December 2004 -
Fishing for complements: Anglers are more likely to walk
away with a complement of whisky than a wild salmon these
days
There is strand of opinion
in angling that applies the domino theory to the campaign
for animal rights. Once the fox hunting packs and their
followers have been disbanded in the UK, the theory goes,
the shooters will be next on the list and, when the last
grouse has hit the heather, the campaigners will turn to
the rivers.
Why should anyone worry?
Game anglers have already neutered their sport to a degree
that it is difficult to see how any animal rights organisation
could position itself between fish and fly with any real
conviction.
Somewhere in the roof space
I still have the 4ft-long gaff I used to impale my first
rod-caught salmon nearly 30 years ago. It was a 23lb beauty,
a huge gleaming slab of silver from the River Tay.
Those were the days when
you killed what you caught and ate what you killed. A trip
to the Tay in March or April would keep the freezer stocked
for a year with firm-fleshed fish, not the limp and pasty
farmed-variety on some of today's restaurant menus.
The wild salmon has a tough
life and the one that attacks your lure has already beaten
the odds against survival so many times that the chances
of getting away again have to be stacked in its favour.
I could line my house with tins of John West for all the
fish I have lost after hooking them.
So the one that is brought
successfully to the bank deserves nothing less than a swift
slap on the head with the priest. But what do I do? I take
out the hook and gently guide my hard won prize back into
the stream.
The practice of catch and
release has been adopted for maybe the last five or six
years on the River Dee where I fish in the summer.
The code is voluntary but
once introduced it was difficult to resist the peer pressure
to conform. I have heard misty-eyed anglers describing the
satisfaction associated with the act of repatriation as
if they had undergone some kind of religious conversion.
To keep us on side, the
owners of the beat hand over a bottle of malt whisky for
every clean fish caught up to a maximum of two per rod.
One of my fishing partners is thrilled at this rare demonstration
of Scottish generosity. He doesn't care for the taste of
salmon but has no similar aversion to whisky.
Fishing for whisky can never
be the same as fishing for the table. I used to enjoy coarse
fishing until a friend questioned my habit of throwing the
fish back. "The least you could do is to eat it once
it's been caught. Anything less would be unfair to the fish,"
he said.
The fish might have had
a different view, but I decided he had a point and switched
to game fishing. I never enjoyed killing - the practice
of blooding was not for me - but I never worried about it
either. In contrast, returning fish is discomfiting. So
are some of the suggestions creeping in to the fishing approach.
Instead of treble hooks with barbs, today we are asked to
use nothing more than a double unbarbed fly pattern.
Sooner or later we will
be asked to fish one-handed with a hookless feather on which
a compliant salmon will be expected to suck itself into
submission.
If animal rights campaigners
turn up on the river banks, the chances are they will be
shooed away by over-protective nanny anglers worried that
the salmon might be spooked by all the noise.
Conservation issues are
real and important. Fish stocks are under pressure. But
the rod and line are the last and probably least of the
salmon's problems. If it isn't natural predators such as
birds and seals, it is the mile-long fishing nets off the
coast of the Irish Republic that scoop up the cream of the
wild stocks. No wonder wild salmon is so cheap in Irish
supermarkets.
The wet summer made for
good fishing this year and a full complement of whisky.
But the only fish to make the pan was a sea trout and there
are those who would ask me to put that back too. Well I
didn't and have no regrets.
Last month I was a guest
at a pheasant shoot in Devon where a catch and release policy
is far less practical. But give it time. Sooner or later
I expect we will be zapping radio-controlled plastic birds
with laser beams as the horses and hounds pass by, following
their paper trail. Standing by meekly, the fish watchers
will wave from the bank, flashing their naked gums (we shall
no longer have teeth), counting the splashes and wondering
whether mayflies have rights.
