I guess that it probably started around the time of my separation and subsequent divorce. Looking back now, that must have been the start of it right enough.

I’d had a fabulous year up until then – had been in Mauritius chasing marlin, had a poor spring salmon trip but subsequently hammered the grilse in July and then took off to Venezuela where in three and a half days fishing I rose more marlin and sailfish than I had ever seen before in my life. I completed the tour by going salmon fishing on the last day of the season on the Spey (30th September) and taking one, two, three, four, FIVE!...count ‘em, salmon. What a day and what a fishing year.

It was whilst driving home that evening that I first realised that something was coming adrift in my life. It was a simple thing – I couldn’t get my (now ex) wife on the phone and when I eventually did, I just knew by her voice that all was not as it should have been. And so, it transpired, all was not as it should have been. She’d been making whoopee on the side with some geek from up the road. The exchange of bodily fluids with people outside the marital home normally finishes things off pretty rapidly and so it was with us. One of those things that can happen to you, it seems, after nineteen years in a stable, trusting, relationship. Ciao. Get over it. Time to move on.

Divorce is neither pleasant nor fair. In my case it was doubly unpleasant and doubly unfair because not only did she and her army of lawyers and accountants take me to the cleaners (the men always get the rough end of the Family Law Act – even when they are cuckolded), but also the general trauma and upheaval seemed to break that connection I’d forged with my fishing during that magical last year. Oh, perhaps I should mention that there weren’t exactly a ton of salmon around during the next three seasons and, besides, divorce lawyers cost too much to allow you to afford fishing trips at productive times and pay their bills.

Of course, truth be told, I lost a lot of connections with a lot of things around that time as anyone who has gone through such a sudden loss will appreciate: but I didn't know that at the time. Something more sinister was at work. Had to be – after all I’d paid my dues and learned how to fish for salmon. I should be catching them every time I went out and on every other cast. Surely.

More as an act of defiance and to prove that I could actually afford to buy something for myself (which wasn’t true – I was broke) than out of any real need, I decided that I needed a brand new Sage 15ft 1in. double-hander (is it me or is this a crazy size for a fishing rod). A beautiful tool, in a fetching green carbon blank, which throws a line for ever and is unfeasibly light for its available power. A precision casting tool if ever there was one.

Co-incidentally with that purchase, a hat appeared in my garden. Not just any old hat, but a bona fide Akubra, wide brim, real felt, hunting-shooting-fishing hat. It is tan coloured with a pretty feather cockade in the band.  I had no idea where it came from, except that it had been very windy the night before it arrived, and so I checked with the farmer to see if was his. Nope – he’d never seen it.

I tried it on. It fitted perfectly, which is a bit unusual too since I have trouble getting hats to fit (big head – in lots of ways).

And I did need a new hat.

So I went fishing with the new hat, the new Sage rod and the heavy heart.

But the fishing, at best, was slow. There were some salmon around, but nothing like the numbers that there should have been. The springs came and went without significant salmon runs and I was forever looking forward to the grilse run of the summers. The grilse, though, when they came, came in sporadic little pockets – but never when I was on the water with the new rod and the foundling hat.

It had to be the hat. I started wondering where it had come from and how it had found me. Can inanimate objects pass on luck? Certainly the previous owner had been unlucky enough to lose it. Or maybe he’d been so unlucky owning the damn thing that he simply threw it away and it blew on the tail of the storm until it found me.

Maybe it was the rod though. My old 16footer – now that was a killing machine. What sport I had with that rod. Maybe it was the new rod. Or the combination of the rod and the hat making some bad magic.

I was once treated by an acupuncturist for a chronic back problem and I had been going for weeks, always receiving exactly the same treatment, with only limited benefit. On one particular visit, when the last of the needles was inserted, I almost shot off the bed. My whole body felt as though it was in spasm with bursts of electricity flying between the needle points under my skin. The practitioner, a qualified Chinese doctor who was, incongruously, Italian, noticed my reaction and asked me if there was anything special about that day. It was my birthday. The back pain left me almost immediately after that session. Maybe we don’t know everything after all.

