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2003 Review 

In common with all other east coast rivers the Earn had a terrible year, particularly the upper beats beyond Dunning. Things started well with a good run of springers and some early sea-trout. Then the summer came and we had about three days of significant rain over the next 20 weeks i.e. from early June until the end of the season. There was very light fishing for most of the season with few fish and corresponding catch returns were very poor as can be seen from the table above. The figures are to all intents meaningless as there were constant reports later in the season of the tidal stretch of the river being stuffed with fish with far better catch returns for those beats. Therefore, the actual fish caught does not fairly reflect that number of fish that entered the river as a whole nor those that eventually made there way to the Crieff water once the river levels rose in November.

Sea trout numbers were also down on last year; again this will have been due in part to the lack of anglers and so one would expect less fish to be caught. Notwithstanding this, year on year figures for sea trout continue to fall and anglers should make every effort to return a high proportion of fish caught. There were certainly good numbers of fish about in October although many were coloured or gravid, and there were reports of kelted fish being taken too.

In the absence of stocking there remains a good head of brown trout in the river with the odd fish over 2lb being taken although they are notoriously difficult to tempt.

Drummond Loch

The loch fished well from the opening of the season until July when it clouded with algae. Later fishing was difficult because of clam, bright conditions. 200 brown trout averaging 1lb were stocked in April; 368 were caught this year, 139 for an average of 1.62lb were kept with 229 returned. Several anglers had over wintered fish around the 2¹/₂lb mark and fish up to 4lb were recorded.

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