Not such a silly old trout
In 2019, The Prof resolves to dedicate more time to the challenge of chasing hill-loch trout
As the New Year begins, the brown trout of Scotland’s hill lochs tempt David Profumo
IT’S a resolution I’ve made before, but, this year, I’m definitely going to spend more time in pursuit of hill-loch trout. They can be among our comeliest of fish and, in my dotage, I find my fondness for wild brownies is on the rise.
Perhaps because that’s where it all started for me—as it doubtless did for many COUNTRY LIFE readers—i’m drawn to the smaller waters of Sutherland and the Isles, whose peat- and malt-hued denizens splatter obligingly to my surface team of Soldier Palmer and Bloody Butcher, even in the dog days when the summer salmon are sulking in their streams.
Many such lochs are oligotrophic, so their trout never grow beyond a modest size, but I’ve come across some (on the Hebridean machair or in the limestone country around Durness) where the odd walrus head will appear near my artificial.
I’ve yet to find an unstocked loch where the trout are big and numerous—and, if I do, I shan’t be telling you. The water I probably know best, having fished it since 1975, lies behind The Doctor’s croft in Harris. We call it the House Loch, although, in the Gaelic, it means the Loch of the Rowan: it’s dark and acidic, with just a few sizeable trout that seldom come to a surface offering.
It’s not that they’re especially dour—they’ve become bottom feeders and decades of autopsies have revealed water boatmen (Corixa) and sticklebacks as the main stomach contents, along with windfall terrestrials such as Daddies and heather flies.
There’s no boat and you must keep well back among the peat hags before casting. I only manage a couple a year, but my best weighed more than 2lb, taken against the odds in blazing August sunshine.
To the infidel, loch fishing is a monotonous business of ‘chuck and chance it’, a lacklustre, mechanical process for paltry pickings. To me, it’s often an experience rich in nuance and unpredictability. Last autumn, I had a day afloat near Forsinard in Sutherland, not so far from the scene of my childhood apprenticeship. After a long drive up a forestry road and a walk-in over boggy Flow Country terrain, encumbered by midges, we reached Loch Caol around elevenses.
There was a pale-grey sky, with the odd Crayola scribble of blue and a light breeze. Occasionally, it pays to try the dry fly in such conditions, in particular, a sedge or olive pattern (the Parachute Greenwell’s is my stand-by), but I strung up a traditional team of three and didn’t let the gillie see certain reservoir monstrosities lurking in my fly box as a last resort—lures such as the Appetiser and Tequila Sunrise Blob. In the event, we didn’t need them.
Especially when the wave is minimal, I’m an advocate of midge-tip or intermediate lines to take your flies a little deeper, but, today, I’m toting a full floater on a number five, 10ft rod. Fanning out medium-length casts as we drift, then raising the rod tip to dance and dibble the bob and dropper, I soon have some fish coming through the ripple at my Kate Maclaren Muddler.
When fishing a team of three ‘pulled’ wets, you must remember to hang the flies briefly before recasting and, today, the eldrins of Caol are on their best behaviour, turning eagerly on the lift-off. I find you have to strike as quick as chain lightning and they fight as if trout twice their weight, gleaming in the clear water like finnock.
By the time gillie Reuben slid our keel up a sandy bay, where we unpacked our pieces and uncorked the Sauvignon, we’d taken five and moved perhaps a dozen more. And what wonderful creatures they are—firmly muscled, small of head and, from their tail roots to the orbits of each eye, darkly spotted on a background of silver, with white chests bordering flanks as buttery-hued as any tropical strand. Hill troots nonpareil, with the best going just over 1lb.
We finished with a basket of a dozen (three killed) and it struck me that this was a nearly perfect expedition. It wasn’t a bonanza —on a nearby water, three of us once took 101 brownies in the day, the record for a lodge since lost to fire—but, in its camaraderie and wilderness context, its blend of concentration and relaxation, it would be hard to beat.
Such fishing, if not gratis, is generally inexpensive, but you really can’t put a price on a day out like this.
It struck me that this was a nearly perfect expedition