Trophy fishing on the Dee

The spring Dee salmon fishing was as tough as ever this year but our party improved slightly on last year’s performance with seven fish. Two of our goals were achieved when everyone caught a fish and we had a fish on every day of the week.

They were all in the 6 lbs to 10 lbs range, so we didn’t land one of the big Dee springers although Mark Crampton Smith lost a big fish, apparently after mistaking it for a rock. This is not as daft as it sounds.

A big salmon can be pretty stubborn, holding station, refusing to budge, but if there is any “rock or fish” doubt in the mind, it’s better to hold steady rather than yanking hard at the obstruction as Mark did. His rock finally responded by spitting out the hook and shooting off up stream to a more appreciative beat.

First fish

The first fish fell to Bryan Kruse which, in an earlier visit, when we did that sort of thing, would have scooped him the first fish prize money in the sweep.

Mark objected to a sweep, arguing that it was ungentlemanly to despoil our experience with grubby money, so he had to settle for our new trophy, the Carlogie Cup for best all round fishing performance. This included ferreting out a fish from a “secret pool” that also produced a salmon for Will Sadler who had been showing signs of desperation as the only fishless rod midway through the week.

First he blamed his rod, then his line, then his rod and his line until the ghillie loaned him an identical rod which somehow seemed better.

Sluie Saucer

There was a second trophy, the Sluie Saucer, named after another nearby beat that we had rented for the week. This one has less to do with fishing prowess and more to do with general ineptness. After falling in the river three times, hooking myself twice, dropping off in the hut while holding a glass of wine, and losing my wading stick, I suppose I couldn’t complain when the saucer came my way.

Two other goals, a salmon over 15 lbs and a fish at Sluie, both eluded us. Sluie has recorded just two fish for the season to date and the beat owner is more than a little hacked off with spring runs that are a shadow of the old days.



During the 1960s river netting was taking 60,000 salmon a year and 10,000 or more were falling to the rods. Today the annual total of rod caught fish on the Dee in a season is somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 fish with all but a small minority returned. It's difficult to say how many fish are caught more than once but when records were taken of River Carron salmon - all tagged - some 19 per cent of catches were fish that had been caught twice.

Burn Improvement

While burn improvement on the Dee is to be commended, I am less convinced about the wisdom of the Dee Salmon Fishery Board decision to close its hatcheries. If the river was teeming with fish I could appreciate an argument to simply let the fish get on with their own breeding. But the Dee is far from reaching the levels of returning fish it needs to restore and sustain the kind of abundance it enjoyed in the past.

This week the weather warmed up and catches increased. They had 15 fish between four rods at Ballogie, the beat below us. The Carlogie total was six in ideal conditions, so I don’t think we did too badly.

The spring fishing is much improved on the way it was 10 years ago when some believed that the Dee springer could be extinct, but there is still a long way to go.