Story and Photography by Bob Wyatt
An excerpt from 'Trout Hunting - The Pursuit of Happiness' soon to be published by Quiller Press, London, England.
To any one familiar with the huge expanses of the North American west, Scotland may seem pretty tiny. I suppose it is, but the thing about Scotland is, it is dense. By that, I mean that you get a tremendous variety of terrain and micro-cultures packed into an area the size of, say, a good sized Californian shopping mall. It takes me less than five hours to drive from my home in Glasgow to Lochinver, in Sutherland. In that time, you travel through what seems like at least three distinct geographical and cultural zones. Between the sprawling sectarian raffishness of Glasgow and the industrial central belt, to the scrubbed grey puritanism of Aberdeen on the east coast - a two hour drive - there are linguistic gates to daily life to which only a local birth certificate will permit access.
You can take the ferry from Skye to the island of Harris, where the church services consist of massed Gaelic chanting and the golf courses are posted against play on Sunday. One Hebridean Sunday, gathering a bucket of mussels for dinner at low tide, I was glared at in silence by a car-load of black-suited worshippers, who rather pointedly stopped on the ancient stone bridge, interrupting their journey to church services to deliver a baleful reproach to my transgressive hedonism.
Or, you might celebrate the summer solstice on Orkney with a crowd of Nordic bonfire dancers, and wonder if you haven't somehow landed in Iceland. By the time you have travelled two hundred miles, you feel like you've really gone somewhere. Scotland provides its own prophylactics against creeping internationalist blanding-down.
Sutherland is visually very similar to some of the northern Canadian wilderness, like the Cassiar district in British Columbia. It even reminds me of the southern Alberta foothill country, where I grew up, except that Sutherland is normally wet. I suppose the visual similarity comes from the fact that these areas were heavily glaciated. The other difference, of course, is that western American grasslands had a nomadic native hunting culture before the Europeans came, while this is where those Europeans came from. The evidence of that old Scottish culture, broken castles and the desolate crofts of the highland clearances, is everywhere.
Every year, at the beginning of July, I am part of a group that spends a week fishing for trout in Assynt. We rent a Lodge, cowering under the sombre mass of Ben More Assynt, on one of the few feudal sporting estates still maintained primarily for the purposes of deer stalking. It's in good wild country, which continues to strike me as miraculous given that we’re on an a wee island with a population of sixty million.
The nearest village is Lochinver, about as close as we get over here to a fishing town, like West Yellowstone in the States. There are, however, big differences. Lochinver is just a place where you can buy some supplies and liquor, eat a cheap breakfast at the Fisherman's Mission, or go for a pint. In fact, it is closer in some respects to what existed before the big leisure and fly fishing boom of the 1970's and 80's, like the old mining towns of the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, only without the slag heaps. For instance, there are no specialist fly shops, guiding services, float trips, fishing contests, or international professional fly fishing conventions. There are several reasons for this, some of which are specifically cultural, but it's mostly because most folks over here just can’t imagine trout fishing as a business. I think of this as a sort of golden age, which, because things inevitably get worse, will certainly be regarded by the boys and me as the Good Old Days.
There are two well preserved salmon rivers that provide the focus for the Lochinver area; the Inver and the Kirkaig. A couple of hotels, one fairly new and up-market, the other a well worn Victorian sporting retreat, across the bay from the town, which now seems to be swallowed up by the industrial fishing wharf. The wharf and ice making facilities are no oil-painting, I can tell you, and the Culag pub reminds me of the bar scene in the movie, Star Wars, but these are the kind of thing you find in coastal towns everywhere. The village itself is a tidy curving row of white stone-built houses and small shops, lined out primly along one end of the bay. The Inver rushes in abruptly at one corner of the stone sea wall.
The profound shape of Suilven looms up behind everything, giving the place a rather otherworldly aspect. (One thing you notice is that they give their mountains proper names, as if they were personalities – so it’s not ‘Mount ‘ Suilven - we’re on a first name basis here with the landscape.) On the whole, a very attractive setting for any kind of outdoor holiday, but for the midges. There are a few tourist businesses and a couple of beautiful beaches nearby. The main attractions for our gang are the wild brown trout lochs, strewn like a broken necklace throughout the surrounding hills.
