If you already fish for salmon, you’ll get this bit totally. If you don’t fish at all, you’ll definitely have all of your theories that all fishers are obsessive loonies confirmed. If you fish for trout at the moment but fancy a go at salmon, take this section as a potential warning as to what can happen to the unwary. Salmon fishing is highly addictive and, although addicts claim it brings on a sense of calm and even gives them pleasure, there is sound anecdotal evidence that it produces a form of incremental insanity. There is no cure, victims become progressively more ensnared the longer they sit beside the river. It should be regarded as though it is as dangerous as a Class 1 narcotic. You have been warned, save yourself whilst you still can.
Salmon reawakened the obsessive loony in me, at least where fishing is concerned; I’m a career obsessive loony as far as everything else is concerned. I’d sort of drifted away from fishing for a while in my mid-teens whilst I concentrated on chasing women, but I was fully focussed again the first time I saw a salmon lunging out of the water in front of me and crashing back in a welter of foam. It was on a river in the Highlands of Scotland called the River Alness and I was staying with my uncle who worked in the local aluminium smelter. He later moved from there to Venezuela of all places, and decades thereafter I would go there too, chasing the marlin, but that’s a story to be told later. At that time, I was just a guy in his late teens that had been splashed by a silver fish in a peat-black river.
The other thing that sticks in my mind about that time was that I was a guy in his late teens who was recovering from tuberculosis; not a pleasant condition at any age and thankfully a rare disease generally these days. I was just unlucky, or unwary, I guess. After what I termed “my release” from hospital, I was sent to Uncle John’s for “the fresh air” of the Highlands. Fresh air, it seemed, cured everything. And indeed it did cure my post hospital melancholy, but it gave me an addiction to salmon and salmon fishing which can’t be cured. Ever. Bummer.
The addiction didn’t start right away, though, but it festered and bothered in my mind for years. A bit like an itch that I couldn’t quite scratch properly, and that moved around annoyingly from place to place. Eventually, it broke out in a complete, all-over body rash, but that was only to happen after I had drifted back out of fishing again, this time for the sake of rock and roll, and had come back in via Rainbow trout.
So, to go back to being eighteen for a second; I was there in the breathtaking countryside of Easter Ross, standing on this rocky outcrop, with a trout fly rod in my hand, a salmon fly tied to the leader, and this fish leaped out at my feet, literally. I almost toppled from my perch on the rocks I got such a fright. Uncle John was a resourceful guy, probably still is, and had blagged me a dodgy permit to fish on the river for the day. The local bailiff was in collusion and when he wandered round later that day to see me, he told me I was wasting my time with my fly fishing gear and showed me his rig. It was a centre pin reel with nylon line, which he played by hand into the stream allowing a large, weighted, lob-worm to bounce along the river bottom.
I followed him around, casting in the fly-fishier bits of the pools whilst he stuck to the runs and rapids at the necks or tails. I watched his technique but nothing much happened for a while and I confess that I was getting pretty bored. Then he climbed up a fairly steep track above a likely looking backwater and lobbed his worms into the neck of the current from the top, which gave it the impetus to meander the bait freely all around the backwater. There was a ledge underneath his perch, close to the water, where I decided to position myself and continue my purist pursuit of fly-fishing for the king of fish.
Chancing to look up, between my fruitless casts, I noticed the tip of his rod bouncing over. “Here we go” I heard him say as he transferred his cigarette from his hand to his mouth, and, after a few more taps on the rod, he struck hard. The water in front of me exploded as the hooked salmon took to the air.
I was impressed. It was a nice 7lb fish and pretty bright too, although at that time I wasn’t smart enough to know the difference between fresh and stale fish. The bailiff, I forget his name, was a nice enough guy and once he had landed and despatched the fish we stood together in admiration of his catch. He lifted the gill covers and showed me the infestation of gill-maggots the fish was suffering from. I could sympathise; after all I’d just gotten rid of my own set of parasites from my lungs. We chit-chatted some more and then he said “You’ve nae chance wi’ that stuff son” before giving me a loan of his rod and reel and showing me how to use it. He left me with strict instructions that if anyone asked me who I was, I was to tell them I was in the “Marshall party” – clearly someone that he knew who had booked but hadn’t shown up.
Needless to say I didn’t catch anything for the rest of the day, but the memory of that silver fish nagged at me for years, even through my rock and roll years.
