Just before Christmas several club and committee members fished a light-hearted 3-hour match on the River Derwent, just upstream of Belper town centre, and landed some fantastic winter bags of silver fish!
The top 5 anglers weighed in: 11lb 2oz, 10lb 14oz, 9lb, 7lb 2oz and 3lb 14oz, with the predominant species being dace and roach. That is some serious winter sport for any river!
Our club runs a full programme of matches, held throughout the year, and this Christmas Eve river match may become the next addition to our match calendar.
We run a series of short summer evening matches, which often need 16lb+ to win!
If you’d like to sample some of our red-hot, winter river fishing for yourself, or if you’re a match angler who would like to join our club scene, then please consider becoming a member.
A historic, rare and special capture was reported to one of our water bailiffs, recently. A visiting angler spent a few hours lure fishing whilst visiting the area and had quite a suprise when he hooked and landed a “silver tourist”!
Derbyshire Derwent salmon!
The cock salmon was hooked close to Belper town centre, on a small Fox spinner which was intended for pike & perch. Despite being hooked on 50lb braid, the fight from the fish was of such intensity that it still took 45 minutes to land!
This salmon – caught from the Derbyshire Derwent at Belper in late 2017 by a lure angler – might be the first salmon caught on rod & line in Derbyshire for over a Century! It was safely released, alive.
This salmon capture is highly significant. It may be the first salmon caught on rod & line in Derbyshire in well over a century! Certainly we cannot find any mentions of captures from the Derwent, and earlier in 2017 another cock salmon was found dead at Belper weir, which was the first salmon recorded at Belper for over 100 years!
Belper is only a few miles from the centre of England (Morton parish, Derbyshire) – as far inland and away from the sea as an English town can be. So in order to get here, this salmon has successfully negotiated the Humber estuary and passed through large towns and cities such as Hull, Gainsborough, Newark, Nottingham and Derby. It has overcome numerous weirs – including many formidable ones on the Trent, such as Collingham Weir – and has swum over 140 miles inland, upriver! That is one incredible journey, and we’re pleased to say that the captor released the fish alive and reported that it swam off strongly – hopefully far enough to meet a female at their spawning grounds.
Who knows, the parr this fish helped create may already be hatching in the Derwent…?!
The River Derwent once had a thriving salmon population and this significant capture is yet more evidence that salmon are migrating further up-river and in greater numbers than has been seen for decades. The whole River Trent catchment is seeing an increase in salmon numbers which is great news for Derbyshire.
Other recent mentions of salmon in the River Derwent:
Have you spotted or caught a salmon in the Derwent?
Although the above capture is historically rare, recent conservation efforts seem to be slowly increasing the number of salmon travelling upstream in the Trent system, including the River Derwent. If you have any verified sightings or captures of salmon from the river, please send us an email via our contact page.
This month, the Environment Agency visited our mixed coarse & carp stillwater fishery, Wyver Lane Pond at Belper, to conduct a netting exercise. The purpose of this was to evaluate & health check our fish stocks and to provide valuable insight for any future stockings of the pond.
As we expected, the netting produced a real mixed bag! Carp to over 20lb were caught, as well as thousands of roach, dace, skimmers & perch. There were also a few larger bream (“slabs”), good tench, a few pike… even a Tommy Ruffe!
Netting a fishery is known as a good indicator to the stock levels of a fishery, but it is notoriously difficult and fraught with problems including the net snagging, fish escaping from the net and fish taking refuge around obstructions and other inaccessible areas. Despite this, we recorded a healthy number of fish and several scale samples were taken away to be tested.
Click on the following thumbnails to view pictures from the day, showing the netting process by EA Fisheries Officers and some of the fish caught:
Wyver Lane Pond is our members-only lake, which is open for all annual members to fish during daylight hours. There is also a night fishing ticket available, but numbers of these are very limited. Click here for more information on fishing Wyver Lane Pond.
The annual match, held on the River Derwent at Belper, was won by Thomas Webster.
Thomas Webster was triumphant in this year’s John Mason Memorial Match, held on our Wyver Lane Pond stretch of the River Derwent at Belper (just upstream of Belper’s River Gardens).
His superb 7lb 14oz bag of roach & dace, caught on pole, was enough to clinch the title and win him the John Mason memorial shield for 2017.
Thomas Webster with his winning bag of River Derwent roach & dace.Angler, Thomas Webster, is presented with the John Mason Memorial Shield
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