It’s not often I get the chance to fish purely wild rivers nowadays, mostly due to the fact that a lot of the rivers here in south Wales are stocked sometime through the season, even the upper reaches have fish introduced each year, with some stocked fish somehow finding their way upstream to non-stocked areas.

Considering the amount of river fishing I do and with countless invites from my good friend Steffan Jones to come down and fish, I finally took him up on the offer to fish the upper Cothi on the Wye and Usk foundation tickets. Gavin Perry and Steffan were late as usual, which left David Watkins and I waiting for well over an hour…

However, they soon turned up and before I knew it Gavin and I paired up making our way upstream from the junction of the Cothi and river Twrch. It was some time before any of us connected with a fish, im not sure if us walking on the high bank may have been spooking them or if it was Gavin’s angling ability, but he soon proved me wrong when we made our way into the first deepish run, taking two fish in consecutive casts using an hare’s ear jig he tied back in 2005!

As most of you will know, fishing so far up the river system the fish aren’t going to be big at all, a 7/8 inch fish will be considered a large fish with the average being just a few inches. Catching such fish can give you great confidence in your own angling ability let alone for the future of the river. Although we didn’t catch many of the larger fish (pictured) we got many small fish, mostly on the nymphs.