I went out with a girl from Aberdeen, off and on (mostly off since Aberdeen was a good 3 hours drive from my place), for a couple of years and when I visited her, I’d fish for salmon in the river Don with some borrowed spinning gear. Finally, after a number of visits, I hooked and landed a 5lb grilse on a large Toby lure. Karen and her daughter made a huge banner saying “Chic Caught A Salmon” and put it up in the house for me. The fish wasn’t a bar of silver, more of a purplish hue, but it was a fish nonetheless. My first salmon – what a moment. But it still wasn’t right, was it? I mean, I’d got it on a spinner – to a dyed in the wool fly-fisher like me that was nearly poaching wasn’t it? Remember my comments and theories on fly-fishing snobbery…
After that, I went back to college as a mature student, ostensibly to help me gain worthwhile employment but in reality to buy some more time for me to try to make it as a rock musician. During these years, I tried to fish for salmon again in the River Endrick, which flows into Loch Lomond. But once again, the legacy of my trouting years defeated me. I fished too fast, struck too soon, moved between pools too regularly, read the water all wrong and despite trying hard for a few seasons on that river, I advanced my score and knowledge by not too much at all.
Eventually, in my late twenties, I finally accepted defeat in my quest to be a career rock musician, just ahead of starving to death and before I got too old to be called a pervert by the groupies. So I started my own IT business and I thought that the time had come to get a grip of this salmon fly-fishing lark once and for all. It was almost a right of passage; some businessmen shoot, some play golf and the rest fish. That’s just how the script goes. Of course I bought all the gear, read all of the books and tied all of the flies, but I just could not figure out how on earth you were supposed to get a salmon to grab a hold of anything.
This situation persisted literally for years. The obsession was growing exponentially too, and manys a December night would see me tying flies furiously or looking up fishing magazines and brochures for where to fish. I couldn’t wait for the start of the new season and each winter I’d even cruise along the banks of my favourite rivers like a kerb-crawler, willing there to be fish in them. I drove everyone nuts.
But when the time came to do it for real, I'd maybe get a take or maybe even be lucky enough to land one fish in the whole season. Consistency eluded me. I had read the basic truth about salmon fishing many times (go to the right places, go at the right time, do the right things) but still I didn't really get it.
In actual fact, I was going to low budget, day ticket waters where the fish were occasionally plentiful but were mostly old and stale. Or, I would go to “good” beats in high summer when the water was low, but the prices were more affordable. I would thrash the water for hours on end with my hopelessly inadequate, book learned, version of a Spey cast. Practice was not making perfect – this was a much more complex cast to master than my old book-learnt-soup-plate-practised overhead trout cast. Even videos (oh yes…I even got that desperate) didn’t help.
Then a chance conversation with a customer changed everything. He was a serious salmon fisher and he recommended a beat on the River Spey to me. Sadly, I'm not at liberty to divulge where this beat is, or the name of it, because the owners, for their own reasons, do not permit anything to be written about it. Let’s just say that it is paradise, or as close to it as it is possible to achieve that whilst still breathing, and leave it at that.
This beat of the river has pretty consistent runs of salmon from the late spring and into the summer months - a rarity anywhere these days. You know that in all probability you are at least covering fresh fish when you go at these times, although there are enough variations in numbers between years to keep you wondering. So that took care of the “go to the right places” bit of the aphorism.
I also managed to book a prime week, not realising at the time that the reason I got on the beat so easily was that there was a recession in that year and lots of the “regular” rods had cancelled. I learned thereafter, though, that once you’re in, you’re in. So, by good chance and by someone else’s misfortune, I had completed the second bit of the picture. I was now going “at the right time”.
The place has proper ghillies too. Ghillies who will tell you, in a friendly and inoffensive way, how to improve your chances, if you’re smart and unassuming enough to ask them that is. Particularly one Alf Gaskell, to whom I owe my casting ability. He literally changed my life.
Alf taught me how to Spey cast properly, first by getting me to move my arms correctly and then to slow down and feel the loading on the rod. Slowly, but surely, I learned. Casting properly is the critical part of salmon fishing; something I had read but never appreciated fully. Once the basics of casting were mastered, I improved things further by buying better gear; another thing that I had read but never appreciated properly. Well, truth be told, I thought that it was just a scam to get me to part with more money. However, with the new gear, my casting got even better, and that took care of the “do the right thing” part.
So I spent my prime week casting into these achingly perfect pools and every so often, a salmon would come up and grab one of my flies. A truly magical moment. This event became increasingly more regular until I was getting into double figure catches for my weeks’ fishing.
I felt that I had finally arrived. I was a bona fide salmon fisher.
Not that I am claiming expert status - far from it, but blank days are rarer now and I get my share of the harvest, which is all you can ask for in life and in fishing.
There are three main seasons in salmon fishing: Spring, Summer and Autumn and my take on each is covered in more detail later this book. But in general, the fishing starts in January, when it is, in fact, the middle of winter and lasts through to the end of November when it is, in fact, the middle of winter.
