Tight Lines - Richard Donkin's fishing notes

Ballogie

2011-08-31T15:26:00.019+01:00

Ballogie is one of the Aberdeenshire Dee's great river beats. There's a pool in one section (above) that has always held good fish, but this year I must have counted half a dozen or more separate salmon in the upper 20s/30 lbs plus class. I hooked in to one of them one evening. The fish held me there in its lie for about a minute and shook off the hook.

The next morning I was fishing further down river on a stretch called The Flats above Potarch Bridge. It's one of my favourite spots and had already produced four fish that week. The fish were taking small flies and I cast a size 13 Cascade on the point with a Silver Stoat dropper the same size, working the flies around a big flat-topped stone in the middle of the river.

There are quite a few prominent stones there so I wasn't surprised to find the hook caught up and gave the line a good yank to get free (not for the first time). But it wasn't a stone. I saw the eruption and looked towards where I'd felt the take, only the fish broke surface on the far side of the river. The line must have been pulled in a great bow.

I was holding the rod up and winding but the fish was in control and heading up river now on the far side towards a big stone about parallel to where I was standing. In front of it was a smaller stone and I was trying to prevent the fish moving between the two. You never want to be wrapped around a rock, not on the far side, but this fish had a mind of its own and pulled towards the obstacle.

The line went slack and I was conscious of that empty feeling that always accompanies these moments as you wind in the fly. Except as I took up the slack it was clear the fish was still attached, mid stream now, in front of the big stone. I towed it towards me a little, pumping the rod, and there it held a full fifteen minutes.

There was plenty of time to think during this impasse. It was a big fish. That was without doubt. I was a good 150 yards above the falls so there was no immediate danger there and I know from previous catches just above the falls that the fish rarely run back down. I was checking out a good place to land the fish and wishing I had someone with me, watching the cars going past on the A93 towards Ballater, wanting to tell someone that here, on the end of my line, was something a little bit special.

My biggest salmon to date is 23 lbs and this, I knew, was of a different order. The poly leader attached between the casting line and the leader line was touching the rod tip now and I could see the dropper above the surface. The fish was only about five or six yards away and maybe a foot under the surface but I couldn't see it. Besides I was concentrating on other things. I knew it would run and prayed it would run upstream.

I tried to pull it out of the stream but, for every pull I made, it made a few pulls backwards, heading closer to the big rock and I couldn't hold it. There was some good drag on the reel and I was adding more pressure with my hand. But the fish was downstream of the big stone now and pulling away more freely, not one of the wild runs I have experienced in the past, but a steady pulling away down stream like a successful tug-of-war team bent on taking its opponents with it.

Should I give it line to fool it into thinking it was free? I was running out of options. The backing was paying out above my head and the fish was chugging away now towards the falls. If it stopped as I hoped, I might have a chance but there's no following a fish down those falls. So I put on more pressure, more than I wanted to, yet confident that the line would hold. But the hook didn't. Out it pinged and after half an hour in its company I was left to rue yet another failed tussle with a big Dee salmon. But it's those tussles that bring me back year after year.

For the first time this year, I lost more fish than I caught but two of those losses were exceptional fish on small flies. For most of the week we had good water holding steady at about a foot on the gauge. I'm sure I would have caught more had I not been concentrating on the big fish lies.

It's never easy to hook a salmon, or so they say (and I agree), but one lunchtime in bright sunshine I put up my 9 ft rod and had a go with a Bomber, a Canadian pattern fished as a dry fly on a dead drift. Robert, our son, who had never fished before asked to have a go when he saw I had raised a fish. Within five minutes he was in to a salmon. He didn't know much about playing a fish and he held it perhaps a little too hard and it broke him. I tied on another bomber and a short while after he had another fish on. This too was played hard and it shed the hook. It's a pity but it proved what I already knew - that a Scottish salmon will take a bomber in the right conditions.I never stamp my feet after losing a fish - well, maybe the odd expletive - because fishing is all about problem solving: finding where the fish are and what they will take. When you get the take that's a crucial part of the problem solved, the next part is getting the fish to the bank. Most lost fish get off in the first minute as the fish struggle to work the hook free. If the hook hasn't set well, the fish will most likely get free. But it's galling when they shed the hook after being on a while.

That said, I wouldn't play my fish any other way. Had it not been for the Potarch falls I would have given that big salmon some free line. But had I done that only to see it go down the falls I would have cursed myself for choosing the wrong option. In the end, there's no point beating yourself up about a lost fish or crying in to your beer. There's always another day.

I hardly ever catch my fish when there's a photographer nearby but Gill often seems to get them when others are close at hand. The series below shows Rob netting her a nice 14 lb salmon. So for the second year running she bettered anything I caught. I'm not bitter, honestly! I think she's doing a little jig in that last picture.

Orkla tussle

2011-07-27T10:04:00.011+01:00

Mark Crampton Smith, who I fish with on the Dee in April, has just come back from a trip to the Orkla after reading the blog, one down from this one. This is the note he sent me:

"The Orkla is a quite extraordinary river. I am still in deep shock! There were six rods, fishing in pairs on three pools rotating at midnight and mid-day.

The six rods had fifteen salmon for the week and two sea trout. I had a three-fish day and caught one other salmon and a sea trout. Two of the rods blanked for the week.

It was very hard fishing and technically challenging. Most of the water required much longer casts than I could manage so I am resigned to get a rod that will put my Carron line out another 10 yards.

I suppose that you want to know what I caught? Well I am going to tell you anyway!

On the Monday in high and cold water, I put on a large cone head Black Francis and landed a 17lb hen fish that had been in the system for two or three weeks. It gave a reasonable account of itself, but nothing more than a similar weight fish on the Tweed or any other Scottish river.

On the Wednesday morning I caught a grilse of 6 or 7 lbs that ran me round the pool with some fervour and was a hint of what was to come - my appointment with a lump of a fish that took my fly, a half-inch gold bodied Willie Gunn at about 6.55 am. The fish grunted away from me until it was about 80 yards away, where it stopped and sat in the middle of the river for what seemed like ages.

I leant on it but it refused to move. Clearly I was going to have to go to it. As I got back onto my line, the fish ran again (another 100 yards) and I had to set off after it. This pattern repeated itself twice more, and, eventually, after we had travelled nearly five hundred yards and into the next pool down, it stopped and allowed me to lean on it for 20 minutes or so.

More short runs and nearly 40 mins after I had hooked it, the fish came to the bank where I beached it. No photos but at just over a meter long it was estimated at nearly 30lbs (Ed: later revised down to 28 lbs after initial euphoria has subsided). The rest of the day was spent in a post fish trauma until about 11.00 pm when I put a fly down another pool (following my fishing partner) and hooked into another fresh 17lber. This one gave a serious tussle and was landed in the pool below after nearly twenty minutes. What a day!

The Orkla is a magical system; I can seriously recommend it." This is one of the fish caught in 2010 - what a fight!

We call Mark "the Pikey" because he smokes roll-ups, steals the ghillie's deer stalker hat and wears clothes that you wouldn't take to a jumble sale. But he has the knack of winkling fish out and, now that he knows what the big ones can do, he'll be better prepared for a big Dee springer if one comes along again and repeats the take he had on our April trip.

West Country salmon

2011-06-14T17:19:00.007+01:00

It's good to have unfulfilled ambitions. One of mine is to catch a salmon in an English river. For those of us in southern England whose minds wander northwards when contemplating a salmon fishing trip, it's worth recalling that England once produced some giant salmon, and one day they might come back.

Imagine a fish such as the 64 lb salmon caught by netsman Richard Voysey on the River Exe in Devon in 1924. Orri Vigfusson, chairman of the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, was recalling the catch this week as the NASF announced the buyout of netting interests on the River Exe as part of a £500,000 package of conservation measures and habitat work that was began four years ago.

The package, co-ordinated by The River Exe Project, is seeking to double the number of salmon in the river by the end of 2014.
The buyout has been brokered jointly by the NASF and the River Exe and Tributaries Association (RETA) a partnership of local angling and conservation interests and the Environment Agency.

The Migratory Salmon Fund (MSF), a UK conservation charity launched by NASF, will contribute half the funds required towards the netting buyout.

The annual Exe salmon run was big enough in the 1950s to sustain a netting and angling catch of 3,600 fish a year. In recent years the combined catch has averaged about 600 salmon. Today about 70 per cent of rod-caught salmon on the Exe is released.

Screaming reels on Norway's River Orkla

2011-05-16T17:41:00.017+01:00

I’ve just come off the phone to Anthony Luke, the man who taught me how to fish the sunray shadow on a visit to Norway in 2007. Anthony runs three beats on Norway's River Orkla which have begun to fish well since he acquired them five years ago.

He says: “We’re getting to know the pools now and what fishes best at various heights. Also the river grapevine is working for us and we usually hear of pods moving up river so that we can be ready for them.

"In the opening four years of our tenure we have landed just short of twenty 30 lb+ salmon, spread throughout the season; a staggering statistic for such a small stretch of water. The average weight of our early season fish is over 20 lbs."

His rod returns for 2010 delivered a statistic of 0.4464 fish per day per rod, or nearly half a fish a day which is no bad return over a season that runs from June 1 to the end of August.

They’re pretty big fish too on the whole, running to upwards of 30 lbs. If you want to get a feel for the quality of the fishing just look at the bend in the rods and listen to the scream of those reels in this video compilation from the 2010 season.

At £1,800 per rod for the week, including accommodation and food (but not booze - it's Norway so stock up before you go) his rents are considerably cheaper than some of those you find through agencies. Flights from Gatwick to Trondheim in August are about £180 return. With five to six rods, split in pairs over three beats (Hilstad/Ree and Kjerstadholen/Ree) covering 3.5 Kms of double-bank fishing in the mid Orkla near Meldal the fishing is well spread. Anthony sometimes fishes the sixth rod but he doesn't fish intensively these days.

Anthony has fished all over in Scotland but he doesn’t care for the ghillie system or the opposing banks of the Dee. Those who fish with him on the Orkla are generally experienced fly fishers and it’s fly only water. You can keep some fish too although some 72 per cent of those caught on his beats last year, including all the big hen fish, were returned.

One of the rules says that if you kill a fish during a 24-hour period you vacate the beat until the end of your stint, so the choice is yours. His parties also fish sensible hours, not all-through-the-night fishing that can happen on some Norwegian rivers in mid-summer.

He doesn’t advertise his fishing. People usually come to him by word of mouth and this year he’s almost fully booked (at the time of writing he has one rod for the week commencing July 17, three rods in the week of Aug 21 and one rod for the half week from 8-12 June). Unless you move quickly you'll be looking at 2012, but it will be worth the wait.

I know this may read like an advertisement but I’ve fished with Anthony and he’s a lovely man who really cares about salmon. He’s not one of these catch-and-release evangelists who make you feel guilty for even sniffing your fish, but at the same time he understands the need for conservation and sensible fishery management.

Most of all, though, he loves to fish and he loves to catch them near the surface with a floating line. I hope he doesn’t mind me identifying him in the video as the tall thinning-on-top long-haired chap who has a look of the late Sir Michael Hordern about him and not a little of the bearing. There's some great fish action and I'd be tempted myself if I wasn't...er....grounded until August after a rather hectic spring.

Note: Norway fishing anoraks might note that the sign in the picture is not from an Orkla salmon beat but it was the first I could find in my collection of Norwegian fishing images.

Note 2: While posting the above video link I came across another fine video from the Kola Peninsula. Wow!

For more details of the Orkla fishing contact:

Anthony Luke
Manor Farm House
Nunnington
York YO62 5UX

Tel. +44 1439 748 213

mobile +44 77 99 76 46 90 (UK)

+47 41 59 66 90 (Norway)

Dee fishing for sale

2011-05-12T14:08:00.001+01:00

I don't think I can put my hands on a spare million pounds just now but if I could I might be tempted to exchange it for the Lower Dess fishings on the river Dee that come with the fine Mill cottage and rod room.

We stayed in the cottage last year and shall do so again this year. It has everything you need for living plus one of the best rod rooms anywhere on the ground floor, complete with fine old table, chairs, stuffed deer, birds, stove etc, in fact everything you need but the kilt, to play the Scottish laird.The fishing is not spectacular. Carlogie on the south bank opposite is a better beat. But when fished properly the Lower Dee isn't bad. I've seen its existing owner, David Payne (proprietor of Craigendinnie Estates), come down to the water many times and take a fish off a short cast. But he knows what he's doing.

The fish all run up the Lower Dess side and generally lie in the deepest water. There's a big fish lie at Mill of Dess. Fishers don't need a long cast but they do need to stand back on the bank to give themselves the best chance. Instead many will wade in to the lies and chuck out a long line then wonder when they have no luck.Both the Lower Dess and Upper Dess beats are on the market. If you want to buy the whole lot with the Lower Dess estate and buildings, Mr Payne is looking for offers over £4.3m but the estate is also divided in to 10 lots.

If you do buy the fishings please don't get any ideas about increasing the number of rods. There are quite enough already. As older riparian owners leave and new owners appear there is a real danger that the Dee could be seen as a money-making machine for the nouveau rich. It's a salmon river and a very fine one and those privileged to own a section are custodians of something special.

These two beats are special because of their very fine huts, one of which is barely used anymore. The best pool at Lower Dess is probably Dess Mill pool but it is better fished from the other side. Pitslugs, higher up the beat, fishes best from the Dess side. Looked at as an investment there are probably better returns to be had elsewhere, but looked at as something to treasure, something that will reward you in ways other than your annual returns in rents and fish landed, the purchase is tempting indeed.

In addition to the beats already mentioned, Craigendinnie Estates, is also selling its Lower Blackhall and Kinneskie fishings (offers above £880,000 are being sought for this rare chance to buy some double bank fishing on the Dee).

Some thoughts on Spring salmon fishing

2011-05-09T14:11:00.007+01:00

Time to get the trout rod out again. I'm pretty sure now my spring salmon fishing is over this year; and what a spring it was. It began with the Oykel, moved on to the Tay, found time for the Dee and ended on the Tweed. It even inspired a bit of poetry.

Each of these rivers has its own characteristics and styles, even down to the permissible hooks: single, treble, double, treble in that order. I stopped using trebles a few years ago and enjoyed fishing with a single hook on the Oykel.

Each of these rivers has switched to catch-and-release to preserve their spring stocks that are genetically different to the much more abundant run of fish that enter the river later in the year.

There was talk on the Tweed that later running fish might have been undercutting the redds of spring salmon that are the earliest to breed. I'm not sure how you could collect evidence for this.

The Tweed fishing was intriguing with a lot of people coming and going on half-week arrangements. Surprisingly it wasn't the prolific catches that were most mentioned among those who told me they preferred the Tweed, but the shorter journey times from southern England relative to the more northerly rivers. That said, the Tweed is not so prolific in the Spring, saving its big catches for the back end of the season.

There's no avoiding the conclusion that getting to the Oykel involves a long drive if you're based near London, unless of course you fly to Inverness and hire a car. For someone who likes to think of his car as a fishing box, the idea of carting all my stuff through an airport doesn't appeal, although it would force a more minimalist approach and that would be no bad thing.

So what were the good bits this spring? It was good to hear that big spring salmon are beginning to return to the Tay. It was good to hear that the same fishing syndicate that owns the Lower Oykel beats has bought the Upper Oykel fishings, ensuring a consistency of approach that favours conservation.

And it was good to have some low water fishing at Carlogie on the Dee that suits such conditions. I've often driven through Kelso and looked at the Junction Pool from my car window, so getting the chance to fish there was a real bonus, and catching a couple of fish on the pool (each within half an hour of each other) made the whole trip worthwhile.Anything I might have done differently? It's difficult to recall the conditions on the Oykel - the river wasn't crystal clear - but I might have experimented with slightly smaller hooks, although the fish I caught took a flashy flame-red fly.

I would certainly have fished smaller on that first day on the Dee when the river was alive with fish. It seemed odd, during our last day on the Tweed, seeing the water rising and colouring up again after weeks of dry conditions.

I lost three fish and caught six - not much, you might think for 21 days fishing, but spring fishing is rarely easy. Besides it's not a numbers game. I dare say I would have caught more if I had hammered some of the best pools a bit more. But that's not why I go fishing. If I can hook a fish to a good cast and bring it to the bank smoothly, without too much hassle, I'm happy to know that I've done everything right. In the same way if a fish is lost because the hook pings out - as they all were - and not because I was giving slack line, or because of a line breakage or badly tied knot, I can put it down to bad luck.

I was sad to have a fish die on me. On the Tweed I had one with a hook well down and cut the line. Unfortunately with the one that died, it had already bled and wouldn't revive.

So what other thoughts from fishing a variety of rivers? Levels of enlightenment in salmon fishing seem to be in inverse proportion to the size of river. While the Oykel has moved on to single hooks, fly only, the Tay still persists with harling, big treble hooks and worming at certain times of the year.

A ghillie on the Tweed told me he had no problem with spin fishing throughout the season. "It allows a greater range of anglers to come fishing. There is too much snobbery around fly fishing," he said.

I take his point but I disagree about the snobbery. Fly fishing isn't about snobbery; it's about learning and enjoying a skill. Had I not been raised on the doctrine of "spring spinning, summer fly." I would have gravitated to fly fishing much earlier. After all I had fished for trout for years with a fly but it wasn't until I began summer salmon fishing on the Dee nearly 20 years ago that I began to try and master fly fishing. It would have happened much faster with some good instruction.Even when you're not catching fish, you can still take pleasure in working on your cast and fly presentation. The problem here is that you can become so focused on getting out a straight line that you forget that this too is a means to an end. If the fish are a few yards away, there's not much point heaving out a fancy thirty yard cast.

The final lesson from all of these trips is that as fun as it is to go salmon fishing, the occasion is made by the company you keep (the picture above shows John Senior, founder of Heroes Welcome) and I've been fortunate to fish with some good people. They know who they are. Tight lines to all of you.

A fine brace on the Tweed

2011-05-05T16:51:00.016+01:00

Another week, another river: this time the River Tweed and my first opportunity to fish Kelso's famous Junction Pool, the place where the Teviot runs in to the Tweed.

I was working down the stretch from the neck of the pool at the top of the beat this morning, starting at the leisurely time of 10 am. The river is very low and so it seemed right to take up where we left off on the Dee a week or so ago, selecting small flies.

After running down the pool with a size 12 silver stoat I switched to a size 13 Smith's Shrimp. There was a wind blowing in to our bank so the ghillie, Gavin Brown, introduced me to the Circle Spey Cast (called a Snap C cast here although, unlike the Snap T, there's less of a snap and more of a circular positioning of the line). It's a new one for me and I liked the smooth lay out of the line.

I had been struggling to get good presentation with a single Spey from the left bank. The way the Circle Spey works is that you raise the line off the water and roll it out over the river at an angle, sweeping your rod back towards the bank and down , then raising it to get a D in the classic Spey cast. When it works, and I had to persevere a bit, it puts the line out nicely at a classic fishing angle. It's a real help if you're casting in to an upstream wind. If you can bear the accompanying music this clip shows the cast being performed on the left bank (that's the bank to your left as you look downstream).

Gavin was correcting me as I tried to put the cast together, urging me to slow things down. No sooner had he left the river for a few minutes to run an errand than I was in to a fish, a lovely fresh springer of about 7 lbs, no sea lice but not long in the river.

Soon after he returned at about noon I hooked another one, this time a strong 14 pounder, that was safely banked and returned. Had I run down the pool again I think there'd have been a good chance of another but Gavin had brought over a new Hardy prototype rod and I tried it in another pool on the right bank. The rod was OK but here I was trying my newly put together cast over my left shoulder (as in the first video but not nearly as well as that demo. It was all a bit too technical to be trying a new rod and line left-handed in to the wind so I switched back to my usual set up and the line was fishing well again.

Lunch beckoned and here I am writing this, waiting a bit impatiently to go out again this evening. You would never normally drag me off the river, but my host was keen to rest it this afternoon. It's giving me time to research a nice fishing story - the reason I'm up here. This is a bit of a detective story and all will be revealed in a week or two.

No pictures of the fish, sadly. My camera was in the boat with the net. No camera, no ghillie, no net - yes that's about par for the course but both fish were safely banked and what a great introduction to the Junction pool. For those who know the pool, it was up in the neck, in Willie hole. If you're fishing this week in low, clear conditions, try something small. It can make all the difference.

Four men in a hut (to say nothing of the dog)

2011-04-27T12:11:00.027+01:00

There were four of us: Will Sadler, Bryan Kruse, myself, and Mark Crampton Smith aka The Pikey. The Pikey’s Labrador, Stanley, is far too well behaved to win a trophy as unwanted as the Sluie Cup, but he had his moments. Swimming across the river to sniff the bitch on the other side might have put him in contention had it not been at the command of his owner who prefers to do things by proxy.

The Sluie Cup (sometimes called the Sluie Saucer in recognition of its dubious status) was devised by Will Sadler to be awarded each year on our spring week on the Dee for the kind of haplessness that falls short of acceptable levels of competence and bank side behaviour. The more coveted trophy is the Carlogie Cup, taking its name from our beat and awarded usually, but not necessarily, to the one in our party who catches the most fish.

The capture of a very fine and large fighting fish might eclipse the number of landed fish to any rod, but, so far, this has not happened, possibly because of the rich and varied incidents that tend to make the Sluie Cup the most hotly contested of the two. Why the Sluie Cup? Because Sluie, a little way down river, is a beat we rented one year where none of us managed to catch a fish. As a result, I suppose, it’s become a symbol of failure.

