You can’t talk about trout fishing in most of lowland Scotland 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 is somehow apt that it was through the grayling that I found my “true” calling in fishing. That genetic bridge between the species gave me a spiritual bridge between the two main schisms of angling - game fishing and coarse fishing.

My first attempt at grayling fishing employed 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 freshwater shrimp that you disturb. Then you drop a small quill float cast, weighted with a few lead shot and armed with a fly called a Red Tag tipped with a live maggot, into the discoloured stream below you. The cast is allowed to trot down for around a rod length and then it is 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.

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 of a pound or more and it would open its massive dorsal fin like a para-sail and be carried off downstream, peeling line as it went. Magic.

They are indeed a pretty little fish, grayling. 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 the herb thyme, but since I had no idea what that 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, with some pride, that I was one hardy kid in those days.

Shuffling was banned long ago, quite rightly, as it ruins the riverbed and hence the spawning reds, but I 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 I used a fly to catch fish, that didn’t make me a fly fisherman and it wasn't long before I wanted to learn to do it properly. So I engineered a home made fly fishing outfit by converting an old spinning rod, a fixed spool reel and (believe it or not) 50 feet of flat braided nylon garden twine for the fly 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 explicit instructions, from a second-hand junk shop which 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 tip sections; 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 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 of course, 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 that first 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, or so the lore ran.

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 got stuck in an overhanging tree and 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 locally well known haunt called Garrion Bridge with my younger brother, John, and a friend called Roy McGowan. Roy got bored 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 size trout, but I remember floating on air all the way home and running up to Roy McGowan's house with that little prize where I did some serious bragging.

I may have been only twelve years old, but even then I knew that this was living.

As often happens, what started as a hobby website grew arms and legs until it eventually became a full-blown book. In February 2004 it was published under the slightly enhanced title Game Fishing Diaries: Details from Fishing in Life and is now available from most outlets from as little a $2.99 on Amazon Kindle. In November 2011 Volume 2 made an appearance also available on Kindle

Game Fishing Diaries - Volume 1

Game Fishing Diaries - Volume 2