2025 Trout Season Kicks Off!

After my trip to Sicily (in the adventures blogs section!), I had a slightly delayed start to the brown trout season in Oban.

Connor and I headed up to our favourite hill lochs on a sunny, but slightly windy Sunday around midday.

Early in the season when the water is cold, sometimes the smaller fish are active during this time in some of the smaller lochs.

We started off however on a larger deeper loch with streamers and woolly buggers on sinking lines. It was hard work to start with, but a shout of "First Fish of the Year!" from Connor after an hour of changing positions and working the shoreline was a big relief. I also had my first belly laugh of the year as the fish came off immediately after his shout. A shame I will admit, as it was a big fish for the loch at maybe 2.5 lb.

With nothing more for a while, we headed for a bit of a drive to check out other lochs to try find some shelter from the wind, and find some rising fish to give us some confidence, but it wasn't to be.

Only at 6pm, the wind dropped, and we found a shallow area where the fish had certainly woken up!

There was a big hatch of large midges, and I caught 3 in quick succession on a size 16 black klinkhammer, with a very sparsely dressed hook shank. At sunset the large midges stopped hatching, but the fish continued to feed on something on the surface, or just under it.. So we switched to size 18 Griffiths Gnats, and Connor caught his first for the year (and landed it this time!), and I followed suite with another 2.

So after an initial struggle, we kicked the season off with a fantastic hour with a beautiful sunset!