By
Bill Currie
I was brought up in the south west of Scotland, on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. My fishing nurses were the River Ayr and the Doon, two rivers speaking of two different kinds of Scottish land. The Ayr is a gentle stream, idling beside meadows with fat milking herds in them, forming ‘dubs’ and ‘wells’ where the river slides under red sandstone cliffs and shows good trout rising seductively to summer flies beneath full trees. The Doon speaks to me of a different landscape. It gathers its flow from the hills of the Southern Uplands, great green rolling hills with heather on the tops and lochs nestling in every valley. It draws its highest waters from the moors and the peaty streams which fill the lochs, then , gathering massively in Loch Doon, the river itself pours down through Ness Glen then loses itself for a mile or two, ‘a foiled circuitous wanderer’, in the flat bottomed valley between Dalmellington and Patna. There, it takes up what I think of as its true character, - that of a fast rocky stream picking its way through the glen at Smithston, roaring down the Borland Glen and giving us a salmon water full of variety and challenge.
By the greatest good luck, having been brought up more or less on the banks of the Doon and having as a boy caught my first salmon there, I found myself nearly fifty years later helping a friend to improve the Smithston fishery not far downstream from Patna. I had fished that water as a schoolboy for, I think about half a crown a year. It must have been a sum as low as that, because , when I came home on leave from the RAF I was charged five shillings for my day’s salmon fishing and I thought it was quite a price. It was, after all, quite a large percentage of my conscript’s salary of twenty eight shillings a week. The Doon then was a productive salmon water, however, and in those historic days the river provided me with much longed-for sport.
Nowadays, I fish Doon each year in the first week of September. Sometimes the water is so low that I do little more than poke about with a trout rod, looking for a grilse behind a boulder in a stream. This year, as I have said, a September deluge came and raised the water a foot. The Doon never looks like a lowland river, even in low water. It always seems to rush past Smithston like a hill water, making a multitude of small pools, rippling down streams and frothing round boulders. But when the September deluge came the Doon’s tune became fortissimo. The hill stream became a salmon river proper, unfordable, impressive and full of the promise of a salmon. To add to the sense of excitement, people kept saying to me, ‘ Have you heard? The bay at Doonfoot is heaving with salmon waiting to run.’ I fished all morning on the first day without seeing or touching a fish. The river was clearing and falling slightly. As I fished, I had the unusual feeling that I was not in the South West of Scotland; I was up north, somewhere in Sutherland or in the Hebrides. About half past two, I was fishing a smashing little stream called the Roe Deer and I saw a salmon rise to my fly and miss it spectacularly like the rise of a burn trout magnified a score of times. That sudden rise really did it. It woke me up. I brought my line in quickly, not reeling in but handlining so that I could cast precisely to the same place again. I was no longer in the south of Scotland. I was up north, up in Sutherland on a Hebridean river and I knew I should be dibbling. Dibbling ? Let me explain.
In the far north and north west of Scotland we often fish our summer flies for salmon in a rather particular way. Instead of letting the fly swing round with the stream and cover the lies, we fish two flies. One, on a dropper to the main cast, is made to trail through the stream and bounce over the ripples; the other, the tail fly, is made to follow it , sometimes waking through the surface, sometimes below it and at the end, just before you lift the line out, it also skitters and dances on the water. This can be a wonderful way to catch salmon. You see the fish moving to dropper or tail fly, a great arch of silver or, even more exciting, just a head appearing on the surface, opening a large mouth and engulfing the fly. Dibbling is a great test of character. In the middle of the spectacle of a great rise, you must hold your hand and let the fly go down with the salmon before you tighten.
Without moving from my position on the Roe Deer stream, I quickly rigged up a dropper, tied on a little shrimpy-looking fly with a trailing tail and, leaving the tail fly as it was - one of my own tying, a small double Claret Shrimp - I lengthened line and fished the stream exactly as before, but dibbled it. This time I raised the rod top and made the dropper surface and trail on the ripple. A small trout leapt at the dropper, but missed. I cast again and half way across the pool a trout of about a quarter of a pound leapt at the dropper and this time stuck on. I did not want that. My mind was on bigger things. I raised the rod to see whether the trout would fall off again and as I did so I saw the salmon sweep round on the tail fly just as it broke the surface. I waited a second, tightened and was into the fish. The little trout wriggled on the tight line and mercifully dropped off. Somewhere down into the stream the salmon pulled hard, then ran upstream and jumped. Great! A decent fish, silver and blue, up from the bay ten miles below.
I brought the fish in after a few minutes, netted it, and looked it over. It was an eight pounder, - the quintessential summer salmon in the west. It was a hen fish, short, very thick in the shoulder, strong and fresh. Now, this year has been a rather poor one for salmon on the west, except, it seems, on one or two rivers like the Doon which brought in good grilse and summer salmon, albeit a week or two late. I decided to return the fish, and, taking the Claret Shrimp out I lifted the salmon up gently, walked the step or so towards the water and began to stoop down to slip her back in when she leapt high out of my hands and landed on her back in the river among the bankside rushes. She seemed not to know what to do next, so, I stepped into the river, righted the salmon, turned its head upstream and after a sup or two of water she kicked out of my hands and glided away.
That salmon was, it seemed out of place and out of time. It was a fish like a northern one rising like a trout to a dibbled fly. Doon had become like the Inver or the Kirkaig or the Aros, - but then, I suppose, all hill rivers are kith and kin. The Doon had also, that day behaved like an old-fashioned salmon river, - I mean a west coast river with good stocks of salmon ready to rise in the pools and streams. In the poor 1997 season that old-fashionedness was a considerable virtue, not to mention a considerable surprise. Doon had the good grace to stay old-fashioned for most of the week. I got into six fish, landed five, released four and took one bright eight pound cock fish home to feed the troops. Of course, the thing we all most fervently want is for all the rivers of the west coast and the Hebrides to become old-fashioned again in precisely this way. Will time run back and fetch the age of gold ? That week on the Doon made it seem just possible. When that happens fishers throughout the West and in the Hebrides will will stop each other to give them the news that the bay is full of fish and when the rain comes, fishers will not sleep for excitement. Then we all might settle down to importing tactics from the north and possibly exporting others back again. There must surely be a Gaelic proverb which says that when the past becomes the present again salmon fishers and all just folk can once more savour felicity.
You can find more articles in the archive under A Line On Scottish Fishing.
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