By Bill Currie
This year the spring all over Scotland has come early. Indeed, it has come so early that there is a danger that it might decide at some point to go away again. We should keep it in mind that winter can come in March - or later. Just to cheer up readers, let me digress with a short story about last spring. After a mild, even hot April, I was up in Aberdeenshire fishing the Dee for salmon. The tropical spring suddenly stopped at the end of the month and it was followed in the first week of May by a remarkable cold snap. The warm April had brought out the white blossoms of the wild cherry, the gean tree, as we call it in Scotland. There was one beautiful gean in the garden of the house I was staying in during my week's fishing and it was absolutely festooned with white blooms. A cold wind came down from the north and on May 6th, I think it was, we woke to find that it had snowed and the cherry with all its blossom was covered with a white crest. Snow on snow, as it were. I couldn't help saying over to myself a memorable line from one of the pessimistic poems of Houseman. You'll remember it, no doubt. The poem begins, 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough..' Houseman slides into gloom at this prospect. Why is he pessimistic in spring with the cherries in blossom ? He is depressed by just having had his twenty-first birthday. The arithmetic of this troubles him. ' Now of my threescore years and ten,/ Twenty will not come again' . He ends the poem however with the memorable lines, ' About the woodlands I will go/ To see the cherry hung with snow.'
Last year we did this in real time, without resorting to metaphor. I'm not saying that this will happen. Indeed, as a fisher, I fervently hope it will not. I'm writing about the opposite, really. I have been out salmon fishing in February this year and we are finding trout taking our salmon flies and these trout are in excellent condition. We have not had a winter worth mentioning,just a long mild autumn and an early spring so far. I have already seen several of these lovely , hardy flies, the dark olives, sailing down on the surface of the late January Tay and the February Tweed. These flies are the harbingers of spring trout fishing. For me, in the past, they have also been a great source of temptation. It is a special kind of temptation, not referred to in Scripture as far as I know. It is the temptation to lay the salmon rod aside and fish for trout which, in the spring river can pop up for dark olives with a freedom which they will never again show during the year.
Let me give you case histories of this happening. I was fishing with a friend on the Tay at Logierait in March and we were doing that rather dull thing, harling for salmon. That is, we were trailing a fly and a plug behind the boat. My only excuse for not wading and casting to the salmon is that the particular pool we were on was very much a no-wade place. During our weaving back and forth in the boat, we began to notice, first the odd dark olive, sailing past like a little yacht, then a handful. A hatch was beginning. The trout were rather reluctant to rise at first. Then, as if the first splashy rises stirred up the others, the pool was suddenly alive with rising trout. Because of the angle of the light, we could sometimes see the fish themselves and they were excellent trout, many over a pound. Temptation set in. I fumbled for my trout rod. Yes, I would abandon the salmon fishing and try for a decent trout or two. I was, however, saved from sin, as it were. A salmon suddenly took the plug we were harling over the deep pot and the trout were abandoned. The fish was eventually brought ashore, fourteen pounds, and there were feelings of great satisfaction all round. When we looked back at the stream, perhaps now to try for a trout, not a fish was to be seen. In March and April trout rise suddenly and stop equally abruptly. If you want to catch them, you have to be ready to work fast and work hard while the rise is on.
On the Tweed at Lower Birgham, where we try for a salmon at the end of March or the beginning of April, we prepare sensibly for the temptation of the trout. We set up our trout tackle before we begin trying for a salmon. But, to keep us on the straight and narrow path, we do not take our trout rods down to the water until lunch time. Then, after a hasty pie, we go down to the side of the salmon pool where our lunch hut is and sometimes we hit the rise perfectly. I have seen a trout of a pound and threequarters there and many smaller fish. When the March rise is on to olives you would think there was no tomorrow. The fish go hard at the feast, taking their first decent fly hatches of the spring. The floating fly is best and I have sometimes caught these early trout on a size ten fly, which, in other words, is a very large dry fly indeed. We are, of course, imitating a big natural, but later in the season, trout become very wary of large floating artificials. Sometimes they even become wary of large floating natural flies. I have seen trout scared to take Red Sedges on a summer evening when they were scuttering over trout-filled water leaving a wake like a surf boarder.
It is remarkable to see aquatic flies hatching in cold water. We see them on Tweed right to the end of our autumn salmon fishing on St Andrews Day, at the end of November. Trout fishing stops on Tweed at the end of September ! If I am down looking at the water in winter, walking the dogs by the salmon pools, I often see lone olives floating down in really nasty weather. The colder it is the darker they get. What a remarkable fly ! It is a real northerner, preferring the cold to the heat. But, when I see hatches in March in decent numbers, I feel that spring has come, even if the season is sometimes maverick and slides back into winter when the calendar says spring proper should have come.
You can find more articles in the archive under A Line On Scottish Fishing.
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