I prefer catch and eat fishing

We’ve seen the first of the sea trout. Well I can’t say I’ve actually seen any yet but the fishing twittersphere has started lighting up with the odd report here and there. Which is just as well. Last year the sea trout catch in Scotland was the fourth lowest on record.

Apparently we caught “only” 18,269, which strikes me as a huge number but clearly not. And anyway my score was three. I still cannot work out why everyone is obsessed with catching salmon.

Only I suppose because they are bigger and therefore in theory more exciting. Frankly anything on the end of a line is pretty exciting. But somehow sea trout, like their brown trout cousins, don’t really seem to count.

In the eyes of the angling world everything seems to be rated by the number of “fish”, that is salmon, you can land. And then, very tiresomely, put back. This year as last year we have been pretty well ordered to put back all sea trout. As I catch so few I have to confess that anything I catch tends to end up in the pot, classified as a “bleeder” that is so badly injured in the catching that it would be inhumane to chuck it back, or rather, gently ease the hook from its mouth and carefully let it swim free after affectionately stroking its tummy and letting it wiggle away into the stream.

I realise there are a great many anglers who simply do it for the pure love of the game. But honestly when my grandson or granddaughter catches his or her first sea trout or salmon there is no way, if I am there, I am going down on all fours in the shallows to tell them, effectively, it’s all been a complete waste of time and we must let this lovely fish run free. Get it on the barbie.

At least they then get a lesson in dispatching, cleaning, filleting and cooking. Which officially is quite the wrong attitude but one which I suspect may be more prevalent than the catch statistics produced by Marine Scotland suggest – 84 per cent of all fish caught are released.

I am not suggesting, quite, that you should keep every fish you catch, but what’s the point if you can’t eat them? That many anglers live on a higher spiritual and aesthetic plane than myself and are just happy to splosh about in perfect surroundings and care only about catching a fish and happily returning them, I cannot deny. And the more the merrier.

But it’s like that thing on the grouse moor when after three drives you’ve seen three coveys and shot half a brace and someone says, “Yes, but of course it’s just so lovely to be out here in the hills.” Well yes up to a point Lord Copper. Up to a point. n