Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Casting into the unknown
Patrick Laurie’s local river isn’t the sort of place that people travel miles to fish, but it’s worth a go when the sea trout are running
There is nothing more mysterious than a sea trout. Even the finest scientific minds are slightly baffled by these fish, which move enigmatically back and forth to the sea like ghosts. Some years will bring big runs of sea trout up my local rivers here in Galloway and yet there will be times when they seem to have vanished off the face of the earth.
The mystery is compounded by the fact that the fish have become scarce in many places and they are not always easy to find. Catch records of salmon and sea trout on my local haunts show a steady decline in numbers for the past 20 years. Sea trout enjoy an unexpected blip now and then, but the direction of travel is almost exclusively downhill.
I can try my luck for the entirety of a summer and only bump one or two fish, but when you read back through accounts of sea trout in the old days, it’s a relief to realise these fish have never been easy to work with. Great works by wise writers such as Hugh Falkus identify trends and patterns in sea trout behaviour, but each river seems to behave slightly differently for the angler. Tricks that might pay off in one place might be useless in another. It’s difficult to find any hardand-fast rules that apply everywhere.
Flexible approach
I have learned my way from copying friends and neighbours over many years, but I was sorely humbled a few years ago when I accepted an invitation to fish on a fine sea trout river in Angus. I tried to play the same tricks from home and I came up empty-handed. It was a useful reminder to remain flexible and, after three nights, I began to understand how the pools worked and fish responded. Perhaps inevitably, I came home and tried out some of my newfound tricks on the river below my house. I failed miserably.
The biggest problem in recent years has been a lack of suitable weather for sea trout fishing in Galloway. They like a decent downpour and rising water in late spring towards midsummer. Something about that flush seems to bring them nosing upstream.
However, the past few years have seen an extremely dry period of weather from May to July. The water levels drop right down to the rocks and even the resident brownies are bored by the shallow pools and the static, soupy water.
There is almost no point trying under these conditions, but I can’t believe that every sea trout would simply stay away in the salt water until the weather was ripe. I think it’s more likely that a handful might try their luck anyway, but these bold individuals are probably so scarce
and hard-pressed that it would be a difficult business trying to catch one.
It’s more conjecture than scientific fact, but I base this theory on the discovery of a very fine sea trout of around 3lb that I found, munched and discarded by an otter. This fish was several miles up a river that was
“Tricks that might pay off for the angler in one place might be useless in another”
running very low and members of the local angling club were amazed to think anything would run upstream in such conditions. Perhaps there had been foul play. Perhaps it was a plant, but it seemed to reconfirm some of the strange mystery of these fish.
Watching them jump up the weir in Dumfries, it’s clear that sea trout are madly determined creatures. If they set their minds to go, nothing will prevent them. Besides, the life cycle of the sea trout would be impossible if fish had not decided to go against the flow at some point. The actions of a few renegades soon become the habit of an entire species and I think that’s a nice justification for optimism.
With the water low down and only a few small ripples of rain throughout the summer, I accepted a challenge from Shooting Times to catch a sea trout on the river below my house. It was far from impossible, but the weather was against me as I walked down one evening to try my luck.
It had been wet during the preceding days and the river had risen enough to hide the worst of the bottoms. A few eddies swirled here and there. While the prospect of success did not look great, I have been able to conjure up some useful results from less promising conditions in the past.
I like the wild turkey flies that are sold in my local fishing shop. I’m not sure if these are universally available, but something like them used to be tied by a gamekeeper that I followed around when I was a boy. That redand-yellow body looks simple and low-tech, but it has delivered the goods many times over.
Life in the old river
It’s said that wild turkeys are great on the river Annan, but whenever I have tried to buy them in other parts of the country, I’ve been met with a frown of confusion. If they are a local variety, it seems like an odd choice of name — I tend to think of turkeys in an American context, so perhaps this pattern is an import.
The river below my house is heavily overgrown with nettles after a long, ripe summer. Back in the days when fish came here in abundance, the banks were kept clean and tidy by an enormous number of visiting anglers. As the fish have declined, the
“I would love to see the river from a fly’s-eye view, watching as trout come in for a strike”
banks have become overgrown and some of the best pools can only be reached by wading through nettles and thistles in chest waders. That adds a certain excitement to fishing after dark, particularly in the height of summer, when midges abound.
I started to cast in the early twilight and a few small brown trout downstream seemed to confirm that there was life in the old river. Some of these rose to follow and bother the wild turkey, but the chunkiness of the fly seemed to deter them from making contact. They would have been more of a bother to catch and the disturbance caused by hooking and unhooking a little ’un might have blown my cover in a scenario where stealth and quiet are key factors.
After more than an hour on multiple pools down alongside the deep willows, I started to wonder if luck was on my side after all. Young mallard moved out from the rooty banks to eyeball me suspiciously and I wondered if my time would have been better spent with the 12-bore.
The final pool is overhung by enormous veteran ash trees and this water runs deep and slowly. It’s hard to fish in complete darkness for the risk of catching your line on overhead twigs, but there was still enough light to flick away from the edges and let the current tow the wild turkey diagonally across the deep water.
In the age when anything seems possible, I am still waiting for somebody to invent a camera that can be attached to a fishing fly. I would love to see the river from a fly’s-eye view and there would be so much to learn from watching the fish as they come in for a strike. Do they dart like a barracuda, or is it a more leisurely, stand-offish approach? I bet the activity will vary depending upon the situation, but it would be fascinating to learn how often we experience a near-miss without ever realising it.
Rogue outsider
My time was up and, aside from a few small nibbles from the tiniest of fry, my attempt had wound up in failure. When it’s dry during the height of summer, it’s fair to reckon that the main bulk of fish come up later in the year when the water is better. I had been hoping for a rogue outsider, but I’ll keep fishing into the autumn.
There are still enough sea trout in this part of the world to hold my interest and, given the general direction of travel for this species in Britain, it’s important to take nothing for granted.