time to stop high seas netting

The last salmon run that was anything of a spectacle on the River Stour in Dorset occurred in the autumn of 1987 viagra online pharmacy. Over several days in late October what seemed like dozens of fish leaped at the Canford weir pool geneic viagra. Though I guess a few took the ladder built for them, most forged time and time again against the violent push of water that squeezed under the gates across an apron of concrete, and in this way their vain, blinkered instinct compelled the fish to the most thrilling display of power, grace and persistence, day after day, the numbers slowly dwindling until only one or two were left and finally after a fortnight, there were none at all cialis. How big was that run viagra? A few hundred fish I guess. The Stour never was a prolific river, though it had been famous I discovered later, for its big salmon cialis. Indeed the following January one of the schoolboys found a spent cock-fish, almost dead, in the mill stream off the same weir, and that fish weighed about 32 lbs online viagra. Only as the years passed and each October the sluice gates remained unassailed did I realise that the run as it had been that autumn of ‘87 was perhaps the last of any significance that the river would ever know.

I was in Iceland this past summer fishing with Orri Vigfusson who had just agreed to take over a lease on the River Hofsa. We got caught in a cold snap, the river fell asleep and in this lull Orri took me over the valley to look at another salmon stream, the Sela, one on which he’s had the lease for many years. We drove quickly in Orri’s well travelled Landcruiser, yomping over pot-holes and puddles as he explained how he had opened up this tributary, that waterfall, each designed to ease access to spawning water and nursery habitat. One impassable stream fell off the side of the hill and made only a few hundred yards of flat water before the main stream: there were only Arctic char in it, said Orri. Or so he had thought until one day his son caught a salmon there too. Now even on this small stream they have made a habit of fishing it now and then, of moving the fish up the hill to the moor above, and in this way the tributary has acquired an appreciable run of its own. When he took over the lease, Orri told me, the annual catch in the Sela had amounted to about 300 fish. He had trebled this once to 900, and once again to the current average of 2,700. If he could treble it again, he said, he would die a happy man. He chuckled at the apparently preposterous idea, but I could tell he believed it was possible. I realised then, as we spoke, that the years over which the run of salmon in Sela had gone up and up, were the same that had seen the disappearance of salmon in the Stour.

What though has the fate of these two rivers, one in Southern England, the other in north-east Iceland got to do with Scotland?

Orri is the man behind the North Atlantic Salmon Fund. Under his watch NASF has made great gains in salmon conservation, not least in persuading north Atlantic netsmen to stay their hand, and let the great fish alone. As he has expressed it to me, it was always been the priority objective of NASF to end interceptory, mixed-stock fisheries for salmon. Those first three adjectives are key. High-seas netting of this kind is indiscriminate: salmon caught might just as well be fish from the Dorset Stour, a river that can hardly afford to lose a single fish, as the Spey. They might be from among the very few fish that still run the Dordogne, the Thames, or into the Pyrenees, as the more abundant Tweed, or the rivers of Norway. Twenty years ago NASF worked with the fishermen of the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland in whose waters all these Atlantic salmon feed, to end their commercial fishing. It was a huge sacrifice for these island fishermen, who have little opportunities in life besides fishing, but somehow it has worked and each year NASF invests with them in developing alternative, sustainable fisheries. Greenland and the Faroes have very few salmon rivers to benefit from this sacrifice or where an improvement in runs might be recorded, but across the whole of Iceland this cessation of commercial fishing contributed to a three-fold increase in runs.

Indeed it has been calculated by NASF that the Faroes fishermen have spared over one million Scottish fish (and four million Norwegian fish) in that time. You can see why it might upset them to learn that over the same period Scottish commercial fishermen have landed 969,234. Every single fish the Faroese have spared to boost salmon runs in another nation’s waters and in the cause of salmon conservation, has been caught by Scottish netsmen.

Charles Clover pointed out in his great book The End of the Line, that the great flaw of our oceanic fishing policies is the commonality of ownership. Everyone races everyone else to the last fish in the barrel because if they don’t get it someone else will. But even private ownership of oceanic rights would not spare the salmon from this schoolroom mentality, one that has been taken to an art form by the Scottish government. The Atlantic salmon is an international fish and can only be saved when all the nations to whom the salmon belongs co-operate towards a common goal.

