Year Of The Big Brownies

Andrew Flitcroft explains why Rutland Water has experienced arguably its best-ever brown trout season.

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RUTLAND WATER IS unpredictable. Regular rods will agree that no two seasons are the same. “But that’s the appeal,” they say. Rutland is so big (3,000 acres) that its character and grown-on fish are similar to a wild fishery. The sport is sometimes dour, but it is often outstanding and every now and again conditions and hatches align to offer what is possibly the best stillwater fishing in the land. It happened in 2012 when high water flooded the surrounding grassland and vast numbers of corixa in the margins were preyed upon by 4lb-6lb grown-on rainbow trout. That season’s early-summer bank fishing was possibly the best in my two-and-a-half decades at the reservoir, but this season something equally special has happened.

It started in the autumn of 2016 with reports of rods landing some big brown trout. “Nothing unusual in that,” you might say, “it’s the back-end and brownies always show up at the back-end of the season.” Little did we know, however, that these fine sea-trout-like specimens would continue being caught throughout the 2017 season.

Brown trout comprise ten per cent of the annual stocking at Rutland, the rest are rainbow trout. Stocked at 1¾lb, the brownies are frequently caught in the first or second week after their release, after which they usually disappear into the depths during the warm summer months, sporadically reappearing in the summer gloaming, but re-emerging when the water cools in autumn. “In the past, you could set your calendar by it,” says Anglian Water fisheries manager Jon Marshall. “It was always the third week in August when they started to appear again.”