Wiltshire
Wilton Fly Fishing Club
Membership: price on application. It holds 7 miles of water across 1 stretch.
About Wilton Fly Fishing Club
The Wilton Fly Fishing Club holds just over seven miles of the River Wylye, and it is wild fishing throughout. There are no stocked fish. Every trout and grayling in the club’s water was born there, which is the whole point of the place and the reason its members stay for decades.
Membership is capped at forty five, so the fishery is never crowded. Fishing upstream with dry fly, emerger or nymph is mandatory through the trout season, on barbless hooks, and other methods are only permitted once the trout season closes. The season runs 1 April to 15 October for trout, then continues from October to 14 March for grayling and pike, which leaves only two weeks of the year when members cannot fish. Catch and release has been 100 per cent for over thirty years.
Members wade in chest waders as a matter of course. The wading is not difficult or dangerous, with few deep areas, but the fishing asks for stealth and a degree of casting skill because the fish are wild and selective. Fly boxes here run from size 10 mayflies to size 20 flying ants and gnats, with small olives, black midges, emergers, sedges and weighted nymphs doing most of the work outside the mayfly weeks. The club employs a full-time river keeper, currently Dave Griffiths, who came in 2018 after twenty six years on the Welsh Dee, the Spey and the Ure, and it runs a mentoring system so newer members can get to know parts of the river they have not fished. Reach notes are updated each season.
How fishing here works
Membership is capped. New members join a queue, which can run to several years depending on the club.
Membership and waiting list
Membership
Membership: price on application
7 miles of water controlled
Waiting list
Membership has always been capped at forty five, which is what keeps the pressure off seven miles of river. There is no published fee and no formal queue: vacancies come up through advancing age or a change in someone’s circumstances, and the club asks anyone interested to make contact and have a conversation first, including a visit to the water. Overseas members are catered for with separate arrangements, since many cannot fish often. Plenty of members have held their place for more than thirty years.
Counties covered
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