Shooting Times & Country Magazine
On the trail of the elusive Dee springer
Looking to fulfil a long-standing ambition to land a Lower Crathes salmon, Sam Carlisle enlists the help of head gillie Robert Harper
This is Green Bank and this is your best chance today,” said Robert Harper, long-time gillie on Lower Crathes and West Durris, as he pointed out the pool.
A beguiling run hugged the far bank of the river Dee, with the speed of current that salmon like to rest in. Despite a desperate lack of rain that had the local farmers worrying and the gillies in despair, Robert’s soothing Aberdeenshire accent inspired hope.
“Just below that patch of daffodils, that’s where you’ll get him,” he said. Right on cue, a lithe silver torpedo leapt from the water, pulsing with oceanic energy, before plunging back into the flowing water. Full of excitement and expectation, I slowly waded to the top of the run and began the metronomic process of Spey casting my way down the pool, waiting for the moment when the swing of my fly would intersect with the salmon we had seen.
In full flow
Fishing for Atlantic salmon is a tough game at the best of times. Success depends less on the skill of the angler and more on an uncertain and unscientific alignment of meteorological conditions. Perhaps the most essential is rain, so the river flows full and the salmon are tempted to continue their migration upstream.
A salmon that has recently moved from one pool to the next, unsettled and jostling for position, is more likely to take a fly dangled irritatingly
in front of its face. The water level is by no means the only factor. Into the equation you must put: water temperature, air temperature (which should be higher than the water temperature), atmospheric pressure (ideally on the rise) and cloud cover (not too bright). The other essential ingredient is the salmon itself. It may sound obvious, but in recent
“I can only imagine those glorious days, filled with adrenaline-soaked fishing”
years, even when the conditions have been ideal, this has often been the missing piece of the convoluted puzzle.
Spring fishing for salmon is often considered the zenith of the sport. It can be brutally cold, often snowing, and wading for even a short time is a limbnumbing affair. The fish are at their least abundant, with normally just a few trickling in from the sea, as the rest of their compatriots wait for warmer weather. But the fish, known to salmon fishermen simply as springers, are an entirely different type of quarry. They tend to have spent an additional winter at sea, feeding on rich supplies of capelin and sand eels under the
Greenland ice. They are stronger, rounder and more athletic than the summer or autumn run fish.
When you hook one, its dance is all power and might. Once landed, its mirror-silver flanks, with mesmerising hues of blue and black, are one of nature’s most beautiful sights. This, alongside the often harsh conditions you have to brave to catch one, makes them the highest prize in salmon fishing.
Spring success
John Ashley-cooper, one of the most famous salmon fishers of his generation, wrote in his book The Great Salmon Rivers of Scotland that “the Dee is par excellence a spring river… Provided it is not too cold, the fish run continuously from the opening (1 February) till near the end of May.” He wrote that in 1980, when Robert had been a gillie here for four seasons.
“I remember well my second season on the river, in 1978. In February that year, we caught more than 170 fish and in March more than 200.” These are remarkable figures. Now, the five-year average catch for February and March is down to 16 and 33 respectively.
These numbers are still considered respectable. Lower Crathes is arguably the most productive spring beat on the river, but it is still a fall
of close to 90%. I can only imagine those glorious days, filled with adrenaline-soaked fishing.
Today, the river is incredibly low, having had no rain for weeks. The sun is uncharacteristically bright, shining into the face of the fish and forcing them closer to the riverbed. The odds are against me. Despite this, as my brightly coloured Tronach Shrimp fly swims seductively across the current,
I am still full of hope, the final key element of the equation that can equal success in salmon fishing.
Robert also sees some hope on the horizon. “Salmon have always existed in cycles. Nowadays, we see more fish running in the summer. When I first started here, we stopped fishing at the end of May. Now, those summer months are our most prolific.”
A little upstream of us, a strangelooking contraption is anchored to the side of the river. It looks like an aluminium landing raft, with a large Archimedes screw sitting in the middle. It is a smolt trap that catches juvenile salmon, known as smolts, as they swim downstream. Smolts are about 12in long and en route to the ocean for the first time.
It’s part of a project run by the River Dee Trust to assess survival
“Once they show this interest, it becomes a tantalising game of cat and mouse”
during the downriver migration and for the first few miles within the estuary. Preliminary results have indicated that almost half die, most likely from predation, on this part of the journey. A similar project on rivers that drain into the Moray Firth showed much the same level of loss.