I saved my game fishing year in 2002 from a total blank (yes, you read that right) when I went out fishing (hatless it should be pointed out but with the Sage rod) one July evening with Robert the ghillie. We were fishing down the March pool and I was, as usual by now, throwing a long line into nothingness and cursing the midges when I heard a “Zzzzzzzzz…” behind me. Robert had one on – then he hadn’t. “I just felt that one would come to a wee black Stoat’s Tail in this light so I changed the fly” he said. “Pity it didn’t stay on” he added unnecessarily.

I took his lead, changed my fly to a black Stoat’s Tail and within two casts fed some slack to a cracking 7lb summer salmon – sea fresh and fit as a flea. So it wasn’t the rod then. I let the salmon go – the river god may have been watching and another reward could have come my way.

But that was my season – one salmon – despite several more fruitless forays.

Change the fly. What a phrase. It bounced around in my head for ages and became a metaphor for my life. Pay attention to details, do something different if what you are doing isn’t working, think like the target, go back to basics, success depends on the smallest thing, focus on the end of the line… Change the fly.

What if the hat wasn’t jinxed and it was just me and my attitude? There’s a lot more to fishing than catching and I could easily have gotten myself into a place where I believed that I somehow deserved to catch salmon. Maybe I was feeling sorry for myself, god knows I’d gone through enough. Or maybe I’d just gotten sloppy. I knew I didn’t check my leader nearly enough, I left the same fly on all the time, I went through the pools quickly and gave up readily if I didn’t see anything move. But…but I was also wearing that hat and fishing with that rod.

Spring came round again and I went fishing, complete with the hat and the rod, but thankfully the finality of my divorce had lightened the heart considerably. As often happens, through no bad initial intent, these things result in two people who used to love and trust one another becoming mortal foes, entrenched in opposing positions with diametrically opposed versions of their truths. The relief to be finally “free” was palpable to me. I had my life back without the shackles of her lawyer’s interminable inspections of my financial affairs; they may have stolen my past but the future was all mine. It was time to break the jinx.

Things started with high hopes – a lot of fish had been caught in the recent high water. I saw it with my own eyes because I’d had a day and a half fishing in a previous week as a guest of Bill. I watched, smiling stoically, as my fishing partner took six fabulously fresh salmon in this day and a half from the opposite bank to me whilst I never touched a thing. The hat felt tight on my head as I drove home.

The start of my official week had me back up raring to go, but the river had fallen down to summer level and was still falling. Not great but certainly fishable. By lunchtime Monday, two salmon were on the bank but sadly not to my rod. Mornings and evenings were the only fishable times of the day because of the low water and bright sunshine, so fishing time was strictly limited.

Each morning and evening I donned the hat, rigged the rod, cast long lines, checked leaders, changed flies.

But the pattern continued throughout the week- my fishing buddy catching one a day with me getting blanked. I only had one half-hearted take on the Wednesday evening. The fish didn’t hang on to the fly.

Now. I could have started getting freaked out by the damn hat and the damn rod. I was tempted to burn the bloody things by then, you will no doubt understand. But I just kept whispering my mantra “Change the fly…” and I checked my leader, concentrated on my casting, changed the fly regularly and stayed faithful.

On the Saturday morning, at the eleventh hour, fishing down Straan pool on Tulchan C beat I felt the gentlest of pressure on the line I was holding between my fingers. I fed about four feet of the loop out slowly and when I felt the line tighten completely I lifted the rod into a fish. It bored deep but I managed to turn it upstream where it tore off all the line into the backing in a mad dash before sulking its way back to me. After a number of dogged runs, I had it on the bank: about 9 pounds of sea-liced, silver-flanked Atlantic salmon. As quickly and efficiently as I could, I unhooked it and held it in the water to recover before it slid off into the depths.

I tugged the brim of my hat down, checked the alignment of the sections of my rod, changed the fly and went back into the pool…