Citizens of Scotland now belong to one of only two countries (the other is Norway) that allow the indiscriminate mixed-stock fishing that robs not only its own rivers of fish, but also rivers like the Stour that cannot afford to be robbed at all, while Scottish ministers like Alex Salmond and Richard Lockheed ignore letters from NASF and the Faroes fishermen imploring them to think again.

big bonefish in new caledonia

Sorting through photo albums as my twixt Christmas and New-Year activity therapy I re-discovered a sequence of Matt McHugh catching and releasing a nice fat New Caledonia bonefish and felt all time-to-get-on-a-plane-ish.

monster pike!

One of my most treasured fishing books is Fred Buller’s Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike. Years ago I lost or loaned (the same thing sometimes) my old, well-worn copy and I hadn’t realised just how much I’d missed it until my wife gave me a first-edition paperback for Christmas last year. There’s genius in the title of course, not just in the allusion to the 1086 all-encompassing record, or that book’s own self-conscious reference to the Day of Judgement, but because there is something doom-laden, something so foreboding about the idea of a giant, let alone a ‘mammoth’ pike. Esox lucius – the esox from the Latin for hunger or Celtic for big fish, the lucius from he who gives light or wolf, all depending on which source you read – is as close to a flesh-and-blood water-monster as you’ll get this side of myth. And this, of course, is what makes Buller’s book so compelling. While it carefully and scientifically catalogues all of these enormous fish, with photographic evidence, eye-witness statements, newspaper cuttings, and so forth, it is all the while probing at the edges of the unbelievable, trying to reach for the place where reality blends into the apocryphal and then, while you sip your whisky and the flickering flames of a winter fire light up your dreaming mind, it edges beyond into the misty waters of the unknown. Can there really have ever been a pike that weighed ninety-two pounds, which beached itself on the banks of the Shannon in pursuit of its prey, was slain with an oar and was longer than either of the two men who killed it?

The books lists 230 fish that weighed 35 lbs or more and fittingly perhaps for a land draped in mist and myth, over half of these came from Ireland. Those limestone loughs grow some massive pike: Lough Mask alone accounts for two dozen. By comparison Scotland’s share is modest: only ten fish in that original Buller list of 230, though two of them are in the top ten and the biggest of those, a monster weighing 72 lb caught in 1774 in Lough Ken, accounts for eight whole pages of rumour, controversy, letters, engravings and poetry. The giant head is no more: it existed until after the Second World War, and was tracked down to a cottager’s outhouse near New Galloway and photographed, though by then it was little more than two enormous jaw-bones. Returned to the outhouse and forgotten about, by the time Buller went looking there was nothing left to find. The fish, before it became dust, was caught by John Murray, game keeper to Viscount Kenmure, at the mouth of a small burn in Lough Ken and taken allegedly with a fly: a 1798 letter to the Sporting Magazine mentions that the lure was made with a peacock feather. Buller doesn’t believe it: he cites another letter describing how the beast was caught with a rope and a live duck. But peacock feather or whole duck, the fish was vast: Murray was a tall man and yet as he dragged it to his master’s table, the head of the fish was above his own and the tail dragged along the ground. He threw it at the Viscount’s feet and said ‘Take the next yersel’.

Not a bad entreaty then to any Scottish pike angler. I’ve never beaten twenty-five pounds myself and have occasionally wondered whether my love of pike fishing with a fly will forever confine me to the lower echelons of the pike captor firmament. But I’ve been going ‘the long way round the barn’ (as an American pal of mine once described fly fishing for these toothy monsters) with pike for some years now and so I like to believe that 1798 letter – why shouldn’t the Lough Ken monster have been caught with a fly?

I often get asked where and how and even why to start, as though it is such an obscure way of going about a simple operation as to defy common sense. To take the questions in reverse order I tend to say: because somehow there is nothing quite to compare with the hit of a massive pike on a surface fly, or the hair-raising sense of impending violence as a bow-wave cuts out of a reed bed and traces towards you: that light-headed, ear-pounding adrenalin rush you get when you shave just a bit too close to something dangerous is what I get every time a big pike hits. There is something so direct about the link between fly rod and fish, as if you are connected to the very core of the animal itself.

