The Traditional Fisherman's Forum

Here's a conundrum for you chaps. Last year, fishing the Calder in Yorkshire, my grayling averaged around 10 to 12oz with fish to maybe 1lb 8oz. This year fishing the same stretches my fish are averaging around 6oz with nothing over 12oz. Now I know that grayling are relatively short lived, but last year's fish certainly looked healthy and appeared to have a fair bit of mileage in them. The year classes in this river are quite distinct and I'm catching last year's fish at a few ounces and the two year old fish at around 6oz, but where are the 3 year olds?

Any thoughts?

You any the wiser Sean since you posted this. From the lack of comments I think none of us are.

Is there any increase in Preds Sean? Or an Otter maybe?

No wiser really. There's no evidence of otter activity, although there is some evidence of fish eating ducks, but no more than last year. It looks like we've just lost a year class and that maybe the bigger fish were in fact four year olds and that we had a missing year class (ie 3 year olds). There are certainly plenty of smaller fish which look like this year and last year's spawning.

One of the little mysteries of fishing I think!

Hi Sean. The Calder's where I spend my fishing time. I'm told that toward the end of the trout season Halifax and Ryburn stocked it with a lot of grayling up at brearley. Over the next few weeks the trout disappeared and the only fish rising were a myriad of these smaller grayling. There were millions of them! The bigger ones are still in their respective pools and seemed to come out to play when the river was fining down after initial heavier rains in october/november time.

They could simply have moved to a different stretch of the river. Larger grayling are very nomadic fish.

Probably 80% or more of my fishing these days is for grayling. Beautiful fish.

What a lovely fish Luke. :thumb: I take it you caught it on a fly looking at the line in the top right corner of the picture.

Thanks Mark. Yes, most of my fishing for them is done with fly, mainly dries, though the Righyni floats and gilt-tail worms (if I manage to find any!) come out from time to time during winter.

Could it be dwarfing? Not knowing the size of the river it would be hard to tell but I did read that they are prone to dwarfing if there are a lot of fish in a small area.