Fish and chip revival plan

If the Icelandic banks don't pay up perhaps all those English local authorities owed money (they can't say they were never warned) should send in the bailiffs. They wouldn't get much for the assets in Reykjavik although it has a nice church (Hallgrímskirkja, pictured). An administrator could probably sell the Blue Lagoon thermal springs for a tidy sum to a company such as Disney.

There are big aluminium smelting plants too but they would have to be sold as English councils know nothing about smelting. On the other hand the councils could send in their parking experts to paint a few yellow lines. The Icelanders park almost anywhere which makes them easy meat for our dedicated urban traffic wardens.

My favourite assets, however, are in the water. First there's all those salmon rivers. I would happily look after them for a small fee. Better than salmon, however, are the cod stocks. It would be a neat revenge for losing the Cod Wars and could herald a long overdue revival of fish and chip shops.

If none of the above is enough we could lay a pipeline to pump away Iceland's geothermal heat that could be redirected to the council estates of those local authorities with funds at risk. Finally they can give us back our women! But fish and chips first please.

Why do fishermen lie?

Why are fishermen prone to exaggerating the size of their catches? It's something I have been pondering after reading on the Fishdee website that salmon of 22lb and 20lb were caught on the beat of the river Dee that I fished last week.

I know all about these fish since I caught them. Once upon a time you caught a salmon, you knocked it on the head and then you weighed it carefully on a spring balance, only rounding up the figure by a few ounces.

Since a catch-and-release policy was introduced on to the River Dee, however, there has been an imperative to ensure that your fish gets back in to the river swiftly and safely. This means that I use a net all the time these days and seldom lift a fish out of the water for more than a second or two.

If it's a good fish I try to take a measure with my rod or wading stick so that I can use one of the length-weight conversion tables that give you a rough idea of a weight. The first salmon I caught last week was a beautiful specimen, very silvery and fresh from the sea with sea lice still attached.

It was hooked just above some falls and there was a danger for a little while that it would escape the way it had come as it headed back towards the lip of the falls. But I managed to hold it in the stream and finally brought it to the net. The ghillie had appeared, as they do so often on these occasions, almost out of nowhere.

He reckoned the fish was "touching 20lb" since it had a very wide girth, so there it was - my 20 pounder. Then, on my last evening at the river, I hooked another big fish, an inch or so larger than the other, according to a measure against my wading stick while it was still in the net. So I put this one down as 22lb. But something rankled. I had caught fish of this weight before and in my memory the fish I had in the past seemed to have been bigger.

Another thing - although they fought well, both were well hooked and neither gave me too much trouble after one or two runs. It was just a case of tiring them out and getting them in. Back home last night I found that my rough measures did not correspond to a 20lb+ fish. At best, I reckon, the first one was 18lb and the second 19lb.I feel a bit guilty about this but I guess I'm only confirming what the none-fishing community has always suspected - that anglers can be economical with the truth.

Next time I shall take my spring balance.

The 26lb fish mentioned on the site was caught by my father-in-law - not bad for an 81-year-old. He has caught many salmon in the past and estimated that this one - which he didn't measure - was between 25 and 28 pounds, so we settled for 26 pounds. Not scientific, I know, but neither is fishing. Anyway, I do not doubt him. There were some big fish in the river last week. I saw one giant in the 30lb to 40lb class.

Gill, my wife, has a spring balance built in to her landing net so she could confirm that her two fish each weighed just less than 5lbs. On second thoughts, perhaps I'll leave the balance at home.

Shellfish behaviour

Humiliated in a pub quiz at the Britannia Inn, Elterwater in the Lake District. The plan was to be home by now after a week on the Isle of Skye but bad traffic in Scotland forced a change of course. My God there are some scruffy areas on the outskirts of Falkirk.

We diverted to the Lake District and the Langdale Hotel. The pub meal was fine but we were kicked out of one room that the waitress told us was the "restaurant" where prices were 10 per cent higher. I think she was a bit irked when she found me laying our table after I had ordered at the bar. It's a pub. You go to the bar in pubs. I hate pubs with pretensions to be something they're not.

The upshot was that we ended up in the backroom with the locals who seemed to have a far better grasp of general knowledge than we did. I wouldn't have minded but the quiz marker even went so far as to add an "Sp" in brackets after a misspelling. I get better treatment than that from the FT sub editors. It was like school.

We were rubbish.

It's teeming down outside - exactly the weather we needed in Skye to provide a much needed spate that would have sent the fish up the river. The only fishing I had up to Saturday was an afternoon in a boat at sea fishing for mackerel and Pollock. Sea fishing is pretty messy.