I answer the how more prosaically, insisting that you can’t quite make do with a bastardised salmon kit. To throw around a six-inch fly that weighs the same as a drowned chicken you need a poker-stiff nine-foot, nine-weight rod and you need a purpose built fly-line. The fly is simple though; easy to tie – just loads of white bucktail and sparkle yarn, and orange Arctic fox (a friend of mine catches plenty on strips of chocolate foil lashed to the hook) and easier still to buy. A weed-guard is a good addition. The maxim goes that unless you’re throwing the fly into the undergrowth, you’re not throwing it near the pike.

And where? You could try Butterstone Loch in Perthshire, or Loch Clunie (where legend tells of a three-legged dog, its fourth in the belly of a monster pike) or Loch Vennacher, or Loch Insh on the Spey, or Loch Awe or Loch Lomond. Or any one of a hundred or more lochs throughout Scotland, and who knows in one of them may lurk a seventy-three pound leviathan.

First written for The Scottish Field

scottish grayling

The trout season is over then. It always seems to flash past and increasingly so as the seasons roll by, each one shorter than the last. I’ve had that explained to me: that when I was twenty a single fishing season, at half-a-year long, was a fortieth of my life, but now that I’m forty-five, the same thing is a ninetieth. That didn’t make me feel any better. Time again – and too soon by far – to clear out of the car all the rods, reels and waders that live in it most of the summer and morbidly to wonder whether I’ve had more than I’ll have. Seasons that is. Far too Eeyore. But there is little consolation in the passing of a trout season you won’t see again, except to think the next will soon be here, which only goes to accelerate the whole life-flashing-past thing. Too many rivers, too little time, that’s what I say.

Little consolation ... except perhaps in remembering that as one season closes, so another begins! That it has been crisper in the mornings of late. That the trees have turned coppery, and that every so often when the wind rustles a horse chestnut there is that dry rattle of falling leaves, which along with the low, watery sun and the onset of frost spells grayling time.

Technically, we could have been fishing for them since mid-May and we could keep on fishing for them until mid-March. But somehow if I catch a grayling in the trout season it doesn’t feel right and as for the depths of winter I’m not that hard-core. For me it’s that short window of the year in the last couple of months before Christmas when grayling are at their best, feeding hard, steely and fat. They are such elegant fish with their downturned mouth and almond eyes, their light peppering of spots and that whopping man-o-war dorsal fin, all vermillion and orange.

And yet I’ve never really got on well with Scottish grayling, though I have caught a few and I’ve seen some enormous ones. I’ve spent more time fishing for them down south I suppose. My best in Scotland was from the Isla, on a day when it was the only fish I caught. It weighed about two pounds: a good grayling by any standards. The Isla seemed to me about the most perfect grayling stream, sliding gracefully over gravel banks and deep, silent pools, nuzzling timber jams. And then those long, gently boiling glides that grayling abound in. It was in a glide just as I’ve described that the roll of sheep’s wool I’d picked off a fence and snicked into my tippet took a dive downwards which – for the first and only time that day – meant there was a fish on the line, not a stick. I’ve caught plenty of grayling in the Earn though, downstream of Crieff. Nothing huge, though I’ve seen big fish in the water and on someone else’s line.

But it was on the Tweed that I had my most memorable Scottish grayling encounter. I’d snuck south from Perthshire for a weekend on the river near Peebles where a beautiful, spring-fed tributary the Lyne water joins the main river. Through the miracle of online satelitte mapping I’ve just flown seagull-like a few hundred feet above the exact spot and can see the line of alders on the north bank through which I gawped at those two enormous grayling all those years ago, the two fish that have been messing with my mind since the curtain closed on this year’s trouting.

Of course taxonomically speaking there’s no such thing as Scottish grayling: they’re all fishy grey squirrels north of the border. In fact grayling are indigenous to only a few English and Welsh rivers and none at all in Ireland. They transport well though and breed prolifically in the middle reaches of upland rivers, if the water is clean enough. When Walbran wrote ‘Grayling How to Catch Them’ in 1895 there were far fewer grayling in his beloved Wharfe than their had been only a few years earlier because of the raw sewage spilling out of towns like Ilkley and Otley, and the ‘Lady of the Stream’ had only just been introduced ‘into the Scotch rivers, though in none have they done so well as the Clyde’. The Clyde has seen it’s fair share of pollution in the intervening century, though I expect they are doing well in it again. And now I hear about truly enormous grayling coming out of the Annan, a nineteen-inch fish caught in April this year, and one two-feet long off the same beat in ’06.

