FLY TALKING

Planning tactics and swapping stories with like-minded fishing folk is half the fun of being an avid angler

Sharing tall tales and talking tactics over a dram is part of the enjoyment of fishing

Late one August evening I dropped into a Highlands hotel for refreshment. The evidence of anglers within festooned the car park. Leaning on the bar behind me I heard a familiar voice from long ago. It hailed from a once-famous figure in the area who had bought a fishing beat and transformed it.

For several years he lived on the water whilst salmon were running, re-defining the river by multiplying the catch record through his singleminded approach. Here he was now, standing whilst others around him sat, in an Indian summer following no summer at all, expatiating on how to fish in low-water conditions.

Questions and theories ricocheted around the room. One man said: ‘I like to bust them out of their lethargy, give them something to think about.’ Another asked if there were thermoclines (temperature bands) in rivers. An old hand pointed out that as autumn approaches each passing day changes t he salmon’s metabolism. Spawning urgency closes in. Any frost and the cocks would start fighting for space, charging each other with their ugly, blackened snouts.

This is the angling ‘ conversation’, part of the reason we do what we do, to get the craic, exchange views, show our mettle. The standing angler fielded the queries with relish. He said that only a month ago he had been on this now-sweltering river in a temperature of 16C. A lady angler gasped. Could that be true?

Everything in angling is true. That is the point. We have free rein. The elementary matter of why salmon move to fishing flies, when they have stopped feeding soon after leaving the wintering grounds in the north-east Atlantic, can keep conversation, imagination and speculation alive deep into the wee hours.

Anglers stand out because they are packed with hope. As the car boots open and fishermen assemble the mighty appurtenances of what has become normal angling gear, hope is almost tangible in the air. This contrasts to the water flowing past, where so often nothing happens. Nothing may continue happening all morning.

Yet that same angler is not deflated. He goes into the lunch-hut, if such a thing exists, with the pool he will start on after lunch already forming a picture in his mind. The triumph of hope over experience is championed by salmon anglers.

One wonders why. The answer is, maybe, nothing to do with the probability or otherwise of catching something. It concerns what occurs when a salmon sweeps the fly into its jaws and the angler feels the first jolt. The sensation is extraordinary.

Pound for pound the fish in its element is far more powerful than the angler. The fisherman could not swim so fast or jump so high or bore so deep. The silver tourist, with the double-meaning beloved of my Irish friends, outperforms its antagonist at every level. It has the immediacy and glamour of supernatural vision. Only cleverly fabricated fishing tackle puts the contest on anything resembling an even footing.

‘The triumph of hope over experience is championed by salmon anglers’

Immersed in angling It is this engagement that seeps into the tired angler lying in his evening bath, his own static imitation of the salmon habitat. Maybe a shell holds the soap. Bath tiles are fish-motifs. On the wall, crumpling with repeated damp steams from soaking angler cadavers, are pictures of people with bent rods fiercely glaring into the water where a line zips around attached to a concealed fishy form.

Outsiders to this scene talk airily of fishing bores and lampoon the foibles and frailties of salmon-focused people. But consider, if it were not salmon what other subject would have snared the imagination of these driven individuals? Standing where the water flows, they do little harm. They exact maximum meaning from simple situations.

Don’t knock us. There were no other passers-by in that hotel. Salmon keep alive the country’s remote corners. Anglers’ dreams cut through colour, race, and creed. It is all as mysterious as why salmon take the fly.