28/06/2006 - The Varzuga season ends on a high

We have now closed our Middle Varzuga, Pana and Kitza camps for 2006. It has been a wonderful final week and has demonstrated yet again that even in tough conditions this river produces astonishing fishing.

The weather has been rather unstable all week, on Friday we had a heavy rainstorm followed by exceptionally still and close weather with air temperatures touching 27 degrees. The winds have shifted in their direction and their intensity and the water level dropped throughout the week despite the rain. As a result we took fish at Middle Varzuga in the deeper and faster waters of the Royal Dee Bank and above the Korevi Pots into the Scott's straight.

Given the above conditions Middle fished very well indeed with a total of 171 salmon for the seven days this last week, split to 123 to Nigel Hawkins's seven rods and 48 to Ralph Congreve's group in the second half. On the final afternoon we flew to the Upper Kitza, setting the helicopter down a few miles below the first waterfall and, in the space of four hours, pulled out some magnificent fresh salmon in the colder, fast water and we look forward to exploring this beautiful stretch in more detail next year.

We had a team of four rods at the Kitza this week, spending the whole week there rather than splitting with Lower Varzuga. These four rods certainly hit the jackpot and released, in their seven days, an astonishing 340 salmon, bright strong fish barely run in from the White Sea estuary a few kilometres below camp and still very fresh and aggressive.

Pana has barely checked her stride all season and during the first three days eight rods took 162 salmon and the second half of the week's seven rods have added a further 218 to that score to bring a total of 380 for the final week of the season in this highly sought after camp.

And so ends the final Varzuga web report for 2006, on a very high note. Shortly I will post an end of season report with catches for each camp for each week, the total number of salmon we released this year and an average catch once the final information has been collated. My thanks in the interim to all of our clients and rods who produced these figures and especially to the guides and Russian staff in all of our camps who make the operation such a pleasure to run.

STOP PRESS - Norway has started very well and our group fishing one of our new private estates have had a great start to their week with eight rods taking 31 fish in the first five days with several larger fish being landed. Private and exclusive water is hard to find in Norway and we will look forward to bringing you more news on this exciting development.