Grayling, it seems, do very well in Scotland, now that they’ve hitch-hiked up here and found lodgings. Well enough, now I think about it, that emptying my car of its load of rods, reels and waders can wait another another eight weeks at least. I learned a trick not long ago, from a French angler who chases the most inscrutable grayling I’ve ever seen in his home river in Provence. He showed me how you wade up right beside them – they won’t spook if you’re slow enough – and now, arm aloft just as much as you can stand it, you fire the tiniest and most bullet-like of nymphs into the stream above them. ‘Animation’ he called it (with a French accent), the most infitessimal of lifts as the nymph hits the target zone. It worked every time, and will work I reckon, on those Tweed monsters. If they’re still there.

First written for The Scottish Field

salmon on a dry fly

I wasn’t even fishing for salmon the first time I rose one on a dry fly - I was on the River Tummel, vainly chasing the enormous trout that allegedly inhabit its stark, stony waters and was so surprised when this silver hull lifted off the bed of the stream, appearing out of nowhere to engulf the Klinkhammer, that I missed the strike completely, Nor the second a year or so later, when I hooked and landed a fresh-run six-pounder but managed - I confess - to be disappointed it wasn’t a trout. I was downstream on the Tay near Dunkeld and this particular fish had been rising steadily to olives and moving a chunk of water with every mouthful. When I rose and hooked it and felt the heft I thought that at last I had risen one of the Tay’s truly large trout, one of the seven-pounders I had long sought, had seen rising now and then, but that somehow only ever got caught on a salmon fly. When I brought the fish in and saw that it was a salmon, I was crushed. And on a Sunday too.

I had to replay the scene. But I hadn’t made it up. This fish had been rising to olives, not every so often and abstractly, but steadily and intensely. And now I had risen two salmon without trying, it begged a question: how many would I rise if I was trying?

And yet salmon on a dry fly is a minor tactic amongst minor tactics. You read about it on Canada’s Restigouche and Miramichi, salmon coming up to a Royal Wulff, or skated Green Machine. But the mantra goes that those are Canadian salmon. They behave differently, somehow. Maybe they do. It was, after all, a French-Canadian, George La Branche, who pioneered the idea with his 1924 book The Salmon and the Dry Fly, after experimenting on the Upsalquitch River in New Brunswick, developing bog-brush flies like the Soldier Palmer and finding they worked a treat. The British angler A.H.E. Wood, who himself had pioneered the floating salmon line and a minimalist approach to fly tying, heard about La Branche’s dry fly experiments and invited him over to try them on the Dee. The story goes that La Branche rose quite a few, but hooked none. And so perhaps from that time on the method got pigeon-holed as something to try in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, but not Deeside or Sutherland.

Interestingly La Branche was a trout angler. And I have wondered, if this is where he was most comfortable, whether it might explain not only his faith in the technique but his understanding of how and why it might work. I’m a trout angler too. For better or worse I best understand flowing water through this matrix. And I worked out some while ago that I do better at salmon angling if I approach it like I’m trout angling: if I stalk individual fish, if I know where they are or can see them, or at the least know exactly where they should be and believe they are present and “up for it”.

Fishing a hopelessly low River Morsgail in the Hebrides last summer, when I turned a fish to a Cascade in a pool slick as slate, and warm and thin, a fish that would not come again, I remembered the business with the dry fly. Something about the intimacy of the river made me think of it as a trout stream. I took a note of where the fish was lying and a few hours later went back, with a lighter rod, lighter line and a Kate McLaren muddler, which I greased with a dollop of Gink. I measured out the cast, dropped the fly a few feet upstream of my target and then, just as it drifted downstream over where I was hoping the fish still lay, I lifted the rod tip and danced the fly over the head of the salmon. It rose with a boil – an impulsive response as if I had flicked at a switch deep inside the small, fishy brain – and was on, a fresh, four pound grilse.

