By
Bill Currie
Sea trout are welcome fish, sung about, sought out, accorded almost mythical status, but, alas, neglected at the same time. Natural migration, of course, is like that. It has a side which seduces you with its great romance. Fish , like salmon and sea trout, arrive, trailing clouds of mystery behind them. Where have they been; what have they fed on; what brought them home ? You can see that it would be easy to lose yourself in a kind of mist of wonder with these fish. If you do, you will perhaps fail to see that the sea trout is a very local fish, even if it goes to sea and seems to disappear from our ken. To forget that sea trout are fish of local waters and local coastal feeding is, alas, to put the fish and its future in jeopardy.
If you were to take the Saint Andrew’s cross and lay it over the map of Scotland it would give you four sectors of the country matching the four sorts of sea trout Scotland has. The main west coast sector covers the area from the Firth of Clyde to Cape Wrath, embracing all the Hebrides and the West Highlands. The northern sector would cover the waters from Cape Wrath to Wick; the eastern sector would take in all the eastern-flowing waters, roughly from Wick to Edinburgh and the strange fourth sector would outline both the sea trout in the Tweed and its area and, on the west, the rivers of the Solway and the south west. To see just how local sea trout are, in 1996 - 97 and for some years before that, the West was so short of sea trout that alarm spread through the community, committees sat, structures for recovery were proposed and serious thoughts were raised about the way the western coastal environment was being used. At the same time, the north was good, the large eastern sector was enjoying some of its best sea trout years and the southern waters in Tweed and Solway were doing as well as water conditions dictated.
As usual in natural things, most people do not realise the value of a resource until it declines or threatens to disappear. When the resource is migratory, already shrouded in a degree of mystery, the decline can go seriously far before people ask themselves what they have lost and why they have lost it. We have not to look very far into the past to define the quality of the sea trout resource. Nor do I think we have to look very hard at what is happening today to see at least one of the reasons for the decline of the West Highland and Hebridean sea trout.
For nearly three decades I fished the river Shiel in late June for its sea trout. You know that river; it is one of the short, beautiful rivers of the west flowing out of a substantial freshwater loch. Maree is one, Shiel is one, and the list could go on. In the sixties this river had prolific, large sea trout and the river and the loch above it provided first class fishing. The quality was extraordinary. My first ever sea trout from the Shiel, caught on a trout rod in the dark weighed four and a half pounds. The best I had came in a flurry of fish after two hours of blank fishing under a clear sky when suddenly a film of cloud came over from the west and I took four fish, the best eight and a half pounds, two not far behind and one tiddler of a pound and three quarters. I do not think you could go anywhere in the fishing world and get better flyfishing than that.
The Shiel was not always like that, of course, but it never let you down. The last great night I had there was not long ago, in 1985 to be precise. We were blank until two in the morning, and in June terms in the West that means just before the white night turns into the dawn. Suddenly sea trout appeared in a mass. Two of us had sixteen fish almost as fast as they could be taken and, as a trumpet blast to end the night, each of us took a salmon in the grey light of dawn. We were in bed by quarter to four. Subsequent years on the Shiel showed serious decline and by the early nineties it was showing virtually no sea trout at all in the river or the loch above. Throughout the Hebrides it was the same story. A whole resource of fish seemed to be heading for extinction. On the east, catches were still big, some waters even making records.
One part of me wants to write about the days and nights, - particularly the nights - of sea trout fishing I have had in the West Highlands and the Hebrides, but I think it might be more important to air some of the problems the West is facing. The decline in sea trout has coincided with the establishment and vast development of salmon rearing cages in our sea lochs. These cages, part of what is undoubtedly a very important economic development for the Hebrides and the West, bring high concentrations of fish to the very waters sea trout feed in and migrate through during their sea phases. Stale food and faeces from the cages foul the sea bed, poison feeding areas and remove sectors of the food chain essential for the sea trout. Worse still. Growing salmon massed in cages attract parasites, particularly sea lice. These reach epidemic levels and, to counteract this blight on the caged salmon, seriously dangerous chemicals are introduced to the cages to keep sea lice at bay, producing toxic waters round the cages with unknown, but deleterious effects on the environment.
Lest you think these points are just the bleatings of a fisher who has not done so well in the west in recent years, let me say that I am presenting here ideas from official reports and studies carried out within the last five years, details of which can be found in the conservation section of http:\\www.gamefishing.co.uk. The most recent document I have been working on is an excellent consultative paper Marine Cage farming in Scotland: Regulation and Monitoring produced by the newly formed Scottish Environment protection Agency. In the natural world it is never enough to trust to nature’s bounty and it is often disastrous to adopt a policy of ‘wait and see what happens’. It is doubly dangerous to go on talking nostaligically about former years when West Highland and Hebridean sea trout were plentiful. I have a strong hunch, however, that the anxious complaints of fishers and the communities of the west which benefit from the annual migration of sea trout are at last being heard. I hope I can be forgiven for harbouring a grain of hope that sea trout will hold on , then multiply again and restore to us their astonishing presence in our lochs and rivers.
As if to add point to this article, as I was writing it , I had a chance to fish on Lower Tweed for sea trout. The conditions were those of warm, early June, - low water, high day temperatures, soft still evenings, - perfect for sea trout. Now, Tweed reads from a different rule book for its sea trout fishing than Mull or Benbecula. Tweed actually yields some of its best fish in daylight, or at least evening light, whereas Hebridean day fishing for sea trout would be confined to lochs well rippled with a west wind. Well, on Tweed I chose a long deep glide broken by a small croy of stones to make the glide furl into a small shingly stream and in that stream sea trout began popping up and leaping high as the light declined. I pulled and failed to get the first one, but took the second. Then in a sequence which made me think my hand had lost its cunning, I missed four and only at last light did I take a final fish before the rise ended. It was a timely reminder of the excitement, the engagement, the passion of fishing for sea trout. I was suffused with feelings which brought to mind the mouth of the Aros river in Mull, with one night of great, almost explosive activity with running sea trout, of a four pounder from the Forsa on Mull (by day !), of many nights on the astonishing Shiel…..and I could go on. I came home at midnight. In front of me, on the computer, was this half-finished, sad article. I could hardly read it, because my hand and heart were trembling with delight from catching sea trout on lower Tweed. Then I remembered the Saint Andrew cross image. The three parts which are holding up well merely make you look to the west with even greater intensity, and work even harder for the restoration of sea trout there, in those astonishingly evocative streams and lochs in the scarcely dark nights of summer, when the fish bring a kind of divine madness to the whole environment.
You can find more articles in the archive under A Line On Scottish Fishing.
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