So we gathered in the hut, put a few logs in the stove, poured some generous glasses of malt and began to discuss tactics. This year our three-rod beat had been turned in to a four-rod beat. We preferred it as a three-rod beat as it allowed us to compile a rota including rest sessions, so that each of us would fish four and a half days (or nine out of a possible 12 sessions over six days). But the riparian owner decided it should be a four-rod beat. In fact he said it had always been a four-rod beat but he had chosen hitherto to fish it with three. My protest was overruled with the reminder that Carlogie faced two beats on the other side: Lower Dess and Kincardine, each with three rods. So we were fishing four rods against six.

He had a point. I would argue that Kincardine and Lower Dess are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable with six rods between them. When you have 10 rods fishing hard along both banks of a two-mile stretch of river, the ideal of resting a pool gets thrown out of the window. Of course those fishers used to standing shoulder-to-shoulder in Labrador or Newfoundland would wonder what the fuss was all about.

They might also wonder at the pettiness of grown men acting like children, sprinting against each other on either side of the river in order to get first in to a pool. On one stretch, when he reached the best bit of a productive pool, the man fishing opposite appeared to have become glued to the bank until I was almost upon him. He fished the rest of the pool faster than Usain Bolt running the 100m, returning briskly to the head of the pool before once more losing the use of his legs. Such is the level of gentlemanly conduct on today’s pressured salmon river.

The upshot of our new four-rod arrangement, apart from added expense, was that we would need a carefully designed rota to ensure meal preparation and harmonious relations between ourselves and the rods on the other side.

The harmonious relations were tested somewhat when the Pikey threw his colour-co-ordinated, plastic encapsulated beat rota on to the fire, saying he didn’t think much to it. I'd sweated over that rota. I burned my fingers, rescuing it from the embers and dusted down the charred edges. It was still visible and still the law.

Something odd happens when men more accustomed to city comforts and motorway driving attempt to adopt the mantle of the woodsman and a simpler life with its requisite accessories. I have a friend who goes nowhere without his fire-making sticks in the boot of his car. Need to light your cigarette with half an hour to spare? No problem. I don't have sticks but I do have a finely honed Swedish sheath knife that’s excellent for whittling and that I popped into the pocket of my moleskins. You feel ready for anything with a knife like that.

I was not, however, ready for the cold gush of water down my waders when the point of the said knife poked through its leather sheath, worked a hole in the trouser pocket and finally punctured several holes in the waders, earning me an early place in the Sluie rankings.

The Pikey was already above me, having enjoyed total immersion at a place called Pitslug where the wading is demanding for those who feel they must do it, and the Pikey always does. He hung out his clothes to dry but there wasn’t a peg big enough for his iPhone. Will’s mobile phone soon followed in to the drink when he too stumbled, avoiding the full-bodied baptism reserved for the Pikey. One pair of waders and two phones out of action by midweek is about par for the course on one of these trips. But at least no-one had hooked himself. An East wind blowing up river soon settled that with the Pikey (pictured right in deerstalker stolen from the hut a previous year in typically Pikey behaviour) and then Bryan (below) managing to embed hooks in their cheeks (instructions for their removal are provided here).

It should be said that among all these mishaps, fish were being caught and they were also being lost. Bryan managed to lose three in a row after catching his first fish and Will lost two before edging ahead in the catch records with four fish. But the fish were all of average size in the 8 to 11 pounds range.

A really big fish was eluding us until the Pikey hooked in to something very big, very fresh and very strong one evening. The big springer ran him ragged and finally broke him in the gloom. The Pikey was distraught, devastated even, at this terrible loss. I blamed his fluorocarbon leader (I use Maxima). It did not improve his mood.

My own fishing went well with one exception. An average-sized salmon took my fly and stripped a lot of line in one long run, yet came in quite placidly on its side. The hook was lodged in its gills and must have bled the fish before I had it in my net. We tried to revive it for more than twenty minutes under the binoculared scrutiny of the ghillie and other rods on the other side of the river. But this fish had run its last. It was dead when I lifted it out of the water. Trying to argue otherwise would have been as futile as the Monty Python pet shop owner at the return of his Norwegian Blue parrot.

A few years ago I’d have thought nothing of it. You caught your salmon and you banged it on the head. But these are the days of catch-and-release when you do your utmost to revive and return a landed fish. Killing a fish in a 100 per cent catch-and-release river is the ultimate Bateman moment for any angler. It’s not too enjoyable for the fish either. It didn't help that Will had come down to the riverside and insisted in photographing me with the fish which should never have come out of the water (although it wouldn't have revived). So I'm pictured in full catch-and-release pose with a fish in its death throws. The shame of it all. In mitigation all I can say is that this is the first time I have killed a fish unintentionally since the introduction of catch and release. But such mitigation carries little weight when making a case for the Sluie Cup. Nor did I help my case when a day or two later I pulled out a handkerchief from my wading jacket, only to see my car keys come with it and flop in to the water. Soaking my arm, I succeeded in retrieving the keys but the water did nothing for the electronic door-opener. There were other minor Sluie-worthy intervals, such as the fiasco when Bryan cooked his boned-joint of fallow deer. Bryan is an experienced stalker who knows how to bone a deer. But he is a less experienced cook and didn’t take the oven temperature at the start of cooking. I think it was 11.30 pm and we were half-asleep when we finally sat down for our venison feast. But it was worth the wait.

We lost too many fish this year and had a slow start on the Monday, trying to understand the extraordinary unseasonably warm and sunny conditions. The water was relatively low, warm and crystal clear. Size 13 and 12 hooks on a full-floating line seemed to be doing the business. I spent far too much time trying to entice a fish with a sunray shadow, but it's something I like to do and I did have one surface snatch that missed the fly.

The awards ceremony is in a week or so and the cup winners will only be announced on the day. At least I didn’t hook myself this year, or lose my wading stick, or fall in, and I caught a few fish but maybe not enough. We shall have to wait and see. Below is the view from our cottage by the river. Above is the track down to the Ballogie beat adjoining Carlogie. No wonder we keep coming back.

Fish of a lifetime killed for the family album

2011-04-12T18:18:00.009+01:00

I'd love to catch a 40 lb salmon. But not this way. Not now. These pictures remind me of the Tay 30 years ago. In fact I remember hanging my first salmon - a 23 lb fish - by some string on a pole just like this for a photograph. That fish was gaffed out of the water and it was killed like every other we caught in the spring in those days.

I'm not soft on killing fish but I think a big springer such as this is far too precious today to take its life. It's a privilege simply to fish for them and an extremely rare experience to hook one, even rarer to land one. It simply doesn't need this kind of trophyism around the dead specimen. It's reminiscent of those black and white films of hunters shooting big game in the days of Empire. Those days should be over.

A beautiful fish, caught on the fly, shouldn't end its life like this, but after spawning so that other springers just as big might replace it. The anglers may be smiling but they're leaving very little for their children to smile about and that's sad.

I know that catch and release divides salmon fishing like no other. In the past two weeks, fishing first on the Oykel (100 per cent catch and release for spring salmon, then on the Tay (advised to put first fish back with the option of keeping your second) I was exposed to both sides of the debate. On the Oykel there was no discussion of catch and release. It was simply taken as read and no-one questioned the policy.

On the Tay attitudes differ among anglers. I've noticed that there seems to be an age gap with older fishermen, although by no means all, in favour of knocking some fish on the head while younger fishers seem more receptive to putting fish back.

I understand there is a debate about the need for catch and release but I think we can't afford to be wrong about this so I prefer to err on the side of preservation. If catch and release helps to restore stocks I'm for it.

Next week when I'm fishing on the Dee (where catch and release has been practiced for some time) I know I will see a hell of a lot more salmon about than I do every spring on the Tay. The Tay has done far too little to conserve its springers, particularly in the lower and middle river. Smolts from fish stripped of their eggs in the middle river are generally taken to the headwaters which means that they return to this part of the river as adults, thereby depleting the breeding stock that would normally populate the lower stretches.

Conservation policy needs to be better thought out than this. It's time that the Tay introduced 100 per cent catch and release in the Spring. That would at least remove the uncertainty and relieve ghillies from the need often to arbitrate between fish and fisher.

At the same time the Tay should begin to phase out harling with kynoch killer lures and big treble hooks. The Tay is a big river and harling has gone on for generations. Georgina Ballantine's 64 lb British record salmon was caught this way on the Tay in 1922. One Tay ghillie who harls every day in the season called it the "most boring form of fishing imaginable" when I was chatting with him last week.

Today the appeal of harling is confined mostly to beginners and older anglers who might struggle to fish all day from the bank. Some boat fishing might be preserved to cater for older anglers but it's high time that harling began to be phased out in favour of fly-fishing.

I would argue that putting fish back is not just for the sake of the fish but also for the fishers. Would you rather catch a few fish in your week and return them or catch none at all?

Postscript:

David Summers, Fisheries Director of the Tay District Salmon Fisheries Board, has replied to this blog.

He writes:

My attention was drawn recently to your fishing blogspot article on the River Tay where there were a number of significant inaccuracies.

The policy of the Tay DSFB has for two years now been 100per cent of catch and release of springers up to the end of May, 100 per cent release of all females thereafter with only one male grilse per day being kept if an angler wishes. The policy is outlined here.

Around 90per cent of spring salmon were released in the Tay last year and I would have thought the great majority of beats will achieve the same this year also, though there are as you point out still some areas of resistance. I am surprised that you were not aware of this given it has been widely publicised on the river and that the head ghillie on the beat you were fishing is in fact a member of the Fisheries Board. It would be wrong to convey the impression that catch and release does not happen on the Tay.

Furthermore I can also confirm that the TDSFB policy is not to take broodstock from the lower reaches of the Tay and stock their offspring in the headwaters. Broodstock collection in the Tay district is concentrated in the headwaters of the river (where springers spawn). Fish are only taken from well populated spawning areas and their offspring released into nearby locations where for whatever reason we find juvenile numbers to be low or non existent (e.g. where there is a barrier to adults). When we do take broodstock from the main stem their progeny are released into tributary burns of the main stem as close to the source of the broodstock as possible. The idea that the lower river has been stripped of its spawning stock for the benefit of the upper river is complete fantasy. In fact broodstock have never been sourced as low down as Stanley anyway.

I am very grateful for you and others like you for seeking to spread the catch and release message as it is the right thing to do, especially for the large Tay springers and I hope you will continue to spread it. But I would perhaps caution against being taken in by some of the misinformation which obviously flies around, despite what people are told, which only seems to provide excuses for the reluctant as to why they should not bother putting fish back.

Kind regards

David Summers

Fisheries Director

Tay DSFB

I would like to thank David for the correction, particularly on the sourcing of broodstock. The contrary information was passed to me by someone with a close knowledge of the river. On the matter of catch and release, while I do not dispute the figures, I can confirm that some resistance remains among certain anglers.

I hope, however, the Tay DSFB would not be claiming to be progressive in its conservation policies. They are at least six years behind those on the Dee which might explain why the Dee is a far more attractive spring fishing river today than the Tay. Furthermore, a catch and release policy that continues to condone worming does not make much sense to me.

Signal Crayfish and freshwater mussels

2011-04-12T09:30:00.004+01:00

North American signal crayfish have been one of the most successful of invasive species in the UK. Rather like the grey squirrel, they have pushed out the native crayfish on many river stretches, creating a real problem as they eat almost anything - eggs, fry, the lot.

On the other hand, the signal crayfish makes for good eating itself and can be found on supermarket shelves in take-out sandwiches. But there are strict laws governing crayfish trapping. It appears the environment agency doesn't trust people's judgement to distinguish between the invader and the native to allow trapping without a license.

If you want to find out more about trapping, cooking and eating signal crayfish and you have the stamina to wade through umpteen threads on an internet forum, I can recommend this one. Like all forum threads there are a few ill-judged comments in a discussion that exposes the levels of uncertainty around crays. But a lot of the information is genuinely helpful.

I also chipped in on a thread where anglers were being blamed for removing freshwater mussels. My own comments, including some simple advice for cooking and eating are supplied under the nickname, Earthwatcher. I always look out for signs of freshwater mussels when I'm salmon fishing. Those on the left were photographed during a recent visit to the middle Dee. The picture shows them buried half way in to a sandy ledge, their shells half-open, filtering the sand. They're an important and only too easily overlooked part of the ecosystem. I don't have a waterproof camera but took this picture by bending over and dipping the end of my camera lens in to the water.

Spate river

2011-04-04T11:00:00.008+01:00

Just arrived on the Tay at Upper Scone near Perth, after a pleasant week on the Oykel fishing for spring salmon where previously I have fished the grilse run. There were fish in the river and we had plenty of water, probably too much by the end of the week after the river was looking a little thin at the start. Big winds and unsettled conditions played havoc with tactics but that's the challenge of spring fishing. We had 16 fish for the week between 12 rods on the Lower Oykel. I had a nice 12 pounder on the Friday.

This is single fly fishing and full catch and release until the grilse run starts in the summer when when the odd grilse can be kept. This policy is ensuring a healthy run of fish but springers are still pretty scarce.

I always think these Scottish weeks are made by the company we keep as much as the fish we catch and we had a happy band this week - a good mix of characters and even a sing song in the bar. My thanks to Nick Hartley and his chums, John Senior and Graham Fraser who are a great team to fish with. They also indulged constant references to progress of a poem inspired by the spring conditions.

Anywhere here it is for what it's worth. It's called:

Spate river

Under the watery sun,
Under the char brown moor,
Droplets clinging to winter birch
Far from summer’s door.
Ripples kissed by seasons,
Coy as a bridesmaid’s blush,
Veiling suitors’ weathered stains,
Cleansed by autumn’s flush.
Moss-mottled boulders,
Parched over peat-shrinking days,
Haven for stone-fly and caddis,
Migrant wanderer’s cradle,
Wet-nursing spring’s promise,
Indiscriminate porter of souls,
Dark, impenetrable crucible holes,
Ever the healing spinster,
Ever the skin-chafed wife,
Chattel for time in obeying,
Ordained in the service of life.

31.3.11

Record salmon catch for Scotland

2011-03-24T11:17:00.007Z

In 2010 Scotland had its highest salmon catches on rod and line since records began in 1952, according to provisional data released today.

The final figures will show that for the first time in nearly 60 years the rod catch will exceed 100,0000, of which more than two thirds were put back to continue their spawning journey (that's one of them in the picture, caught on the Lower Oykel in July).

The data has been compiled for the 2011 Association of Salmon Fishery Boards (ASFB) and Rivers and Fisheries Trusts of Scotland (RAFTS) Annual Review published today.

In 2009 the total catch was 72,595. The 10-year average from 2,000 to 2009 inclusive, was 76,431. The previous record of 96,488 was set in 1988.

While 2010 was another poor year for spring salmon, many east coast rivers had spectacular summer and autumn runs and the River Tweed alone recorded more than 23,000 salmon caught. The story in the southern west Highlands was less encouraging. Catches remain poor, probably because of the concentration of salmon farming on the west coast.

Both fishing bodies point out that better techniques, season extensions and increasing numbers of filled rods will have been responsible for part of the increase. Catch-and-release must also be making a difference now.

But the report reminds us that, when looking at fish abundance, the figures are not comparing like with like.

In the late 1960s about 500,000 fish were caught in Scottish nets while the combined salmon catch of Greenland and the Faroes was 3,000 tonnes. In 2010 the Scottish nets took between 15,000 and 20,000 fish - that's the declared catch, all killed for the table.

So as the chairmen of both fishing organisations agree, returns of migratory salmon are still "nowhere near as abundant as they were 50 years ago”.

They add: “The challenge for managers, simply put, is to ensure as much of our salmon producing habitat is accessible to fish, that water quality and quantity and aquatic habitat are of the highest quality and that exploitation in all its forms (rods/nets/predators) is kept as low as possible.

“When marine conditions favour salmon, as they clearly did for some stocks in 2009/10, then our fisheries will reap the reward. But given the dynamic, complex and extremely unpredictable nature of our marine environment, particularly in these days of shifts in climate, a cautious approach – even against a background of record catches – is the only sensible position to adopt.”

*The ASFB and RAFTS Annual Review is sponsored by legal firm Gillespie MacAndrew and property consultants and land agents Strutt and Parker. Copies are available from ASFB/RAFTS, Capital Business Centre, 24 Canning Street, Edinburgh EH3 8EG, asfb@btconnect.com or telephone 0131 272 2797.

Call of the wild

2011-03-22T12:30:00.010Z

Dreaming of the river? Can't wait to be wading in that stream again? Stuck at work? Not to worry, why don't you bring the river to your desk with this nature sounds website? It's great fun and only takes a minute or two to put together a sound like this.

Admit it, you could almost be there. The only thing missing is the splash of the take and the buzz of the reel. You can find reel sounds at various web sites but most of them seem to be paid-for downloads and ring tones. Still it's free to listen and since I'm about to head off salmon fishing this should get me in the mood. More here at singing reels.

Fish on but don't fish too long

2011-02-24T15:11:00.012Z

It's looking very likely that legislation will be passed soon in the UK to allow the clocks to move forward one hour on to what is known as double summer time. The result will be darker mornings and longer evenings.

What will this mean for anglers in the UK? My guess is that it could result in more time on the water, particularly among salmon fishers. Is this a good thing? Well let's see.

The debate over time systems can sometimes appear a little confusing as there are only so many hours of daylight in any day. But our living patterns tend to be dictated by habit and what we might call "working hours": the time the radio news comes on, the time we're expected in to work, even the time the pub shuts.

Sure we can get up earlier on a fishing trip to the salmon river, but in my experience few do, although I love the calm of an early morning (see the lower Oykel, top).

Typically on one of my Dee weeks I might be out on the water by 8.30 am on the Monday, but generally I'm happy to be in the water by about 9 am. That isn't going to change if the clocks move forward so if the proposed change goes through I'll be out by what, in the existing system, would be 8 am.

What will change is the length of time I fish in the evening. I always fish up to dusk as I've always found that time just before dusk the best time for a fish.

During the time I've spent on the River Oykel it's been the habit of our host to bring people together for dinner in the evening. That's reasonable as not everyone there has come to fish.

But it means missing pudding and a mad dash out on to the river for a last fish and, very often, the wine and the company wins. This is very much social fishing and, frankly, it would be rude and pretty selfish to be focused entirely on the fish.

That extra hour, however, will change everything, creating the possibility for a couple of hours fishing after dinner to well after 11 pm.

Of course these options lead to one thing: exhaustion. This was my experience during an early fishing trip to Norway in midsummer when it was possible to fish on in an eerie half-light. The Icelanders allow no such options (below, fishing the Big Laxa, Iceland in June 2006). There, a fishing day is regulated at no more than 12 hours. Beats divide the time as they chose but generally in to two six-hour shifts broken by an afternoon rest period, allowing time for a nap or a spell in the Jacuzzi.
I suspect that in the summer, at least, I might be tempted to break up the Scottish fishing day in a similar fashion. As it is, I usually take a good rest in the afternoon, particularly if the sun is shining (nothing like a good book, see below).

Some would argue that salmon pools should be rested regularly but I've never been wholly convinced by this. Often the fish we catch are running fish and these rarely rest for long. In Canada I've seen fish stacked up and I'm sure they get used to - and bored by - all the flies going over them, so they do need a rest, but it rarely happens. That aside - whether or not resting improves taking opportunities - I think it's reasonable just to give the fish a rest from "us" from time to time. They give us so much pleasure when we catch them.

It's tempting to squeeze every hour we can from an expensive salmon week, but it's good to find balance in what should still be seen as relaxation and not the labour of Sisyphus.

Double summer time will take time to bed-in on the river, but I hope it doesn't mean that the fish will be at the mercy of our flies any longer than they are today.

Time to close the record books

2011-02-24T11:21:00.008Z

Is it time to close the book on angling records? I yearn after a big fish as much as anyone and yet the more I read of angling records, the more I'm tempted to ask whether the death of a great fish is worth all the glory and satisfaction of finding yourself the top rod.

I've been doing a lot of reading recently around the clamour to set big game records during the 1920s and 1930s. The marlin expeditions led by Zane Grey and others were plundering the seas just as much as their contemporaries - often the same individuals - were clearing the forests and plains of big cats all over Africa and the Indian sub-continent.

Anyone who sought to kill a tiger as a trophy today would be justly ostracised, if not put behind bars. Yet anglers are still setting out, particularly at sea, to capture record fish.

It's the chance of a "grander" that brings wealthy game anglers to Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands in the summer months. I set out myself two years ago in order to write a feature for the Field (but also to fulfil a lifetime ambition to catch a blue marlin).

In my mind, there was no question of keeping anything I caught. They would all go back and most of them do. That's the policy of the game fishing skippers. They don't want see their livelihoods disappearing with the stocks of game fish.

But it's not true to say that there is no question about fish returns. The skippers I spoke with said that if they had captured a potential record-breaking fish it was highly likely that this would be killed. It's the only way that such a fish could be weighed for the record books.

This is exactly what happened in 2009 off County Claire in South West Ireland when the capture of a 1,056 lbs six gill shark broke the rod and line record for the biggest fish caught off the British Isles (the headline is misleading since the angler was Swiss). Previously the record had been held by a 968 lb bluefin tuna (caught in 2001 off the west coast of Ireland).

That last record itself is a source of concern, that such a majestic and endangered fish as a bluefin should have been taken. The bluefin is a prize indeed with a price on its head. In January this year (2011) a somewhat smaller blufin tuna, weighing 754 lbs, fetched a record price at auction - £250,000 - in Tokyo.

In the 1930s off Britain's north sea coast, Bluefin tuna were being caught regularly by anglers casting herring baits from little skiffs. In a single haul, one angler returned with fish worth more than £1m in today's inflated Japanese prices. In those days there was scarcely a market for bluefin in the UK. Those big specimens photographed on the quaysides of Scarborough and Whitby were often left to rot or cut up for pet food. Contrast that with Japan's insatiable appetite for bluefin today.