There are usually eight or nine of us, which may sound like far too many for a fishing trip, but it works out pretty well. There's a natural tendency for the group to break down into smaller units of two or three for fishing purposes, so there is never a situation where six guys descend on some wee loch and thrash it into submission. As a matter of fact, it's unusual for any one loch to be fished more than once or twice over the week. There is a lot of water available, and we all have our favourites. Sutherland provides the opportunity to do what most trout anglers just can't do anymore, which is catch astounding numbers of trout on the surface fly. Fishing for numbers quickly becomes meaningless. So, for most of us, the trip serves as a kind of philosophical pull-through. By the end of the week you have ratified the reasons why you fish.
Fishing pressure, as we now expect it, is almost non-existent north of Inverness. Some of the more accessible trout lochs do get fished, but, if anything, this improves the size and condition of the fish. There is a tradition of killing trout in Scotland that can be compared to thinning a row of carrots. If you want rows of nice, fat, well-conditioned carrots in your garden, you pull out all but a suitable number of the young ones. So, on the few lochs that do get some sustained culling, there is a noticeable improvement in the quality of the trout. Most of these waters don't get any real pressure, however, and to make any significant difference in the numbers and size of the trout there would have to be something done about restricting the spawning. Genetics possibly come into it as well, so some lochs won't change much no matter what we do.
Sometimes, you will run into a patch of small, dark, mature looking fish which aren't worth eating. A lot of lochs have a strain of these stunted trout, which exist on the margins of the prime micro-environments. A six -inch fish may be spawner several years old. Good fish husbandry dictates that these runts should be killed, squeezed to deflate the air bladder, and then thrown back into the water. This might help a little to maintain the biomass while reducing competition for food. If that seems just a tad hard-hearted for you, well, okay, but not if you're going to keep only the big ones. The hole you leave by killing a good-sized trout will be immediately filled by three small ones.
You can take great comfort in the knowledge that most of these lochs are just as good as they ever were, and will remain so barring some environmental disaster. Most of the lochs involve some kind of a walk. This can range from a pleasant stroll to a real muscle stretching heart-breaker of several miles that seems uphill both ways.
Space being the world's last great luxury, this is a place where you can indulge yourself. The terrain is mostly rock and bog so, until they develop better ways to sell bog, the only commercial use of it involves deer, sheep, tree farming, or tourists. Despite a shameful level of conifer aforestation, there is still a vast area of open land and the legal freedom to roam and feel alone. To a prairie boy, this is the aspect of northern Scotland that is most appealing. After a period alone in a wild landscape you tend to renew your appreciation of other people. A week of this solitude, and the whisky, will turn the sourest misanthrope into a regular Sammy Davis Jr.
Good fishing is a relative thing. Usually, to anyone who has been doing it for any length of time, it means you come close to a meeting between your desire and the potential of the water you're on. What qualifies as a big trout is also relative. In Alaska or New Zealand, as we know, big means bigger than anywhere else. However, in most of North America and Europe, a foot-long brownie is a good fish. Big starts at about fifteen inches, and weighs maybe a pound and a half. By these criteria, the fishing in Sutherland is much better than fly-fishing for brown trout ordinarily gets.
For one thing, you can forget sinking lines and leaded flies, at least throughout the best part of the season, which is June and July. This is nice, because it feels like brown trout fishing as it should be. A trout taking a surface fly is worth a bag full of fish on a sunk line. When there is no hatch, the Sutherland brownies are still keeping a beady eye on the surface so, even when the fishing is bad, it's pretty good.
During June and early July, there is usually a hatch of Mayfly on most of the lochs. This isn't the ordinary large Lake Olive, or Summer Dun, although those flies are also common. These northern lochs have an honest to goodness hatch of Ephemera Danica, the legendary Green Drake. These critters are big, with bodies at least an inch long, and I've seen nymphs over an inch and a quarter. In July you will also see the Murragh, the Great Red Sedge, although some of them are grey-blue. In flight, these look more like small birds than flies, and when one has you in its flight path it is hard not to panic. These animals may explain the northern trout's penchant for huge flies dragged over the surface.
