By
Bill Currie
I am lucky enough to have known and fished Mull for several decades. In my early days on Mull, I explored and fished the lochs on the Ross of Mull, - that ancient arm of pre-Cambrian boilerplating reaching out towards Iona. At that stage, as if at a distance, I heard about the major fishing waters of the island, but I had never fished them. I was a student working on a rehabilitation project on a salmon netting station, then a forestry worker. Places like Loch Ba and its extraordinary, short river were beyond my reach. Except one evening when I plucked up courage and knocked at the door of Gruline House and the tenant remarkably said, yes, I could fish Ba from the shore. I made my way to the banks, set up my trout rod and flies and waded along casting here and there, expecting trout or finnock. Instead, the waters parted and gave my line an almighty heave. I had, for a few seconds, the sensation of being into a great fish, then sudden collapse of contact as my trout cast broke. That fish had to be a salmon. Just a chance cast, with the wrong flies and weight of tackle, one glorious heave, and it was gone.
There is a kind of smiling of the gods at work when this sort of thing happens. Sometimes it leads to a memorable loss; sometimes to a catch which comes ashore despite fumbling and ineptitude and inadequate tackle. Both have happened to me on Mull. In the case of this early loss of a salmon on Ba, it raised the place to almost mythical status for me and planted in me a deep longing to return.
Ba remained for me a curious and compelling place; its long loch among high hills and its short, delightful river became places of wonder. Thirty years after losing my chance salmon on the loch, through a great friend of mine who settled on Mull and ran an excellent fishing lodge there, I had the chance to get to know the river, and the loch, quite well. I usually fished both river and loch late in the season in September and October. On the loch you wait for a steady westerly breeze and drift its waters. On the river, you long for a flood. On the Ba, as on other Mull waters, a flood comes and goes suddenly. The spate brings a sudden rise of water. Pools change shape and character almost as you watch. In the river Ba in a falling spate, you cannot fish the same pool twice. River height, pool shape and new fish are all in turmoil. Out of that flux an incredible richness is born.
I remember fishing down to a pool on a bend, adopting the conventional approach of covering the stream and letting the fly sweep round below me into my bank. I touched nothing. Walking back up the river in an hour's time I saw the pool from a new angle and I saw it differently. I saw that the normal stream was not where the salmon might be because a great eddy had been formed in the flooded pool between two streams and, like a target, this appeared to me to be the focus of the place. But how was it to be covered ? I decided I had to fish this eddy upstream, - something never done in salmon flyfishing. But the eddy turned the river round, slow swinging water between rushing runs. The eddy had not been there the last time I passed. In half an hour it would certainly be gone. I popped my fly into that slow, turning place, holding the line up to allow my small copper tube fly to get down fairly quickly and fish the few yards of gentle, turning water where the salmon might hold. I was, in one sense, fishing the pool backwards. I was, however, sure it held a fish. I was right, for once; I had a take and hooked a nine and a half pound salmon. Incidentally, that was the heaviest salmon I have ever had off the Ba. Most are six or seven pounders.
As I got to know the resources of the river Ba I found it to be a place of tiny corners and great detail. In lower water it was a considerable challenge to fish it well. Let me tell you about one of these neuks. Above the road bridge of the Ba the river has only run about half a mile from the loch above. In that reach it gathers its waters into a series of small pools and glides, one of which is known as 'The Flats'. This is a splendid place to fish, and it will give you great sport if you are subtle about it. This is a place, par excellence, for the dropper, that subtle fly fished on a strand half way up the cast and trailed and bobbed on the stream. We fished size eight Invictas on the dropper on Ba using a single handed trout or sea trout rods. We treated the Ba salmon as if they were sea trout. We crept to the bank, kept our heads well down and fished the Flats from our knees. The fly came in on a short line, right under the bank, out of sight eventually, its dropper trailing and waking and bouncing on the ripple. The salmon rises there were fantastic, sometimes as gentle as a small trout, sometimes quite violent. Once or twice all you would see was a hint of an arc in the water changing the colour of the stream and the fish would be on. Thereafter, all resemblance to trout fishing ceased with the salmon tearing around on the trout rod and causing all manner of anxieties. A small, red salmon took me there one October and ran vigorously down through two pools before I managed, after a frantic chase, to net it out almost at the road bridge.