And yet I cannot read of those halcyon days of "Tunny" fishing in the north sea without feeling a surge of excitement and a feeling of "what if?"

Part of me would love to go after those bluefin. To feel the power of a 600 lb monster on the line, dragging you along for all its worth must have been one hell of an experience. Yet the more I read of the bluefin fishing, the more it's clear that even then anglers were questioning their sporting ethics.

The truth is that these big fish would often die on the line, their hearts bursting in the struggle, leaving the angler to drag up the dead weight from the sea bottom. There's no honour in catching a fish this way.

For the same reason today, when practising catch and release in fishing for salmon, we play our catch firmly to get it to the net and released with a minimum of distress to the fish.

As herring stocks recover, I think it's entirely possible that the bluefin runs could return to the north sea. Indeed I have no doubt that a few shoals are out there each year already. But I think we should leave them there, and if we can't leave them alone, then they have to be protected by law. And so do the sharks and any other fish, for that matter, that would need to be killed to be weighed for the record books.

Why you should never wear seal-coloured waders

2010-11-03T16:32:00.003Z

An afternoon's sea fishing: you wade out about knee deep, get ready to cast your fly, who knows, there may be some sea trout, bass, anything will do; as long as it's not too big and doesn't have razor sharp teeth and an appetite to match. Free Willy? I bet he did, and right down the inside of his waders.

A Facebook for fly fishers?

2010-10-28T12:34:00.008+01:00

I've just come across a new web site called Fools on the Fly which seems as if it's been developed as a social networking site for anglers.

It's very early days, barely 50 names up there at the moment, including mine. Yes, I go under the moniker Deesider as I do on some forums. No, I don't live in Deeside, but I love the place and spend a bit of time there, so grabbed the name before anyone else did. Someone always nips and grabs Piscator early.

Why do you join these things, you may ask? I think that most of us will be living and working through the web eventually. In fact I've written a novel about (not yet published) it and it forms part of the regular presentations I make on work (based on the books here).

The only way to find out how these things work is to sign up and get involved. You don't have time? It's a good point. The net can begin to take over your life so I guess you have to have some discipline and you need to make this stuff work for you.

I'm a member of two fly fishing forums and they can be really useful for getting answers to specific questions. Everyone has an opinion, so you have to understand that there will be some nonsense there. But there are a lot of remarkably knowledgeable people out there and this can be an effective way of drilling down to specific detailed knowledge.

You want to know what salmon pools fish best on a beat of the river you're planning to visit? Ask a question on the salmon fishing forum and I bet you get a useful answer.

I can't vouch for this new site. Like many such sites it is seeking a way to be successful commercially. Some of that may be through acting as a market place - a sort of trading post. But I noticed it was also mentioning credits for forum postings.

If it expects people to pay for membership or posting it will fall at the first hurdle. If it brings in charging after securing a critical mass of registered members, it might just get away with it. But I'm wondering if it's experimenting with one of those systems where you begin to buy credits for deeper involvement in the site beyond the basic stuff that comes with free membership. That might work. Suffice to say I have no intention of dipping in to my pocket at this stage.

Verdict: After four days, I just returned for a peek. Unless they remove the fee from forum contributions (what a ludicrous idea) the site is dead in the water. If people cannot freely exchange views on a site like this they're going to go somewhere else where they can.

Finzean fishing

2010-09-20T19:04:00.008+01:00

After a great August week on the Middle Dee it felt greedy to return for one last visit in September but when opportunity knocks, well you have to take it. Bryan Kruse, one of our spring party on the Dee, took his own week at Commonty and asked me along with Will Sadler to share a couple of rods. It took my salmon fishing to 30 days this year, even more than I did as a fishing columnist when there was no shortage of
invitations.

We stayed in a cottage on the Finzean (pronounced Fingen) estate, home of the The Farquharson family that included the Victorian landscape artist Joseph Farquharson. Most of us must have had one of his snow scenes as Christmas cards at one time or another. He was a master at painting snow.

The fishing was tough on an unfamiliar beat but there was no shortage of fish. It's difficult to know where to start with the excuses but let's try the wind. For two days strong easterlies played havoc with casting and fly presentation. The only way to get out a decent line was a single Spey cast over the left shoulder.

Then torrential rain brought the river up to nearly 5 ft. Still there were chances and my fellow rods were contacting fish - and losing them. I had the odd pull but couldn't get in to a fish.

Instead I went back to my bad old ways, chopping and changing too much, trying different depths, methods and flies when I should have been concentrating on systematic coverage of the pools and listening much more to the ghillie who knew this beat at different depths. But even he couldn't explain our lack of success.

"If you'd held on to all the fish you hooked this week, the figures would have been pretty good," he said.

I like fishing the sunray shadow and nearly made it work when I had a snatch at the fly close in to the bank near a burn outlet. Back at the hut I told one of the other rods who had joined us for the day. He nipped up to the same spot, put on his sunray shadow and caught a fish. I'm sure it was the same one.

Will finally landed a nice 13 lb salmon after losing two earlier. I had my chance when a fish took briefly but it was one of those "now it's on, now it isn't" takes. For all the disappointment of not catching a fish it was still a good week on interesting and challenging water and great fun using the Jeep in real off road conditions.

Oh, and it also allowed us to present Bryan with the Carlogie Cup for outfishing the rest of us in the Spring.

Killer Shrimp

2010-09-13T12:34:00.005+01:00

No I'm not talking here about yet another streamer fly for hooking salmon, or the debate on whether or not fishing the prawn should be allowed on salmon rivers, but about the discovery at Grafham Water in Cambridgeshire of a particularly aggressive and non-native shrimp.

Its name is Dikerogammarus villosus and, as this story in The Independent says, it prays on native species, often shredding its victims without eating them. Who knows how it got there? But you can bet that if it has been found in one lake it has already found its way in to others.

A tip for catching salmon

2010-08-31T18:23:00.007+01:00

Tell any salmon fisherman about a catch and the first thing they will ask you, often before asking where you caught the fish, is "What fly did you catch it on?" I do it myself.

Then we might want to know the fly size. Fly and size of fly do matter, but often they are not the most crucial details. Fishing depth, the depth of the water, the pool, the lie, the speed of flow and the time of day are all equally and probably more important.

In my case, last week on the Dee, fishing depth seemed to make a difference. How much difference is difficult to say. But in at least one pool I'm sure that a sinking tip was the difference between a take and no take.

There was plenty of water coming down which seemed to affect clarity a little so I didn't fish too small. My fishing friends in the beat above were having most success with size 8 flies and sinking tips. I found success with a size 9 Ally's shrimp. I'm sure a Cascade would have been just as effective, it was just that I happened to have been fishing the other fly.Something bright and showy is all you need unless the water is very low and ultra clear when you might want to go down in size. The size nine was exactly the size of fly that was getting results in the spring. The shorter-shanked Partridge hook was holding well too.

I read a lot about the difference that water temperature makes and I don't doubt that it does, but the truth is that here on the Dee, at least, the same set ups were catching fish in the summer as caught fish in April.

The sinking tip with a floating line seemed to do better than an intermediate line. The flies don't sink too deeply, but making it a little easier for the fish to take the fly seems to produce more takes, particularly in the deeper lies. But of course what makes most difference of all, is a head of running fish. Fresh running fish are not too choosy.

Last week I got lucky and found some in a pool and had three before hot footing it two pools further up river in order to stay with the pod. It worked too. I had one fresh fish from the higher pool (at the top of my beat) before the pool went quiet again. Sometimes these pods of running fish show, but not always. In the first pool there was nothing out of the ordinary but higher up the fish were showing, barely breaking surface in their hurry to keep going.

Why some pools don't produce many running fish is a mystery to me when fish have to run the whole river, but I think it may have something to do with the running line (the route taken by the fish that is often far from straight). If you can find it and intercept it or find a resting place, it can make all the difference. That's where ghillies' knowledge on an unfamiliar beat is crucial, so don't upset the ghillie.

I can't be certain about the sinking tip. Gill caught all her fish on a full floating line so it might have worked just the same. But if you're having a lean time on a summer river with plenty of fish around, it's certainly worth a try.

Mrs Donkin goes fishing

2010-08-31T17:43:00.007+01:00

I thought Gill's fish deserved a blog to themselves. She fished the first three days of our Dee week with not so much as an offer, but her casting was improving all the time. If she persisted enough, a fish would come. When it did it was a good one - OK, a bit of a kipper but a 20 lb kipper that gave her a big boost in confidence.

The next day she went back to the very same spot and landed a silvery 16 pounder. I wasn't surprised to find her heading for the same pool the very next day but after an hour or so I thought she was flogging a dead horse this time. She was thinking the same thing when on her final cast before trying somewhere else, she was in to another fish, this one around the 19 lb mark (above and below).

It's a good spot for landing fish and I was on hand with a net but there was a tricky rock to negotiate when playing this one and she did a great job of steering the fish clear. That was her fill for the week, but not a bad return and eclipsing my own fish in size.

I had been having a lean week after a 10 lb fish early on the Monday. I'd had pulls and snatches and had lost one good fish in the teens before a monster took me to the cleaners. But fishing a little deeper began to produce results and in a good run of fish on the Saturday I had one of those classic sessions when a pool comes alive. What an end to a great week.

Big Salmon and one that got away....again

2010-08-30T06:54:00.008+01:00

There were some big fish about on the Aberdeenshire Dee last week. Really big ones, the sort you dream about, that entice you back to the river time and again in the hope of hooking in to one. I did just that a few years ago. It tore off down the pool with such power and at such a rate I felt utterly helpless to stop it, and when, finally, I put on the pressure in an attempt to turn it, it took my hook.

One evening last week I left Gill at the hut to head down to the same pool. I'm not sure what made me turn back to get the camera, but I guess it was that memory as I said to her: "You never know, it could be the big one."

Gill had been finding good fish in the same pool, landing a 20lb salmon, the previous day and a lovely 16lb fish that same morning (pictured above). She was having a bumper week.

It was a little after 7 pm when I waded to the top of the pool and cast in to the spot that I knew held some good fish. I could see the boil around a submerged rock and it was around that boil, just two casts later that my line stopped dead.

The thought that I might have snagged the rock had barely formed in my head as in a swirl of water,a great fan shaped tail broke the surface and the biggest salmon I have ever hooked began to run, stripping line from my reel at an alarming rate.

I had been here before and this time I was better prepared, with a strong Hardy Zane reel and hundreds of yards of bright orange backing that was flying out at speed. I knew what I had to do - just let it run. An old ghillie once advised me to give a fish like this some line in order to fool it in to thinking it was free. But that seemed so counter intuitive. In the event I did what I had told myself I should never do and began to tighten the drag.

This reel had been rejigged and the drag had lost its feel. While it felt loose it was tightening. Anyway the upshot was that the fish shed the hook in yet another failed attempt to stop a giant salmon. Why didn't I leave the drag alone? I could have slowed it with my hand on the spool, after all. I wish I had an answer to that. It took me a while to realise the fish had gone since so much line was payed out, it was creating its own weight in the water.

How big was it? It was very big, into the forties I would guess, knowing that this is bound to attract the sceptics. It was fresh too and full of fight. I've had several fish around the 20 lbs mark, some of them springers - the biggest running to 23 lbs - and none of them came remotely close to this one.

This pool holds big fish. There were several in the upper 20s, one in the thirties and at least one I saw that deserved the portmanteau description. The experience has left me wondering if I could ever land that fish of a lifetime. It's one thing hooking a really big fish, but quite another playing it. Those epic struggles of old we can read about in Fred Buller's Domesday Book of Giant Salmon, usually involved a large single hook that would bite deep in to the gristle. The Partridge hooks I was using that week were size 9 and good enough for the fight, but this one came out and would probably have done so anyway, but I would have liked to have turned its head, to have felt that mighty fish just a little longer. It was like entering the ring with a heavyweight boxer and never landing a punch.

Afterwards I stood there in a state of shock, too shocked even to swear, running through the experience, wondering why I had tried to stop the fish when there was ample line on the reel and length in the pool to have let it run and run. The truth is that a fish so powerful is so surprising, it scrambles the mind. It scrambled mine anyway. The shock was also mixed with a sense of admiration for a great beast and, yes, a feeling of privilege that at least I'd had my chance when I probably hadn't deserved it a second time.

The next morning Gill had a 19 lb fish in the same pool. It was a strong fish, stronger and fresher than her biggest fish that was in breeding colour. Her three fish of 20, 19 and 16 pounds overshadowed mine in size although I had a good Saturday afternoon with four fish up to 12 pounds and one lost as a run of fresh silver fish went through the beat.

I've been wondering how many other fishers may have hooked in to a really big one on the Dee. I know they get big fish in Norway and the Chinook in Alaska grow very big, but here in Scotland a 40 pounder is rare today, so rare I had adjusted my ambition to a more realistic hope of one topping 30 lbs. I'd be happy with that. And if something bigger comes along? Well you have to keep the faith. Big fish are still about.

Rod, reel and line combinations

2010-08-19T11:11:00.008+01:00

Like many anglers I have more fishing kit than I need. The equipment I use today is better quality than the rods and reels that served me well for years. You don't need Sage, Loomis and Hardy to catch salmon. But the good gear is pleasing to use and that's part of the experience.

One of the reasons I appear to have a lot of kit is that my wife, Gill, also fishes so we do need two of everything. She has fished for the past few years with a Shakespeare Oracle Rod. This rod, no longer available in a three-piece format, held up well against more expensive rods in a Trout & Salmon comparison a few years back. It's an excellent starter rod, very forgiving, and shoots a good line.

But two or three years ago I bought a 12ft 9ins Sage TCR, 9 weight as a second rod (more like ninth or tenth. ed). I haven't used it very much because the Orvis WF 9 line I was using with it would not go out very well. I was thinking that maybe I hadn't mastered the TCR's fast action. But when I borrowed a friend's identical rod I realised that my Orvis line wasn't up to the job.

Gill had also been using my old Leeda Magnum with Snowbee line. I'm a big fan of the Snowbee XS floating lines and have used them for many years. But the Leeda reel, while perfectly serviceable, will not fit on to the Sage rod. To do so I would need to file down the mounting.

I've upgraded my own salmon kit so thought that it would be good to get a new reel and line combination so that Gill could use the TCR. I did my homework and decided on a Hardy Marquis salmon reel matched to a Hardy Mach II, 55ft shooting head floater.

The reel would be used exclusively for salmon fishing so I didn't need anything anodised for saltwater fishing. Anyway this was before I called Grangers' in South Kensington and spoke with Gavin Hodgson, the manager.

Gavin had persuaded me to buy a Hardy Zane reel a few years back. The Zane is a good reel but I think, on reflection, I should have gone for something like a Hardy Swift. There are two things I don't like about the Zane. The first is the mounting that looks as if it could be a weak spot (although I have not heard of any breaking, and if they did I'm sure that Hardy would replace them). The second is the clumsy way that the reel dismantles.

I'm attracted to Hardy's new range of retro reels and I particularly fancied a Marquis as I use one with my trout rod and love it. I also like the ratchet sound. Isn't the zinging of the ratchet as the line is running out just one of the most exhilarating sounds you are likely to hear anywhere?

But Gavin had other ideas. He recommended a Lamson Lightspeed reel. I haven't heard of Lamson reels but they seem to have good reviews. This reel is as happy in salt as it is in fresh water. It retrieves quickly, detaches the spool neatly without any screws or catches, and has the smoothest of clutches. I had to admit that in comparison, the Marquis was a veteran reel. Gavin offered to change it if I (she) wasn't happy so what could I do? Now she just needs a big fish on the Dee next week to find out whether the new set up works.

Gavin also tried to sell me a Rio wind-cutter line. People try to sell me Rio Windcutter lines in almost every shop I enter. Do they pay good commission or something? I'm sure they're great lines but I prefer to fish a floater, interchanging with an intermediate line and, if I need some extra depth, adding a sink tip. Incidentally, had he explained this detail to me, I might have gone for the Rio. I hadn't realised that the tips were lighter than the main shooting line. Again, that can be mirrored to some extent by using a poly leader that provides a lighter turnover.

I'm convinced that delicate line turnover makes a difference in salmon fishing since many salmon will see the fly the instant it lands on the water and the more natural the landing, the better.I have fished a couple of rivers in Norway where deep fast sinking line was necessary but in Scotland I rarely need it and it's a pain to cast. So I went with the Hardy Mach II floater again, knowing that if we need it, the old kit will work perfectly fine. I landed a very tricky fish on the pool just below the Oykel falls a few weeks back (pictured here with the fish on) and that was on the Oracle/Leeda/Snowbee set up. The good gear is nice to have, but I don't think it makes you a better fisher.

Another word on the business end of the line, although I'm sure I've said this before: to get the best out of a wake-fly such as the sunray shadow, use nylon such as Maxima. It floats whereas fluorocarbon doesn't. And unless the water is ultra clear, don't feel you need to fish too fine a line.

The Ghillie's Fly Box

2010-08-06T12:08:00.006+01:00

Sean Stanton, the ghillie at Ballogie and Carlogie, two beats I fish on the river Dee, seems to spend much of his time when he's not ghillieing, tying salmon flies. Anyone travelling alongside the Dee on the A93 can see and buy his flies at the Post Office in Kincardine O'Neil, six miles to the west of Banchory. There's been a glass-topped wooden fly box there for as long as I can remember. Today it's full of Sean's flies.

But if you don't happen to be on the A93 and you're seeking to stock up with flies before a salmon fishing trip to Scotland, you might like to know that his flies are now available mail order from The Ghillie's Fly Box.

They're all good flies and here you can find the Smith Shrimp I mentioned in an earlier blog. Unlike some fly sellers who may stock a wide variety of flies you may never need, the flies here are all tried and tested on the Dee. I bought a few before my most recent trip to Scotland and they arrived in the post the day after I ordered them - and they caught fish. He uses the best hooks and materials so the prices seem fair.I have already stocked up for my next Dee visit later this month.

Whirling salmon

2010-08-02T18:51:00.003+01:00

Last week on the River Oykel (see below) I saw something I have never seen in all my years fishing. We were standing by the hut looking over a narrow run where a spur of shingle divided the fast water from a slack section nearer our bank. A fin appeared in the slack water and a salmon began carving tight circles for more than a minute before it beached itself on the shingle.

The fish flapped back in to the water, then repeated the process. One of the rods carried it in to the stream and tried to revive it for about twenty minutes but it seemed exhausted so we knocked it on the head. It had slight lesions on either flank but nothing much. I have seen livelier salmon with large bite marks from seals and red claw marks on their sides. It also had a mottled greeny tinge on the side of its head but if you had caught it you would have thought nothing of taking it to eat.

I have no idea what caused the behaviour but wonder if it could have been a case of whirling disease, Myxobolus cerebralis? I have only heard of this in the past in trout farms so think it unlikely but something had upset this fish and it was sad to see it in so much distress. Perhaps it had bashed its head on a rock, causing it lose its motor skills. The ghillies were unable to shed any light.

Record Oykel salmon catch

2010-07-30T10:07:00.015+01:00

July rain has delivered a record month for the River Oykel with more than 730 salmon and grilse for the month. Many game fishers have never heard of this small river in Sutherland on the East Coast of Scotland. But it’s hard to ignore a return of 286 salmon in one week achieved two weeks ago between 12th and 17th of July between 12 rods on the four beats of the lower Oykel.

The total overtook the previous record set in the 1980s. Conditions for a big catch were ideal. June had been dry on this spate river so most of the grilse run was stacking up in the estuary. When the rains came in July, fish entered the system in large numbers. The spates were spread throughout the week, ensuring a good height of water each day with fresh rainfall bringing more fish up as the week went by.

Spate river fishers dream of these conditions. When the fish are there, the best approach is to keep things simple. The top rod for the week, Richard Sankey, who knows the pools like the back of his hand, caught all of his 69 fish on a cascade fly, size 8 or 10 (see insert).

Ghillies often talk about wind direction but fish catches did not appear to be affected since the wind switched from the east to the west during the week with little difference in taking behaviour.

Catches were good but not quite as impressive during the second week and more spates this week delivered fresh runs and plenty of sport for those of us fishing the last week of the month. Most of the grilse have probably gone through now and the river has dropped towards the end of the week. But more rain is forecast so we may still see running fish later today or on Saturday (update: Saturday brought some bigger fish among the catches with two around the 16/17 lb mark and one over 20lbs lost beneath the falls. Caroline Pindar is pictured here with one of the larger fish caught on Saturday evening). This took the Pindar party's total to 34 fish for the week (some of the group are pictured below).

The water temperature during the record week ranged between 57 deg F and 60 deg F. The water temperature this week peaked at 61 degrees and muggy conditions at the beginning of the week seemed to be putting the fish off the take. A new spate and cooler, fresher air brought taking fish by midweek so we were not complaining. Anyone with a big enough pocket might be interested in bidding for the upper Oykel beats that have come on the market for the first time in nearly 50 years. The upper Oykel is divided from the lower river by a set of falls and few fish seem to move up before July unless there has been some good rainfall. Fishing on the upper beats begin in June.

The upper Oykel beats consist of about six miles of double bank fishing with a five year average catch of 247 salmon. Offers are being sought between £350,000 for a single beat to £1,650,000 for the four beats. The sale is being handled by Bell Ingram, tel: 01463 717 799.

Wildlife spotting

2010-06-20T13:14:00.005+01:00

I know that many anglers are in touch with the nature around them. It's part of being on the river. I usually take my camera with me on fishing trips, not just to record a catch, but to take pictures of other things I see around me.

