Thanks for watching and a very happy new year to you, I hope you have a very successful fishing season. Many of the Lewis lochs have Norse names (usually with Gaelic spellings) as Lewis was settled by the Vikings around 840 and it didn't become part of Scotland until 1266 so many of our loch names end in "vat" and our hills end in "val" - we have many Loch Langabhats for example which would be pronounced Lang-a-vat. You might feel right at home :-)

Lewis has a very many trout lochs, maybe over 1000, so meeting another angler is a rare event plus once you walk away from the road then it is possible that it has been years since a fly was cast on the loch you are fishing. There are a few well known lochs beside the road when you might see another angler but with over 1000 to chose from it is easy to avoid them should you wish.

@ That sounds like heaven,, is this in Ireland?

We are very lucky to get to fish in such nice places.

Happy New Year Calum, hopefully we might get a cast together next season for a bit of a day out.

Happy New Year - no tea sounds like a serious situation. I mean no flies is somewhat inconvenient but if you can't drink tea to help you cope then it becomes an emergency :-)

They were actually flying ants! I'm not a DEET fan just because over time the solvents required to make it work melt rods, fly lines, cars etc. so I tend to go for icaridin myself.

@ DEET is by far the best but it certainly melts plastics! I never get it on my hands when fishing because I use disposable gloves to apply it. Makes a huge difference!

Happy New Year Tony, have a good one and plenty fish!

Glad you enjoy them even if they are a bit basic, have a very happy New Year.

Glad you enjoyed it Billy, I had a little while free yesterday and thought to put it together just for some fun. Happy New Year to you.

I'm on a diet.

It is good to have a bit of fun with the videos so glad you enjoyed it, I hope you have a very Happy New Year.

It is always a mystery to me Calum, salmon are a law unto themselves :-) I was genuinely having a nap in the little hut when I felt a change in the conditions. I think the wind changed direction as I could smell the sea. I cast into the top of the Boat Pool and on maybe the 3rd cast had that wee fish. Lucky break. Lunch was indeed at the top of Major's - I'd often use the hut but with it being such a nice day I just sat by the wee streamy bit of water to eat. I think the hole you are referring to is called the Sniggle Hole and it is a spot that always seems to have fish in it and where I have moved a very big fish but I have to be honest and say I've never caught something from it.

@ Yes it was the Sniggle Hole, I couldn’t remember the name off the top of my head. I do have an estate map of the river naming the pools, which in my teens, having framed it, hung on my bedroom wall, no pop star or fast car posters for me it has to be said, which is now languishing somewhere in the house, possibly the attic. I feel it would be more than my life’s worth to suggest that it goes back up on a wall now, SWMBO would certainly object.

It wasn't you, or anyone, in particular in my mind but it is a question that gets asked a lot and a proportion of people do come with short rods and a goodly supply of size 22 dry flies with the intention of fishing the rivers and lochs with them. Part of the problem is that most rivers get salmon and so there isn't really any such thing as a trout permit, also the trout in them tend to be small and I don't think they rise to much as there isn't much on the surface mostly. You did have one breezy day, with it mostly being very calm, but it really wasn't anything close to a "big wind" and if it hadn't have been cold and in the north it would have been a great day for trout. Lewis is said to be the most windy place on earth and, again, I think this works against the dry fly even on the lochs. I also enjoy the tradition of the wet fly, it is nice to follow in the footsteps of some who have gone before us and there are, of course, places where the dry fly tradition is much more relevant. Hopefully when you come back you will get better weather conditions with the wind warm and in the south or south west and then you will find the fishing much more productive, and if you get a flat calm trying a dry daddy longlegs fly is always worth doing if only for a bit of entertainment.

That is part of the reason why I don't publish some of the videos until the season ends as it then cheers me up during the winter :-) I usually edit them all in a big batch so by the time I'm watching them in December I've forgotten what happens!

Good luck, I hope you do better. It always takes a while to get into the swing of it, like anything else I guess, plus the weather last season was not great for fishing so things will almost certainly get better for you with time.

And the same to you James, hopefully the conditions will be better in 2025 than we had this past season but that is part of the fun.

