A likely summer pool on the Spey
A likely summer pool on the Spey
The middle two weeks of July is the prime holiday time in central Scotland which means that it's guaranteed to pour from the heavens. This is only good news if you are a grilse fisherman.
A grilse, in case you didn’t know, is a salmon that has only been at sea for one winter. Spring salmon have been at sea, feeding, for two or sometimes three winters and so are usually bigger. Grilse tend to run to around the 5lb mark, although on some river systems they get a bit bigger, occasionally reaching double figures. Up until I fished on a July week, I had only caught the odd grilse, but usually I caught them in the autumn when they were coloured up and they just looked like a smaller version of all the other coloured salmon in the river.
The fresh grilse are different - short and powerful with silvery bodies and a stubbier head than the spring/multi-sea-winter fish. A perfect sports fish if ever there was one, not least because there are so many of them and they are so keen on taking the fly. Indeed, on many Scottish rivers there would be no real quality salmon fishing left if it weren’t for the wee grilse that run from June to September.
The July rains come on balance most years, and although the floods can run to three-foot or more above normal level, the fishing is still manageable. Mostly. Except when the river runs 5ft over the norm. Then it’s pretty dire; like fishing in chocolate soup, accompanied by cold temperatures and driving rain.
It actually rose over eight feet one July and flooded out many of the villages and towns lower down the Spey valley. In the year of the “big one”, I was fishing for only a half week and I arrived when it was hitting the 5ft mark on its way down. Further downstream, the largish town of Elgin, on the banks of another river, was completely flooded so it was a serious spate in what passes for summer-time in Scotland. I didn't get any grilse in that year, but I did get some summer salmon (two or more sea-winter fish) up to 16 lbs as the river fined and cleared; a satisfying salmon in anyone's books.
My ghillie for this regular July week is Robert, a large beaming highland laddie who has the dubious distinction of once being slapped in the face by Lady Whatshername (don't want a lawsuit now do we). The story is too long to go into, but it involved a combination of a lost Sea trout and the English titled-class's endemic confusion over service and servility. To Robert’s immense credit, he refrained from pitching the old crone into the water.
I’ve fished with various anglers on this week (my spring week is settling nicely into a routine where I meet up with Bill and his son Nathan for a week of over-indulgence in alcohol, food and bonhomie with a little casting in between). My co-angler on the beat for a while was a certifiably insane chap from the North of England that we'll call “Mr J”. I fished with him a few times, and his first words one year were "Ow do Chic, having a good 'un?" Before I could respond he followed on with, "Ah've only caught a goose so far this year."
Clearly his medication was not working as well as it needed to.
Without waiting for any response from me, he started to ramble on about how he had hooked this goose on the back-cast and how it had flapped around over his head and so on and on and on. Robert and I backed further away from him examining the contents of my fly box as we went. He topped that week by catching a large black hen salmon, which he killed to everyone’s disgust. He had been fishing for it for over an hour with me watching, and I had all but decided to go and suggest he move on when he hooked the unfortunate beast.
Where he had been fishing was at the tail of a hugely productive pool, which is very deep and dangerous with steep banks. When he hooked the fish he was on the bank; the minute he hooked it he jumped into the water! “What a nutter” I thought. If you don’t fish for salmon, you should know that the last place you want to be when fighting a fish is in the water. When on land, you can run up or down the bank as the fight develops and dictates. The additional height also helps you dominate the fish more and so shorten the fight time.
I watched, in cringing fascination, as he battled the poor fish for at least 40 minutes trying to bring it to his net. Eventually, Brian, another ghillie, appeared and I sent him down to get the fish out or get Mr J out, before one or other of them expired.
By the time he got there though, Mr J had got a hold of the hapless salmon and dispatched it. Later in the hut, he told everyone that this was the fish he’d hooked and lost the year before in exactly the same spot.
Like I said, the guy was certifiable…
He doesn’t come anymore on this week and his place has been taken by a very affable bloke from Birmingham. Thank god.
I came to the grilse late, as I said before, and it was a year or two before I started to take my family with me, after a few “exploratory” trips on my own. My family accompany me on most of my salmon fishing expeditions and I love to have them around. By and large they love it too, provided it’s not a balls-out-fish-till-you-drop trip, that is.
But the grilse suit family life very well; the fishing is best in the morning and the evening and so I can spend all day with the kids doing the regular holiday-dad stuff. It’s a good enough arrangement for all concerned, even if I’m totally done in by the end of it.
And the fishing is usually pretty good enough too. Grilse are obliging wee fish, with a real love for chasing small silvery flies. Where the obligement declines is when they actually take the fly itself. They can be the devil themselves to get a hook into. Sometimes there is no possibility of missing them, they hit the fly so hard, but mostly they take it so gently that you would be hard pushed to know they were even there, especially in the slower pools.
