Tay kelt

Yes, that's all I had to show for six days on the Tay with just two spring salmon among six rods. It was disheartening to see just the odd fish running in such great spring conditions with a falling river and settled conditions.

The six days of casting practice, I suppose, will come in handy for the Dee in a week's time. The Dee figures seem to have picked up a little last week while the Tweed's again were poor.

The opposite banks are fished separately on the Dee so I was surprised to see that the left bank Kincardine beat had 10 fish while the right bank Carlogie beat had nothing. It's the same stretch of water, after all.

There were some great hatches of March browns for the trout fishers and plenty of trout about. That's good news for the World Fly Fishing Championships (trout and grayling)to be held partly on the some of the lower Tay beats in June.

Salmon beat auction

The Atlantic Salmon Trust's annual auction of fishing beats and other stuff is upon us again.

Some £80,000 worth of fishing beats in 289 lots go under the hammer this year in aid of salmon research.

There are beats as usual on UK rivers such as Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey, Tyne and Wye but this year for the first time there some Icelandic and Norwegian rivers in the pot, including the West Ranga and the Namsen.

I notice that some Scottish haaf netting is also included in the list of lots. That's one to test your prejudices.

Copies of the catalogue, which includes an increased selection of online-only lots, are available from the AST on 01738 472032. Email: jenny@atlanticsalmontrust.org. The catalogue can also be viewed here in a day or two.

The deadlines for bids are February 2nd and 3rd for the conventional and on-line auctions respectively.

2007 - a bumper year for Scottish salmon

It seems hard to believe this but according to the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards, the total rod catch of salmon for 2007 was the third highest since consistent recording began in 1952.

Its annual statistical bulletin, Scottish Salmon and Sea Trout Catches, recorded 91,053 salmon caught by anglers in Scotland during the year, of which 55,472 (61 per cent)were released back into the water.

Only two years in the last half century have exceeded that figure - 1988 with 96,488 and 2004 with 92,918. The number of salmon and grilse killed on Scotland's rivers in the year fell to 65,468, of which 19,468, nearly a third, were killed by netsmen

The total reported Scottish catch of sea trout in 2007 was 27,115, compared with 28,824 in 2006. This breaks down to 5,574 killed by netsmen, 10,383 killed by anglers and 11,158 released by rods.

If you, like me, do some of your salmon fishing in the spring, you might be surprised by those figures. It didn't make for bumper catches on the Dee or the Tay - at least when I was there. I suspect that by far the the biggest catches have been recorded in the autumn.

Hugh Campbell Adamson, Chairman of the Association of Salmon Fishery Boards, described the number of salmon entering rivers as "fairly stable and on most rivers robust." He also said that there had been a "quantum leap" in the number of salmon caught and released.

But he said there remained concern over spring stocks, the erratic nature of grilse runs, and the continuing decline in sea trout catches.

If salmon stocks are stabilising I wonder if we are approaching the time when fishery boards could contemplate the tollerance of those anglers taking a week's fishing in the summer months having the option to take a fish of a certain size - say up to 7 lbs?

I remain uncomfortable about blanket catch and release for a game fish unless stocks were critical (in which case it's arguable we shouldn't fishing anyway) but would not want to see a return to the indiscriminate killing of the past.

As more anglers practice catch and release, so they are less likely to want to retain a fish but there are still those, particularly fishing in the last month of the season, intent on killing everything.

Those engaged in salmon conservation increasingly have an encouraging story to tell. It would be a shame if their efforts were undermined by a minority concern to knock everything that's landed on the head.


A 2007 trip to the Dee

The Salmon King

As an antidote to the same old stuff they were pedalling at the game fair this year (see previous note) I would recommend Crawford Little's article on Colin Leslie, the retired Tay ghillie, featured in the August issue of Trout and Salmon Magazine.

Fishing magazines are often criticised for running similar material year after year but, when you think about it, the way we fish has not changed radically over time. Neither have the fish. That great new pattern promoted as this year's "wonder fly" may well resemble those that have gone before.

Leslie makes the point in the article with a swipe at Alistair Gowans who created the Ally's Shrimp (if you read that article, incidentally, I can tell you that I am not impressed by wobblers and other fancy attachments.

