CHASING RAINBOWS

The weather front that Michael Wigan recently encountered on a loch fishing expedition proved testing, but the experienced angler knew to ensure his boat flew under the radar

Navigating weather fronts is part and parcel of a day on a trout loch

Occasionally a session on a trout loch is worth reporting. This time the weather had been turbulent, holding promise. In my brief loch session there were three weather spells. At first the air was heavy as rain washed out distant hills.

When I started rowing the loch a bubble-train frothed up where the oars had dipped in. The fly-line hung out the back between the white foam rows. Trout do not like that. They do not take flies trailing in bubbles. Nor do they like the atmospheric pressure which makes bubbles.

I kept rowing as rain began to fall.

It was a short drenching shower. Only the loch was deluged, the far-off ridges brightening. There was the usual hissing and zinging from rain drops hitting placid water.

Getting wetter, all you can do is keep moving. I steered a course along the edge of the reed-beds. Trout glide through the reeds which afford some shade and some cover. Barring each other they have no major predators on the loch, the osprey apart, but they still like cover, the shadow and dark corners.

A fat yellow-bodied trout took line and dug deep. Reeling hard, getting his head up, I slid him over the rim of the net. Adequate dinner for one. I needed more and soon had several. Woken by rain oxygenating the water, fish searched for food.

In the next weather change rain moved up into the hills and the loch stilled to a flat calm. Extra-clear light etched sharp contrasts in the sky and the water was a glass mirror. Mill-pond spells are temporary, ticklish with suspense.

The outflow end of this loch has patches of floating weed. Weed neutralises movement even when there are waves. Even-bottomed on

‘One fish rose but with mouth shut’

the stony shallow side there were cavernous holes beneath the peat hag banks opposite. I tried flipping an oiled green drake onto individual fish steadily surfacing and slurping at insects in between the flotillas of weed. One fish rose but with mouth shut. Trout expressed interest but no conviction.

My green drake was bigger than other insects I could see dipping and floating in the flat air, but surely big trout would be lured by a big titbit? The rises were from chunkier fish, you could tell. There was no splash just a pooling ring and a moment of slow suction. Anglers like that situation. In the stilled-down air suction noises popped around me. But not for me.

The whole loch was mirror-flat by now. I paid out most of the long line and rowed. No untoward motion, the oars just slowly dipped and gently rose. A small swirl curled where the oar lifted. There were no bubbles and the water was silk.

Let no-one tell you that fish can’t be caught in a flat calm. They can. But the boat and the angler have to become distant presences, working from afar. Flies or fly swinging in an arc seem to provoke more reactions. The parade of trout on the floor of the rowing boat grew. Somehow a trout caught in a flat calm is worth more. I slid into the mooring in the boat-bay damp, weary and happy.

When fishing is easy, it is so easy. Understanding fishing is evidently not so easy. In Monmouthshire an ancient salmoncatching method, only surviving in one place, involves standing in the Severn Estuary’s tidal flows manhandling enormous lave nets waiting for tide-running salmon to swim in. It must be one of the most physically demanding methods of catching a salmon ever thought of, like trying to catch swallows with a butterfly net.

The latest jape from Natural Resource Wales, the authority in these matters and not best loved by Welsh anglers, is to impose catch and release on the lave netsmen. You may continue your antiquated low-impact fishery but you may not keep a fish. Heritage in Wales is apparently a two-edged sword.

‘The parade of trout on the floor of the rowing boat grew’