If you do the same, you may be interested in this relatively new website called Ispot. Once signed up you can submit images and observations of any wildlife you may have seen. I haven't seen any salmon on the site yet. I'm not sure the trophy picture would be appropriate but any of fishing leaping falls might be good additions.I have just loaded a picture of elvers seen climbing the falls at the top of the lower Oykel.

I went along to a presentation last week by the site's originators who work for the Open University. They stressed how keen they were that spotters put as much identification data that they can with pictures. The site is structured in a way that helps us to learn more about the plants and animals we encounter on our travels. Just now it is focused on the UK but the site managers are looking at the possibility of extending it to other parts of the world.

Orkla Fishing

2010-06-20T13:09:00.005+01:00

Anyone thinking of a trip to Norway salmon fishing, might like to watch this video of fishing on the river Orkla made by Crispin Rodwell. Don't expect cartloads of fish but the ones you might get are of the strength and size of the one caught here. If this doesn't get the juices flowing, nothing will.

Old man and the Dee

2010-05-15T11:59:00.005+01:00

Hemingway's old man had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish; me, a mere twelve. It may not be the longest period I have fished without a salmon - it's best not to look back and count too much - but it's probably the most frustrating because these days I'm supposed to know what I'm doing.

My cast gets out pretty well, I think quite a lot about fishing depths and speeds and fly sizes and types, leader length, line density, making sure the line doesn't splash, staying quiet in the river, approaching the spot carefully, all that stuff that's supposed to give you an edge. The result - zilch. Well, not quite; I lost a nice fish, didn't play it too hard or too soft but it wouldn't come, just jagged at the line, staying in one spot, jagging hard until the hook came out.

It doesn't help that there are not too many salmon about on the Tay in the spring where I spent the first six days. I fly fished from the bank most of the time and didn't have so much as a pull. The harling boats on the beat had three fish between six rods.

The other six days were on the Dee. I know the beat pretty well and where to fish at the various heights. But this year it had me beat. There were fish around. I had a pull on the first day and the lost fish near the end of the week and that was it.

Top rod in our Dee party this year was Bryan Kruse, who has been salmon fishing about three or four years now. OK, he got lucky for his first fish. He got in to a pod, lost two and landed the third. But really it wasn't luck that got him his three fish. He just stuck to the job. Had I lost two fish shortly before lunch as he did I might have packed in. If not I would probably have changed my fly or done something differently. Bryan kept on as before with the same fly that, after all, had just hooked two fish, and got his result.

He had two more fish that week. All of them fell to the same fly - a Smith Shrimp (like a cascade except with a yellow hackle and gold reflective body). All came in bright sunshine so perhaps the reflective qualities of the fly helped.

I think he caught the fish because he stuck mostly with a fly that worked and he worked the pools methodically.

I think I didn't do so well because I moved too quickly down the pools and chopped and changed things too much. Still I've done that before with more success. Also, the other two in our party didn't do so well either. One had a salmon and sea trout, the other lost a fish as I did. To be sure we all fished that Smith's shrimp when it worked for Bryan - as it did for those on the beat below us. The Smith's Shrimp was the dynamite fly this last April on the Dee. It's funny how a particular fly grabs attention. A few years ago it was the Cascade, then the Black Frances, then the Monkey. We all know that if we all fish a particular fly it's going to be the one that catches fish but there is no denying that this one seemed to have the edge because we tried others.

I suppose when we're talking about low numbers of fish the difference between zero and three is not very great. But it feels that way when you're on zero. Maybe it was luck, but I'm not convinced. I think the best fisherman caught the most fish. I'm going to have to pull my waders up and get my act together. In spring salmon fishing you just have to keep at it.

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2010-04-29T13:00:00.001+01:00

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Hard to swallow

2010-01-21T12:30:00.004Z

Some time ago, in this feature about Taimen fishing in Mongolia, I mentioned a fish that had been found, about 5ft in length, with a 3ft Taimen stuck in its mouth. While I had heard the story I did not know that there was a photograph of the fish until I found this just now. Scary!

A treasure trove for salmon fishers

2009-12-01T07:53:00.009Z

I have just made a note in my diary to pay a call on Colin Innes when I next get up to the Dee. We haven't yet met but Colin contacted me a little while back and pointed me to his website, feathersfliesandphantoms which I can only describe as a treasure trove for salmon fishers. I have added a link to the sidebar here headed: Vintage Dee flies.

Just now I'm looking at his section with photographs of Dee salmon huts. I have never met anyone who goes salmon fishing who has not developed an affinity with the fishing hut. There are good huts, there are so-so huts and there are classic huts.

My favourite is the main hut at Carlogie beat on the Dee. Another great hut featured here by Colin, is the one at Sluie. The fishing at Sluie is not so great because of the profile of the beat (the best pool fishes better from the other side of the river) but where better to ruminate over this discovery than in its very fine hut? Colin has photographed the old maps and pictures on its walls.

Another great feature of this site is Colin's catalogue of old fishing flies used on the Dee, Don and Deveron. Looking at these old flies reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. I can almost guarantee that the new wonder fly you will read about in virtually every issue of Trout & Salmon magazine will have had some earlier manifestation on a big single hook, perhaps, or tied with slightly different materials.

I would feel confident fishing any Scottish river with this Akroyd fly. Colin not only gives us a profile of the maker but also includes step-by-step instructions if you want to make the fly yourself.

It doesn't take long to realise that Colin must have ploughed through a lot of old (and therefore out-of-copyright) material, and transferred the relevant stuff on to the site, with plates of flies, covers and illustrations from old catalogues and newspapers, plus many of his own photographs. It would take one huge book to include all this stuff but a web site is like a living organism that can be updated constantly.

Colin says he enjoys curling up in front of a fire with an old fishing book and a whisky. Today I guess you can do something similar with your lap top. I only wish we could make lap tops more like books with spongy leather exteriors. No doubt it will happen eventually.

For those who prefer books to web sites, however, Colin tells us he is gathering much of his work together in a forthcoming book. In the meantime we can scan through this marvellous library of fishing ephemera. All I can say, Colin, is thank you for sharing your research with fellow anglers in such an accessible format. Not everyone can get access to libraries and this work provides a valuable window in to salmon fishing's rich heritage.

Bid to fish - great beats in NASF auction

2009-11-27T12:01:00.005Z

The North Atlantic Salmon Fund is to hold its 2009 fund raising auction on Ebay from the 1-11 December. Postal bids can be accepted too.

Among the lots are: fishing for dorado in the north of Argentina or the big sea trout they get on the Rio Gallegos in the south. There is bone fishing in the Bahamas; salmon fishing on the Gaula and Laxselva in Norway, and on the Sela, Laxa i Kjos and Jokla in Iceland. In Scotland there is fishing on the Tweed plus top chalkstream fishing for trout.

There are also rods, reels and flies from the best known tackle manufacturers and clay pigeon shooting, and it is possible that extra rods may be available on some beats upon contact with the owners.

Fly cufflinks

2009-11-24T15:01:00.006Z

Let's face it, we never have enough fishing tackle, but we also know, deep down, that that's not true. The reality is that our bags and boxes are overflowing with stuff and if we're not careful we can spend too much valuable fishing time simply trying to work out what we should be fishing with today. Even that creates anxiety because when we start fishing we begin to worry about whether some other set up would have done better. This is not clever and definitely not relaxing which takes away some of the reason for fishing in the first place.

Then there's our nearest and dearest. They have long ago abandoned the idea of buying fishing tackle for Christmas or birthdays. You may get away with a book, but another rod? You must be joking.

But we like fishing so much that it would be good to have some kind of fishing present, something classy perhaps. What about these gold-plated fishing fly cufflinks made by James Hartley? At £125 a pair or £299 for three pairs, they're not out of the way for the man who has everything. You couldn't possibly buy them for yourself but why not get a friend to post a link to your loved one and wait for the results? Or if you are the loved one who simply refuses to buy yet another fishing reel, why not take a look? With a pair of these there would be no more excuses for staying in.

Salmon film

2009-10-20T21:58:00.002+01:00

The angler in this film is lucky to get away with a snag while he is playing a salmon. The underwater camera shows just how salmon respond to a fly. They seem to be tempted most when it is dangled just above them. Of course it's rarely so easy to find a group like this but the crystal clear Icelandic waters enables the fisherman to pinpoint his cast.

No waders? No problem!

2009-09-06T16:39:00.002+01:00

I thought I'd seen everything, but sight casting with a snorkel for tarpon is something else.

Salmon porn - live action

2009-09-04T15:46:00.005+01:00

When you're fishing don't you ever get the urge to get in among them? I've never been down in to a pool with a snorkel or diving gear but I'm told it can be fascinating. Perhaps the next best thing is watching a river through a camera, monitoring a pool constantly. You can do just that on this web site which has an above water angle that will show you if anyone turns up to fish here on the Suldaslaagen river in southern Norway.

Big salmon

Beware, you can end up spending a lot of time staring at these screens but you will see fish. The camera positioning is explained here. Do they catch big fish here? The answer can be found on this site, which not only has a picture of the pool, but also has a picture of a 28lb specimen caught here in 2008. I've never heard of salmon pornography, but if there was such a thing, this is the place to find it.

Helmsdale prices

2009-09-04T13:04:00.005+01:00

Those who like to mix their fishing with deer stalking might be interested in a package for two rods, inclusive with accommodation and ghillie that has just come up on the Helmsdale for September 14, price £7,100 (contact Ron Sutherland at enquiries@helmsdalecompany.com).

That's a bit out of my price bracket. Also, I'm not sure I want to mix the two. The stalking, however, should not be too demanding. I was driving down the Helmsdale valley at dusk just over a week ago and stopped the car when I noticed about half a dozen red deer stags in the gloom not more than 30 yards away from the road. I wound my window down and whistled and they looked back but didn't run.

I had been doing a bit of touring in the far north after fishing for a week on the Dee. With rods in the car I was wondering about the Helmsdale Association water but thought it was a bit unfair to pile fishing on fishing when my wife was keen to do other things.

Heading northwards we stopped in a lay-by on the A9 just north of Dornoch. There's a hill here called The Mound and I had been told how to get some reasonably priced salmon fishing nearby on the river Fleet. It was tempting to give it a try but one of the locals said the fish had not been taking in the previous week (just like it had been on the Dee) so I decided to give it a miss and we took a trip to spend the day on Orkney instead (where, incidentally, you can get some very good trout and sea trout fishing).

The flow from the Fleet is controlled by sluice gates where salmon and sea trout queue to pass. I was curious to know what restrictions, if any, there would be to fish the tidal bit immediately east of the gates but couldn't find out about this. I'm keen to know about the rights on river estuaries. Does anyone know how they work? The picture here was taken just west of the sluice gates at dusk. There's more information about the sluice gates here and if you read the last sentence you can see why I'm wondering about fishing rights.

We were late back from Orkney and, unwisely, drove west so that I could explore the Halladale and Helmsdale valleys. This would have been fine in daylight but the track was narrow and bleak during the late evening. The one hotel en route, called the Fosinard, said it had no rooms. This seemed odd as there were no cars in the car park and all the room keys were on their hooks. Perhaps it is simply closed for business.

I didn't get chance to call in the Helmsdale tackle shop but this is the place to find out everything you need to know about fishing in that area. A few doors down there is an excellent fish and chip shop called La Mirage. As the picture shows its decor is a little strange but the fish and chips are first rate.

Sunray Shadow

2009-08-26T13:34:00.006+01:00

The only fly that had much success for me on the Dee last week was the sunray shadow. I'm not sure why the fish weren't taking as they were the previous week. Many fish had moved through, leaving stubborn residents in the pool and it didn't help that the water level was up and down all week.

The sunray shadow fishes best with a riffled hitch and pulled across a lie so that it creates a wake on the surface. Often fish will wait until the fly reaches the end of its arc and "on the dangle" before striking. But on one occasion last week a salmon struck as soon as the fly hit the water.

Some people argue that this fly works best where the water surface is relatively unbroken but I find it works in a ripple too and I prefer it if there is a reasonable push of water too.

It can work well on resident fish as it can provoke them to strike where other flies will fail to do so. The fish pictured was a 10 lb resident that fell to the fly. The strike is always visible and dramatic so it's an exciting way to fish. I wouldn't fish this way all the time but neither would I be without a surface-fished wake fly in my box. It's an essential piece of salmon-fishing kit and works for sea trout too.

Grilse on the Oykel

2009-08-01T18:41:00.006+01:00

Water conditions were perfect for Andrew Pindar's party on the River Oykel this year. But, for some reason, the fish were not running in the numbers that anglers have come to expect on this first class spate river.

The midges were out in force too, particularly on the highest of the Lower Oykel beats above the bridge. I love this beat with its short pools below the falls. To one side of the falls we witnessed one of the wonders of nature as thousands of young eels made their way up a wet sloping rock on their migration to the upper waters, all the way from the Sargasso Sea where they were born.

It was quite a big party and there was plenty of rod sharing but I found I could get in some early morning and late evening sessions. One early morning stint brought me two fresh run grisle, one from a long cast and the other from a long retrieve in quite slow water. Another came late in the evening after sneaking off from dinner on my last chance to fish above the falls.

I hadn't reckoned on the clouds of midges that were so thick they caught at the back of the throat. It was pretty miserable but I knew there was a fish to catch on the lip of the pool. It rose on my first cast, finned again after a quick change of fly, then took a third change of fly but shot off over the lip in to the next pool down where I couldn't follow.

A bigger fish might have been tough to get back but this one - about 5 lbs came back up over the small fall quite steadily. Almost everyone caught a fish and one or two were kept so we had salmon on the table one evening. Even in these days where catch and release predominates it's still good to eat your catch now and again, particularly on a river which can claim healthy stocks of fish.

So why were the numbers lower than expected? There was a rumour of Russian trawlers with big nets taking salmon out at sea but I don't know its veracity. We saw one of the local nesting pairs of ospreys had produced a chick but only one of the other pair had returned this year and it did not stay. We watched the active nest long enough to see an Osprey returning with a good sized fish, possibly a sea trout.

Gill had a nice fish on the last day. I had not been on my best behaviour, giving her a hard time over her casting and fishing a bit too intensively occasionally - certainly not relaxed about it - but this morning I left her to it on a nice run and sat in the car watching her cast. The Spey cast that brought her fish was perfection itself. I saw the take and came over to net it for her and she played it really well.

We reached double figures for the party in the week but it could have easily been twice that had the fish been taking better. There were a lot of pulls that never converted to takes.

Much is written on fly types and sizes but I think a variety of sizes of just three types is enough for most summer fishing in Scotland: stoat's tail and silver, Ally's shrimp and the Cascade. If I was to add anything it would be a plastic tube to fish riffle-hitched on the surface (as you would fish a sunray shadow) and maybe an Irish shrimp and something black or dark bodied. The rest of them - and believe me I have them all in my boxes - are really window dressing, sitting there as "try outs". That said it was one of these try outs - a variation of the stoat's tail that caught my fish above the bridge. When I looked at the fly next morning it was probably the tattiest specimen in the box,but there you go.

Blue Marlin in Madeira

2009-08-01T11:50:00.013+01:00

Just back from three days in Madeira, fishing for specimen blue marlin. I'd never been out before apart from a short trip in Antigua)so was not too optimistic, given that you can go days without a bite in this kind of fishing.

As a fly fisher I had always assumed that the real skill in this kind of fishing belonged to the boatmen and that's true; but it's a real team affair and the one in the chair has to do his part too. It's easy to fluff things taking the rod to the chair and, when the people around you are working so hard for your enjoyment,you need to listen to what they're saying.

In the event we didn't have to wait long, the boat was barely out of Funchal when a dorado snatched at the furthest lure. There was a bit of a commotion but it didn't seize the big squid-like artificial bait which is a bit big for these fish.

But the commotion was obviously enough to interest something else as barely 30 seconds later I could see a fin moving up on one of the starboard lures. I don't have the combination of letters to describe the boatman's scream. There was a lunge and the fish dropped back but Nick Bayntun, who runs the back of the boat, was already working the lure and when the fish came again he let loose the drag momentarily, popping the bait in to its face and I could see it all, the take, the turn, the run, everything.

My task was to lift the rod out of its side-holster and position it in the seating in front of the chair, while settling myself and clipping the seat chains on to the reel. Then up with the feet on to the board and ready to go, all as the fish is running out. When all this is happening it's as if time has slowed down as your senses capture every detail of the moment.

The line was dipping down about 20 yards behind the boat, so it was surprising to see the fish break the surface some 200 yards behind the boat. Then it was pumping and winding, but not pumping the handle. You don't hold the rod at all, just work the chair with your body, winding with the right hand and guiding the line with your left hand on the spool. Meanwhile the skipper is making life easier by reversing the boat.

It didn't take too long, maybe 15 to 20 minutes to bring a beautiful blue marlin (pictured above)to the boat. How big? The skipper thought 400lb. Nick thought maybe 350lb. Naturally I went with the skipper! Oh, the joy of catch and release!

Ten yards from the boat the action wasn't over. A fish like this isn't caught until someone has touched the leader or "grabbed the wire". You need to be really careful grabbing that wire as Stewart Campbell, one of the world's most experienced marlin fishers discovered here. (Edit: well if if the clip had not been taken off YouTube you would have seen a sprightly Mr Campbell being yanked over the back of the boat by an even sprightlier marlin. What a pity, it was quite amusing. You'll just have to use your imagination).

Those last few yards had the boys on deck sweating a bit but they held on and she was ours. What a beautiful fish she was too and very healthy, quickly released to grow, hopefully, in to one of those "granders", the 1000lb+ blue marlin for which Madeira is famed. How did I know she was female? All the blue marlins caught here are female.

There was so much of the day ahead and we felt optimistic for another as I handed over the chair to my host, Jonathan Fletcher, part of the Blandy Madeira family, and owner of the boat, Balancal. But it wasn't to be. We saw fin back whales, we saw dolphins, we even saw a huge leatherback turtle, and what a sight that was, but no more takes.

Mission accomplished, we dropped plans for a second day out but I had the chance to go along with a second boat where an 11-year-old boy, Curtis de Silva, was trying to capture the "small fry" IGFA Blue Marlin record that today stands at 448lb. The day I caught my fish he had lost one in the 800lb class. It helps that his dad, an experienced Trinidadian skipper "Frothy" de Silva, is at the helm.

Frothy pulled the baits three times through surface-feeding big eyed tuna, but didn't get a bite. The conditions looked great with plenty of mackerel shoals (or bait balls) near the surface, showing up on the fish-finder, but the bites weren't coming. As we made for the harbour in calm water at the end of the day I was staring down in to the depths from the platform and saw what I thought was a dolphin just ahead of the boat. But no, there was the bill and the fin. We were moving up on a cruising blue marlin. With a kick of its tail it was gone before I could take a picture, but that image of this most majestic of fish at one with its environment will stay with me for the rest of my life.

It was real privilege to meet some of the world's best known big game fishers and skippers - people like James Roberts, Peter Bristow and Anibal Fernandes. Bristow probably has more 1000lb+ black marlin to his name than any other skipper, once coming across a shoal of maybe 50 fish north of Cairns in the 1990s. "We got among them and hooked 30 fish, caught 20 that day. I've never seen anything like it before or since," he says. Watch out for my full report on this in a forthcoming (October 2009) issue of The Field.

Repairing waders

2009-04-21T12:28:00.003+01:00

I have yet to graduate to a pair of Simms waders, relying as I do on my much cheaper Snowbees that seem to handling the wear and tear of heavy use just fine. But this Simms video has some good tips on repairing the pin holes in waders you can get from hooks and thorn bushes.

Hogging lies

2009-04-20T11:14:00.006+01:00

Can ghillies hand out too much information to anglers? I heard a ghillie on the opposite bank last week pointing out the "hot spots" to his rods. This, you may argue, is exactly what a ghillie or guide is paid to do.

But anyone who has fished a beat for many years will know that while some stretches of river perform better than others, catches are by no means restricted to the best known lies. Besides, the performance of different pools varies depending on the water height.

The problem with giving out information in this way is that it can encourage anglers to believe that the hot spots are the only places where they can catch fish. The result is that they begin to hog the favoured lies which really does them no favours since the lies are flogged with cast after unproductive cast.

I saw this happening all too frequently among a party of anglers fishing the opposite bank to me on the Dee last week.

One angler did not move more than 30 or 40 yards in a morning and plastered a promising taking spot with dozens of poor casts.

He would shape up his line with a reasonably executed roll cast before launching a longer spey cast. The roll cast would have been quite sufficient since the fish were lying close to his bank. But the spey cast failed almost every time because it could not turn over his fly which landed on the water in a crumpled mess.

I didn't feel too frustrated, fishing the opposite bank, since there was plenty more water to fish, but it makes for poor angling etiquette when people do not move purposefully through a pool.

The ghillies on our beat have tried to open up new pools in order to give anglers more variety and to relieve the pressure on popular taking places. While these can hardly be described as favoured pools, they are spots where fish are occasionally taken and sometimes it's better to visit a neglected pool than one that is being overfished.

One morning I arrived at a pool before the "flogger" and, fishing the sparsest of flies on a size eight hook, had a nice fish that seized the fly almost immediately after it hit the water. I was fishing a floating line on a long cast and the take was almost summer-like, quite unlike those you often have to search out at depth during the spring.

The floating line was doing well on the Dee last week although, when in a taking mood, the fish were not too choosy about the depth. Our flogging friend saw me catch the fish and took up residence in the spot for the rest of the day until leaving at about 6 pm.

I was fishing further down stream when a friend turned up to suggest we went off to the pub. But sometimes there are evenings when you just know there is going to be a fish. It just feels right.

