I “graduated” to rainbow trout in my mid-twenties, or the planet’s mid-eighties, depending on the degree of importance you attach to either reference point. I had read about rainbows, of course, but at that time, in Scotland at any rate, a “fish” was a salmon and a “troot” was a brown trout.

I had taken to fishing in a small reservoir near the village of Strathaven; Kype was its name and it was polluted with tiny brown trout. It was a very small body of water and to reach it you had to drive over a farm track for a couple of miles through fields full of sheep. Once when going up there I saw the farmer coming across the field with his two obligatory dogs bouncing round him. In one hand he was holding a fox by its brush. I couldn’t tell whether it was dead or alive, but every so often he would put it to one or other or both dogs and they would savage it ferociously. Training, it seemed. Cruel? Perhaps, but it was lambing season and the dogs were clearly getting the message: Fox – Bad. Townies are often too quick to judge country folk and the guy was entitled to earn his living.

I first went to Kype because I’d heard that the local fishing club, in an effort to catch something that was big enough to fit a size 16 fly into its mouth, had stocked the reservoir with rainbows and I thought I’d go and see what all the fuss was about.

I was walking along the dam wall (by that time I’d read enough fishing magazines to know that rainbows seem to be drawn towards dam walls) when I saw a couple of fins and backs breaking through the waves. The brown trout I fished for up till then didn’t tend to do that so I reasoned that these had to be rainbows. I flicked out the fly - a grey winged miscellaneous dry thingy - about a yard in front of the nearest cruising fish. It looked as if it would swim past until I gave the fly a little twitch and then it turned and simply ate it up as it went on its way. I set the hook and shortly brought a lovely little stock rainbow to the net.

This was easy. I could handle more of this.

That little stockie, however, was the last rainbow I caught for some time. Kype wasn’t a great success as a fishery for me and the small brownie population just became a pest. Also, my “career”, if you could call it that, in the music business kinda got in the way of my fishing at that time. You couldn’t be the lead guitarist in a bad-ass heavy metal band and admit to going trout fishing. That wasn’t at all cool.

Years later, after the music itch had been scratched to death, and whilst out on a Sunday drive, I found a trout farm. This was a real oddity in Scotland at the time and why anyone would want to stand, shoulder to shoulder with other “anglers” casting into a hole in the ground filled with muddy water into which a barrel load of fish had just been tipped, mystified me completely. I had to have a go.

I also had to have some tackle as my old trout gear was long gone - lost in the mists of time but probably flogged to buy guitar strings or somesuch.

So I went back the next week, paid my ticket for my regulation two fish and bought a cheap fly fishing set up: carbon fibre rod like a poker, cheap reel, double taper line which lay on the water in coils of memory and some leader material. The whole kit and kaboodle. The owner was a pleasant enough fellow, and he must have been over the moon to see me that day, so much did I spend. The setting was pretty too, being as how it was on the banks of my childhood favourite River Mouse. In reality though, I suspect that the fish farm was the source of the pollution which killed the river as a wild brown trout fishery. The rainbows were reared in big tanks, fed and cleaned by river water, and then scooped out and dumped into one of three ponds. There was a bait pond, a lure pond and a “purist” pond where only “traditional” flies could be used.

I tackled up and started to cast in the lure pond. Incongruously, the anglers all stood on small platforms that stuck into the water like mini boat-jetties. The guy on the far platform was calling to the guy on the platform next to me; “They’ve gone off noo, eh?” he bellowed. “Aye” replied my neighbour, “They wur hittin' the old Black Zonkers great style hauf an oor ago tae”.

I looked in vain for a hatch of Black Zonkers, nothing being immediately obvious on the surface of the water. What the hell was a Black Zonker anyway? I still had my old fly box (an old tobacco tin with a foam lining) – the sole survivor of my teenage tackle - and still had most of my old hand-tied trout flies, so I rummaged through looking for inspiration until I opted for a standard 3 wet fly team, just like I used to use on the Clyde.

I had a couple of flicks in the pond with my little wet fly patterns and soon got bored with the lack of activity and corresponding scarcity of emerging Zonkers. Eventually, I wandered over the bridge to the purist pond. One of the other purists had just caught a small rainbow and was happily hauling it vertically out of the water on a short line. He then swung it around and dumped it on the ground where, without ceremony, he yanked the hook out and simply kicked the hapless fish back into the pond.

I was getting a strange feeling about this place; it had nothing whatsoever to do with fishing in any sense of the word that I knew. As Mr Spock would doubtless have said, “It’s fly fishing, Jim, but not as we know it.”

That aside, anyone who knows me knows that I would have a cast in a puddle. So I had a cast.
And after a few casts, one of the rainbows came up and ate the tail fly. It put up a reasonable account of itself and, best of all, it was well over two pounds so this was a serious trout compared to the fishing I’d had up until then. Maybe this wasn’t so bad after all.

