuttlecocks and sedges. olives were prolific if i remember correctly?

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