I don't venture out until around the 14th of February, near to opening day on the River Spey and sometimes it can be surprisingly mild. One year, the air temperature was as high as 14 degrees Celsius, but in the year 2000 it never got above freezing with snow on the banks and my fly line regularly frozen in the rod rings. That early in the season, I normally don't catch anything much apart from kelts (salmon which have spawned) and the odd finnock (small immature Sea trout). But it has to be done for the ritual alone.
I go out again in March, usually as a guest of the ghillie on the beat where I normally fish and, again, I don't normally get a fish. In 1999 however, on my very first cast, and after taking a good thirty minutes of careful wading which positioned me so that I could cover the best known lie and make that cast, I had a hold of one. So surprised was I that I held it far too tight and pulled the hook. Could have been a kelt, I suppose, but...
In April, I used to go for a half week to either the Spey or the Avon (pronounced A’an). That was in the days before the kids had started school and holidays could be booked on the spur of the moment. I have caught fish in April too; a few crackers from the A’an but just the one from the Spey. That Spey fish was made all the more special because my dad was with me on that day. He'd never seen a salmon before and this one was a 6lb bar of solid silver. My mum told me later that he told all of his mates in the pub afterwards about the “huge” fish that "we" had caught.
But May, ah May; that's when the real runs begin on the Spey and my spring fishing truly starts.
But there are no guarantees in salmon fishing. The key ingredient for successful salmon fishing, unsurprisingly, is salmon - lots of them. And some years the spring fish just don't come. Well, let's clarify that; occasionally there is a bonanza, some years they don't come in big numbers and some years they are so scarce that you think there are virtually none in the river. Either of the latter events is cause for a great deal of misery and blame apportionment. There doesn’t appear to be any real pattern either: 1998 was poor, 1999 was a bonanza, 2000 was the worst ever and 2001 barely made it to average.
When it’s not a bumper year, the secret is simply being in the right place at the right time when a pod of fish comes through. Come to think of it, a lot of salmon fishing is just that; being in the right place at the right time, but at least when there is a lot of fish, the defining factor is that you are more often in the right place at the right time. The key to success at such times, therefore, is simply to do the right thing.
When they virtually don't come at all, you genuinely begin to question why the blazes you do it. It is somehow easier to remain focused and interested when fish are showing regularly in the pool, but you just can't seem to catch any. Then, you see, you can blame yourself if you blank. But when they're not there at all, you begin to get sucked into global conspiracy theories about over-fishing, pollution, bad management, global warming, acts of god, etc. etc. None of which is backed by terribly good science, but all of which collectively explain clearly why you are catching nothing whatsoever, and so is therefore comforting in some way.
On these dismal days, you retire to the fishing hut and have long, lazy lunches, drink too much wine and harken back to the glory seasons when the days were warmer, the fish bigger, the company better, the pools neater, the waistline smaller. You get the whole catastrophe. I'm no whiner, but I can go at it with the best of them in a bad year.
And it all takes a fair piece of change too. A spring week on a prime water like the Spey can set you back the equivalent of a major family holiday or a small second-hand car. What you are buying is not the weight of fish you'll catch, that's a financially unviable calculation to make even in good years, but the right to fish when there are likely to be fish around. You're buying possibilities. If the fish don't come, you start wondering whether that money would be better spent in Alaska or Canada or Russia. Anyplace where there could be fish.
But if they come it can be glorious. Classic pools with long, lazy draws for floating line fishing and silver salmon porpoising all around. There is nothing in the world quite like sitting on the banks of the Spey on a May evening with thrush song ringing through the trees and bouncing off the hills, whilst fresh fish pour into a pool that only you and one other soul share. To be there should be the right of every thinking man, but sadly it is only for the few. The reasons for that are not as simple as some would have us believe; like those hoary old “landed-gentry keeping the natives at bay” conspiracy theories. It’s simple supply and demand - most fisherman demand solitude, clean water, fresh salmon and the peace and quiet to get on with it. That commodity is, in Scotland at any rate, very thinly available.
So it is priced in such a way that if the few, rather than the masses, want to take advantage of it, then the few must pay a rate which gives the land owner the same yield as though there were masses. And let’s not get into those other hoary old “land ownership by the people as a whole versus the wealthy few” conspiracy theories. People own land, from gardens to farms to estates, and they are as entitled to own it and make a living out of it in exactly the same way as anyone who owns a truck or a corner shop is entitled to make a living from their “asset”.
I don’t make the rules. I just thank god that for now at least I am one of the few.