The T&S article doesn't name Gowans (did they think he might sue?)but Leslie, quite rightly, points out that the Ally's Shrimp is simply a hybrid of the General Practitioner. "I fished those flies before he was born," says Leslie.

I love the article because it gives a flavour of the banter and rivalry between ghillies. Indeed some of the current Tay ghillies were scoffing at Leslie's book title, "Scotland's Salmon King" when I met them in the spring. "Aye ye'll be wantin' to meet the sage o' Cargill," said one of them, stifling a giggle.

What Leslie doesn't point out in the article is that the vast majority of spring salmon caught on his ghillied beat, Cargill, would have fallen to the Kynoch killer - a plastic fish lure harled from the back of the boat.

He is pretty scathing too about the Spey cast. But I think a well executed Spey cast is still worth learning and vital for rivers where no back cast is possible.

Like many other Tay ghillies he swears by high strength Maxima line and I think he has a point as I discussed in my Oykel blog here.

His memories of fishing shrimp - he says he introduced the method to the Tay - brought back memories of my own. When I first went up to the Tay in the late 70s, part of the tackle were jars of dyed prawns and buckets of worms. Those days certainly have gone on the Tay and will not return.

There is some great advice about how to fish a fly and a spinner - he is a strong advocate of the sinking tip, even in summer (but then the Tay is a big deep river). he also worries that anglers can sometimes fish too small and I would agree with that.

Lelsie caught a number of big salmon in the 40 lbs class and one of 56lbs which was such a poor specimen, he said, he fed it to the chickens. This fish, I notice, has not made it into Fred Buller's Domesday Book of Giant Salmon (mentioned here).

I'm not saying that everything about a ghillie's job is perfect but spending your life by the river, catching big salmon, drinking whisky and chatting with interesting people, knowing that you're the expert who they must respect, well there are worse ways to make a living.

I haven't read Scotland's Salmon King (Melrose books) yet but it's on my list.

What ever happened to the Vosso?

For some time now I have been curious to know what happened to the salmon runs on Norway's Vosso River that I read so much about in Arthur Oglesby's book, Salmon.

I started a discussion about it here in this fly fishing forums thread. After carrying out some recent work looking at the salmon farming industry I am now convinced that salmon farming was largely to blame.

There is an excellent feature about the river in the Winter 2007 journal of the Flyfishers' Club. The feature, written by Morten Harangen, mentions a recent fishing trip to the river when he failed to catch anything.

He says the record book for 2005 mentions "seven or eight" salmon caught on the river. But were these genetic Vosso salmon? Or were they escaped farm salmon? It does not say.

The catch is pitifully small, even if, as Harangen asserts, "there is no doubt there are still a few forty to fifty pounders out there."

I hope he is right. What will be difficult to discern is their genetic purity. On the other hand there is every reason to believe that something, if not entirely genetically pure, then very close to the original strain, could be restored even if it hails from a salmon farm cage. This is because a significant constituent of the Mowi strain, the first salmon farm fish to emerge in Norway, were salmon taken from a Vosso tributary, the Bolstad.

These large-growing fish are typically four or five sea-winter fish. The more winters that salmon spend at sea, the bigger they get, hence some excitement in the May Tay Salmon news bulletin from the Tay Salmon Fisheries Board, that a good proportion of the Tay's spring fish this year appear to have been bigger three-winter salmon.

All well and good - I'm as delighted as anyone to see evidence of big spring salmon back in the Tay - but the run is still relatively small compared with the 1970s. A few big salmon does not a spring run make.

As for the Vosso, it was closed in 1992 and re-opened in 1998 without any signs of improvement.

So why did the river collapse? Karl Magne Bolstad whose Berga farm overlooks the Bolstad pool, and which has some of the most famous beats on the river, has no doubt that many smolts were killed by sea lice that accumulate in large numbers around salmon farm cages. But there was also a lot of dumping in the river when a road was built. That killed a lot of fish, he says. Moreover a power plant constructed on the river led to significant changes in water temperature, another possible contributory factor.

