THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN
water is hell for fish and anglers High
The Autumnal fishing conversations around the country lingered over last season. As usual some of us are ruing the use of a fly which might not have been right. We saw a fish roll and tried something that didn’t work, or we passed one over him too soon, or too long after. Somehow the fish stayed in the stream while we stayed looking at the place he moved. Anglers know the feeling.
Much of the fishing talk across Scotland dwelt, as ever, on rain. August and September saw a prolonged spell of warm, rainless, windless, balmy weather. Even in Sutherland grass was still growing up to mid-October. The fish stopped pirouetting in front of frustrated anglers when rain eventually came and steadied themselves for the move up-river.
Spawning is normally due during the first week in November. But Scotland is wonderfully various and notoriously difficult to predict. On Sutherland’s River Shin it is a month later.
But weather talk exceeded itself in 2016, inspired by a new occurrence. I saw it at first hand in late July. Out of nowhere a plump of rain dropped on a hillside about a thousand acres in size. Like an overturned bucket, it fell monsoon-like.
This hillside drains into a burn which is around a yard wide. After a mile it joins another similar burn which drains a loch. Seeing the burn that they both issue into suddenly transformed into a racing brown torrent some 50 yards wide, I crossed the moor to investigate. One feeder burn roared downhill, measuring a good forty yards across, while the other was unaltered. Brown water coursed into the river Helmsdale and fish clung to the edges to keep soil out of their gills.
On the river Findhorn a similar event occurred but here the results were even more extreme. High up-river in the hills at Drynachan the gamekeeper was working near the lodge when he heard a roaring sound. Round the corner of a steep corrie he saw a rolling wave advancing. He ran to his truck and drove fulltilt 400 yards down-river where he found two anglers calmly casting into a glassy pool which was quiet after weeks of warm sun. They were ankle-deep on a wide gravel-pan. He shouted for them to get out and thankfully they did.
Further down river an angler was perched on a mid-river rock meditatively long-casting to the far side. He ran for high ground too. This is the fact which makes you pause; at a pinched point the river rose seven feet in under three minutes. On a Highland scale this was a small tsunami. One angler thanked the keeper for saving his life.
At a later date in t he summer another thunder-plump hit the Strath of Kildonan. A lodge with a garden occasionally open to the public found a new water feature swilling through it. Burns as wide as a shoe became torrents with rolling rocks. The roads department struggled to clear the debris, large culverts were choked, and the road was closed. No-one had seen the like before.
This had repercussions for fishermen, and for fish. These thunder-plumps, often accompanied by close-overhead thunder, were in mid-summer. The ground was hard and dry and non-absorbent. The spates were consequently quicker and heavier.
Had these events happened when fry were emerging from the redds in early spring they would have caused multiple casualties. As it was, young fish were stranded in evaporating backwaters. Some may have found their way back into the river; others were tipped down the throats of herons.
Big salmon will have sheltered behind bed-rock and gone low in swirling eddies.
But it was not only the fish that were in danger; it is time for anglers to take note. Maybe it is less advised to walk into the water wearing headphones and listening to loud music. The weather forecast may not help a lot, common sense and general awareness might.
The climatic causes may in t urn affect salmon. The Dee was ferociously swept out in early spring, an event which was widely reported. How that once-great river recovers its salmon run will be watched with interest.
‘On a Highland scale this was a small tsunami’