So I suggested he had a few casts over Lucky Hole (the lie where I had had the fish in the morning and that had been covered all day long from the other side). He went for his rod and three casts later he was in to a fish that, unfortunately, was lost at the net. This fish took a weighted Monkey pattern fished on an intermediate line. So much for all the science over line depth and fly type.

Was the ghillie right to urge his anglers to concentrate on favoured places? These lies produced fish, after all. I think he should have advised his rods to fish down the whole length of the pool with maybe one or two extra casts over the most promising lie. Fairness demands that all the anglers should have a chance in the known lies. Everyone's chances are improved this way because fish are unlikely to rise to a series of duff casts in the same spot. A pool need not be rested too long but it does benefit from a rest.

The lies were all close to the far bank yet some anglers would insist on wading them when a short cast from their bank was quite sufficient without disturbing the fish. What is this urge to wade? I would far rather stand on a bank than plunge waist deep in to the limb-numbing water of a spring salmon river.

I noticed that none of the fish we caught last week was held in the scissors, suggesting that they came up from behind rather than turning on the fly. All three of my fish were the softest takes and two of them were quite lightly hooked, but they all came to the net without much trouble.

One of the fish had been mauled around the flanks by either an otter or a seal. There were a pair of claw marks on one side and some exposed flesh on the other. Will it survive until spawning? Well it has the chance (the Dee runs a catch and release policy), but I would have preferred to have knocked it on the head and would have debated the option had the ghillie been present.

Instead I made sure it never came out of the water; nor was it handled. It didn't seem to have been weakened much by its ordeal so I'd like to think that its wounds will mend.

NB. I'm not sure of the name of my fly and can't recall how I came by it. It's very similar to a Silver Wilkinson or a Logie. The main hairs are yellow, blue and red over a silver shank with a red band holding a wisp of yellow hair at the rear. It's a good hooking fly because, unlike flies with long tails, there is nothing for the fish to grab other than the hook.

I caught my other fish on a Black Frances - an excellent spring fly but one which sometimes produces a strong pull rather than a take as a fish grabs at the whiskers trailing from the shank. With this fly I had a 4:1 pull-to-take ratio whereas each take on the Silver Wilkinson (or whatever it is) produced a fish. If you happen to know the name of the fly (pictured) please let me know.

Wild Trout Trust auction

2009-04-06T14:04:00.004+01:00

There are just two days to go before the end of the Wild Trout Trust annual online auction. I haven't looked at all the items but the £460 bid for membership of the Salisbury and District Angling Club has reminded me to post off my membership subs.

The Sage TCX salmon rod looks as if it might have a bit more to run with a bid of £410 at the time of writing. With 200 donated lots, the auction has something for everyone although I notice that no-one has yet bid for the ploughing lesson.

Tay kelt

2009-04-06T13:24:00.003+01:00

Yes, that's all I had to show for six days on the Tay with just two spring salmon among six rods. It was disheartening to see just the odd fish running in such great spring conditions with a falling river and settled conditions.

The six days of casting practice, I suppose, will come in handy for the Dee in a week's time. The Dee figures seem to have picked up a little last week while the Tweed's again were poor.

The opposite banks are fished separately on the Dee so I was surprised to see that the left bank Kincardine beat had 10 fish while the right bank Carlogie beat had nothing. It's the same stretch of water, after all.

There were some great hatches of March browns for the trout fishers and plenty of trout about. That's good news for the World Fly Fishing Championships (trout and grayling)to be held partly on the some of the lower Tay beats in June.

Coelacanth site

2009-03-27T20:24:00.002Z

Everything you need to know about coelacanth.

Tweed kelt

2009-02-17T10:32:00.007Z

I sneaked away for a couple of days on the Tweed at the end of last week but had nothing to show for it. The tattiest kelt took my lure but there didn't seem to be many fresh fish coming through. Still a kelt will do just fine for some.

All the same, it was beautiful sunny weather on Friday, wading the river below the bridge in the aptly named town of Coldstream. It's why people go winter fishing.

I was fishing the lower Tweed Lennel beat that is owned by a fishing syndicate. The original syndicate bought it for about £38,000 nearly 40 years ago. A 24th share was sold last year for £160,000, valuing the beat today at more than £3.8m, a multiple of 100 during the lifetime of the syndicate. So it hasn't been a bad little investment.

The syndicate members divide their time so they have two days a month on the river. That's fine for people living in the north but it's a heck of a drag from the south for just two days.

There is another opinion, however, as my fishing companion pointed out, that anyone who has to run a business can take a couple of days without it interfering too much with their work. Another advantage of the system is that people get the chance to fish the river in all weathers, when the fish are running in numbers in October and when they are not in....er, February.

Being a Borders river it's easy to insult your Scottish-sounding ghillie by calling him a Scot when it turns out he was born in England. Equally I got it wrong with another ghillie who I thought must be English. "Och no," he said. "I'm six miles Scottish and my wife's a hundred yards English." These things matter.

Angling - the work of Sisyphus

2009-02-02T00:51:00.003Z

I was just looking something up on my website and came across this note I wrote on ghillies, ageism and fishing. It's in my work section but I thought that fellow anglers might be able to relate to the Sisyphus analogy. David, the ghillie, incidentally is still going strong, working on another beat.

Taking the pulse of anglers

2009-01-27T22:35:00.004Z

I had a long chat with a fellow angler this afternoon where he suggested that people with lower pulse rates were potentially better fly anglers than those with faster pulse rates.

The theory goes that the high-pulsed anglers will be more excitable and more prone to the kind of impetuous behaviour that simply doesn't catch fish.

I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on this, or has researched whether fishing in most circumstances is the type of past time that lowers your heart rate? I say "most circumstances" as I can think of one or two where the heart really starts racing. An interesting idea nonetheless.

Gripping squid

2009-01-15T14:51:00.002Z

As a child I remember being gripped, reading Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, when the Nautilus is seized by a giant squid. But I never thought I would see something like that for real.

Fishing Girl

2009-01-04T12:36:00.004Z

It's freezing out there, your waders are wet and you've run out of the right kind of dubbing for your flies. You're fed up with yet another magazine article on Czech nymphing and you just don't fancy opening a book or watching one more casting video. What can you do?

Well you could play Fishing Girl. This is a little more sophisticated than Salmon Survival but you can practice your online casting and catch a few fish. Beware the bigger fish are like tarpon and just run off with your lure - as if that's never happened before!

The tackle tarts may be tempted to accumulate bags full of lures but that can prove ruiningly expensive (just like real life then!). For those averse to killing big game there is a way to rescue the little boy (the aim of the game) without resorting to bombers (no, not those bombers).

Give beavers a chance

2009-01-02T16:25:00.004Z

A number of anglers have been getting in to a blather about the re-introduction of beavers in to Scotland. I have been surprised that so many so-called "celebrity anglers" who have lined-up in opposition to the move. Maybe they know things I don't.

I've come across European beavers in Norway. You don't see them during the day much but you certainly hear them at night. Fishing in the gloom, late at night, when your senses are becoming stretched, the sudden loud gunshot-like slap of a beaver tail on the surface of the water is enough to startle you out of your waders.

Those opposed to their reintroduction say that beaver dams will clog up good spawning streams. I doubt that. Beavers and salmon have been living side-by-side for thousands of years. One thing I do know about nature is that animals have ways of complementing their separate behaviours.

Lions stalk the plains of Africa, feeding off old and young herbivores. the Lions fulfill an important role in the ecosystem. It may be that beavers help the ecosystem in providing stretches of deeper water.

Reading through some comments from Anglers in North America, writing on the LinkedIn website, there seems to be some consensus that trout often sit close to Beaver dams.

"I fish around beavers all the time and if anything I think they do improve habitat to a point, especially habitat for juvenile trout, by flooding brushy areas of stream-side vegetation. Occasionally, if there are too many beaver dams on a stream they can cause excess siltation by slowing the flow too much and dams need to be removed. Salmon are creative and can get through or over most beaver dams," says Jake Ricks, a member of Fly Anglers in Business on LinkedIn.

Skip Zimmerman, another member, says: "I see beavers in almost every stream where I fish. Most have not created dams, just lodges. I've only seen dams in head water areas or in smaller spring creeks, so can't think of a reason why salmon spawning would be too affected."

Of nine replies on the site, all from people with experience of fishing among beavers, there is scarcely any negative comment. Here in the UK change of any kind leads to a kind of irrational alarmism. I simply don't understand it.

I never saw such vocal protests against sheep grazing to the edges of burns that really did damage spawning habitat. Conservation efforts, such as fencing off the grazing land (now widespread, but still quite rare when I mentioned it here in this piece), have done much to restore depth to burns. Maybe beavers could help in the same way. I think we should give them a chance.

Anything goes on the Calder

2009-01-02T16:00:00.005Z

I hadn't been to Yorkshire over Christmas for two years so it was good to get some Grayling fishing on the River Calder near Sowerby Bridge during the break.

Drew Short, a good fishing friend, wanted to introduce me to the finer points of Czech nymphing. But we took along some maggots just in case.

This is an "anything goes" river, so while we were putting up our fly rods it was no surprise to see a couple of chaps with their spinning rods. Twenty years ago this stretch of water was exclusively course fishing but as it cleaned itself up over the years after industrial decline the river began to attract good stocks of trout and grayling.

The game fishing took a big hit two years ago when stocks were reduced in a pollution incident. The fish population is building again but there are too many small fish. A little while back you could catch grayling here up to 2 lbs, but not now.

I can't say I enjoyed the Czech nymphing - ledgering with a heavy nymph and an indicator on a short line - and the fish were scarce. So I swapped to a float, trotting maggots for an hour in the afternoon. I still like to see a float plunging under when a fish takes. You could say the same happens with the indicator but often you find you are simply catching the bottom.

The water was cold but I felt snug in my thermals and with a nice bit of pork pie, oxtail soup and Christmas cake for fuel, we had enough to get us through the day. I took some spare clothes too although didn't take a tumble this time. We didn't catch a lot of fish but it was better than pulling Christmas crackers.

Catch and release - or else!

2008-12-07T22:23:00.004Z

I know this has been around a long time but I still think it is a novel method of imposing catch and release.

And we all know how easy it is to lose a fish.

Finally, if you want to collect the set.

Restoring the Vosso

2008-12-05T12:26:00.006Z

What must be the most intensive and comprehensive salmon recovery programme on any river is to be launched on Norway's River Vosso.

The Norwegian Directorate of Nature Management has drawn up the rescue plan after a long-running study blamed the sustained failure of the river stock largely on salmon farming in fjords.

Stocks collapsed in 1988 and have not recovered although salmon are still present in the river due to escapes from farm pens and hatchery programmes. Vosso salmon genes are preserved in a live gene bank and the directorate plans to use its gene bank reserves, that can not be preserved indefinitely, to re-establish the pure Vosso strain.

The research looked at a series of possible contributory factors to the Vosso salmon's decline, including:

* Lowering of the Vosso lake (1989-1991).
* Road-building close to the river in the late 1980s.
* Acidification of water.
* Escaped farmed-fish spawning in the river (60 to 70 per cent of the catch in recent years has been escaped farm-fish).
* Sea-lice from fish-farms killing outward migrating smolt.
* The Evanger hydro-power station creating lower summer river temperatures and more acid water.

Of all these possible contributors, the report concluded that the most persistent overwhelming damage to stocks was caused by sea lice killing returning smolt and the escape of farmed salmon diluting what remained of the gene pool.

Earlier problems, such has acidity, have been resolved through better water quality. Fry survival from hatcheries in the upper river has been encouraging. But smolt still struggle to run the gauntlet of the salmon farms.

More recently conservationists have begun towing batches of smolt in special cages through the fjords, giving salmon farms a wide berth. Smolts are also being vaccinated against sea-lice attacks which research has shown is another significant aid to survival. Return rates have improved as a result.

Now the directorate is to consolidate the most successful initiatives in a programme that will re-introduced the Vosso gene. The programme has a two-pronged strategy aimed at both improving the quality and survival rates of Vosso salmon smolts and at lessening the damage caused by salmon farming.

Specifically the programme intends to:

* Establish production of 1.5 to 2m eggs a year in the gene-bank through increased breeding stock.
* Increase the capacity in the Vosso hatchery.
* Implant 1 to 2m "eyed ova" during wintertime.
* Release 200,000 to 400,000 one-summer fry.
* Establish a part of the upper river that has no natural run as a "living gene-bank".
* Release 100,000 to 200,000 smolt at different parts of the migration route, and with different treatment regimes against sea lice attacks.
* Establish a regime for marking all genetic material.

To limit sea lice attacks on smolt it intends to:

* Coordinate anti-sea lice treatments among all fish farmers.
* Control sea lice levels.
* Move some fish farms.
* Catch some of the smolt in river, and tow them out to sea (tests have shown this methods produces much higher return rates).

To limit escapes from fish farms it will pursue the following initiatives:

* Instigate better escape-prevention.
* Limit net fishing in fjords.
* Insist on the release of all wild fish (marked) and the culling of escaped fish.

It's good to see such a co-ordinated response. To succeed it will need the co-operation of powerful salmon farming interests with a view, perhaps, to a shrinkage or radical repositioning of salmon-farming in future. That commitment does not exist at present but if this initiative fails it could be the only answer. If the plan succeeds we may yet get the opportunity to fish for those magnificent Vosso salmon once more.

Material for this report was supplied to me by Riise Bjørn of Klæbu Sparebank in Norway who has been monitoring the Vosso programme for some time. He describes the Vosso as "a unique biological resource." I would second that.

Salmon beat auction

2008-12-01T15:47:00.004Z

The Atlantic Salmon Trust's annual auction of fishing beats and other stuff is upon us again.

Some £80,000 worth of fishing beats in 289 lots go under the hammer this year in aid of salmon research.

There are beats as usual on UK rivers such as Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey, Tyne and Wye but this year for the first time there some Icelandic and Norwegian rivers in the pot, including the West Ranga and the Namsen.

I notice that some Scottish haaf netting is also included in the list of lots. That's one to test your prejudices.

Copies of the catalogue, which includes an increased selection of online-only lots, are available from the AST on 01738 472032. Email: jenny@atlanticsalmontrust.org. The catalogue can also be viewed here in a day or two.

The deadlines for bids are February 2nd and 3rd for the conventional and on-line auctions respectively.

Record year for Iceland's salmon

2008-10-28T21:59:00.007Z

I had lunch at the Flyfishers’ Club in London today with Orri Vigfusson, who is over in the UK this week to raise funds at an annual auction for the North Atlantic Salmon Fund.

If Iceland’s economy is suffering, the same cannot be said for its Salmon fishing which can report another record breaking year, besting the previous record set in 2005 by some 25,000 fish.

The 2008 grand total for salmon caught on rod and line in Iceland is 82,000 (with one or two rivers still to report), a staggering increase on the 55,168 caught in 2005.

Why the big increase? Orri believes that much of the success can be put down to the end of netting at sea, achieved over the past 15 years in a succession of net buy-outs by the fund.

Monster salmon

Another reason, he suggests, is that the salmon are ranging more northerly where they could be finding good stocks of krill, sand eels and capelin. “We have had many more larger fish in the rivers this year,” he says.

The same seems to be true in Norway and anecdotally, at least, in Scottish rivers (Scotland takes somewhat longer to produce annual fishing returns). Norway’s river Alta, known for its big fish, had about 70 salmon weighing more than 40 lbs this year and 15 over 50lb. The Gaula meanwhile had 70 fish topping 35 lbs.

A monster salmon of 82½ lbs was caught in nets in the sea close to the Alta estuary. Imagine hooking that on your size 12 Ally’s shrimp with a 20 lb leader.

Fish ranching

These bigger fish are great news. But the improvements don’t end there. If you look more closely at the Icelandic returns you find that 30,000 of this year’s total were caught as a result of what Orri calls “ranching” but what most of us would know as river stocking.

Stocking policies on the East and West Ranga rivers have created salmon runs where none existed before. Salmon do not breed in these rivers naturally. Yet these two rivers alone accounted for more than 21,000 rod-caught salmon this year, more than two-thirds of the total caught as a result of stocking.

Survival rates are improving too on these rivers. In the past a 1 per cent return rate has been considered the norm from stocking but this year the return rate was 7.5 per cent.

Hatcheries closed

This would seem a powerful argument for maintaining hatcheries on rivers. On the River Dee in Scotland, however, hatcheries have been closed to divert conservation funds towards habitat improvement.

This seems a mistaken policy. Rivers such as the Dee need both stocking and habitat improvement to return their stocks to levels that could be classed as abundant.

Before we start to become complacent about these successes it’s worth noting that maintaining the net buyouts costs about £400,000 a year. In the last four years the NASF has raised between £700,000 and £800,000 annually enabling it to buy out more nets but the future is likely to be focused on maintaining the status quo.

While I hope that Orri Vigfusson maintains his considerable energy for many years to come, there will come a time when his specialist skills of negotiating with netsmen in the Faroe Islands, Greenland and elsewhere will need to be undertaken by others.

Future plans

It’s important now that salmon anglers and supporters of the fund begin to think about the legacy of this work. Orri says that in the next two or three years he wants to build a capital fund for the future. But it’s important too that the fund maintains its businesslike character and reputation for getting things done.

I’m not sure that any one individual will be able to replace his remarkable persistence in taking the NASF campaign to those who can make a difference. But the straightforward “capitalist solution” to conservation that he introduced has cut across the sometimes grindingly slow and ineffective lobbying of some conservation groups. Long may it continue.

New sedge fly guide

2008-10-23T15:13:00.005+01:00

The Riverfly Partnership, working with the Field Studies Council, have produced an excellent guide to caddis flies, often described as sedges by fly anglers.

It's a glossy pamphlet with high quality pictures and detailed information that will easily fit in to a fishing bag or a large pocket.

Priced £3.50 plus £1 for postage and packing, it can be ordered here or at this number: 01743 852140.

Online fly casting lessons

2008-10-06T20:33:00.006+01:00

I don't know about you, but I find I have to work on my fly casting constantly to help it improve. I didn't have lessons when I started and that's a pity because it meant I got in to some bad habits which still return from time to time.

On the other hand it has meant that I have had all kinds of advice from some of the best casters in the business. If you are just about to embark on fly fishing it might be best to get some tuition.

Even if you have been fishing a while it's worth checking out the experts from time to time to pick up a few refinements. If you can't afford lessons and don't have an experienced friend to help you you could do a lot worse than building your cast from this series of videos.

The most important thing on the cast is to take note of the forward and backward stops. You need to get both of them right. It took me a long time to build in the forward stop and even now I sometimes forget it when salmon casting. The point is made here in Eoin Fairgrieve's site, looking in this case at the Spey cast.

One problem of, course, in concentrating on your cast is that you can be focusing so much on doing long, perfect casts that you forget to fish. If you want to cover the fish that might be nearest to you it's important to start with short casts, sometimes standing well back from the bank.

It's a bloke thing, I suppose, to wade in as far as you dare, then launch great shooting casts across the river. Why? Because you can. You see this all the time in salmon fishing, less so among chalk stream fishers, stalking individual trout by sight.

If a salmon river is swollen after heavy rain, the likelihood is that the fish will be lying quite close in anyway. There will be no need for wading or for long casts. Yes, we all want to cast properly but first we have to think about the fish.

2007 - a bumper year for Scottish salmon

2008-09-30T14:42:00.004+01:00

It seems hard to believe this but according to the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards, the total rod catch of salmon for 2007 was the third highest since consistent recording began in 1952.

Its annual statistical bulletin, Scottish Salmon and Sea Trout Catches, recorded 91,053 salmon caught by anglers in Scotland during the year, of which 55,472 (61 per cent)were released back into the water.

Only two years in the last half century have exceeded that figure - 1988 with 96,488 and 2004 with 92,918. The number of salmon and grilse killed on Scotland's rivers in the year fell to 65,468, of which 19,468, nearly a third, were killed by netsmen

The total reported Scottish catch of sea trout in 2007 was 27,115, compared with 28,824 in 2006. This breaks down to 5,574 killed by netsmen, 10,383 killed by anglers and 11,158 released by rods.

If you, like me, do some of your salmon fishing in the spring, you might be surprised by those figures. It didn't make for bumper catches on the Dee or the Tay - at least when I was there. I suspect that by far the the biggest catches have been recorded in the autumn.

Hugh Campbell Adamson, Chairman of the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards, described the number of salmon entering rivers as "fairly stable and on most rivers robust." He also said that there had been a "quantum leap" in the number of salmon caught and released.

But he said there remained concern over spring stocks, the erratic nature of grilse runs, and the continuing decline in sea trout catches.

If salmon stocks are stabilising I wonder if we are approaching the time when fishery boards could contemplate the tollerance of those anglers taking a week's fishing in the summer months having the option to take a fish of a certain size - say up to 7 lbs?

I remain uncomfortable about blanket catch and release for a game fish unless stocks were critical (in which case it's arguable we shouldn't fishing anyway) but would not want to see a return to the indiscriminate killing of the past.

As more anglers practice catch and release, so they are less likely to want to retain a fish but there are still those, particularly fishing in the last month of the season, intent on killing everything.

Those engaged in salmon conservation increasingly have an encouraging story to tell. It would be a shame if their efforts were undermined by a minority concern to knock everything that's landed on the head.

A 2007 trip to the Dee

Sunray Shadow

2008-09-07T18:25:00.007+01:00

I've written a piece on my web site about fishing the Sunray Shadow on the River Dee. There are also some notes about landing fish. If you need an assistant, take my advice, be careful about asking your better half! Click on the link in the text if you wish to read more.