It's astonishing how human activity in different areas has collectively destroyed one of the world's most precious wild salmon rivers with barely a whimper of protest. Today, hatchery-reared smolts are being transported past the salmon cages but will that work as a conservation effort?

Bolstad does not sound too optimistic of restoring the strain. A once mighty salmon river, its fish the stuff of legends, has been lost to angling and may never return. That's a crying shame.

April on the Tay

The problem with turning up to fish on the River Tay in the spring is that the fishing has been so poor in recent years I find it difficult to raise any sense of optimism and, believe me, I am an optimist.

No matter, it's good to practice my casting. On the Monday morning I had been fishing just 20 minutes at a place they call the "little shot" - an old netting spot - on the Benchill beat of the Upper Scone fishings, when I had the strongest of pulls on the fly.

I had run a Black Frances through the pool on an intermediate line with a fast-sinking tip, and had just changed the fly to a Temple Dog.

I retraced my steps on the bank and, after about three or four casts, hooked in to a salmon. Could it have been the same fish? Unfortunately I lost it after two or three minutes, but it was a reminder that I shouldn't have been so complacent. Fish were running and, although they weren't stopping, there was always the chance of a take.

On the Tuesday it rained heavily, leaving the water coloured for much of Wednesday. On the Thursday I was fishing the Cawnpore pool just opposite Stanley Mills when a fish took my fly just three or four yards from the bank. It was not a big fish, about 8 lbs, but it stripped off a lot of line before I beached it and returned it, having left my landing net at home.

On the Saturday morning I hooked in to another a little further down the same bank but this too, came off after a couple of minutes. I noticed that the landed fish was lightly hooked. These were fast running fish, hitting the fly from behind, not turning on it in the classic take.

Our group had six fish for the week, not great but a hell of a lot better than some recent years when the return has been one or two or none at all. Had all the lost fish held we would have been in double figures.

It was satisfying too, that the bank outfished the harling boats, with four coming from the bank, three on "flying C" spinners. I was the only one fishing fly but it fished just as well as the spinners. In fact I would argue that it fished better because it fishes a little more slowly.

It's too early to be optimistic about the Tay but the spring runs do seem to be improving gradually. It will be interesting to compare this with the Dee in a week's time.

Mill dams, Marmite, tea and cigarettes

In the alphabet of life, fishing comes somewhere between the boy scouts and girls, or at least that was how it happened for me. Come to think of it, I would have barely enrolled in the cub scouts the first time I cast a hook over the pier at Whitby and hauled out some small silvery "kamikaze" with fins.

Earlier still I was pulling greedy sticklebacks from the park lake that would attach themselves obligingly to the brandling worms I had tied to a piece of string. This method seemed to catch bigger specimens than I could get with my net. The net was made from one of my grandma's stockings tied in a knot, threaded on a piece of wire and attached to a bamboo pole.

I would take the sticklebacks home in a jam jar where they would die within two or three days. I had more success when I put them in a plastic tank outside until a heavy frost entombed them within a block of ice. Perhaps this was when I first began to appreciate the merits of catch-and-release.

Pink underskirt

Once I slipped on a wet leaf by the side of the lake, finding myself fully immersed in the "mucky end" where all the leaves, litter and uneaten breadcrumbs left by the satiated ducks would gather.I must have been about three or four years old. My mother dragged me out, took off my sodden clothes and dressed me for the bus ride home in a pink underskirt she had bought on the market. It was the bus ride from Hell and the associated humiliation most probably scarred me for the rest of my days.

Apart from holiday fishing I did not begin to take the sport seriously until I bought my first fishing licence and joined a coarse-fishing club in my early teens. It was on one of those fishing trips I bought my first and only packet of cigarettes - 20 Embassy - just like the ones smoked by mum and dad.

I had gone with a friend to fish a mill dam just outside Ossett in West Yorkshire. For some reason we thought that our chances were better the earlier we arrived so we were on the bus at first light and on our way before the first of the shift workers.

No sooner were our floats in the water than we were both puffing away on our "lights." Within two or three smokes my face must have gone the colour of the pea-green dam water. I can't recall whether or not I finished the packet but it certainly cured me of the urge to experiment any further with cigarettes, although I did try smoking my dad's pipe with the same unfortunate results.