Unquestionably, one of the best things about fishing in general, and salmon fly-fishing in particular, is the sheer quantity and variety of stuff that you can buy. It’s almost more fun than the fishing itself to be honest.
If you just take the rods alone, there is a bewildering variety to be had. I’m a Sage man these days, but I don’t offer this as any endorsement of the rods themselves. I started with Daiwa and these were good enough, in a workmanlike way, but when I bought my first 16ft, 3 piece Sage, it put an extra 5 yards onto my cast for the same effort and that had to be a good thing. It also bent over almost double when fighting a fish, unlike the Daiwa which was more of a poker, and so made me feel that I was fighting Moby Dick each time I had a fish on.
But the 16 footer was kinda restrictive when I fished in the low water of summer or on a smaller river, so I went out and got another Sage; this time a 12ft 6 grilse rod. It’s a lovely wee thing too and throws a very tight loop, but, paradoxically, it can really take it out of you if you try to use it on a bigger pool and attempt to throw a very long line. I have now swapped the original 16footer for a 15ft 1”, 4 piece and it is a cracking weapon; throws an even longer line than the 16 did yet is lighter and much more portable. Annoyingly though, Sage have now brought out a 4 piece 16ft version and I can feel temptation rising. Of course, I still have all of my old Daiwa’s. For backup. You know how it is.
Lots of guys carry two big rods, loaded with different reels and line types, around all day but I prefer to only have the one with me on the river and I am happy to change the line or leader if the conditions dictate. It only takes a few moments and, well, each to their own.
Of course, once you have the rod, you need a reel. Or two, possibly even three. I started with that old workhorse, the System 2, and I’ve still got it, loaded permanently with a sunk line. But later I graduated to Lamson reels for salmon and Abels for Sea trout. They are very well constructed but more importantly they sound fantastic when a fish runs. I once bought a Loop reel and sent it back immediately because it was silent when line was being taken. That’s no way to fish – you need to hear that ratchet burn.
I started to use the new Spey taper lines a few years back – thereby rendering all of my double taper lines redundant, but kept in storage, just in case – and so I now have a selection of these from floating to intermediate to full sinker in sizes and weights suitable for both my main salmon rods. You getting the drift yet?
After that comes the braided or poly-leaders so that I can vary the depth of the fly when fishing with different line weights and finally the dozens of spools of leader material, in a variety of colours and breaking strains.
I also have a massive multi-compartmented fly-box which is absolutely jam full of salmon flies. Hundreds of them probably, in a variety of sizes for each pattern. Then I have other paraphernalia and accessories; like a Ketchum Release tool, various zingers with multi-tools, pliers, insect repellent, hook sharpeners, tape, fishing glue, gloves, wader guards, thermometers…it goes on.
I also own three fishing jackets, one vest, two life preservers, two landing nets, two fishing bags stuffed with the aforementioned accessories, three wading sticks, three fishing hats, two sets of waders, nine assorted trout and salmon rods plus their attendant reels and fly lines, and a Range Rover with which to get it all to the river.
And when I get there? Well, I stick a couple of flies on my jacket lapel, rig up one rod with a floating line, stick a sink-tip poly-leader in my pocket for emergencies, grab the first spool of leader material I can lay hands on, pull on a pair of waders and wander off, leaving everything else locked in the car.
There is such a fundamental difference between a fresh, spring salmon and a stale, late season fish that you could easily be forgiven for believing that they were different subspecies of the same genus. A fresh springer is a thing of beauty - deep bodied, firm and fit with shining flanks of silver graduating to blue-black on its back. The head is neat and tidy, without the ugly (at least to the human eye) kype that males disport in their breeding finery and the spots on the body are confined to a few distinctive marks around the gill covers and the head. The shape is perfectly hydro-dynamic and the fish simply move through the water by a process of osmosis.
These fish face god-only-knows what trials in their drive to return to their native spawning rivers. That any come back at all is a miracle of nature in itself. And in that elegant way nature has of organising things, they come back on a fast of biblical proportions. The spring fish, in particular, can do without food for anything up to a year, slowly consuming their own flesh and turning themselves into a single-purpose reproductive machine.
Logic, as well as evolution dictates this - an annual influx of huge predators into any ecosystem would result in the rapid decline and ultimate collapse of that ecosystem. So the salmon don’t feed whilst in freshwater. If they did they'd mostly eat their own offspring anyway. And, to top it all, since most of their native spawning burns are acidic and poor in nutrient, most of the adults conveniently die off after spawning, returning some of the sea’s bounty far inland, and enriching the bio-chain that feeds their own young. Nature is indeed a mother.