In one sense that is a tricky question simply because there are so many options so there are a lot of answers :-) Travel is easy but, obviously, Lewis is an island so it requires a ferry or a plane to get over the Minch and ferries, in particular, are often fully booked some goodly time in advance. Calmac run the ferries and you can come either from Ullapool, about an hour from Inverness, or you can drive up through Skye and come to Harris from Uig in the north of Skye. LoganAir fly from Inverness, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Many trout lochs are considered free fishing and do not require a permit but some do and Lewis has some of the most exclusive salmon/sea trout fishing on earth so if you intend to fish any particular spot then it is worth making yourself aware of the requirements in that area. You can ask locally. A fantastic resource for the visitor is that the Hebrides have a Fisheries Promotion Officer and Donnie is a very keen angler who has fished pretty much every loch and river on the island plus he is in touch with many of the anglers and so always has up to date information. The best thing you can do if you are visiting to fish is to get in touch with Donnie and see what he recommends: www.fishhebrides.co.uk/contact-us/ There are several angling associations that do day permits, and yearly permits, which are relatively inexpensive - the Stornoway Angling Association has the River Creed system, including some salmon/sea trout lochs, plus something around a dozen trout lochs some of them with boats and a yearly membership is about £100. The Gress Angling Association also have excellent fishing for salmon, sea trout, and brown trout and I think a yearly membership there is around £25. I have posted several videos over the years of both the SAA waters, often the River Creed, and also the Gress waters so a simple search should turn them up. Permits can be bought online for the SAA: syangling.com/membership/ or in No10 in Stornoway for Gress. I did some short "overview" videos of the Gress and SAA waters: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jn6QenejpLucqpo and kzbin.info/www/bejne/l2TTYqltad-ee6c

Thank you Rick, glad you enjoyed it. It is hard to believe that on a most unlikely day in terms of conditions I managed to move a few fish. No idea how you explain that.

@ sometimes when we least expect it the fishing gods bestow a day to remember on us mate …and take it we do whilst shaking our heads wondering “now where did they come from”🤣

Yes we need to get a little voyage of discovery going once the season starts, I need to get some exercise and do some walking before then! It will be interesting to see how the hooks perform and if they make a difference, the flies are certainly fantastic so they alone will make a difference. I'm still not sold on the new camera as I think the images fall well short of the GoPros in terms of quality but I will keep working on it and hopefully, with experience, things will improve.

Great stuff Philip, have a Happy New Year, when it comes👍🎣

I think that is why it is so interesting because, in truth, you've got no control at all over what might happen. In saying that there is no question that some people are "good at it" so there must be something going on there. Some years back someone who lived in the village near this loch commented on one of my videos saying that he'd fished it for years and only ever caught two fish and that really doesn't surprise me but then on the most unlikely day of the season I find myself catching and missing a few.

Just so unpredictable Fred. The fish in here are really lovely fish it is just that they generally have not the slightest intention of getting out.

Maybe Sherlock could have told me why, on the least likely day of the season, I suddenly caught and moved a few fish? :-) Have a very happy New Year

Glad you enjoyed it, I was amazed to get fish at all in view of the reputation this loch has, guess I just got lucky.

I tend to use an 11 foot 7 weight rod for pretty much all my fishing from spring salmon to brown trout. These days some people might fish a bit shorter, maybe a 10 foot rod, but the 7 weight pretty much does it all. Flies come from Lewis fly tyer John Maclean and really that's pretty much it: facebook.com/profile.php?id=100057469959391

Technology has made its way into the world of fishing: kzbin.info/www/bejne/epmyn4Oca9yNoLMsi=we2Z0xchV8r5rGe2

The salmon start on Lewis on 11th February, there's never been a fish caught anywhere near that early and it is really July before the fish come but that's not the point and no excuse for not getting out there :-)

I was pleased to get a few fish Tony as this is a very dour loch and with it being so calm and so late in the season I was pretty certain that my chances were slim.

I don't know what it is with this loch - I fish it for years and catch nothing and then on the most unlikely day I get a few fish.

Good timing :-) I hope you had a great Christmas and will have a very successful 2025 fishing season. This video was shot right at the end of September and I was really surprised to get a fish or two but that is part of the fun with fishing - most things that happen come as a surprise.

It tends not to get too busy.

You can't beat it Rick, I hope you had a great Christmas and will have a very happy New Year when it comes around.

@ and the same to Phillip …I hope you are wintering well mate ❤️👍

It wasn't ice Robert, I'd say temperatures were maybe 6 - 8 degrees so with the breeze it was feeling a bit cold to be standing about. On a cold day in September you can often put your hand in the water and feel that it is warmer than the air - the water will probably be about 10 - 12 degrees.

I love my Special 6, in fact I have 3 of them I think but one needs to go back to Buffalo for some zip repair work. There are a few new, lightweight, synthetic alternatives to down starting to appear and they would be lighter and might pack smaller than the Special 6 so I might take a look at them. Reducing the size and weight of the rucksack might be good but to be honest most of the weight is in the video gear, stove, and other stuff like that.

Hi Doug, now I've invested in a new camera I've no choice but to keep going :-) I've got to say I'm struggling with the video quality out of the DJI compared with my GoPros but, as with anything new, it takes a while to come to terms with it. I hope you have a great Christmas and a very happy New Year when it comes along and hopefully once the season here starts up again there will be more videos.

