We met on a cool dry morning with a moderate, South-westerly wind. As time went on the wind got up a bit more and helped enormously to stoke up the bonfires.
During the five-hour shift, a huge amount of work was achieved. There are now fishing spots from the Belgrano mooring right round to the west side. This has made something of the order of 15 fishing spots.
A big thank you to Alex, Luke and Simon from Anglian Water for doing heavy chainsaw work. This was a great help and increased the rate of clearance considerably.
Five large bonfires were lit to dispose of all the trimmings following the chainsaw work.
We were very thankful to the eleven volunteers from Rutland Water Fly Fishers: namely-:
Paul Wild, Ralph Avery, Colin Best, Ron Sutton, Roy Taylor, Peter Gover, Mick Connor, Dave Walker, Bill Rolph, Gordon Alleyne, John Wadham.
Thanks also to the “Rutland Water Park Lover Volunteers” gathered together by Luke Russell to make a total working party of almost two dozen. These volunteers had the unenviable task of bearing the logs left by the chainsaw workers up to a log pile within the spinney.
On Thursday 27th Jan some thirty-seven club members either personally or virtually, welcomed this well-known fishing guide and writer who devoted an evening to his approach in locating and catching the brown trout in Rutland Water.
John Wadham introduced Iain and offered a few anecdotes of Iain’s history particularly with regard to the day when, at the age of eight, he took us all to the cleaners on the green bank with a rusty Jack Frost! From this it was quite clear that, from here on, Iain and his twin brother Craig were quite clearly naturals at the game.
Iain provided an entertaining evening’s talk with loads of hints and tips of how to target the famous Rutland brownies.
Iain opened by drawing a schematic diagram of Rutland Water giving us some idea of the contours in relation to depth when fishing from a boat and emphasised that these locations vary annually. So, you have to experiment each season to find them.
This was the first time that we have had a hybrid physical / virtual members event at RWFF with some members in the clubhouse and others joining from home via Zoom.
We had a successful members meeting via Zoom on 6th Jan with an interesting talk from Peter Waterhouse from Scottie Products. Due to the COVID situation the committee decided to hold the event on Zoom as a trial.
Twenty one members attended the online event. Peter gave an excellent overview of the well known Scottie Products history and range plus some great inside information on fly tying materials!