Despite two hundred years of determined, no nonsense, conservatism among Scottish loch anglers, our group are satisfied that a fine and far-off approach produces bigger catches of the better trout. The short heavy three-fly cast of traditional 'attractors' has gone the way of the Claymore. A tapered, fifteen-foot, two-fly leader is standard. Flies for the far north are also evolving fast. I now work out of one box of proven northern patterns, the other four that I carry serving primarily as ballast while wading. Every season pushes the evolution of the Great Northern Trout Fly just a little bit further toward perfection.
One advantage of spending a week with a large group of fanatic anglers is that the evenings provide some great brain-storming sessions. Well, maybe brain-storming is putting it too strongly. We compare experiences, however, that would take one sober fisherman years to work through. Good examples are development of the Veyatie Black and Silver, the Deer Hair Sedge, and the Deer Hair Emerger.
The Veyatie Black is a slight variation on the Irish wet Mayfly style. It's basically a deconstructed Connemara Black, and retains the appropriate conventions of form which are essential for cultural continuity. It's got a sparsely palmered badger hackle, over a skinny black seal fur body, with a long, soft, hen pheasant shoulder hackle, instead of the traditional folded, bronze mallard, wet fly wing. Tied 'leggy', on a size eight or ten light wire hook, it will give you the edge on overcast days, when Mayfly are hatching. We mix a little claret seals fur with the black and think it makes a difference. So does a golden pheasant topping tail - we think it must represent a shuck, or something
I always fish a Deer Hair Sedge on the dropper. Again, this is an 'evolved' pattern, and one I have used in various forms and colours since Jerry Avaledo, owner of Jerry's Sportshop in Bellevue, Alberta, gave me an orange bodied one, on the Crowsnest River in 1958. I claim he was the unacknowledged originator of the Deer Hair Caddis, which he and my uncles in the Crowsnest Pass called, simply and erroneously, the 'Bucktail', although it was tied with mule deer body hair. I have never seen an earlier version of this fly, he came up with his fly in isolation at least as early as Al Troth created his Elk Hair Caddis, so I just figure I should stick up for old Jerry, who died a few years ago.
My version of the Deer Hair Sedge is the simplest fly in the box; a 70-30 mixed black and claret seals fur body, with a clump of deer hair lashed down on top of an emerger style hook. The butt ends are clipped long to form a sort of half-muddler head or thorax. That's it. No hackle, no tail - the scruffier the better. Gink it up, and throw it out there.
The Deer Hair Emerger is the latest arrow in the northern loch quiver. This is really no more than a version of the Comparadun, only with the curving, sunk abdomen of the Klinkhamer Special. Tied slim, with no hackle or tail, and just a spikey thorax of hare’s mask ahead of the upright deer hair wing, this fly is an absolute killer during a hatch.
All that may sound a little declasse , to a real aficionado of the art and science of flyfishing. It may sound a bit too primitive and altogether too easy to stay interesting. Maybe, if you got too much of it, catching stupifying numbers of wild trout could lose its appeal over time. So could anything if you get down to it. So far, in well over forty years, this particular malaise has not overtaken me. After all, this is superb fly- fishing for wild trout in beautiful surroundings, not bingo in the church basement.
You already know that the lochs with the best fish often lay on rock with some limestone in it, and that some have only a few big old lunkers sharing a good food supply - these lochs will really test your character. Boggy lochs are normally, but not always, too acidic for quality trout. Look for weed-beds not reeds. Lochs with a mud or silt bottom produce the Mayfly hatches. Look for lochs with limited spawning - lochs with good spawning usually have huge populations of small, if perfectly formed, trout. In these waters, you will have to sort out the bigger fish from the hundreds of small ones. This is not unpleasant work in itself. This kind of fishing sets you up for the inevitable tackle-buster, which will come sooner or later. You can become pretty cavalier after a run of ten-inch fish, and will pop a leader on a two-pounder before you know what hit you.
END NOTE:
Bob Wyatt lives in Glasgow, Scotland, where he teaches art and writes about fly fishing. Part of this piece appeared as Brainstorming in Sutherland , in Fly Fishing and Fly Tying (UK), June 1998.
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