Blackwater salmon

Recent guided sessions produced some nice spring salmon from the Munster Blackwater river. This season the water levels have been quite high on our local rivers and fly fishing opportunities have been fairly limited. Luckily the weather has been improving and the rivers reached a better if not ideal fly fishing height, particularly in the upper stretches. As a consequence we managed a few very nice salmon.

My guests were using two outfits, one was a 13’7 Mackenzie Atlas rod matched with a Mackenzie Phased Density Shooting Head in Float/Sink 2 and a short leader to a White Francis fly.

The other client used a 15ft Mackenzie FX1 GRAPHENE Rod matched with a Mackenzie Float/S1 shooting head and attached to the business end was a local shrimp fly pattern called Hick’s Bug. The guys were blown away by this kit and when good fish came the were even more impressed.

So some very happy anglers and a nice tackle test was a great result. The river is coming into good order again after the latest flood so fingers crossed for some more action. Tight lines!

The Prince Shrimp

Prince Shrimp

Prince Shrimp

Black flies such as the Stoats Tail, Black Bear Green Butt and Black Shrimp all work very well on the Munster Blackwater river.    I devised the Prince Shrimp a while back when the only fly working in low clear water was the Black Shrimp.    The Prince Shrimp also has a tail of black golden pheasant.

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It has a glow bright lime green tag and some very dark claret boar bristles in the tail.  The rear body is black floss ribbed with oval silver.  The mid hackle is dyed red badger.

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The Prince Shrimp has a front body of UV Neon Silver straggle.  The roof is a pair of dyed red jungle cock feathers.  The fly is finished with a front hackle of cream badger.

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