The picture here shows how it can be done as Andrew Pindar has a salmon netted by his wife, Caroline on the Oykel. All smiles and calmness.

August monsoon on the Dee

2008-08-26T16:15:00.008+01:00

With two big spates in the same week, our trip to the Dee last week (August 2008) was wetter than usual. The fish didn't mind. They were taking advantage of the big flows and tearing up the river as fast as their fins could carry them. I think some of them were veterans of Rob's salmon survival game.

It made tactics interesting. Big fly or small fly? Floating line or intermediate? Sinking tip or no sinking tip? Start casting or have another cuppa in the hut?

The problem with sinking tips, to my mind, is that while they get down to fish that may be resting close to the bottom of the river, they are not crossing that wider cone of vision on the surface.

In the spring when the water is colder and the fish less willing to move far to a fly, the sunk lure is often essential. But in summer when running fish are moving quite close to the surface a sunk line could be fishing beneath them.

It doesn't help either when the water colours up in a spate. I change my flies and my approach too often - I know I do - but I do think you have to keep ringing the changes. It's a matter of degree and I need to be a little more patient, sticking with a fly for the length of a pool at least.

All the salmon I caught and hooked last week (OK we're talking three here) took a surface fly on a floating line (with a Maxima leader in preference fluorocarbon). The only fish I caught on an intermediate line were sea trout. I realise this is not statistically significant, nor is it typical.

My friends on the next beat were catching fish with a mixture of approaches although they too were often struggling in the conditions.

What this says, I think, is that there is no text book approach. Luck and persistence continue to play a big part.

End note: Gill's dad, Alan Barraclough who has been my fishing partner for the past 14 summers in Scotland, has decided his fishing days on the Dee are over. At the age of 82, wading was getting difficult. He isn't hanging up his rod altogether and plans to be fishing on the Tay again come the spring. I'll miss him and will always be grateful for the opportunity he gave me all those years ago to try my hand at salmon fishing.

Rodless fishing

2008-08-08T01:07:00.001+01:00

No rod? No problem!

Splitters

2008-08-05T15:04:00.008+01:00

One of the most disappointing presentations at this year's CLA Game Fair was the debate on angling unity which I can only conclude after the events of recent weeks, is anything but.

The presence on the platform of Mark Lloyd, executive director of the Anglers' Conservation Association alongside Paul Knight, executive director of the Salmon & Trout Association, did little to remove the impression that the unity initiative has been dealt a damaging blow by the withdrawal of the S&TA from the merger.

Both executives had supportive words for each other and Knight had an explanation of sorts in that the S&TA had just been granted full charity status so, he argued, needed to remain outside the new structure. If that was the case, why did it commit itself to merger in the first place?

Judean People's Front

It's only a few weeks ago I was joking about fishing organisations resembling the Life of Brian Monty Python sketch where the Judean People's Front tries to present an image of unity that is far from the truth.

Sadly I did not realise how close I was to reality. The unity initiative prompted Jonathan Young, the editor of The Field, to commission from me an opinion piece asking whether the same might happen in shooting.

The article had to be scrapped shortly before publication in the August issue after the S&TA announced its withdrawal from Unity.

As I pointed out in the article, no-one was saying that unity was going to be easy. Fishing has experienced a number of abortive attempts to create broader representation in the past.

Fresh impetus

A fresh impetus emerged after Lord Moran’s review of salmon and freshwater fisheries in England and Wales ten years ago paved the way for the co-operative body, the Fisheries and Angling Conservation Trust (FACT) in 2005.

It soon became apparent that there were significant overlaps in the work of this group and that of its supporting organisations, hence the merger initiative among six (now five) of those groups.

Imagine pulling together the respective web sites, governing bodies, administrations and their respective marketing departments, memberships, fee structures and benefits. Petty rivalries, internal politics and personal egos had been buried to secure the big prize of a single powerful representation covering a whole series of angling issues - or at least that was story presented to me.

“Laying aside personal differences and hundreds of years of history to pursue this single overriding vision was a big ask,” said Mark Lloyd, speaking just a few weeks ago before the S&TA decision pull out. “But there has been the will to do it,” he said. The words ring a little bit hollow now but Lloyd shouldn't be blamed. He has worked has hard as anyone to make Unity a reality.

Better positioned

The result, he still argues, is a body that should be far better positioned to represent the 1.8m anglers in England and Wales than anything existing at present. While the combined membership of all the participating groups is no more than 25,000 individuals, the prospective body remains confident that it will provide a range of organisational benefits capable of boosting that figure to 100,000 on a par with the bigger field sports associations.

My Field magazine article had asked whether the fishing initiative could be the start of a trend across all field sports? Goodness knows there are enough organisations out there, from the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) with an annual turnover of around £7m and 125,000 members to the comparatively tiny Shooters’ Rights Association.

For those of us who engage in field sports the landscape can sometimes appear unclear, not to mention the competing demands on our pockets. As a paid-up member of three different fishing conservation associations and trusts, I had been mightily relieved that one set of subscription fees would be saved in the fishing merger.

Then a few days ago my annual subscription reminder notice for the S&TA popped through the letter box. Too late. I have resigned my membership and with it my committee membership of the Surrey branch.

Shooting merger

So could there be any merit in discussing a merger in shooting? One big difference between shooting and fishing, arguably, is the greater polarity of interests across shooting. While the nature of fishing means that all anglers are trying to catch wild animals, it is possible to go target or clay shooting without having any interest in pursuing game. I heard a target shooter at the Game Fair making it quite plain that he had no truck with killing animals.

Target shooting organisations based in Bisley – the National Small Bore Rifle Association, National Rifle Association and the Clay Pigeon Shooting Association – have been holding talks on closer co-operation for about a year now but have yet to reach agreement.

“I know that hasn’t been an easy process,” says John Swift, chief executive of the BASC. “This has been driven in large measure by the coming Olympics and opportunities for funding. But I think there will always be a distinction between the competitive target shooting disciplines and what might be called the country shooting interests – wildfowling, deer stalking management and so forth.”

Political focus

He also points to distinctions of function between organisations such as the BASC with its strong political focus, and those such as the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, that are research focused.

“There are similar divisions to this in most countries and I don’t see it as a practical option to merge those organisations,” he says.

The problem with large organisations, he says, is that they are vulnerable to splinter groups emerging after they have formed (back to The Life of Brian). On the other hand, there is nothing like a strong combined body for tackling the biggest political fights, argues Simon Hart, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance. Fewer issues have inflamed the passions of country lovers more than the Fox Hunting Bill.

The Alliance is committed to seeing through repeal of the Foxhunting bill under a future administration. If it succeeds, what then? Hart points out that the Alliance is about far more than fox-hunting. Just now, for example, it is campaigning against the closure of sub post offices in village communities.

But he doesn’t discount closer co-operation between organisations in future and thinks the days of the single-issue pressure group could be numbered. “Shooting is just one part of the jig-saw,” he argues. “I think there is considerable scope for closer working arrangements than is currently the case.

Future of shooting

“There are obvious attractions in merger such as saving overheads on administration and marketing, and providing just one insurance arrangement. The only thing standing in the way of that happening is the internal process. You need to look at the overall objectives of an organisation and may need to set aside some issues.

“The future of shooting, I believe, would be better served in one body rather than interests being broken down in to many smaller bodies. Unless we take a more co-ordinated approach the Government can hold a telescope to one eye when it faces the countryside lobby.

“A whole way of life is under threat and we shouldn’t forget that,” he says. Neither should we forget the broad constituency of field sport enthusiasts. It's good to hear some open-mindedness in shooting, the sort I had believed was making such significant strides in fishing.

Angling Unity is still going ahead. But, make no mistake, the withdrawal of the S&TA is a serious blow and no amount of warm words at the Game Fair can disguise that.

Always take the weather

2008-08-01T12:32:00.005+01:00

There's a bit of a kerfuffle in the Daily Telegraph today where Devon tourism managers are criticising weather forecasters for undue pessimism (that is forecasting heavy rain when there won't be much. I'm aware that anglers often want some rain). I think there is something in this.

Just before going up to the Oykel - a spate river - I looked at the weather outlook in the Telegraph funnily enough.

There were black clouds over the area, some of them with rain underneath, on every day of the coming week. I was rubbing my hands in anticipation.

In the event we had blistering sunshine the whole week. I couldn't have changed my fishing dates in this instance - besides, as the report said, the fishing was pretty good from the previous week's spate - but suppose I had been going to Scotland on spec, in the hope of catching some good spate conditions towards the end of the week? The forecasters should own up to the imperfections of forecasting beyond a day or two and admit to the imprecisions of their science.

Saturday: looking at the weather today the Telegraph map is again dominated by rainclouds with showers, only you can also see a few little suns poking from behind the clouds. At a glance you would think it would be pouring down everywhere. In reality there has been the odd light shower on a dull day - no sun. I think the problem lies with the symbols - they give the impression of heavy rain when it simply isn't happening.

N.B. If you are at all interested in weather lore you might be interested in some additions I have made to my archive, covering notes on Bill Foggitt, the Thirsk weather sage.

The Salmon King

2008-08-01T11:06:00.010+01:00

As an antidote to the same old stuff they were pedalling at the game fair this year (see previous note) I would recommend Crawford Little's article on Colin Leslie, the retired Tay ghillie, featured in the August issue of Trout and Salmon Magazine.

Fishing magazines are often criticised for running similar material year after year but, when you think about it, the way we fish has not changed radically over time. Neither have the fish. That great new pattern promoted as this year's "wonder fly" may well resemble those that have gone before.

Leslie makes the point in the article with a swipe at Alistair Gowans who created the Ally's Shrimp (if you read that article, incidentally, I can tell you that I am not impressed by wobblers and other fancy attachments.

The T&S article doesn't name Gowans (did they think he might sue?)but Leslie, quite rightly, points out that the Ally's Shrimp is simply a hybrid of the General Practitioner. "I fished those flies before he was born," says Leslie.

I love the article because it gives a flavour of the banter and rivalry between ghillies. Indeed some of the current Tay ghillies were scoffing at Leslie's book title, "Scotland's Salmon King" when I met them in the spring. "Aye ye'll be wantin' to meet the sage o' Cargill," said one of them, stifling a giggle.

What Leslie doesn't point out in the article is that the vast majority of spring salmon caught on his ghillied beat, Cargill, would have fallen to the Kynoch killer - a plastic fish lure harled from the back of the boat.

He is pretty scathing too about the Spey cast. But I think a well executed Spey cast is still worth learning and vital for rivers where no back cast is possible.

Like many other Tay ghillies he swears by high strength Maxima line and I think he has a point as I discussed in my Oykel blog here.

His memories of fishing shrimp - he says he introduced the method to the Tay - brought back memories of my own. When I first went up to the Tay in the late 70s, part of the tackle were jars of dyed prawns and buckets of worms. Those days certainly have gone on the Tay and will not return.

There is some great advice about how to fish a fly and a spinner - he is a strong advocate of the sinking tip, even in summer (but then the Tay is a big deep river). he also worries that anglers can sometimes fish too small and I would agree with that.

Lelsie caught a number of big salmon in the 40 lbs class and one of 56lbs which was such a poor specimen, he said, he fed it to the chickens. This fish, I notice, has not made it into Fred Buller's Domesday Book of Giant Salmon (mentioned here).

I'm not saying that everything about a ghillie's job is perfect but spending your life by the river, catching big salmon, drinking whisky and chatting with interesting people, knowing that you're the expert who they must respect, well there are worse ways to make a living.

I haven't read Scotland's Salmon King (Melrose books) yet but it's on my list.

CLA Game Fair 2008

2008-07-28T22:17:00.005+01:00

The long drive back from Scotland was hard going and we were both pretty frazzled on Sunday when we called at the Country Land & Business Association Game Fair, held at Blenheim Palace this year after last year's washout at Harewood House.

Was it the sun or the heat or did I think that something was missing this year? There was no shortage of people and no shortage of trade but when you have been to a few Game Fairs they all begin to look the same.

The same old faces were chairing the debates and hogging the panels. After hearing John Wilson demand a cormorant cull for the umpteenth time, it all begins to get a bit tiring.

The demonstrations I saw were OK but hardly eye-popping. Henry Gilbey is a fine fishing photographer but seeing him chucking a bass lure on a lily pond is not the most entertaining spectacle in the calendar.

Then there are the crowds. One thing I've noticed about hunting, fishing and shooting - it attracts all sorts, from Dukes to dossers. It was seriously hot on Sunday and still people brought their dogs. But at least the dogs looked better turned out than some of the owners.

Perhaps it was the temperatures making me feel crabby. But all those stands were just too much, leaving us grossed out on tweed and wellies. I couldn't help thinking I'd have rather been fishing.

Salmon fishing on the River Oykel

2008-07-28T13:05:00.014+01:00

Monday morning on the river Oykel. The water was perfect and the fish were running in numbers. You dream about days like this.

Gill and I were sharing a rod as guests of Andrew Pindar, chairman of the Pindar printing group, on the lower Oykel beats. The four beats are run by a consortium fronted by Mohamed Al-Fayed whose kilted waxwork dummy can be found in the shop at the nearby Falls of Shin.

They like Al-Fayed around these parts. He has donated computers to the local schools among other things. That kind of generosity can buy you a lot of tolerance for your kilted vanity. Who cares if there is not, as yet, an Al-Fayed clan tartan?

Osprey nests

So where is the Oykel? I had to ask this myself as I had never been so far north on the east coast. You drive (or fly) to Inverness at the head of the Caledonian Canal and just keep on going another hour, not far from Bonar Bridge.

The lodge, overlooking the river, had magnificent views of the hills where we often spotted golden eagles and ospreys on hunting forays. There are two osprey nests in the area and we spent the best part of an afternoon watching a pair with their fledglings.

That was after the spate when the river was shrinking to its bare bones. The spate itself had been running the previous week when the 12 rods on the four lower beats had caught 145 salmon and grilse.

Snapped line

So Monday was the tail end of the spate and we had to make the most of it. But it's hard to do your best when you reach a new river. We rose before breakfast and went to one of the best pools where Gill lost a fish. We should have skipped breakfast altogether but there was the morning organising to do - the allocation of rods and fishing spots. There is etiquette to observe as a guest and the first day on a new river is always strange for the newcomer.

The gillie took us back to the the same beat and with my second or third cast I felt a pull on the line. The next cast - a long one across the neck of the pool - produced a strong take and a thrashing fish. But after less than a minute it was away - with the hook.

Yes it took the hook. That shouldn't happen. Nothing wrong with the knot. The line had snapped. "Fluorocarbon? Bin it. It's a load of crap," said the ghillie. I tied on a new fly, pulled the line to test it and it snapped again.

This is not the first time I have heard a ghillie decrying fluorocarbon. Jimmy Barrett, who has a lifetime of fishing experience on the Tay where he ghillied on the Upper Scone beat, believes that fluorocarbon can be brittle and prone to nicking. Certainly it does not have the same give or stretch as nylon.

So I changed leaders. With almost the next cast I had a fish on again - a healthy 11 lb hen fish which put up a real fight and needed no revival as it was released. I handed the rod to Gill and within 10 minutes she was playing a grilse to the bank where she released it.

Trusted patterns

The lower Oykel fishings impose a 6-fish limit with no fish to be taken that are longer than 25 ins (about 7 lbs).

Without the breakage, without breakfast, we would have had more, really should have had more, but two fish in a morning isn't bad. Later in the afternoon I had another that came to a small plastic tube fly - stoats tail and silver. The others took either cascade or stoats tail and silver patterns, either size 10 or eight.

There is no need to fish too small when there's a good flow and there are fresh taking fish. Nor is there any need to be too choosy about fly patterns or methods. We simply used trusted patterns with double hooks on a straight cast.

Andrew Pindar hooks in to a grilse.

But when the fish stop running and you're trying for the "residents" in blazing sunshine the fishing gets a whole lot more difficult. We raised one or two on bombers and sunray shadows but couldn't get a take. Had it not been for the bright sunshine I think we might have had a few more fish. As it was we had seven fish to the three rods in the week and everyone who started the week had a fish.

I kept my second fish, a lovely 7-pounder and the first salmon I have killed for some years.

It seems churlish, however, to talk numbers on a river like the Oykel. It's a privilege enough simply to be there. Yes, in purely fishing terms, we are talking about feast and famine. But for variety and scenery it's hard to beat. I loved fishing the small pools above the Oykel Bridge where we could watch the fish leaping the falls. I probably spent as much time with the camera that morning as I did with the rod.

Hot and sunny

Rod-sharing was also fun, allowing time to think about the next session or read a book if the fishing is quiet. It's not often that you catch fish and improve on your tan in the same week. Those who holiday for the sunshine would never understand the game fishing mentality that greets a damp overcast morning with a sense of joy.

"Did you have good weather?" asked a neighbour when we returned.

"Terrible," I said with a shake of the head. "Hot and sunny every day."

Salmon Survival Game

2008-07-16T16:33:00.005+01:00

Rob Donkin, one of my sons, is enjoying his break from university but I have not been able to get him out fishing. Instead he is building computer games. So I was chatting to him about salmon migrations and how tough it was for the fish to get back up the river. How do they avoid all those anglers?

Inspired, he came up with this Salmon Survival game. Why not try it? It's easy to learn but not so easy to avoid those anglers and their fishing flies. My fish keep getting caught on the lower beats. The river narrows the further you get. I also notice that the most successful anglers are the ones that keep their flies moving in the water. Just like real life then.

Carping on

2008-06-27T12:48:00.008+01:00

Looking at the magazine racks of WH Smith today I was struck, not for the first time, at the number of carp magazines. There was Carp World, Carp Talk,Total Carp, Advanced Carp Fishing, Carpology, Crafty Carper, Big Carp Magazine and UK Angling Times Carp.

The front covers of seven of these eight magazines featured a man holding up a big carp. The eighth magazine had two men, each holding up a big carp. I can imagine the monthly editorial picture desk meetings of these magazines:

Editor: "What do we have for the front cover this month?"

Picture editor: "You're going to like this one. It's a bloke holding a carp."

Editor: "Hmm... Anything else?"

Picture editor producing another picture of a man with a carp: "What about this one?"

Editor: "I can't help thinking it's rather similar."

Picture editor: "Totally different."

Editor: "How?"

Picture editor: "He's not wearing a hat."

Those carp editors need to be looking at the rest of the angling press for ideas. Pike and Predator, for example, featured a man holding a perch. The tench special of Course Fisherman had a man holding - yes you guessed it - a tench, while Boat Fish used a picture of a man holding a big turbot.

You have to feel sorry for Fly Fishing and Fly Tying magazine. I picked up a random cover from the pile besides my desk and there was the familiar format, a man dressed in fishing gear holding.....well I can't actually see, but I think it must be a fly.

Heavy metal, light response

2008-06-18T09:19:00.009+01:00

One of the happier by-products of industrial decline in the UK has been the recovery of many of our most polluted rivers. The Tyne in Northumberland, the upper reaches of the Calder in Yorkshire, the river Don at Penistone and many more have benefited from the restoration of natural fish stocks.

The problem is that some of the historic threats still remain. Industrial properties - or their remains - continue to line the river banks in many places and pollution incidents still occur. An escape of cleaning fluid wrecked a stretch of the River Wandle last year. In that case the company involved, Thames Water, is heavily committed to restoration work.

But in another serious incident, this time on the River Derwent in Derbyshire, the subsequent interventions appear to have been woefully inadequate and inexcusably slow in happening.

The River Derwent, some 50 miles long,is the largest river in the Peak District, joining the River Trent just south of Derby.

In January 2007, a settlement lagoon owned by Glebe Mines burst, discharging large volumes of sediment into the Derwent via one of its tributaries, the Stoke Brook. The sediment was contaminated with mine tailings - fine waste material - which included arsenic, cadmium, lead and other metals.

Now dredging work has started on the riverbed in an attempt to get rid of the poisonous sediment after a scientific report, commissioned by the Anglers’ Conservation Association (ACA), found that heavy metals had begun to accumulate in the food chain in parts of the river.

The report found elevated lead levels in insects from the effected area leading to a risk that lead levels in fish could rise as a result. Over time, warns the ACA, the range of elevated metals could pose a threat to the ecosystem and to people who might eat contaminated fish. Concentrations of heavy metals are known to suppress the immune system in animals and humans.

The ACA says the Environment Agency responded inadequately with limited sampling after it had recognised the need to act swiftly.

The lagoon burst in January 2007 and EA fisheries officers were measuring sediment depths in early February. By March EA scientists were aware of "acute damage" to a significant stretch of the stream and recommended the removal of sediments. In June 2007 the EA said that removing the silt was likely to start within two weeks. That was over a year ago. In the interim further pollution has occurred. Only now has the work started.

The ACA has chartered what I can only describe as a classic story of bureaucratic delay when it was clear from the start what needed to be done: get the clean up underway and deal with the "who pays?" argument later. The Environment Agency should hang its head in shame. Anglers deserve better.

From Russia with just a touch of smugness

2008-06-03T10:43:00.010+01:00

Here's a report I just received from Roxtons, providers of fishing and shooting holidays (at a price).

CHARLIE WHITE REPORTS FROM LOWER VARZUGA:

"We are now into the second week of the season and summer has started to arrive. Bright sunshine and warm temperatures are melting the remaining snow and ice and the water levels are rising. The water is currently 5 degrees C and warming all the time but sinking lines are the best choice at present - we may well be into sink tips and intermediates by next week.

Last week the ten rods at Lower Varzuga landed 279 fish with an excellent average size. The rods also caught a number of sea trout - something we sometimes experience in the early weeks. The first three days of this week Michael Evans and party have taken 142 fish, with Chris Davis taking his first salmon on a fly. Alex Fenton and John Millar have each had two fish of 16lbs and a number of fish above 12lbs.

