After a week spent in Aviemore last week, I thought I'd be as well fish somewhere on the upper Don on my way home. Having fished Cottown/Bellabeg last year, I thought I'd give the beat below it a shot, Semeil Farm.
Sure I was £20 for a day ticket on fishpal for trout (£30 if you want to for Salmon if my memory serves me well).
I was trying to get there for earlier in the day before it got too hot, as it was forecast to be up over 20 degrees by midday. The water temperature wasn't too bad, had it been very warm I wouldn't have bothered, but with quite a lot of shade up there it was still reasonably cool.
Anyway, I parked at the lower limit of the beat, by the bridge, and walked up the track to the top. The track was well maintained, mostly a hard packed farm sort of road, but with sections running through the grass that were obviously regularly trimmed with a ride on mower. The only issue since it's farmland, were the flies....I had on plenty of smidge repellant, but it was like a plague of bluebottles and horse flies....If I go in the summer months again, I'll be wearing a mesh net. I even resorted to putting my landing net over my head while I walked for a bit
Once you reach the top of the track you come out on the main road again, and can get over the barrier beside the bridge on the right bank (looking downstream). This looked the easiest way to access the river as far as I could see anyway. Once you were in the water a bit, the flies seemed to die down too thankfully.
There were a few surprisingly deep pools as you will see in the photos, some I would have even said were 5/6ft deep easy. Learning from my experience at Cottown last year, I kept it simple with a small size 12 balck pennel, and I was in to a few wee trout fairly quickly. I'll let the photos speak for themselves...
It was indeed a very pretty place to fish, and I'd like to give the deep pools another go at the end of the season to see what may be lurking in them......TBC....