We filleted our catch in the evening and barbecued it over an open fire by Neist Point Lighthouse where our friend, Jane, had just been celebrating her 50th birthday. There were a lot of lobsters, prawns and langoustines and plenty of champagne. Not a bad party all in all.

The trestle table featured in the pictures collapsed under the weight of Jane's son, Jack. Jane bruised her foot jumping off a wall - as you do at 50th birthday parties. Otherwise no major incidents.

From the cliffs we watched basking sharks and Minke whales feeding in the rich currents that work around the headland.

It was cloudy most of the time with the sort of fine drizzle that works in to your clothes but which doesn't soak anything. On Saturday there had been just enough rain to provide an outside chance of a run so I fished the river Snizort. The result was two small sea trout and a good pull which I'm sure was a salmon - I saw the fish - but which I didn't convert in to a catch.

The best, and saddest, story I heard in the week was that of the fresh-water mussel, once prolific in Scotland but now endangered. These wonderful creatures live up to 140 years, each purifying 50 litres of water a day while eating waste matter from salmon and trout

But they have been hunted almost to extinction for their pearls. It still happens illegally among locals who use glass-bottomed buckets. Historically the freshwater pearl was once so prized that Julius Caesar cited it to the senate as one of the reasons for invading Britain in 55 BC.

I always wondered what it was that brought the legions far in to the north of Scotland near rivers such as the Tay. It must have been the pearls.

The mussels need salmonids in their reproductive process since the gills of the salmon and sea trout host the juvenile mussels for a few months until they drop off in the headwaters of rivers. Today salmon and trout runs in many rivers are so sparse there is much less chance of spreading mussels and extending populations. Many mussel populations don't have reproducing adults anyway, just stately old mussels seeing out their days in a few spots out of reach of mussel hunters.

A few years back a clump of 800 80-year-old mussels was plucked from its habitat during so-called "river improvements". That's 64,000 years of life destroyed in a matter of minutes.

We need to know about these things when we fish. No species survives in isolation.

Good dog, bad dog

The river Dee was as majestic as ever. We could and should have had more fish. Five fish lost of eight hooked is not the greatest return from six days of hard fishing. But one of those caught was a first salmon for Bryan Kruse who can now add game fishing to an impressive list of pursuits that includes shooting, sailing, skiing and canoeing. "I'm going to have to clear a new shelf," he says.

Bryan has a springer spaniel called Solo. Will Sadler, another of our party, described Solo as "the best behaved dog I have ever encountered." What hope then for our West Highland white terrier, Dougie, in that kind of company?

Solo is a class swat among dogs; the sort of swat who is popular with everyone and gets to be head boy at school. Solo likes to please. Dougie pleases himself. He would have Friday detentions every week. He's the sort of dog that likes to stuff his nose in the backside of other dogs and bark at the postman. I don't think I have ever heard Solo bark.

I like to take Dougie along the river bank when fishing. Solo stays where he's put. Dougie disappears. He's not a bad dog. He's just stubborn, like all Westies.

The weather was sunny at the start of the week and the river needed some water. Still, there were fish about and I had a couple within an hour of each other on my birthday - a fitting present. The pool had been thrashed all week, mostly by the rods on the other side (although they would say it was us, such is the antipathy of anglers to those on opposing banks).

I put finesse to one side and swung through a big fly that provoked the takes. I had lost a fish the previous evening because of a badly tied knot on my fly. I cannot remember having made such a fundamental error before.

There was a lot of whisky downed as usual and haggis on my birthday. But no incidents. Well, just the one, involving Dougie again after we had returned south.

Gill had called to pick me up from Will's house and Dougie was behaving badly among his dogs. I put Dougie in the car for some peace and quiet.

My keys were inside and the other set was in the ignition but there was no need to lock the car. Dougie, however, thought otherwise when he triggered the central locking system. There was nothing for it but to smash a rear passenger window. The repair will cost £200. I have explained this to Dougie but he doesn't seem to care. So long as he gets regular walks and kibbles, nothing else matters. Next time I think we'll be getting a springer.

Lies, damned lies, and so-called fishing flies

Some people fish for salmon using spinners. Some people fish using flies. Some salmon waters have banned spinners (that are much easier to cast and generally easier to fish with), declaring them fly only.

Now some wise guys at Grays of Kilsyth have produced the spinhead, a spinner attachment for your fly. If this is used on a fly-only water it is downright cheating. In water that permits spinning there may be an argument for casting something like this with your fly rod but I can't, for the life of me, think what it is. In fact there is no real difference between using this device and attaching a Mepps spinner to your fly leader. The fly-only rivers should move swiftly to ban its use on their waters.

If all you want to know is: "Will it catch fish?" Of course it will. I discussed these moves to create "spinning flies" in one of my fishing columns here. Here is an article trying to justify its use.