A run of springers is an amazing sight to see. One minute you’re casting down through a seemingly lifeless pool and then, as if by magic, silvery fish begin to porpoise all around. The behaviour I like to see most is when they "fin"; it’s a sort of slow, deliberate breaking of the surface with their dorsals and tails. These fish, I now know from experience, can be caught more often than not. You can feel the palpable sense of an imminent take at these moments and your senses become keen and sharp. You become a predator, attuned to your surroundings and waiting for the moment to strike.
Strike is really the wrong word to use. For the most part, the take of a spring salmon is a deliberate statement of intent. When the water is cold, the salmon are usually deep down in the pools, sluggish and reluctant to move far for a fly. You fish a sinking or intermediate line for them at those times and I tend to hold the line tight at all times when fishing sunk, as the fish seem to hook themselves when they take sub-surface. In the spring proper, however, when you change to a floating line, your fly will only be a few inches below the surface and you can actually see the fish rise to engulf it, often as not.
What you do next, I have learned through bitter experience, (despite the volumes of advice I had been given on what to do, I still had to get it wrong enough times to own the despair), is critical. For my part, I learned late the technique of holding a loop of line and letting it drop to feed the taking fish slack line, and even then my success is mostly with grilse - a fish notorious for "plucking" at the fly. So it goes against the grain to let go when I feel a hefty pull from a springer. Therefore, I often fish from a free running reel and let the fish take line from it as it turns with the fly. It can take a surprising time, too, from the initial rise to the ticking of the reel as the line goes out and finally the feel of the fish’s weight. Once I feel that weight, I slowly lift the rod and the additional tension is nearly always enough to set the hook. Nearly always.
This, when you think of it, is no more than a variation on setting the drag for a marlin strike. A marlin will hit the lure, line will peel from the pre-set reel and the skipper will accelerate the boat (raise the rod) to set the hook.
Game fishing is same-old, same-old.
On most private salmon beats in Scotland, the clientele are mostly English and therefore neo-foreign as far as the locals are concerned. It must be understood that a "local" in Scotland is anyone who speaks with a Scottish regional accent. It wouldn't matter if you had lived all of your life in the country; unless you have the common denominator of a regional accent, you're an incomer or, at the very least, a toff and therefore the nearest thing. My regular beat on the river Spey is in the upper price bracket for weekly rents and so attracts the middle to upper class, semi-titled landowners and businessmen from southern Britain and, indeed, beyond. You can go a whole week in their company and hardly hear a hard vowel spoken.
It’s rare to hear another Scots voice on such a beat too, and more than once I have been mistaken for the ghillie and greeted with “The rods are in the boot, be a good chap and set them up would you?” Maybe I'm just being paranoid; maybe it's my dress sense that makes me look like the ghillie. After all, my gear is all worn and used and my waders have patches and smell of the river rather than new rubber. Until recently, too, I used the brands of fly rods and reels reserved for the blue-collar-class fishers. The fish couldn't tell the difference. This, possibly more than the accent, may be the thing that sets me apart. Whatever it is, I like it.
Once you get to know these people, of course, they’re just like everyone else. Some of them are great company, a few are boors, some come for the fact that they can say they fish there and some come because their host is picking up the tab. A handful of them even come to catch salmon. Corporate entertaining is big business in salmon fishing these days, and I have to confess that I have used a visit to the river many times to clinch that elusive big order. It’s a win:win – the client gets waited on hand and foot and I get to fish in peace and quiet with a nice lump of business at the end of it all. Who says working can’t be fun?
The foreign guests change more often than the English ones. Maybe it is dependent on the currency exchange rates or something, but they seem to rotate with more frequency. Most of them speak English to some degree or other, but it's not uncommon to hear greetings like "Good sleepings you haff?" Of course, none of the staff or UK guests speaks a word of any European language. That wouldn't do at all.
It can be quite interesting to sit at lunch with a couple of English and German guests, all in their late 60's and early 70's and, after a few whiskys, the conflicting versions of their war memories start to trickle out. They're too civilised to ever get into an argument or, worse, come to blows, but you have to wonder if it stirs up any old flames of emotion in them. The war touched all of that generation in ways I can never really imagine.
I like these older gents a lot. They come from a time when "breeding" was valued and they never look down on anyone on the beat, neither other guests nor staff. They have class in the best sense of the word. This is in contrast to some of the younger (relatively speaking) guests for whom having the cash to fish the place is enough justification for them to order the staff around and throw tantrums when they can't catch anything.
Over the years, I've made a number of good friends on this beat, which is a rare and cherished thing for me.