I was on my knees at the Flats one October evening, trying to blend with the bank and dibble my dropper over the near stream, when a stag with a head as big as a tree, appeared on the other side of the Ba, twenty yards above me. It stood, scented the air, then marched into the river with high strides. The stag stopped in mid-stream and, like a romantic painting, he stood there majestically, looking down to where I knelt on the bank. It was an unforgettable moment. The stag was frozen in a regal pose in the middle of that Hebridean stream, backed by birches, pines, heather and the tall hill. I don't know whether he saw me or scented me, but he suddenly turned almost in disdain, crossed to my bank and trotted off towards the loch. Those who know the Highlands or the Hebrides only from chocolate box tops and advertisements for oatcakes may think that stags are always there, standing royal and dignified with the blue hills behind. Let them think, then, that my moment with the stag on the Ba was nothing special. I know, however, that the encounter was amazing, a rare and beautiful experience, an unforgettable moment of harmony and balance. The rod and the river, the birches and the hill, the angler and the stag were, for a moment, all one, a perfect suspended experience, removed in all its aspects by the greatest gulf from the cliche of the biscuit box and the illustrated calendar.
Loch Ba has long drifts over bays, past points, along wooded shorelines and, right at the head, it gives you a series of drifts over a shallowing estuary where the top river enters. There you will see salmon crashing out of the water along the steep shingle shore to the south west. You will see sea troutleaping high out of the loch. If the wind is favourable, you can drift in from one shore from the west and with luck manage a drift out of the estuary along the south eastern shore to the burn among the trees where the Knock beat ends. I have had some lovely sea trout on the wet fly on these drifts and have lost better, but I have not taken a salmon there, although I have raised several. My October fishings may be rather late for loch salmon. They are best on Ba in the late summer, but the autumn fish tantalise you with their boiling rises which lead to nothing but raised hopes.
It was on that drift that I saw a sea eagle. These rare birds were recently re-introduced to Scotland and first established themselves on the island of Rhum. A pair came to Mull in the mid eighties and frequented Loch Ba. We were drifting down the eastern shore at the head when we saw the great bird flying up the loch and two hundred yards ahead of our drifting boat, turning into a clump of small trees. When we reached the end of our drift we had only to nudge the boat fifty yards forward to ease round the point to the small bay in which the eagle had settled. It rose suddenly from a pine tree and with great wings spread, eight feet from tip to tip, it came towards us in a great slow beating of wings, as if looking for currents of air to lift it. The sea eagle passed directly over our heads, not thirty feet up, darkening the sky, before rising with the wind and crossing the loch to land on the far shore. On the tree which it had left was a massive nest, a cacophony of branches, sticks and heather, locked into the heart of the pine, ludicrously like a double bed which some upheaval had placed there and mammocked.
Mull is an island which hints to fishers that they are privileged by being close to the inside story of the place. Over decades, you accumulate incidents and they build into not so much an anthology as a feeling for the essence of the island. I feel Mull to be sometimes a lazy place, with its old hay meadows gently declining into rushy moor. Sometimes it is wild and maverick; sometimes it is open hearted and generous. Mull is never a very obvious island. Where it seems to be, it is deceiving you, for just a little further in, it is a place of amazing atmosphere. Fishers know this, especially fishers who do not count their catch as if they were at the market. Ba alone could teach you this, but so could Aros and Frisa and a host of smaller waters. I cannot deny that this place shaped me, at least a bit, and has given me access to a dimension of experience in my fishing which has enriched the whole activity.
You can find more articles in the archive under A Line On Scottish Fishing.
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