Grilse taught me how to fish the loop. Well, let’s clarify that; the grilse themselves didn’t teach me – that would be absurd – it was the fact that I missed so many which eventually persuaded me that I should learn a new trick. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got after all…
I had been fishing happily off the reel for years for spring salmon (a fish that normally takes with a determined authority) and then experienced the hugely frustrating experience of missing a couple of takes from grilse each day. To put this in perspective, I was also landing a couple of fish a day at this time, but being a “normal” fisherman, enough is never enough and the ones you lose or miss are always the biggest. It’s obvious.
Even after my best ever week where I landed 18 fish, I still recall with the utmost clarity the ones that I missed or that threw the hook just after hook-up. Especially the one that ran all of my fly line out plus about 50yds of backing before dropping the fly. How do they do that?
So I tried, as an experiment, to hold a loop of line to feed the fish when they took. This is text book stuff and most people know the theory; you hold a loop of about a yard or so of line hooked under your finger and when you feel a take you simply drop it or feed it to the fish as it turns. After a bit of messing about, it worked. The slightest extra pressure on the line and I’d simply let the loop feed through and, often as not, the nodding weight of a grilse would be there.
A bit of extra pressure on the line didn’t always mean that a fish was responsible of course, and sometimes the line would simply feed out to nothing. The feeling of being in control had firmly returned, however, so it was worth the occasional heart-stopping nothingness. And the more I practiced, the better I got, which is another good thing about grilse. They are obliging as I said and will come to the fly a few times, thereby giving you a second and even a third chance to get it right.
But then again, you have to wonder about how smart they are too. One night I went out with my pal George in tow to take some photos of the event. I waded in three yards, unhooked the fly from the keeper ring, flicked it out into the stream and started to lengthen my line, all the while gabbing to George. Once I had several yards of line at my feet, I raised the rod to make a cast, only to find a grilse on the end of the line! I would never have been believed if George hadn’t been with me and taken the photos to prove it.
I badly want to catch one when one or other of my kids is with me though. Jamie, the oldest, comes out with me in the early mornings and late evenings (night fishing he calls it – it makes him feel very grown up to be trusted to come out “night-fishing” with his dad). Scott, on the other hand, comes down around lunchtime for a quick half-hour or so. He is the more committed fisherman in reality, but he’s just a bit young to be trusted around deep, dangerous, fast flowing water.
The problem with grilse and small kids is that they pose diametrically opposite demands on your attention. For example, one morning I hooked a nice fish in Hunters pool and Jamie started to run down a very rocky shore towards me in his excitement. I could visualise him falling headlong and requiring some time in casualty, so I spent the first crucial 5 minutes of the fight watching him and calling out directions and instructions to “slow down!” Then, as he drew level with me and was finally on a safe sandy patch of bank, the fish simply fell off. On another occasion I turned to tell Scott for the tenth time to please stop throwing pebbles in the pool when I got a perfect take and tightened too early thereby missing the fish. And so on and so forth.
Maybe one day I will hook and land one and they will look at me and ask what all the fuss was about. Such is life when you’re young.
The hardest year for me was 2001. It was desperate weather (some days it only got up to 7 degrees C), there were no fish around (I only got one and I had to wait until the last day and virtually the last cast before I got that) and the river rose to a 5ft raging torrent by the Wednesday.
It was also a very traumatic week for me, emotionally. For years, I had rented this stretch of river and the associated cottage at various times of the year as a holiday home. My wife and kids saw it as a second home and some years we would go there once a month, whether there was fishing available or not, just to stay in the cottage, relax and soak up the Highland air. Out of the blue, however, in September 2000, my wife decided to end our marriage. Just one of these things, as they say.
I was determined to keep things as normal as I could for my kids’ sakes and so we went up in July as usual the next year. It felt very strange being in that cottage without her, both for me and for the kids.
My very dearest friends, Rhona and George, came with us to help out and they did everything they could to make it special for us with games and toys for the kids and organised trips to circuses and whatnot. But it was still very strange.
I’m glad that I did it, a kind of milestone I guess, but it was hard as there were nothing but happy memories for us all there. When you’re going through something like that, it’s best to focus on the negative images of the relationship, as a defence mechanism for your own grief if nothing else. However there were simply no negative feelings or images associated with that place. At least there weren’t for me.
And that’s the real thing about fishing, no matter what the target quarry is. Memories of fishing a particular place at a particular stage in your life tend to live with you forever. I still remember, clear as if it were yesterday, how I felt when I caught my first ever trout and that was almost 30 years ago. I can conjure it up in a flash. I will never, ever, forget the feeling of elation when that huge Blue marlin breached in Mauritius. And I can’t erase the feelings which that cottage awake in me, much as I want to sometimes. The diaries don’t help the healing, but they do help the soul.
So, my boys and me will go back to have summer by the Spey in future years for sure. The river, hopefully, will be kinder and the grilse will run again for us and we will catch our fish together.
But we won’t be staying in that cottage again. Some memories are best left undisturbed.
Chic McSherry July 2001