But the guests aren't the only folk that you have to deal with. To paraphrase Norman MacLean, "A ghillie runs through it". No fishing trip to a private beat in Scotland would be complete without a run-in with the ghillie. The meaning of the word, I believe, is from the Gaelic for "manservant" although when in their company you can instantly tell that they've never read this description and nor would they subscribe to it. John Gierach put it excellently when he said "I thought they would stick around to advise you like American guides, but then I was from outta town."
The job of a ghillie is not one I would have in a million years. Sure, you get to spend all of your time on the water, but you rarely get to fish the decent pools at the best times and you have no choice of your companions. You also have centuries of mythology to live up to and the more eccentric you are, the better the guests will like it. Or so the script goes. Mind you, it's a fine line between "eccentric" and just plain nuts, and I've met some of both.
Every ghillie has his (universally, ghillies are male) own style. Some are chatty to the point of distraction, others are sombre to the point of sullenness, but in either case they rarely spend enough time with you over the period of the week to make either an annoyance. On the face of it, they are there to help you catch fish, but then you often have to stretch the definition of the word "help" to make this sentence work. They’ll walk you through the pools and suggest some flies, maybe even contributing one or two from their boxes, but it’s your first cast that will dictate the tone and pace of the relationship from then on. If your casting is sloppy, they may venture a comment and if that is well received they will proffer another and so the relationship will build at its own pace. For my part, I simply said to Alf Gaskell “Cut to the chase Alf, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing wrong and you know it, so teach me will you?” And he did so, admirably.
In general therefore, you have to accept that on your first meeting with a new ghillie, their critical experienced eye will be observing your technique and appraising your skill level, balanced with the amount of effort they will have to expend with you to catch a fish (oh yes, they do like you to get a fish). They will also take from your general demeanour, whether you’ll be amenable to any advice they might offer and, crucially, they will be weighing up whether you will be a good tipper. It’s not that they are mercenary, at least no more so than the rest of us. If you’ve ever seen a ghillie’s pay-slip, you’ll understand. It’s a form of second sight; the ghillie must make a value call the minute he meets you that any effort he expends on your behalf for the coming week will be amply rewarded by you at the week's end.
That’s a basic skill more of us should cultivate before entering into unwary partnerships.
There has been, still is, and always will be, vast amounts of text (and prose) written about salmon flies and how and when they should be fished. I have nothing of real value to add to the debate.
My formula is simple, if I open the fly box and the fly "speaks to me" I stick it on and if it’s in the water, well that’s where the fish are so it’s got as much chance as the next. I've caught salmon on tiny size 16's when I should have been using 6's; I've caught them on sunk tubes when it should have been floating 8's and vice versa. I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the salmon have never read the books.
As evidence of the success of this approach, I offer two pieces of experience.
The first is the fact that I like to tie my own flies. There is nothing quite like catching a fish on something that you have fashioned yourself. It somehow adds to the primal triumph of the occasion, “Me one smart hunter, fool dumb fish with fur and feather”.
My flies are almost exclusively “designed” by my kids. They call out the colours and I stick them on. “Body?” I’ll ask and one or other will say “Scarlet!” and on it will go and so on until the creation is complete. They don’t all work all of the time, but enough of them do to make me confident enough to fish them almost to exclusion. Besides, I hate the Ally’s shrimp.
When I'm tying my flies, I try to tie them with the fishing in mind. The body wants to be sleek and wispy so that it appears to look like the outline of a small fishlike creature. I want them to look lively and imperfect, like nature. I want them to catch fish, not fishermen.
The second bit of experience comes from my 1999 spring week…
I arrived on the Monday morning and tied on a pretty, gold-bodied fly that looked like a Munro Killer/Thunder and Lightning cross. The river was 1ft above the mark and I started with a sink-tip line.
During the week, the river yo-yo’d up and down and the weather went from overcast and rain through scorching sunshine and back again. I changed from sink-tips to full floating lines as the conditions dictated.
But I never changed that fly for the entire week, apart from to change leader material of course, and I caught 13 spring salmon up to 16lbs on it. I gave the fly to the ghillie along with his tip and it’s still up on the wall in the hut.
Of course, the next year was a disaster and that fly (and all the others for that matter) never touched a fish. However, a legend had been born and the other guests on the beat kept asking me, “When are you going to try your secret weapon, you know the Gold Munro?" It was depressing to let them all down and the next time I get a run of luck I've vowed to keep quiet about it.
So this is offered as experience, not wisdom. I am not immune to the suggestion either that the real expert who concentrates a lot of energy on his or her flies, changes them regularly to suit the perceived conditions, can and will catch more fish than me. But then, if I wanted to fish simply to catch lots of fish, I would never have taken up salmon fishing...