Marmite sandwiches

These coarse-fishing forays, sustained by Marmite sandwiches and a flask of tea, would usually produce a decent haul of perch and roach, never very big. I might have progressed to bigger things had it not been for adolescence and the intervention of progressive rock, underage drinking and girls.

But the fishing was merely neglected, not abandoned, and during a canal holiday with friends I had what I can only describe as my angling epiphany. I was admiring a fine chub I had taken from the Avon near Tewksbury when a friend challenged my ethics (not that I knew what ethics were at the time).

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"Throw it back," I said.

"Don't you think that's unkind to the fish? Wouldn't it show more respect for the fish if you killed and ate it?" he said.

I thought he had a point, so it was not long after that I acquired my first trout rod. This one was a birthday present from my in-laws-to-be who regarded game fishing as a healthy shared pastime for a soon-to-be-married young couple.

Broon and gold

Soon after our marriage they invited us salmon fishing to Scotland, to the Kinnaird beat of the River Tay. It was early April and there were few springers around but Gill had a lovely 17 lb fish on the Wednesday.

We were spin fishing with "broon and gold" devons bought from Malloch's in Perth. On the Saturday I knew I was in the last chance saloon when I hooked in to something big. When I look back now at the tackle I was using it makes me weep. My rod was a bendy piece of hollow glass fibre, bought from a barber's shop in Batley, and my tatty coarse-fishing reel was falling apart.

The fish kept taking line and I was struggling to get it in. I was tiring after 15 or 20 minutes and thought the fish must be tiring too so I tightened up the tension on the reel, but far too much. The fish ran and parted company with the line. It was just before lunch and it was an understatement to say I was distraught.

Silver springer

Straight after lunch I went back to the very same spot, cast again and had a fish on. It felt like another good one. This time I left the tension well alone. When it came to the gaff (this was the late 70s) it was a superb 23lb silver springer.

A year later, on the same beat in the summer I was casting a salmon fly for the first time and hooked in to a fish of about 12 pounds that was at my feet when it shed the hook.

They still shed the hook now and then today but there has been a lot of water under a lot of bridges since those days. I'll never forget that first springer or indeed those early roach and perch. Fishing is something that gets in to your blood.

Fish art

It was great to see trout in Madeira's levadas last week. These are narrow channels used to transport spring water for irrigation all over the island. The channels are not more than two feet wide and the water rarely more than a foot deep so the fish don't grow very big, but there are plenty of them.

In one of the plunge pools at the foot of a water fall we saw trout to about a pound. They were breeding too.

The week away was bad timing for grayling fishing since last week was settled weather in Surrey where I live, whereas this week the rains are back, muddying up the river.

So I've taken out my fly boxes for something to do and tonight we'll probably have a tying session. Yippee, says Gill. Just now I'm sorting out some salmon flies for trips to Scotland in the spring.

Black Frances

Last year (when the water was unseasonably low) I did well with a tungsten-headed Black Frances (you can read how this classic Icelandic fly got its name here). The yellow paint on the tungsten head very quickly rubs off but the fly sinks quickly, allowing it to present well in the stream straight after the cast.

I will probably do most of my fishing with the Frances again this spring, alternating with something brighter such as a cascade tube or a temple dog, trying various weights and sizes depending on the conditions.

I plan to stick with an intermediate line on the Dee and Tay with maybe a fast sinking tip in the deepest Tay pools.

Fishing lust

The other thing that has aroused my fishing lust today is a copy of Beneath the Surface, The Wildlife Art of David Miller that arrived in the post today. David's paintings are superb. Check him out at his website here. I reviewed his book here.

I have just been in touch with another of my favourite marine artists, Malcolm Cheape who lives in Perthshire. His pictures are very much a narrative, containing all kinds of imagery, drawings and sometimes notes relating to the subject. It's clear from our conversation, not to mention his art, that he has a strong interest in history.

Malcolm told me about the Gask Ridge, a string of Roman forts in Scotland, one of which I notice was Inchtuthil. I mentioned this site near Spittalfields in a column about freshwater mussels. I wonder if these forts had a role in helping the Romans exploit and protect pearl fishing interests?