Kitza opened this week with a very encouraging start. The ten rods who are all, bar one, new to the river had 108 mint fresh fish for their three days with four of the rods landing their first ever salmon. The fish have been mostly caught below camp but as the river warms up it will not be long before the fish are spread all over the beat.

Middle Varzuga's first week saw the ten rods landing 211 fish with many new rods to the beat. This week the eleven rods, the majority of who know the river exceptionally well, have so far taken 277 fish. With the number of fish running the river here at Lower, I expect Middle's numbers to be somewhat different by the end of the week!

The river is looking superb at the moment, my only caveat being that we might get a day or two of high dirty water later this week as the warm weather melts the last of the snow."

Well bully for you Charlie. I'm sure we'd all catch salmon if the rivers were teeming with them. Let's be clear about this: this is fishing for the well heeled. It is also fishing for those obsessed with catching fish.

Would I go? With averages of 36 fish per rod per week in the Kola peninsula, you bet your bottom dollar I would. But I'm not sure I would pay the £5,000 minimum I would need to fork out to get there and fish. I'm told the cooking and residential facilities are excellent these days - better than the old days when everything was a bit rough and ready. But it's still Russia and the scenery is desolate.

But you go for the fishing don't you? Well not entirely. I want more than that. I want scenery, I want to stand around a bit and check out my surroundings. I want to chew the fat with my chums and sometimes - horror of horrors - I want to sit down and do nothing. Yes that's called "not fishing."

But when you're bringing back your tally to share with your party you're in a numbers game my friends. There's pressure to fish - all of the time. It becomes obsessive, manic and just a little bit unhealthy.

Am I embittered that I have spent most of my lifetime flogging away for salmon in Scottish rivers for extremely thin returns while novice anglers are filling their boots on the Kola? Not in the slightest (cough!). Blank days maketh the angler, someone once said (yes you guessed, that's a little bit of my home-spun twaddle but I'll hold to it, nevertheless).

So is my envy at these catches as green as the sour grapes? Too right it is. I would love a trip to the Kola rivers, if only to know what it is to see Atlantic spring salmon running in such prodigious numbers. Would I swap that for my summer week on the River Dee? Never. You can buy great fishing with a flourish of your cheque book, but some things in life are priceless.

OK then, would I swap my office-based existence, writing about work all day, for Charlie White's job as Roxton's director of fishing? Hmmm, let me think. Roxtons, you have my number.

Blobs and bling - fishing or rapping?

2008-06-01T10:40:00.008+01:00

The bright yellow sparkly blob, commonly used in reservoir fly fishing has become a controversial lure of choice according to this report in the Sunday Telegraph.

Well what did we expect? Rainbow trout, in particular, will go for bright yellow attractors pulled swiftly through the water. Indeed I was advised to try something bright yellow when fishing in the recent One Fly competition on the River Test where the beat had been stocked with rainbows.

Blobs on a prime chalk stream? Sorry if you've spilled your tea all over your trousers but that's what a competition mentality does to people. I wonder what Halford would have made of the blob?

Egg patterns

Matching the hatch? Not quite, but it could be argued that blobs look a little bit like eggs, albeit fast moving eggs if they are retrieved at speed.

Are we not doing something similar when using bright yellow and orange lures fished fast to attract salmon? In this case trying to imitate the local insect life isn't going to do much good because the salmon isn't feeding anyway.

But the trout is looking for food and what we like most, I think, if you will pardon this generalisation, is to aim our fly at a surface feeding trout and see it taking our little fly in the belief that it is eating something just like the flies it has been feeding on for the past hour or two. That, fundamentally, is the difference in fly fishing aesthetics.

In a less obvious way it divided the chalk stream fishers when G E M Skues began to use nymphs. Unlike a fast retrieved blob there is some real skill in imparting life in to a nymph fished at the correct depth and discerning the take when it comes. But here again we can "cheat" by using indicators that can double-up as floats.

And if we are float fishing our flies, what is the difference between that and dangling a bunch of maggots (other than that the maggots move of their own accord)?

Better than thou

I don't much care for reservoir fishing, I don't much care for "world champion" tags or fishing qualifications that say "I am better than thou."

Fishing, for me, is something personal. I don't want to feel pressured to fish all the time. I like to stand and stare. The other day I was enjoying watching Mayflies on the water. Some were coming down to the water and landing on spent flies attracted by some unknown smell perhaps, or was it the shape?

Fish weren't rising for them although they may well have been feeding on the nymphs. But that day I was looking for rising fish. I didn't want to fish nymphs.

But it seems a crazy old world when anglers spend their lives thinking of ways to attract fish then, when they succeed beyond their wildest imaginings, find their new method is outlawed because it is too easy.

Behind this newspaper report, however, there is something not very pleasant. There is an implication in the talk of "yobs with blobs" that fly fishing is attracting members of the West Staines Massiv who shouldn't be doing it.

Rainbow rap

Sooner or later, perhaps, we will be singing along to "rainbow rap" and choosing our "flies" from glitzy bling boxes. We could park our spare flies in our ear-piercings. Now that's an idea.

Well if it keeps young people from stabbing and shooting each other I'm all for it. In time they will tire of the easy fishing and begin listening to the old farts (sorry I meant to say "experienced fishermen") who would never - not in a million years - be tempted to use a blob themselves. Goodness me, what are those yellow things in my fly box? Hide them, quickly. As Ali G would say, "Let's keep it real."
Respek.

The People's Front for the Liberation of Fishing

2008-05-31T08:56:00.007+01:00

Fishing or angling? Debate over the name of the new all-embracing organisation that is going to represent angling interests in England and Wales has swung away from Angling (or Angling Unity) to something around that word “fishing” I can exclusively reveal.

This is my first bit of exclusive revealing, I do believe, since I exclusively revealed that the body would be called Angling Unity (or Angling). I had every confidence in this assertion because here, for the first time, anglers were speaking as one.

That was before some splitter suggested “Fishing” of all things. So the betting has swung now to something like the Fishing Association or simply Fishing although you can get good odds on “Judean Liberation Front.”

Apparently there was a feeling that “Angling” sounded too antiquated, the sort of thing that Isaak Walton would do with a pole and a length of cat gut.

Fishing, on the other hand is bold, simple and to the point. Unless, of course, you use a net. Then there’s the problem with gender neutrality. The beauty of “angler” is that it can refer to either sex while the rarely used “fisher” does not trip off the tongue so easily as “fisherman” which can get us in to so much trouble with the gender police.

Fisherman is the word you associate with so-called fishing humour – the male-oriented birthday cards, mugs and tee-shirts depicting silly men standing in the rain in waders, exaggerating the size of their catch or doing unspeakable things with maggots.

Fishermen refer to their wives (they don’t have partners) as “‘er indoors.” They lie about walking the dog or going shopping when really they’re off to the river. They’re always buying tackle they don’t need to feed their obsession and they eat Marmite sandwiches washed down with flasks of lukewarm instant coffee.

It is for this reason that I have persisted with the concept of the “fisher” in my writing. I think it works particularly well in fly fishing and have absolutely no problem now writing of “fly fishers.” Somehow “fly anglers” just doesn’t work so well for me.

Angling, on the other hand, has survived well over the centuries, which is surprising given its description, not of fishing, but merely the angle of rod and line. But it doesn’t look as if it will survive as the name for the new body.

Instead it seems we are marching in to the bright new dawn as fishers who go fishing. Unless someone decides otherwise and at some future date I can exclusively reveal that the People’s Front for the Liberation of Fishing has prevailed.

What ever happened to the Vosso?

2008-05-15T14:32:00.005+01:00

For some time now I have been curious to know what happened to the salmon runs on Norway's Vosso River that I read so much about in Arthur Oglesby's book, Salmon.

I started a discussion about it here in this fly fishing forums thread. After carrying out some recent work looking at the salmon farming industry I am now convinced that salmon farming was largely to blame.

There is an excellent feature about the river in the Winter 2007 journal of the Flyfishers' Club. The feature, written by Morten Harangen, mentions a recent fishing trip to the river when he failed to catch anything.

He says the record book for 2005 mentions "seven or eight" salmon caught on the river. But were these genetic Vosso salmon? Or were they escaped farm salmon? It does not say.

The catch is pitifully small, even if, as Harangen asserts, "there is no doubt there are still a few forty to fifty pounders out there."

I hope he is right. What will be difficult to discern is their genetic purity. On the other hand there is every reason to believe that something, if not entirely genetically pure, then very close to the original strain, could be restored even if it hails from a salmon farm cage. This is because a significant constituent of the Mowi strain, the first salmon farm fish to emerge in Norway, were salmon taken from a Vosso tributary, the Bolstad.

These large-growing fish are typically four or five sea-winter fish. The more winters that salmon spend at sea, the bigger they get, hence some excitement in the May Tay Salmon news bulletin from the Tay Salmon Fisheries Board, that a good proportion of the Tay's spring fish this year appear to have been bigger three-winter salmon.

All well and good - I'm as delighted as anyone to see evidence of big spring salmon back in the Tay - but the run is still relatively small compared with the 1970s. A few big salmon does not a spring run make.

As for the Vosso, it was closed in 1992 and re-opened in 1998 without any signs of improvement.

So why did the river collapse? Karl Magne Bolstad whose Berga farm overlooks the Bolstad pool, and which has some of the most famous beats on the river, has no doubt that many smolts were killed by sea lice that accumulate in large numbers around salmon farm cages. But there was also a lot of dumping in the river when a road was built. That killed a lot of fish, he says. Moreover a power plant constructed on the river led to significant changes in water temperature, another possible contributory factor.

It's astonishing how human activity in different areas has collectively destroyed one of the world's most precious wild salmon rivers with barely a whimper of protest. Today, hatchery-reared smolts are being transported past the salmon cages but will that work as a conservation effort?

Bolstad does not sound too optimistic of restoring the strain. A once mighty salmon river, its fish the stuff of legends, has been lost to angling and may never return. That's a crying shame.

Saturday's fish is Sunday's dinner

2008-05-11T23:42:00.007+01:00

There are magical chalk streams and there is Sally Merison’s beat of the river Dever just a few minutes away from the busy A303. As a tributary of the River Test, the Dever is smaller than its more famous big sister, but no less pretty.

A small syndicate fishes the stretch that runs past Sally’s house but not at the weekends when she allows family and friends to fish. That’s when she’s not fishing herself. I had a great day fishing here last year with Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance.

This last weekend Sally invited us again. It’s not just the fishing either; she spoils us silly with a trencherman’s lunch in the hut. One or two Mayfly were coming off the water but not enough to interest the fish yet.

We started fishing shortly before noon and I soon found a feeding fish in mid-stream on a 15 yard cast. But just to the right and closer there was another larger fish in the shallows under a tree. It’s a difficult cast with a tree behind and a need to slot a sideways cast below a branch and above some bank-side vegetation.

The fish needed the fly just a little in front. It took an interest but not enough. I changed the fly to a small brown spinner imitation. Another cast or two and he went for it. Once the fish was returned I started casting to the farther fish that was feeding midstream a little way up from the bend. The trees allowed a long straight cast and the fish took the fly quickly. With two early fish I was thinking it was going to be a day of easy fishing. Far from it. Most of the fish were sitting deep, sullen looking. But there was still plenty action for the dry fly.

I notice that the trout pigmentation varies quite dramatically on different fish. Sally says the fish take the hue of their surroundings. She thinks it has something to do with visual information passed through the eye. Fish that have spent time in a culvert, she says, are dark coloured, while those that have been sitting on shingle are sandy coloured.

The trout today are quite choosy. There are just a few feeding fish but I’m picking them off as I find them, sometimes with a change of fly, often spending some time on one fish. You know you have a fight with a 3 pounder on same strength tippet fished off a 3 weight line on a light seven foot rod.

I read a lot about matching the hatch but when not much is hatching, what do you do? The fish seem to be taking small flies so I try small grey dusters and klinkhammers. Both work with different fish. I end up with eight for the afternoon, all between one and a half and three and a half pounds.

These would have been caught on perhaps five or six different flies. I kept one fish and had a look at its stomach contents. There were four different insects, two different coloured midges, a Mayfly larva and a cardinal beetle.

The point I would make is that article after article in the fishing magazines will concentrate on fly types, yet if you can present a fly well to a feeding fish and if that fly looks a reasonable approximation to an insect there is a good chance you might get it to take.

I found one fish, almost tempted it, then spooked it and I moved on. Later I came back to the spot and saw it was feeding again. I tried a different fly and it took. All the fish were well hooked and all came to the net. It doesn’t always happen like this.

The fish I kept weighed in at 3 lb. I gutted it on the Saturday evening and rubbed some sea salt on the insides and flanks, wrapping the fish in silver foil. The next day I cut off the head and tail, stuffed the insides with herbs from the garden, propped the flanks open with sticks and laid it belly down on the grill in the smoking tin, leaving it to smoke over wet wood chips on a burner for about forty minutes.

The result was a meaty, lightly smoked and herb flavoured fish great with a bit of lemon, mayonnaise, salad and new potatoes and plenty for four of us.

One Fly, one dace

2008-05-07T15:48:00.005+01:00

I took part in the One Fly competition on the River Test the other week. I plan to have a report in my fishing section soon when the FT gets round to publishing it.

For my own part I found it a little disappointing hauling out(not many)rainbow trout stockies from cloudy water on a fast retrieved nymph. It's not the way I like to fish a chalk stream.

The weather was warm yesterday so I popped down to the River Wey near Elstead only to find that it too was cloudy, like thin cocoa. There was nothing doing but on my way back to the car I saw a fish taking insects from the surface. It was a peculiar swirling rise, not like that you get from a trout or even a grayling.

Anyway I stuck a little black fly on, had it taken, and there was a dace. Just one little fish but it made the trip worthwhile somehow.

Hook removal - a practical demonstration.

2008-04-27T13:01:00.006+01:00

In more than 30 years since picking up a fly rod I have never experienced a barbed hook lodged in my skin - until the last Dee trip.

The night before we fished Mark Crampton Smith (aka The Pikey) was outlining a discomforting but, he assured us, effective method for removing a hook from the head. The idea, he said, was to loop some nylon around the bend in the hook, then push the hook inwards with a thumb while yanking swiftly on the thread.

It sounded a bit grizzly to me but the very next day I had the opportunity to put it to the test. I'm not sure what happened, a mistimed cast perhaps, combined with a gust of wind; all I know is that there was a sharp crack to my sunglasses and a bang on the upper cheek, leaving a large double hook embedded in my skin.

Yes, I know some will be saying that the barbs should have been crimped. Well they weren't. The cheek felt a bit a numb but the hook had to go so I went over to our hook specialist, Mark, who seemed less confident than he had been when discussing the theory.

He did just as he had been told and the hooks were out, almost painlessly, leaving a couple of neat pin pricks in my cheeks.

I must have been so impressed that two days later I drove another hook in to my skin, this time a finger. The point was close to the bone so pushing it through wasn't an option. This time I had Will to do the necessary and he chose forceps, ripping out the hook before I was ready. That one did hurt but, again, it left no more than a neat hole. After that I was much more careful in my casting.

If you don't fish with some kind of eye protection I hope these lessons will be sufficient to convince you of the wisdom of doing so.

Trophy fishing on the Dee

2008-04-27T12:26:00.009+01:00

The spring Dee salmon fishing was as tough as ever this year but our party improved slightly on last year’s performance with seven fish. Two of our goals were achieved when everyone caught a fish and we had a fish on every day of the week.

They were all in the 6 lbs to 10 lbs range, so we didn’t land one of the big Dee springers although Mark Crampton Smith lost a big fish, apparently after mistaking it for a rock. This is not as daft as it sounds.

A big salmon can be pretty stubborn, holding station, refusing to budge, but if there is any “rock or fish” doubt in the mind, it’s better to hold steady rather than yanking hard at the obstruction as Mark did. His rock finally responded by spitting out the hook and shooting off up stream to a more appreciative beat.

First fish

The first fish fell to Bryan Kruse which, in an earlier visit, when we did that sort of thing, would have scooped him the first fish prize money in the sweep.

Mark objected to a sweep, arguing that it was ungentlemanly to despoil our experience with grubby money, so he had to settle for our new trophy, the Carlogie Cup for best all round fishing performance. This included ferreting out a fish from a “secret pool” that also produced a salmon for Will Sadler who had been showing signs of desperation as the only fishless rod midway through the week.

First he blamed his rod, then his line, then his rod and his line until the ghillie loaned him an identical rod which somehow seemed better.

Sluie Saucer

There was a second trophy, the Sluie Saucer, named after another nearby beat that we had rented for the week. This one has less to do with fishing prowess and more to do with general ineptness. After falling in the river three times, hooking myself twice, dropping off in the hut while holding a glass of wine, and losing my wading stick, I suppose I couldn’t complain when the saucer came my way.

Two other goals, a salmon over 15 lbs and a fish at Sluie, both eluded us. Sluie has recorded just two fish for the season to date and the beat owner is more than a little hacked off with spring runs that are a shadow of the old days.

During the 1960s river netting was taking 60,000 salmon a year and 10,000 or more were falling to the rods. Today the annual total of rod caught fish on the Dee in a season is somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 fish with all but a small minority returned. It's difficult to say how many fish are caught more than once but when records were taken of River Carron salmon - all tagged - some 19 per cent of catches were fish that had been caught twice.

Burn Improvement

While burn improvement on the Dee is to be commended, I am less convinced about the wisdom of the Dee Salmon Fishery Board decision to close its hatcheries. If the river was teeming with fish I could appreciate an argument to simply let the fish get on with their own breeding. But the Dee is far from reaching the levels of returning fish it needs to restore and sustain the kind of abundance it enjoyed in the past.

This week the weather warmed up and catches increased. They had 15 fish between four rods at Ballogie, the beat below us. The Carlogie total was six in ideal conditions, so I don’t think we did too badly.

The spring fishing is much improved on the way it was 10 years ago when some believed that the Dee springer could be extinct, but there is still a long way to go.

Angling

2008-04-10T23:20:00.004+01:00

Angling Unity or Angling? These are the two names in the frame for a unified body to represent angling interests in England and Wales that is to be created from an amalgamation of six associations. The new body should be ready for legal registration in July if all goes to plan, becoming fully operational by January next year.

Pulling together six different groups in 15 months since the idea was first mooted by the Angling Conservation Association has been a minor miracle. The various boards who have buried any differences and self-interest for the good sense of having single more powerful voice, are to be congratulated.

The six associations in the move are:

Angling Conservation Association,
National Association of Fisheries and Angling Consultatives,
National Federation of Anglers,
National Federation of Sea Anglers,
Salmon and Trout Association,
Specialist Anglers' Alliance.

Now there is just the question of a name. Unless the group comes up with something it thinks is even better, my preference would be "Angling" so that way its interests would be rolled in to a single descriptive word.

April on the Tay

2008-04-06T14:24:00.008+01:00

The problem with turning up to fish on the River Tay in the spring is that the fishing has been so poor in recent years I find it difficult to raise any sense of optimism and, believe me, I am an optimist.

No matter, it's good to practice my casting. On the Monday morning I had been fishing just 20 minutes at a place they call the "little shot" - an old netting spot - on the Benchill beat of the Upper Scone fishings, when I had the strongest of pulls on the fly.

I had run a Black Frances through the pool on an intermediate line with a fast-sinking tip, and had just changed the fly to a Temple Dog.

I retraced my steps on the bank and, after about three or four casts, hooked in to a salmon. Could it have been the same fish? Unfortunately I lost it after two or three minutes, but it was a reminder that I shouldn't have been so complacent. Fish were running and, although they weren't stopping, there was always the chance of a take.

On the Tuesday it rained heavily, leaving the water coloured for much of Wednesday. On the Thursday I was fishing the Cawnpore pool just opposite Stanley Mills when a fish took my fly just three or four yards from the bank. It was not a big fish, about 8 lbs, but it stripped off a lot of line before I beached it and returned it, having left my landing net at home.

On the Saturday morning I hooked in to another a little further down the same bank but this too, came off after a couple of minutes. I noticed that the landed fish was lightly hooked. These were fast running fish, hitting the fly from behind, not turning on it in the classic take.

Our group had six fish for the week, not great but a hell of a lot better than some recent years when the return has been one or two or none at all. Had all the lost fish held we would have been in double figures.

It was satisfying too, that the bank outfished the harling boats, with four coming from the bank, three on "flying C" spinners. I was the only one fishing fly but it fished just as well as the spinners. In fact I would argue that it fished better because it fishes a little more slowly.

It's too early to be optimistic about the Tay but the spring runs do seem to be improving gradually. It will be interesting to compare this with the Dee in a week's time.

Mill dams, Marmite, tea and cigarettes

2008-03-22T12:52:00.010Z

In the alphabet of life, fishing comes somewhere between the boy scouts and girls, or at least that was how it happened for me. Come to think of it, I would have barely enrolled in the cub scouts the first time I cast a hook over the pier at Whitby and hauled out some small silvery "kamikaze" with fins.

Earlier still I was pulling greedy sticklebacks from the park lake that would attach themselves obligingly to the brandling worms I had tied to a piece of string. This method seemed to catch bigger specimens than I could get with my net. The net was made from one of my grandma's stockings tied in a knot, threaded on a piece of wire and attached to a bamboo pole.

I would take the sticklebacks home in a jam jar where they would die within two or three days. I had more success when I put them in a plastic tank outside until a heavy frost entombed them within a block of ice. Perhaps this was when I first began to appreciate the merits of catch-and-release.

