Opening Ceremony 2025
Tuesday 11 February, 9am
Come along and watch the Spey begin its new fishing season

As recently announced in the local media, we want to remind all our friends in the local Aberlour and nearby community to come and visit our opening ceremony for 2025. 

We will begin as usual at the Penny Bridge, Alice Littler Park, Aberlour starting at 9am

Richard Anderson will be our Piper for the ceremony and Reverend Donald Walker will give the blessing. We thank them for their support.

Our Guest of Honour this year is John Anderson, who will ‘open’ the river. John, a long-serving ghillie at Tulchan Estate, recently retired after 42 years of service. We wish John every happiness in his retirement. 

Car parking is available and please remember, if you are bringing young children, to supervise them at all times near to the River and within the car parking and surrounding area.

To help celebrate the start of the new salmon fishing season, drams of the new 11yo Aberlour Scottish Oak FInish from the 2024 Distillery Reserve Collection, will be served by the Aberlour Distillery Team.

Hot drinks supplied by the Aberlour Hotel will be offered during the opening ceremony, along with samples of Walkers shortbread.

The Spey Fishery Board is grateful to Aberlour Distillery, Walkers Shortbread and the Aberlour Hotel for their continued generous sponsorship of this event.

Week Commencing June 21st – A good week for lower beats

Share this report

With reasonably settled weather for most of last week, the river remained on the low side. It wasn’t until the latter half that we saw significant cloud cover and some rain.  This lifted the water levels by a few inches on Saturday.

River heights – 4in-7in(+/- 2in)
Water Temps – 55-60F or 13-15C
Air temps – 10-20C – sunny/clouds – some rain.

For the tourists, the blue sky days are a god-send but for the anglers, not so much – but they do help produce nice photos  – Fiddoch Mouth pool-Easter Elchies in glorious sunshine.

It won’t come as any surprise that the lower river saw the best of the action last week. Fresh fish continued to enter the system, but with the low river levels, they tended to move much slower upstream. The majority of the catch was still multi-sea winter salmon but the grilse numbers are starting to increase.

The biggest reported fish was landed on the Easter Elchies beat by ghillie – Orn Sigurhasson. It took a size 12 black shrimp fly in the Fiddoch Mouth Pool.

The middle river also saw some nice fish landed, including this magnificent double figure trophy sea trout caught by Des Dunlop on the Knockando beat.

Some nice salmon were caught also.

Catch Summary
Upper River  –  
Limited news but 6 reported (no figures from the three main upper beats)
Middle River –
Over 30 fish reported
Lower River –  
Over 100 fish reported
Average salmon size –
approx 10lb. Biggest fish reported 22lbs. Grilse proportion – 20%

As we near the end of June I thought I’d share some of the highlights from our spring fishing this season. You can catch it on our Youtube channel –

Other news

Coming to the SFB website very soon is our new water monitoring station.

Just recently installed on the Easter Elchies beat, this will provide both the board and anglers with some very useful data e.g temperature and PH value.  A live feed to the website should allow us to show this data real-time.  A big thanks to Callum Robertson-owner of the Easter Elchies beat for his support and contribution to this project.

Looking ahead

Another settled and warm week is forecast. River levels will remain on the low side and I guess some unsociable hours will be required at times to intercept a salmon. All part of a mid-summer salmon fishing experience on Speyside.

As always, tightlines to all.

John.

1 thought on “Week Commencing June 21st – A good week for lower beats”

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign up to our fishing report email

Spey Fishing links

Recent Fishing Reports

Follow Us

Scroll to Top