£550.00
If you've been following this blog from the beginning you'll know that when I was first getting into Fly Fishing I visited Kennick quite a lot in my first season with Mike my fishing buddy, and didn't do too well. Mike, on the other hand, usually caught five or six fish a visit. At the time Mike was a season ticket holder at Kennick and it was hard to get him to fish anywhere else.
I still fish with Mike most weekends, but we rarely fish Kennick any more because the fishing has become so hard - we only went twice last year, and the reports we were hearing of how patchy and hard the fishing had become didn't encourage us to go back.
But today was the start of the new season, so we thought we'd give it a try. We got to the water at about 6am - there were a couple of other anglers there before us and over the next hour the place really filled up - there was hardy a spare place on the bank by 7:30.
So, what was the fishing like - in a word -dire! I spoke to a lot of anglers during the day, either when they walked past me, or when I walked back to the car at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and the story was the same - either nothing, or the odd fish, with one or two anglers getting 3 or 4 fish each. Mike and I fished hard all day for 2 or 3 tentative takes that we didn't hit, and we went home fishless, as did most of the other anglers we spoke to.
There were a lot of unhappy anglers at Kennick today, and its not what you expect from what is described as the jewel in the crown of Devon's trout fisheries. From what I saw, only one in three anglers even caught a fish, and whatever the problem is, it needs to be sorted out. I wont be back again in a hurry.
I like my fishing to be challenging, as an experienced coarse angler of some 40 years, I have no love for the overstocked carp puddles that are so popular now, and I like to have to work for my fish, but with over 3 years of fly fishing under my belt, I don't expect to go nearly 8 hours without even looking like catching a fish on a 'premier' trout water.