Pink underskirt

Once I slipped on a wet leaf by the side of the lake, finding myself fully immersed in the "mucky end" where all the leaves, litter and uneaten breadcrumbs left by the satiated ducks would gather.I must have been about three or four years old. My mother dragged me out, took off my sodden clothes and dressed me for the bus ride home in a pink underskirt she had bought on the market. It was the bus ride from Hell and the associated humiliation most probably scarred me for the rest of my days.

Apart from holiday fishing I did not begin to take the sport seriously until I bought my first fishing licence and joined a coarse-fishing club in my early teens. It was on one of those fishing trips I bought my first and only packet of cigarettes - 20 Embassy - just like the ones smoked by mum and dad.

I had gone with a friend to fish a mill dam just outside Ossett in West Yorkshire. For some reason we thought that our chances were better the earlier we arrived so we were on the bus at first light and on our way before the first of the shift workers.

No sooner were our floats in the water than we were both puffing away on our "lights." Within two or three smokes my face must have gone the colour of the pea-green dam water. I can't recall whether or not I finished the packet but it certainly cured me of the urge to experiment any further with cigarettes, although I did try smoking my dad's pipe with the same unfortunate results.

Marmite sandwiches

These coarse-fishing forays, sustained by Marmite sandwiches and a flask of tea, would usually produce a decent haul of perch and roach, never very big. I might have progressed to bigger things had it not been for adolescence and the intervention of progressive rock, underage drinking and girls.

But the fishing was merely neglected, not abandoned, and during a canal holiday with friends I had what I can only describe as my angling epiphany. I was admiring a fine chub I had taken from the Avon near Tewksbury when a friend challenged my ethics (not that I knew what ethics were at the time).

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"Throw it back," I said.

"Don't you think that's unkind to the fish? Wouldn't it show more respect for the fish if you killed and ate it?" he said.

I thought he had a point, so it was not long after that I acquired my first trout rod. This one was a birthday present from my in-laws-to-be who regarded game fishing as a healthy shared pastime for a soon-to-be-married young couple.

Broon and gold

Soon after our marriage they invited us salmon fishing to Scotland, to the Kinnaird beat of the River Tay. It was early April and there were few springers around but Gill had a lovely 17 lb fish on the Wednesday.

We were spin fishing with "broon and gold" devons bought from Malloch's in Perth. On the Saturday I knew I was in the last chance saloon when I hooked in to something big. When I look back now at the tackle I was using it makes me weep. My rod was a bendy piece of hollow glass fibre, bought from a barber's shop in Batley, and my tatty coarse-fishing reel was falling apart.

The fish kept taking line and I was struggling to get it in. I was tiring after 15 or 20 minutes and thought the fish must be tiring too so I tightened up the tension on the reel, but far too much. The fish ran and parted company with the line. It was just before lunch and it was an understatement to say I was distraught.

Silver springer

Straight after lunch I went back to the very same spot, cast again and had a fish on. It felt like another good one. This time I left the tension well alone. When it came to the gaff (this was the late 70s) it was a superb 23lb silver springer.

A year later, on the same beat in the summer I was casting a salmon fly for the first time and hooked in to a fish of about 12 pounds that was at my feet when it shed the hook.

They still shed the hook now and then today but there has been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since those days. I'll never forget that first springer or indeed those early roach and perch. Fishing is something that gets in to your blood.

The worst form of unlucky

2008-03-21T16:58:00.002Z

In my last FT fishing column I mentioned a term used in Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea. The word was salao, meaning "the worst form of unlucky."

Poor Judy Zagorski never had the time to digest the meaning of this word when she was felled and killed by a 75lb spotted eagle ray that leaped in to the boat where she had been enjoying a cruise, knocking her to the deck. But that was salao.

I noticed in the newspaper report that it quoted a local wildlife expert, saying that rays do not attack people. I'm not saying for one moment that this was anything other than a freak accident. But it is not true to say that rays cannot be aggressive.

I was "chased" briefly by a ray very similar in size to the one in that boat when wading on mud flats in Los Roques, Venezuela. My fishing guide was just as anxious to escape although it was like wading through treacle. Fortunately the fish was happy to see us off since we had strayed too close to its territory.

You don't read very often in sea fishing reports of the need to keep an eye out for predators when wading in warmer climbs. Usually there is no problem - and I would not describe a stingray as a predator - but you wouldn't want to stand on one. Nor would you want to hang around if you saw a large shark.

It's not a big problem but it shouldn't be ignored. I'm not sure if there is a word for the best form of lucky, but here's a candidate.

A case for Sherlock Holmes?

2008-03-18T08:47:00.005Z

Caught your salmon? Knocked it on the head? Ready for the pan? If so, make sure you cook it well, says the Food Standards Agency who warn that many wild salmon in Scottish rivers have been infected by the fish parasite, Anisakis simplex.

The parasite is bad news for people too as in extreme cases it causes death. Moreover it's difficult to detect it and it is difficult to remove the larvae. So if you do get it you had better hope that you are seeing a doctor like House (whose character, I only discovered the other day, is based on Sherlock Holmes).

In fact you should heed the same warning if you catch a salmon in England too, according to the Wessex Salmon and Rivers Trust that has received reports of the infection in the Hampshire Avon and the west country.

The agency says that salmon should be heated through at 70 deg C for at least two minutes to kill the parasite. If you're thinking of cold smoking the fish, marinating it for gradvadlax or making sashimi (raw, sliced fish, Japanese-style)you will need to freeze it first for at least 24 hours.

Better still, perhaps, put it back and shop at Tescos.

Snowbee sale

2008-03-07T11:54:00.003Z

I have just bought a few things from the Snowbee sale, including a new pair of breathable waders. For £55 they are a bargain. OK, they're extra large when really I need a large size (not available in the sale). But as an extra pair, which is always good to have in case you spring a leak, they are just fine.

It's worth watching out for the Snowbee sale every year so get yourself on the catalogue list. I shouldn't be saying this because I don't want extra buying competition, but I have made my purchases for this year. Hold on to this year's catalogue for next year because it's the end of line stuff that they sell. If you don't have a catalogue give them a call. The sales staff are very helpful and always pleasant.

Look out for end-of-line opportunities, whatever the manufacturer. You can get something just as good as the new model. This is particularly true of rods. Don't be fooled by the sales guff. Very often you will be buying the same old blanks with new whippings and a bit of new styling. The makers are looking for the "tackle tart" in all of us.

Don't be fooled either by all the nonsense about craftsmen working in little workshops. Sure, it still exists among a few specialists, but the vast majority of rod blanks these day are sourced in Korea. I was told about the blanks for one carbon fibre rod - list price £250 - where the blank prices were £5 from the manufacturer. That's how cheaply they can turn out high quality carbon fibre blanks in Korea. All the rest is finishing, branding and marketing.

Here today, gone by Mayfly time

2008-03-04T20:25:00.008Z

After three happy years writing the FT fishing column my tenure is coming to an end in April, just before the Mayfly hatch. It's time to move on. At least that's what they have told me. Now I know how a Mayfly shuck feels.

It's been a breeze - every bit of it. I have met some great people and made a lot of friends. I wouldn't know where to start the thank yous but people such as Orri Vigfusson, Peter McLeod and Simon Cooper have helped me so much in that time. They have taught me a lot and given me some great fishing experiences. I wish them all well.

This isn't the end of my fishing writing. I'm just getting going. I will be writing here regularly but I will be back somewhere else in the paper medium very soon. Watch this blog for developments.

Another big Scottish salmon

2008-02-11T17:05:00.004Z

Did you see the report that a 40+ pounds salmon had been caught on the River Dee last week at Banchory? It was caught on the Lower Blackhall beat a few miles east of Potarch Bridge pictured here.

The measured length, according to its captor, Nick Craigs, was 53 inches, pointing to an extremely large fish. He has made a relatively conservative estimate on weight of 42 pounds (still the fish of a lifetime, for sure, but nowhere near as big as the claimed length would suggest).

If you look at the Sturdy Scale for calculating the weight of salmon, a 42 pound fish equates to a length of 46 ins. Against the measure of 53 ins is the hallowed weight of 64 pounds. I say hallowed, of course, because this was the weight of the British record salmon caught by Georgina Ballantine in 1922.

Poor Mr Craigs. Unlike the giant salmon caught by Donald Milne on the Ness last October, there were no other witnesses to this catch. No photographs either. And here we are with yet another measure that would appear to challenge the British record.

It should be noted that a 64 pound fish would indeed have been a record of sorts because the Dee is fly only and Miss Ballantine's fish was hooked using the harling method. A fly caught fish of this size really is in exclusive company. Only six (three in Scotland, one in England and two in Norway)of 64 lb and above are listed in Fred Buller's authoritative book, The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon. Why didn't any of these secure the British record, you may ask? It's all to do with authentication.

Poor Mr Craigs. For the rest of his life he must live with questions about that fish, not least those he will ask of himself. How carefully did he make his measure? Could there have been a teensy weency slip up, some nagging doubt? If not, why be so conservative? As he says in his account it was dusk when he landed the fish.

If I were him I would say to hell with the naysayers. I have caught a few big fish (by big here I'm talking closer to the 20 lb mark) and lost one or two larger ones when fishing alone. I know what they were. Today they are nothing but memories. But what memories. This one will be his great memory - something for the grandchildren. The fish itself was returned (in line with Dee fishing policy) to breed yet more big fish.

There are going to be many more stories such as this in the coming year or so. the bigger fish are coming back, I have no doubt. We are unlikely to see the Ballantine record broken for the simple reason that more and more anglers, like Mr Craigs, are returning their catch and that has to be a good thing. Let's leave the record talk and the disputes to the bar room and congratulate those who fulfill the dream of every salmon angler.

Fly fishing forums

2008-02-01T12:45:00.003Z

If you pick up Trout and Salmon Magazine this month (February) and turn to page 10 you can read my thoughts on angling internet forums.

I contacted the Trout and Salmon editor a while back proposing a piece on Taimen fishing in Mongolia, thinking readers might be as intrigued as I was about the mysterious Taimen, one of the oldest and largest of all the salmonids.

I had written a piece on Taimen in Mongolia for the FT's How to Spend It Magazine (the forthcoming May issue) so it was all still fresh in my mind.

Trout and Salmon replied that they would be interested in a feature on internet forums. They had seen something I had written on forums in one of my columns. I offer Taimen, they ask for forums - this happens all the time in publishing.

It didn't matter. I really am intrigued by web forums and the way they work and wanted to write something that outlined the good, the bad and the ugly of web-based conversations.

I thought the article would be a useful way of telling people who might never buy the Financial Times that (a) a fishing column exists there, (b) that I write it, and (c) that the stuff that I write can also be read here at RichardDonkin.com.

Another thing is that I read Trout and Salmon magazine (even if I experience a feeling of deja vu over many of the articles) so it was nice to be part of it for a month.

To all my fellow members of the fly fishing forums, if any of you are reading this and have read the magazine, I hope you think I did the subject justice.

Fish art

2008-01-31T17:34:00.001Z

It was great to see trout in Madeira's levadas last week. These are narrow channels used to transport spring water for irrigation all over the island. The channels are not more than two feet wide and the water rarely more than a foot deep so the fish don't grow very big, but there are plenty of them.

In one of the plunge pools at the foot of a water fall we saw trout to about a pound. They were breeding too.

The week away was bad timing for grayling fishing since last week was settled weather in Surrey where I live, whereas this week the rains are back, muddying up the river.

So I've taken out my fly boxes for something to do and tonight we'll probably have a tying session. Yippee, says Gill. Just now I'm sorting out some salmon flies for trips to Scotland in the spring.

Black Frances

Last year (when the water was unseasonably low) I did well with a tungsten-headed Black Frances (you can read how this classic Icelandic fly got its name here). The yellow paint on the tungsten head very quickly rubs off but the fly sinks quickly, allowing it to present well in the stream straight after the cast.

I will probably do most of my fishing with the Frances again this spring, alternating with something brighter such as a cascade tube or a temple dog, trying various weights and sizes depending on the conditions.

I plan to stick with an intermediate line on the Dee and Tay with maybe a fast sinking tip in the deepest Tay pools.

Fishing lust

The other thing that has aroused my fishing lust today is a copy of Beneath the Surface, The Wildlife Art of David Miller that arrived in the post today. David's paintings are superb. Check him out at his website here. I reviewed his book here.

I have just been in touch with another of my favourite marine artists, Malcolm Cheape who lives in Perthshire. His pictures are very much a narrative, containing all kinds of imagery, drawings and sometimes notes relating to the subject. It's clear from our conversation, not to mention his art, that he has a strong interest in history.

Malcolm told me about the Gask Ridge, a string of Roman forts in Scotland, one of which I notice was Inchtuthil. I mentioned this site near Spittalfields in a column about freshwater mussels. I wonder if these forts had a role in helping the Romans exploit and protect pearl fishing interests?

Nothing like an old jumper.

2008-01-20T18:12:00.001Z

I have just been updating my web site - adding my latest FT column - after packing a few things for a short holiday in Madeira. I thought long and hard about taking some fishing gear and decided against it. Well Gill did. She was holding me in an armlock at the time.

I looked on the web and found that there is some deep sea fishing there. My only previous big game fishing outing on a boat - in Antigua last year (catch pictured) - was not a great success. I was seasick most of the time. It's not the season for marlin or any of the big stuff in January so I think we shall spend more time bird watching and walking.

Besides, it's costly and it's not really my kind of thing, relying as it does on the expertise of the skipper. I thought I would seek out one of the local skippers for a chat all the same. Working on the web site has brought back tearful memories of my favourite jumper pictured here and with the blog.

Shapeless, well worn and full of holes it may have been, but you will understand what I mean when I say it was "just right." Then Gill stuck it in the spin drier. Now it's a skinny fit - ruined. I have a favourite shirt too - a faded tartan check with a threadbare collar. It's taken years to reach this stage. We visited a ghost town called Bodie in California once where the buildings were maintained in "arrested decay." I wish I could do that with my favourite clothes.

I like clothes and kit that is bedded in. My Snowbee waders (bought before they introduced a posh range) are held together by Aquasure but they still do the business. Nevertheless I really do need a new pair. I'm thinking of a pair of Simms G3s (should have bought a pair in the US last summer) but they're a lot of money. There is a Snowbee clearance sale in February so I will be looking out for the notice that comes with the catalogue. It's been a good source of bargains in the past.

Anadromous or Catadromous?

2008-01-15T14:39:00.000Z

Here's a quiz question: what's the difference between an anadromous fish and a catadromous fish? If you know, move along to the next blog and try not to be smug with the rest of us because I didn't know the difference until a few moments ago when I was scrolling down this glossary of fish-related terms.

I was thinking about adding the glossary to the right hand links but I think it's just a bit too scientific in some respects and a bit obvious in others. I don't need to have sand defined for me.

Anyway for the record, salmon and sea trout are anadromous because they reproduce in fresh water and migrate to the sea in order to feed and grow. The common eel, on the other hand, is catadromous because it migrates from rivers to spawning grounds in the sea. So now I know.

This is possibly a more useful glossary for anyone just starting out in fly fishing.

A fly fishing history

2008-01-14T15:18:00.004Z

One of the aspects of fly fishing I like best is its rich history. Some time ago, searching through the internet, I came across Dr Andrew Herd's, A Fly Fishing History. If you seek to know about the beginnings of fly fishing and the various watersheds, such as the move to dry fly fishing on the Hampshire chalk streams led by Frederic Halford and George Selwyn Marryat in the 19th century, this is the place to go. I use it quite regularly so I have put a link to the site map in the right hand side of the blog.

Carping about the Poles

2008-01-03T14:39:00.000Z

I've just had a call from Mark Anderson, or "Zimbo" as he sometimes calls himself. He was walking the banks of the River Wandle not far from Croydon the other day and found brown trout spawning on a stretch above the site of the pollution incident in the autumn.

"What a phenomenal sight. There were five cocks and three hens," he says.

This is good news after the river has suffered such a tough time. The Wandle is just one of those rivers wrecked by pollution and neglect in the industrial revolution, that are coming back to health. The Tyne today can justly claim to be England's finest salmon river, while in West Yorkshire, rivers such as the Calder and the Holme are reporting growing stocks of trout and grayling in their upper reaches.

One of my fishing friends, Drew Short, had 15 grayling in a morning on the Holme just outside the centre of Huddersfield the other day.I'm itching to get at the grayling but work is keeping me tied to the office just now. I mentioned it to someone in the Orvis shop in Stockbridge just before Christmas. "So you're a fair weather fisherman then," he said and promptly lost his sale.

I love cold weather. If the snow keeps coming down as it is at the moment, I'll be reaching for the sledge instead of the fishing rod and heading for Box Hill at Dorking. But I have digressed.

Mark is seeking to promote a more enlightened code of fishing among Eastern Europeans who have been attracting censure in the British press for eating some of their catch. The removal of two fish a day is within the law if you have a coarse fishing licence. It's just that coarse anglers generally don't kill the fish they catch.

Carp anglers, in fact, get quite emotional about their biggest fish and give them names. So it can be rather aggrieving to find that "Scaly Sally", your favourite lake carp, has provided a feast for Polish plumbers.

Mark will have his work cut out but he's the right man for the job. He brings a common sense approach to river management. I have written before about his argument that the role of the Pike, as a leading predator, is important in maintaining healthy fish populations. You won't convince river keepers on the Test but they, after all, have created a cossetted environment for a single species. More farm than wild river? It's debatable given the amount of stocking that takes place.

If you ever want to learn the secrets of hunting Pike on the fly, Mark is your man. You can find him here at xstreamflyfishing.com, or use the link in the right-hand column.

Just one fly - what would you choose?

2007-12-21T17:51:00.000Z

I have just been invited to fish in a British version of the One Fly Event that is held every year in the US. The UK event is being organised by Simon Cooper who runs Fishing Breaks, a Hampshire-based agency that organises chalk stream beat bookings.

Simon has fished in the US event, held every year over two days at Jackson Hole in Wyoming when 160 anglers compete in 40 teams. The novel rule for this competition is that each angler is allowed only one fly for the duration of the event although they may choose the fly with which they will fish.

"I went one year and a woman who was fishing from a boat lost her fly on the very first cast. You can imagine the sinking feeling you have when that happens," says Simon.

Yes, I can imagine that, which is why I fear that I will be spending most of the British competition watching everyone else from the banks of the Test where it will be held towards the end of April.

I can lose flies as I'm tying them to the line. My eyesight is not good and tiny trout flies can be really fiddly. I can be standing on a river bank with green fields everywhere, not a tree in sight, I make my back cast and, bugger, it's stuck in a tree. Trees creep up on you, I'm convinced.

It's going to be too early for the Mayfly but I imagine I will need something robust.There's tippet strength to think about too.

It's an interesting concept because it will force competitors to exercise extreme care when casting - something they should be doing anyway. My problem is that it usually takes me a while to relax. Added to that will be the anxiety created by a fear of losing my fly, so really I have no chance.

Simon has competed in the US for the past three years and has lost his fly once, not a bad record.

So now I have four months to think about my choice of fly. What's it going to be? If you were fishing a chalk stream in late April with the option of just one fly that could not be replaced, what would you choose. Imagine you're fishing for your life. Scary isn't it.

Here's a link to my FT column relating to this blog.

Restoring Nelson's River

2007-12-11T19:31:00.000Z

Thames Water has agreed to spend £500,000 on restoring and improving the River Wandle over the next 5 years, after the company admitted responsibility for killing thousands of fish when bleach leaked in to the river in September.

The Anglers’ Conservation Association that led the negotiations with Thames Water, says it is the biggest settlement in the ASA’s history.

The Wandle, that today flows through an urban landscape in south London, is a historic chalk stream where Admiral Lord Nelson once fished and where Frederic Halford perfected the art of fishing with a dry fly.

The funding has been apportioned in the following way:
• £7,000 project funding for a local education project;
• £10,000 in compensation for the two angling clubs;
• £30,000 to meet the costs of restocking and an ongoing survey to assess damage to the river’s ecology;
• £200,000 core funding for the Wandle Trust to include support for the cost of an employee who will raise additional project funding to deliver access and habitat improvements along the length of the river;
• £250,000 over 5 years for a restoration fund to support local projects to improve the river environment;
• Investment in failsafe measures at Beddington Sewage Treatment works to prevent pollution like this happening again in the future;

The ASA says the announcement will have no bearing on any future criminal prosecution of Thames Water by the Environment Agency for the incident.

Theo Pike (yes this really is his name), Trustee of the Wandle Trust and Senior Vice President of the Wandle Piscators said: “September 17 was a catastrophe for the Wandle, but we are now delighted to be entering into this 5-year habitat rehabilitation project with Thames Water and the Environment Agency. “

Nothing can bring back the lost fish but the agreement should mean that the river’s restoration has suffered a setback rather than a disastrous reversal. Moreover it underpins an important corporate commitment to river health and a new sense of partnership that looks promising for the future.

Corporate responsibility and river pollution.

Fishing notes

2007-12-11T18:59:00.000Z

Welcome to my new fishing blog, Tight Lines. Up to now I have written fishing notes within my original blog, Donkin Life. These include references to fishing trips in Mongolia, Norway, Scotland and Newfoundland, often as they happen.

From now on I am separating my fishing notes so that those who are only interested in angling news and references need look no further than these pages. I shall continue to post on my web site the fishing column that appears monthly in the Financial Times.

But in the coming weeks look out for an update to the fishing section with the addition of new links and features. The second blog on this page is news from the River Wandle, transferred from Donkin Life.

I'm hoping that future notes will also be a little more informative with more links. If the notes on Mongolia appear a little thin it is because the meat must wait until my article from the trip has appeared in the FT's How to Spend It Magazine in May.