If there is a near perfect time to be on the riverbank, it has to be spring, and particularly those spring days when May slides into June (still springtime in the Scottish Highlands). The trees and hills ring with birdsong, the roe deer are pacing around in the woods, flowers are blooming everywhere and lambs are bouncing around the fields.
Walk across a spring lamb field and, if you are looking downwards, you will surely notice two things. Number one is the little stumps of lambs tails laying around where the farmer has docked them with an elastic band and number two is the occasional piece of sheep dung that moves. The moving sheep dung will turn out to be baby oyster catchers and it is remarkable how close you can get to them before you realise what they are. As you approach, they will freeze in a ground-hugging position and you can get even closer before they will panic and move. Usually it's only the screeching of the parent birds that gives them away at all.
Imagine going through your childhood looking like a piece of crap. Most of us have to wait at least until puberty before that happens. As well as being a mother, nature is a comedienne.
One May morning, I was fishing down the right bank of a pool when a large heron flew up and landed slightly downstream but on the opposite bank to me. It purposefully strode towards the grassy verge and froze. The beak darted forward after a few seconds and to my utter amazement the bird drew a live stoat out of the long grass. The stoat was none too pleased with this treatment and I could hear it squeal as it fought the bird. The heron, however, was utterly determined and battered the hapless mustelid to a submissive pulp against a rock and then proceeded to swallow it whole.
The most impressive mammal (another mustelid) that you see on the river is of course the otter. On a still evening you can often get your hopes up after hearing a splash and seeing a dark form roll on the surface, only to have them dashed as the head of a large dog otter pops up a minute or so later in the pool. I recall one evening on the River Tummell in Perthshire when I almost had a heart attack as the head of a large dog otter popped up not 2 feet in front of me. It looked at me with complete disdain and rolled back into the depths. Needless to say, the fishing goes off when the otters appear. They must kill a lot of fish, but unlike the mink (yet another mustelid), most fishers have a soft spot for them these days.
But give it a few years and a steady increase in the population and we'll see; fishermen are fickle lovers of the natural world, especially if their sport is threatened. Ask any grey seal...
Few people really understand why we fish for salmon. I am one of them.
Why would anyone want to spend the kind of money that salmon fishers spend in the pursuit of a fish that has no inclination to eat your fly? The challenge is there; fishing for a quarry that does not feed and therefore should be uncatchable whilst using a technique that is difficult to master and actually makes the whole process more difficult has a certain ring to it.
But challenge alone isn't enough to keep you coming back when it's tough. I have had blank years; now that's a feeling that takes some getting over.
I suppose that you have to learn to love the fishing rather than the catching and, if having read that statement, you still don't get it, stick to the trout rod. It will preserve your income and your sanity. In the really black years though, the love of the fishing wears thin and you begin to get a bit desperate for just a little bit of the catching. When there are no fish about, a creeping madness steals over you towards the end of your week. You know that there are no fish, but you become obsessed with the final day, long before it comes. You imagine, somewhere downstream, a huge shoal of fish heading your way on a collision course for your last night. It quite takes over your life, but it never comes true; at least it has never come true for me. Yet.
In the year 2000, fishless for my entire spring week, I decided enough was enough and went home on the morning of the last day to avoid the near insanity that a blank on the last night would inevitably bring. It was no better though; the minute I arrived home I wanted to be back there and, later in the evening in front of the TV, I kept drifting off to the imagined sound of thrush song and gurgling water around my legs. Like I said, it's a kind of madness.
Fly-fishing for salmon is actually a dedicated pursuit of the perfect Spey cast, occasionally interrupted by a fish grabbing the fly. You strip in a few yards of line dependent on the length of line you're throwing (I usually pull in between 5 or 8 handfuls), then you raise the rod to the vertical, lifting your arms up clear of your body, you sweep the rod around in a graceful arc to place the line upstream of you and then punch it out across the water in a single Spey cast, loosing the line as it goes. When executed properly, it's as graceful as a waltz; one-two-three, one-two-three, ONE-two-three and out she goes.
There are variations too; the double Spey, the left-handed single and left-handed double and the snake-roll - a cast which I can't properly master. Each has its place dependent on your position relative to the bank, the current and the wind direction.
On a good day, I can throw almost 40 yards of line, but not on every single cast it has to be said. I know when I've executed a perfect cast too - the line I shoot positively zips off the water at my feet and the force of the cast causes the reel to buzz a few notches as all 35 yards or more straightens perfectly in the air before settling gracefully in the water. That happens about twice a day, about the same number of times, if I'm lucky and in the right place at the right time, that a salmon will pull the fly. As I have mentioned over and over, getting the cast right is the equivalent of doing the right thing in salmon fishing terms.
