It’s not likely to be in your stocking but some lucky fellow may soon be the owner. One mile of the west bank of the fabled Itchen River in England, featuring stocked brown trout.

The trout season runs from early April until early October each year. The main salmon run is predominantly June/July and then a later run of fish in September. Sea trout also tend to run at these times of the year. Hitherto the beat has been classified by PSFFA as an upstream dry fly water but later in the season upstream nymphing is also permitted. Over recent years there has been an outstanding mayfly hatch and this has often extended through until mid or late June.

500 fish stocked per year, of which only half are caught and presumed killed, and only a single angler fishing about two-thirds of the available fishing days.

It’s plain that European private fisheries are managed for a different experience than those in the US. Our planted private water (ala Donny Beaver style) feature planting large sized fish in quantity, and dues paying sporting gentlemen discuss over a toddy, whether that sloppy fat six pound pellet eating monster was a natural or planted fish.

Hard to imagine some well heeled colonist paying in excess of $400,000 in order to catch two fish per day, in the hopes of landing a 20” fish as a seasonal record.

Although originally constructed in the late 17th century to carry chalk, aggregates, coal and timber, between Winchester and ultimately Southampton port, there remains no right to navigate along the Beat.

… and with this stretch of the river man-made as well, whose antiquity is half again as old as the continental United States, we’ll not quibble much about its authenticity.

Us colonials are horribly spoiled with so much public water, most of which is managed to the angler landing a limit or more, compliments of our respective departments of Fish & Game, and what they imagine we like most.

The Fisheries4Sale.com website lists quite a few easements for sale, with many of the most expensive being coarse fisheries; man-made ponds and stillwater impoundments featuring our pal the common carp.

All descriptions, dimensions, areas, reference to condition and if necessary permissions for use and occupation and their details are given in good faith and believed to be correct.  Any intending purchaser/s should not rely on them as statements or representations of fact but must satisfy themselves by inspection or otherwise as to the correctness of each of them.

Which I’ll assume to be an open invitation to bring along a nine foot fast action graphite to assist me in measuring all those undercut banks, shaded by the local willows …

… all measurements will be done upstream, of course.