The first game fish I ever caught was not, in fact, a trout, as you might have expected. It was a grayling, but I wanted it to be a trout very badly.
I had been coarse-fishing for quite a while in some ponds near the River Clyde, close to the industrial town of Motherwell in Lanarkshire. Not the most picturesque of settings it has to be said. The catch was mostly small roach and perch, but there were also some monster pike in there. In the early spring, they would come into the shallow, weed-lined, fringes and it was a thrill to see the huge vee shapes streaking across the water if you managed to spook one whilst you approached the waterside.
These ponds flooded seasonally and I eventually reasoned that if there were roach and such in the pond, then they must have come from the river. Or perhaps I thought that they went from the pond into the river. It was a long time ago after all.
Anyway, one day a friend (I forget who) and I decided to have a cast in a large backwater where the pond and river met during these floods. I perched on some rocks and flicked the baited hook into the eddy. My quill float went down with some authority almost immediately it settled and I struck into what turned out to be my biggest ever roach. At well over 1lb in weight, this represented serious progress.
So I started to concentrate more on the river fishing than the pond fishing. It wasn’t long before I started to notice little splashes and dimples on the surface of the water where I fished. These coincided with hatches of unfamiliar looking flies which looked like small Chinese junks floating down on the stream. Having only really experienced the common or garden black houseflies and daddy long-legs up until then, these were the prettiest insects I’d seen (short of butterflies of course). So I looked up one of my many fishing books and deduced that the splashes must be trout taking olives from the surface.
They weren't, in fact, trout - they were grayling. But they were, in fact, taking olives.
You can’t talk about trout fishing around here without including grayling. Grayling are a sort of hybrid coarse/game fish. They have the adipose fin of a salmonid, but they spawn in the summertime like a coarse fish. And it’s apt that it was through grayling that I found my “true” calling in fishing. That genetic bridge between the species gave me spiritual bridge between the two main schisms of angling - game fishing and coarse fishing.
My first lessons in fishing for grayling was using a technique called "shuffling". Basically, you stand in the water and shuffle your feet to stir up the gravel bed. This attracts the shoals of grayling, right to you feeding on the insect larva and shrimp disturbed by your shuffling feet. Then you drop a small quill float rig weighted with a few shot and armed with a fly called a Red Tag, tipped with a live maggot, into the discoloured stream below you. The rig is allowed to trot down for around a rod length and then lifted up and dropped back in front of you. Every so often it shoots under and, with a quick strike, a grayling is on. But only if you’re quick enough. You can even get the occasional trout, or so I’m told, but I have never been that lucky.
The average size of the grayling I caught when shuffling was around half a pound, but every so often I'd get a big one and it would open its massive dorsal fin like a sail and be carried off downstream peeling line as it went. Magic.
They are indeed a pretty little fish. I tried eating them but wasn’t too impressed with the flavour. I have read that they get their Latin name (Thymus thymus) from the fact that they smell of thyme, but since I had no idea what thyme was back then, the connection escaped me at the time (no pun intended).
When I started shuffling, I couldn't afford waders and had to wade in my jeans and wellington boots. Consider this in the middle of a Scottish winter, often with snow on the ground, and I have to say that I was one hardy kid in those days. I certainly couldn't do that now.
Shuffling was banned long ago, quite rightly, as it ruins the riverbed and hence the spawning reds, but you can’t deny that it was very effective, and even a bit inventive. And as far as I know the practice of tipping flies with live maggots has died away too. When you think about it, you have to wonder what exactly the fish take the concoction (or maybe that should be confection) for. I mean, it’s the dead of winter and there would hardly be a surfeit of natural looking fauna emerging. Then again, it just deepens the mystery of it all a bit further doesn’t it.
But just because you used a fly to catch your fish, that didn’t make you a fly fisher and it wasn't long before I wanted to learn to fly fish properly. So I engineered a home made fly rig by converting an old spinning rod, a fixed spool reel and (believe it or not) 50 feet of flat braided nylon for the line. I persevered with this unlikely combination until my dad took pity on me and helped me to buy a 4-piece split cane fly rod, a reel and a proper fly line. He got it, on my instructions, from a second-hand junk shop that I passed each day coming home from school. I reckon the dent in the window where my nose used to press must still be there. In those days, the fly lines were level – double tapers were beyond my means at any rate – and the rod came with 2 tips, which was an insurance that I was sure to need.
I was entranced with that little outfit and spent ages practising my casting to a soup plate target in the side garden of our house. Well… I was young and daft and didn’t care what passers-by said. I was getting better and that was what counted. All the technique came from books, and it’s no easy way to learn to fly fish – particularly without the two key ingredients of water and fish. However, eventually I mastered the rudiments and, in time, was ready to tackle it for real.
But still the trout eluded me for quite some time.
The River Clyde flows from its source in the Lead Hills of central lowland Scotland to the sea just beyond the city of Glasgow. It is a renowned trout water in its upper reaches and since these fishable parts were within easy travelling distance of my home by bus, I fast became a “regular”.
The earliest trips were still marked only by catches of grayling, although now I was getting them “properly” - on a dry-fly. Little store bought Greenwell’s and Black Spiders mostly. You had to buy flies for the Clyde locally as most of the flies bought from catalogues were too heavily dressed.
Clyde flies are a breed apart, with extremely wispy dressings and fine thread bodies. I wonder now if it was more a matter of economy with the fly tyers than any predilection of the Clyde trout. Lanarkshire was then, and still is, an area of significant social deprivation and if you only have one feather cape and a couple of thread bobbins, you need to maximise the yield from them. The traditional way to fish “Clyde-style” is in teams of three wet flies just under the surface using a floating line. A cast is made downstream and then allowed to swing round on the current. The fish pretty much hook themselves and it is very effective. I preferred dry-fly fishing though; I thought it was more difficult and therefore somehow more classy. Besides, if you lost a cast whilst wet fly fishing you’d lost three flies, whilst if fishing a dry you only lost the one.
Anyway, that aside, one day I was fishing the Clyde at a well-known haunt called Garrion Bridge with my younger brother, John, and a friend called Roy McGowan. Roy got fed up and decided to go home but John and I decided to stay, mainly because we had seen a large (in those days “large” meant anything around 1lb in weight) trout caught by another angler. It was caught on a diving minnow, a popular method in those times, and although we were fly fishing, the catch gave us enough encouragement to hang on in there.
I was casting rhythmically, regularly and, truth be told, aimlessly into a fast feeder-stream under the road bridge itself and suddenly the Greenwell's glory I had tied on disappeared in a small splashy ring. I struck quickly and a gold flash jumped out of the water.
I almost fell in; it was a trout! Admittedly it wasn’t a very big trout, indeed it was a barely legal trout, but I remember floating on air all the way home and running up to Roy McGowan's house with that little prize.
I may have been only twelve years old, but even then I knew that this was living...