By
Bill Currie
In my loch fishing in Scotland, as a young fisher I very quickly began to value wild trout. In a broad sense, of course, all trout are wild. I mean by that no fisher hunts tame trout - if such a creature exists. It is also true that we cherish our fisheries; indeed, we manage them,- and that management has various goals. The trouble with management of trout fisheries, however, is that the end product might be less than perfect. One extreme category of trout fishery we have become used to in the age of development is the put-and-take stillwater where trout are stocked into ponds and reservoirs with the goal of catching them immediately. Fishers queue up to do their best to achieve this. Now, it is perfectly prudent to stock waters, but to stock them with fish which are immediately caught at the size at which they were introduced seems to me to be grossly artificial.
The horror stories go on. I have heard of lochs where there is a flurry of excitement just after the stocking lorry has deposited the latest stock. People say wide-eyed to each other , ‘ I hear they have put in ten four pounders among the numbers.’ Sometimes fisheries will offer prizes for the catching of a single large fish stocked and sometimes that fish is as big as the best salmon.
If lochs are stocked with fingerlings, they acclimatise to the water, grow in it at the rate the loch dictates and they are , to all intents and purposes, wild fish. Well, they are reasonable imitations of wild fish. I do not think it is fully realised just how precious a resource a fully wild trout stock is. Scotland is privileged to have a multitude of lochs in the Highlands and Hebrides where the stock is indigenous, balanced and self sufficient. In many cases these fish are small, but this is not always so. I have caught trout of the two pound mark in different Scottish waters where there was never a stocking programme. Actually, the largest Scottish loch trout I have caught did come from a stocked water on a Caithness moor, but the stocking consisted of a bucket of small trout caught in the river Thurso and hastily taken to the loch. There the small river trout grew astonishingly and produced trout of four pounds and more.
I had an interesting few days fishing for wild trout in the Great Glen last June. I was really on a family holiday, but a trout rod was packed. On one of our bed and breakfast stops I became interested in Loch Lochy. It is one of the long, deep lochs which makes up the Great Glen which links Loch Ness to Loch Oich, Lochy and the western sea. The whole forms a substantial part of the Caledonian Canal. Deep lochs are not really good news for trout fishers. Trout love the shallows. An ideal place for trout in a Highland or Island loch would be a reed fringed, shallow bay no more than an oar’s depth over fly-bearing silt.
Loch Lochy has a narrow, rocky margin , sometime only ten or twenty yards wide, before it plunges into the blue depths of one of the deepest pieces of freshwater in Scotland. There was one shore, on the northern side where trees hung over the water and at first sight seemed to blank off the fishing on the narrow shallows. Places like that act on me like a lodestone. If they are difficult, they may well hold trout which have been little troubled by fishers. So, pulling on my salmon waders and, parting the fronds of tree branches between me and the fishable water, I found I could wade waist-deep on the boulder shallows and, using a longish trout rod, just over eleven feet, I rolled the line out, or spey cast it, and for most of the time got a fair line out which I then worked back in over the golden stones right under the trees.
The trout were there all right. They pulled at the flies and sometimes cartwheeled over them. Now, these were not big fish; a half-pounder would be a decent one and one of three-quarters would be a trophy. They were, however, very tough and very fast. In a word these were wild Highland trout and as I fished for them, I felt myself becoming a boy again. I felt that the loch and its trout was unspoiled through time, even through history. Trout like this were timeless, plentiful, lively. I brought in nine and released all but four which I took and the following day fried them in the open air over driftwood on a West Highland beach.
The search for quality in Scottish loch fishing is often a search for remoteness. It is also, among other things, a search for places where there would be no case for investing money and time in the fishery. Remoteness and economics go hand in hand. Quality has to be defined. For me it is a genetic thing, primarily. The type of trout, their size, their special characteristics all make for memorability. Quality is, of course, also a measure of environment. Good trout fishing in the gasworks pond could never be a quality experience. Someone once said that wherever there were wild trout there was true wilderness. I accept that definition, but I would add that the wilderness has itself to be satisfying to us. We carry icons of the wilderness in our minds. Trout wildernesses are rural places, set in unspoiled moorland or hill. Sure, they will have visitors. In a country as small as Scotland it would be difficult to find virgin water. The important issue, however, is that the visitors should be in tune with the place. They should value it for what it is.
Wild trout quality, therefore, is wild country quality. It is also the kind of place which speaks to our own internal sense of being in the wilderness, - as if we had an indetity-kit measure in our minds which the unspoiled loch and its trout matches. It trophy terms, wild hill loch trout may not score many points, yet they are the essence of the whole fishing scene, in my view. They are also the most vulnerable to abuse. But it was ever thus. Violation was always frightening simple and restoration virtually impossible.
You can find more articles in the archive under A Line On Scottish Fishing.
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