@@caorach3354 Hi Phillip - I actually thought the video quality was fine !! Cheers Doug

Have a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year Tony. This loch tends to produce decent fish - no real monsters but fish around 2lb or a bit more so really good quality for real wild fish. However I think there is a lot of feeding in the loch and so they are under no pressure to take your fly and that leaves them hard to get. Generally it is possible to get a fish for a day, though a blank isn't unusual, but two fish for a day isn't something you can expect very often so that makes it a challenging spot to fish.

I'd guess you could say it is a Mecca for anglers - they fly in on private jets and all sorts of stuff - however there's a lot of fishing available so it doesn't get crowded.

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it in spite of the lack of fish. I hope you have a great Christmas and a very happy New Year when it comes along.

I thought i'd replied Fred, but it seems to have vanished! Clearly there's something weird going on with YT these days. I got the video a little bit better but even so when you see the shots where both cameras are basically looking into the sun then it looks to me like the GoPro is miles ahead. However, in time I hope to improve things with the DJI and get it closer. Hopefully by that time we will be seeing some video from you as well!

@@caorach3354 One of my replies to you also vanished the other day. Most annoying. My Action 4 seems OK but the low light performance is not great. They say it's better than GP but I never used mine in low light so can't say

By the way I see ver. 19 of Davinci Resolve now includes all the GPU hardware acceleration in the free version. Surely this is now THE best editor available? I moved to the paid version last year and it is incredible if not quick to learn.

@@wildfisher As you know I've been punting Resolve for a long time now and the free version is more than most people need. Like you I have the paid version but really for what I do it probably isn't necessary. Everyone knocks the low light performance of the GoPro but what I found with the Insta360 Ace Pro was that even on a dull June day it really struggled. After some experiments it seemed that turning on horizon levelling (a feature I really value) made it's "cloudy day" performance much worse. I have a theory why that was the case and it makes sense to me. In "real" low light the Insta360 was achieving most of its advantage by using image processing rather than actually having better fundamental image quality and this produced images OK but it only worked for certain specific scenes that, basically, the software was programmed to deal with. I haven't carried out any real experiments on the DJI yet but I'm inclined to suspect that although its sensor does have a slight actual advantage over the GoPro the majority of the low light advantage is coming from processing the images and that always creates an artifical look and may simply not work at all for some scenes. On this basis I'm not very excited about increases in low light performance as my experience has been disappointing so far and it also comes at a cost in terms of "normal" light performance. All this "low light" thing might be a big talking point but I do wonder just how many people actually need it and if people wouldn't be happier with better general performance. That I can see the pictures out of your Action 4 look better than those out of my Action 5 - I don't know the difference in specification but the Action 5 has "always on" HDR and the images look lacking in contrast and detail. Their problem is that, as with the Insta360 which uses the same sensor, it is an 8K sensor and so has very tiny pixels and to get performance out of them they have to use the pixels in groups of 4 which means more processing etc. In that respect GoPro still come closer to getting the basics right.

Glad you enjoyed it John, I must try it in the evening at some point but getting the time isn't always easy and it is a bit of a drive down there as well.

If your up next season Philip I will go with you for an evening😉

@@johnmaclean9318 We should try and do that and have a night out. I did study it with a view to maybe taking the tent at some point but that would really need a northerly wind to get off that bank at the top end.

I'm lucky in getting to fish in serene places where no one else goes. I'm also lucky that I get the edit the videos and so you don't see the times when I hook the bank on every backcast and fall into holes in the bog :-)

I hope you are enjoying the wet fly fishing - for those of us in much of the UK wet fly fishing is very much a tradition handed down from generation to generation. If you can manage to pick up a copy of T.C. Kingsmill-Moore's "A Man May Fish" you might enjoy it - he fished on the loughs of Ireland using the wet fly and invented the bumble patterns. Often the book is out of print and people want big money for collectors editions but usually you can also get good 2nd hand copies for not much money. The man who taught me wet fly fishing on the loughs - Foncey McGovern from Garrison in Co. Fermanagh - actually fished with T.C. Kingsmill Moore and I find all these connections fascinating. It turned out that I didn't enjoy boat fishing much but really liked to walk to bank fish the more remote spots and so I'm no longer to be found in a boat plus I now do most of my fishing on Lewis where there are at least 1000 remote lochs with trout.

It went OK, I'm not that impressed with the quality of the new DJI camera but with a bit of work I will hopefully get it at least a little better.

Thank you, now I've invested in a new camera I've no choice but to keep going with the videos though with the season now closed I will soon be running out of material from last season.