A lot of guys get completely hung up on the distance casting thing. The further they can throw a line the more they feel like mucho hombre. Women, on the other hand, concentrate on getting the technique right and so very often catch more (and bigger) fish than their spear-chucking partners. It can be a chilly recipe for lunch. There is some logic behind the distance thing however. A long line gives what Arthur Oglsby calls “water command”; it slows the fly down and lets it fish over the lies in a most alluring way. But that’s not why some guys try to throw longer and longer lines – they do it because they’re competitive eejits.
I often wonder about my salmon you know. During the damp and dark winter months, I sometimes imagine them (or "it" if it's a really poor year) out there in the cold northern ocean chasing krill or other small creatures, feeding up for that long, terminal run home. I wonder what quirk of fate leads a few of these salmon to intercept my fly; me wading downstream, they forging up. For some of them the meeting is the last thing they will ever know, and that's a train of thought that can get you turned around quite a bit if you let it. At the beginning of every season, though, it's nice to imagine them out there, heading back for our private, pivotal meeting. Has a ring of destiny to it.
There have been thousands of weighty works written about salmon and the skill of (not) catching them. I am in no real position to offer anything new, except to echo what a fishery expert told me. Salmon don't feed in fresh water because of sex, simple as that. As their sexual organs develop, their feeding impulses are turned off, which makes a lot of sense since my appetite fails too when I get horny. Later in the year, when they are ready to actually consummate all of this pent-up passion, they become aggressive and will snap and bite at things in the natural rough and tumble of salmon foreplay.
This seems an elegant way of describing the typical salmon season with the spring and early summer characterised by fresh run fish, at different stages of sexual development, some of which will be willing to respond to an imitation of a prey species and therefore get caught. Then comes late summer, where all the fish are "stale" i.e. their sexual organs are fully developed and therefore they have no interest whatsoever in feeding. And, finally, autumn where fresh fish mix with breeding, displaying, territorially aggressive, fish.
Simple enough for my little brain to absorb, and therefore I can accept it as my truth. Of course, there are enough exceptions to provide evidence for any theory you care to expound about the sport. That's reason enough to become addicted.
My adherence to this theory, though, saves a lot of time (not to mention money and frustration). It means that I don't bother to book weeks anymore on rivers when the fish will be stale or when there is unlikely to be any fresh runs of fish. I do still enjoy fishing the autumn, or the "back-end" as we call it, but not for the pot - just for a last fling before winter. The fish can also be surprisingly big and surprisingly lively. But they're not pretty to look at. From a bar of silver in spring to a slab of mahogany in autumn. The Spey ghillies call it crocodile fishing.
I always have to remind myself though, that I am less likely to catch a fish than I am to get one.
When all is said and done, salmon fishing is a triumph of naïve optimism over hard experience and raw scientific fact. It reminds me of cold calling when I am selling; you just never know what that next call will bring you so you make the call, try to get a response and then move on in hope regardless.
Similarly, when I’m fishing, I try to cast as well as I can, I swim the fly as best I can over the likeliest lies and if I get no response, I take a few hopeful steps down the pool and repeat the process.
Every so often, a salmon buys the gag.
I'm not in the doom and gloom camp, although after the disaster that was my year 2000 spring week I could be swayed. For what it's worth, I think that the forces and cycles that shape our natural environment are well beyond the understanding and lifespan of mere humans.
There is a possibility too that we are shaping the salmon ourselves. After all, only a small proportion of the fish are taking fish and, if this is determined as the scientists think by their sexual maturity, it's not inconceivable that as we anglers "harvest" fish that are sexually immature on entering the river, we are depleting the gene pool of that class of fish. It's a wild and crazy theory, but I kind of like it in an abstract way. It's the sort of classy in-joke that Mother Nature would heartily approve of.
The salmon, particularly spring running salmon, are definitely in a decline phase now, for whatever reason. Everyone is agreed that something should be done but as ever, no one is in agreement about what that something should be.
Single interest politics rule the day and that depresses me more than the lack of salmon in any given year.
Anglers have their part to play too and the argument and counter argument rages on about catch and release. The way some Americans go on about it, you’d think that you were killing their mothers to kill a fish. And in the other, kill-em-all, camp, the twaddle talked by otherwise sensitive and intelligent individuals about the “merits” of killing fish is simply gob smacking.
For my part, I've seen enough fishmongers taking dozens of fish and killing every one to make me believe in the simple truth that every fish killed is just so much dead meat, but every fish released at least has a chance of reproduction.
If I was a fish, I'd want the chance.