But no, by the end of the day I knew that it was that bad after all. I didn’t go back often after that.

Happily though, I’ve had some great rainbow trout fishing since then in a variety of places.
The first was in John ’o Gaunt’s lake by the side of the River Test in Hampshire. I finally got to see a real mayfly hatch there too, after all those years of waiting, and I caught some of the prettiest and best conditioned fish I have ever had the pleasure of catching. The lakes were spring fed, gin clear and the rainbows ran up to, and occasionally over, 5lbs, so were serious quarry. Fit and healthy, with full tails and perfect fins, they were great sport and changed my views on stocked rainbows as a sporting fish.

But best of all was the wildlife around John o’ Gaunt; the waterbirds were there in abundance of course, but the woods nearby would also breathe with nightingale song from about May onwards and in the hut at the top of the main lake, it was often possible to watch small lizards chasing ants on the wall.

I did a fair bit of dry fly fishing there, but the technique I used most was to cast a weighted nymph out and let it sink freely, all the time watching the leader. Sometimes the leader would slide away purposefully and a quick strike would set the hook into a fish. But mostly I’d wait until about 6 inches of leader remained on the surface and then give a long pull on the line to make the nymph dart off at speed. This very often produced the take and the fish was invariably solidly hooked. On clear days I could actually watch the fish approach the sinking nymph, study it carefully and then rocket after it when it was pulled away from them. Excitement plus.

John o’ Gaunt was a 2 fish limit, all-kill fishery, and I was supposed to stop fishing after reaching my limit. However, I was a long way from home and since I released all of my fish anyway, I normally just carried on fishing. The old guys who looked after the lakes usually didn’t bother either, although they clearly knew what was going on. One of them was a Scot and a very interesting one at that. He used to work on the whaling ships and told me some tales of his adventures on the southern oceans chasing grey and right whales (so-called because they were the “right” whales to catch – honest). It was grim, gory work, and even he confessed to feeling sorry for the creatures. But it was work, and people had to take their wages where they could find them back then. By the time he settled in the South of England near J O’ G he had retired, and he looked after the fishing a couple of days a week so that he could fish for free himself. It seemed an equitable enough arrangement for all concerned.

By the time I started fishing J O’G, I was well established as a businessman and one of my customers had put a load of rainbows into a man-made pond on his land. I would go up and fish a couple of times a year at his invitation. Well, it was actually at the invitation of his elegant wife, Elma, who was a charming and enchanting lady. Her husband and pond-builder, Jimmy, was as rough as rats and an odder couple it would have been hard to meet. I have heard that they are no longer together, which is sad.  Anyway, it seemed that Jimmy had taken a brainstorm one day and had dammed a small stream on his land to form a large enclosed pond. It wasn’t very aesthetic, since he’d used old concrete piping for the dam walls and back-filled it with coal tip rubble, but the water was clear and was alive with aquatic life.

From that pond, I took a monster 7lb rainbow using an 8ft split-cane rod and 3lb tippet to a size 16 Greenwell’s dry fly. It was fully finned, fighting fit and jumped like a dolphin all over the one acre pond before I brought it, both of our hearts pounding, to the net. Pure adrenalin, with a mutually satisfactory release at the end.

But the best place for rainbows has to be at my mate Gerard’s. He had this large, spring-fed, ornamental pond of about half an acre constructed in front of his house and initially he put in six inch brownies “to grow on”. I knew it wouldn’t last, of course, and after only a year he went the whole nine yards and stuck in a couple of hundred rainbows up to 4 pounds in weight.

Man, have we had fun with these fish. It’s catch and release and we take them on dry flies, emergers, nymphs, buzzers, corixae and even lures on the odd slow days. Both of my kids have caught fish there; Scott with his little spin casting outfit managed to get one of nearly eight pounds (they have grown well in the intervening years) and Jamie hooked his first fish on the fly there. He held it a bit too hard and the fish straightened the hook and got off, but was he pleased with himself.

This place, more than anywhere else, has convinced me of the merits of catch and release. It gets a lot of fishing pressure from Gerard and the lucky few who, like me, count him as a friend and we must have caught every single fish in there at least once. Yet we have rarely found a dead one and we keep catching them and they keep getting bigger.

These rainbows are not as shy as truly wild fish and Gerard’s pond will never be what you could call challenging fishing. But on a still summer’s evening there’s a certain grace and tranquillity to it. To make it even more difficult, and hence better, I've taken to fishing mostly with midge patterns tied on size 20 hooks and smaller, and the fish can be extremely choosy on the pattern and presentation.

I throw a long line to a slowly cruising fish, straining my eyes to see the tiny dry fly in the failing light, watching for that imperceptible bulge as the fish sucks it down. Then I take a deep breath and tighten into a multi-coloured torpedo. Magic…