A Trip to the seaside

My local Scalby beck runs out to the sea just a mile from my house and when the holidaymakers arent to numerous its one of my pleasures to start fishing on the tideline and work upstream. Today ( Sunday )  I had about 2 hours from leaving the house to walking back in again to enjoy the benefit of living close to this little jewel  Apart from the sea trout that run the river when the beck is in spate the river holds a resident population of little browns . 



Scarborough Castle across the bay



The view from the beck mouth:The sea is calm tonight but still cold after all Norway is NE of here and the North Sea is cold even in the summer.After the Summer Drought that has seen this little beck run dry in some places the last few days rain has put just a little flow back in it.The Sea weed that you can see marks the high tide mark from the recent Spring tides , Just a shame that the river was so low or the sea trout would have run upstream.  The beck can have good runs of sea trout but is heavily dependent upon good water levels

The wading on this beck is difficult as the bed constantly changes and is full of loose boulders and shifting sands and beds of mudstone and silt pockets .  This is the view up the vally just 50m up from the footbridge in the above picture .

The fishing can at times be easy as the little wildies are hungry and are rarely fished for , They seem to like nothing better than a dry red tag or treacle parkin a size 16 or even 14 is taken freely by the smallest of fish . The pools here are tiny an area the size of a dining table between the boulders will hold a resident trout .This little fellow came first cast into the pool above.  Sometimes  when you fish here you will swear there isnt a fish in the river.

The beck is largely hidden in a steep valley and twists and turns,  This means the wind can be blowing hard and yet you can find shelter just around the next bend. The next bend reveals a lovely tiny pool that usually gives a fish or two. 

This pool yielded this little beauty a good fish by the standards of this little beck. 

A red tag size 16 was his undoing I fished on for a while ending up in the largest pool in the stream. A long deep dub ( well deep for this beck) caused by several large boulders that long since formed a bit of a dam and created a large deep glide that forms a lovely holding place for the sea trout when they first run in from the sea. I caught several fish in here in rapid succession all 4 or 5 inches long and all on the red tag.

The evening ended shortly afterwards I spent the last 15 minutes of daylight watching the beck. As the colour went out of the countryside and the bats took to the air over the water I decided that there really cant be a better place to be,,



Scalby beck at dusk