I’ll be honest, I bought my first underwater camera thinking it would be a bit of a gimmick. Something to mess about with on slow days when the trout weren’t playing ball. Turns out, dropping a camera into your local river might be one of the best investments you can make as a fly angler, right up there with decent polarised glasses and waders that don’t leak.
Gear Used in This Article
The model I’ve been testing is a basic action camera in a waterproof housing, nothing fancy, but it’s completely changed how I approach my favourite beats on the Wye. Before using it, I was essentially fishing blind, making educated guesses about where fish were holding and what they were doing down there. Now I actually know, and the difference in my catch rate speaks for itself.
First trip out with the camera was a real eye-opener. I’d been hammering a pool below a weir for months, always fishing the faster water at the neck because that’s where the books said the trout should be. Dropped the camera in on a recce mission and discovered the real residents were tucked tight under an undercut bank about ten metres downstream, somewhere I’d barely cast to. That afternoon I took three fish from that spot, including a lovely brown that had probably been watching my flies sail over the wrong bit of water all season.
What surprised me most was how differently fish behave at different times of day. Early morning footage showed trout actively cruising and feeding in open water, exactly where you’d expect. By midday, those same fish had vanished into the most unlikely hiding spots. I found one decent rainbow practically buried under a submerged branch pile that looked completely unfishable. Once you know they’re there though, you can work out an approach.
The camera has also sorted out some long-standing mysteries. There’s a run on my local stream that always looked perfect but never produced. Turns out the bottom is completely silted up with a layer of soft mud about six inches deep. No invertebrate life, no fish. I stopped wasting time there and focused on the gravelly runs instead. Simple really, but I could have fished that dead water for years without knowing.
For UK rivers, you want something that handles murky water reasonably well. Our chalk streams might run gin clear, but most northern rivers look like weak tea on a good day. I’ve found that filming in the brightest part of the day helps, and adding a small LED light to the camera makes a massive difference in deeper pools or under tree cover. The footage won’t win any awards, but you can see what you need to see.
One unexpected benefit has been understanding how fish react to your fly. I’ve watched footage of trout following my nymphs downstream for metres before turning away at the last second. Sometimes it’s the drift that’s wrong, sometimes the fly is just a bit too large or the wrong colour. Recording a few drifts through a pool where you know fish are holding gives you feedback that’s impossible to get any other way.
If you’re thinking about getting one, you don’t need to spend a fortune. A GoPro is great if you’ve got the budget, but there are cheaper alternatives that do the job. I picked up a decent setup through this affiliate link https://amzn.to/4dbkzUH and it’s held up well through a season of dunking in cold water and the occasional bash on the rocks.
The main thing is to actually use it regularly, not just once or twice. Scout your favourite spots at different water levels and different times of year. You’ll build up a mental map of where fish actually are, not where you think they should be.
Next time you’re heading out for a session, try this: arrive an hour early and spend that time with the camera, checking the spots you plan to fish. Watch how the current actually moves through the pool, find where fish are holding, then set up your approach based on what you’ve seen rather than assumption. You might find you’re fishing a completely different piece of water, but you’ll be fishing where the trout actually are.