The same again in Sutherland this year, on the upper Carron, when everything had calmed down after a day of hectic spate and the pool had returned to torpor, though I knew fish were in it. This time I tried a caddis, a fly built unequivocally for trout, flicked across the run and skated with a lift of the rod top. For ten minutes, I kid you not, it was difficult to keep them off the line. A grilse, a salmon and a sea trout. I’m thinking this might be something worth trying more often.

First Written for The Scottish Field

how things change

So I'm writing a column for The Scottish Field nowadays. This is my first piece for them about my daughter catching her first salmon in the exact same pool where I caught my first ... about a zillion years ago.

Perhaps memory is like a mountainous landscape all draped in fog: parts stand out clearly while the rest is hidden or barely discernible. The memory of my first salmon should be clear enough though. I thought it was. But now, when I compare the landscape in front of me with the landscape of memory there are bits I got right: the general lie of the land, the drift of the river, a few of the rocks. The rest is smudgy. I can’t remember the trees for example: the river’s edge I’m sure was bare and stony. Or the height of the falls: I recall a tumble more than a crash. And the bank down which I chased my fish, the line cats-cradling boulders as the reel hissed, that has changed completely. I threw the salmon up on to the side more or less here, and scrabbled urgently after it to make sure it didn’t fall back in. And now, looking at the depth of the water, the height of the bank, I’m not sure if that can be right. Unless the fish didn’t run quite as far as I imagine it did. Unless the reel didn’t hiss out that much line. Maybe it stopped up there by the island.

I killed it though. I’m sure of that. Who wouldn’t kill their first salmon? I killed it even though it was a kipper. The river was lower then than it is now and it was perhaps a miracle that I got this fish at all, as it had swum upstream weeks before I hooked it. I can’t say I knew a hell of a lot then about fresh fish or stale. To me it was a salmon, the largest fish I’d ever caught or seen and it wasn’t going back. Instead I drove it back to the main lodge downstream, where adults who knew about salmon were less impressed by the colour of it, but polite enough to praise the accomplishment. And to eat it later that day for lunch.

It had been dawn then, that much was the same. It’s Monday morning six-ish now and after three decades I know enough to realise this may be the best chance I’ll get all week or all year. After a three-month drought and a three day-drenching the moss and heather are oozing like a soaked sponge and the river is foaming and brown. I have no idea at all if there’ll be salmon in it though: the record book back at the Manse, the building on the hill over there, tends to list a handful a year. Inside it sleep my family. As this was the scene of my first ever salmon I’ve been harbouring some idea that it might become the scene of Iona’s, my daughter, who’ll be twelve this week and is occasionally keen, though not keen enough to get up at dawn.

My dog is though. She has joined me. Somehow I feel hopeful. If there are fish about Iona may just have to catch the second. But in fact salmon fishing never works like this does it? To have an idea of it built Romantically around a fading image and then to have the moment itself play out exactly as you idly and hopefully imagined it might. To walk splashily through fresh rain under heather, the river roaring at the falls, balls of foam flicking back upstream on the breeze, and four casts in before you’ve even moved down the pool, while in fact you were just tickling the line under the near bank, just in case and because you know that you should, the line jabbing tight, tighter still, the rod buckling now and a bright grilse on the line easy as that, so easy it’s ridiculous. That never happens. Or when it does, as it indeed it did, you must know that you are in a lucky place, that it is an ‘auspicious day’ as the monks say in Bhutan when stars are aligned or paper boats float alight down a pool without sinking. And when it is auspicious you must go back to the house and kick your daughter out of bed, fuel her on porridge and come back to the river, to the untouched tail of the pool where you saw a fish move even while you played out the first, help with the cast perhaps, but leave her to tickle the line around on the current, suggest a couple of strips, your daughter looking bored and non-plussed far too early, until wham! ... the line straightens again, the rod jabs down and she doesn’t look bored anymore. For a doting dad too bonkers about fishing for his own good the moment may mean more to the dad than it does to the daughter, though only time will tell.

But this is how things change. Its a grilse. Maybe a cock-fish, though its too hard to tell when they’re this size. Even so the river can probably afford it and I tell Iona as much. It would be nice to keep your first, I say. It would be nice to put it back too, suggests Iona, though she has never had trouble bipping trout on the head when supper on an open fire looms. Sure? Yes, she says. Sure. And so Eric (or Erica) the grilse swims on. I think that’s progress.

thar she blows