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Andrew Tennant: Salmon fisher and conservationist by Michael Wigan
Over time I have met quite a few anglers and salmon enthusiasts. None of them knew quite so much as Andrew Tennant. Most of what he gleaned was direct from experience. His school was the river not the library. Thereby many of the nostrums cherished by biologists and salmon academics he had no faith in. If he didn’t see it, chances are he didn’t credit it. Andrew Tennant had one inestimable advantage. He was of a generation which had fished everywhere, before some salmon destinations were even recognised as having salmon. He was in Russia on the Kola Peninsular only a little after the reindeer herders had been chased off. Murmansk airport in those days was a chaotic maelstrom. He bumped down the roads to Iceland’s rivers when they were volcanic larva. He fished Scottish rivers, often on the best beats, for year after year. His fishing companion was John Ashley-Cooper who wrote the great salmon book of its time. The two of them sometimes caught 50 in a morning. They fished Rothes, Delphi, and Orton together. Andrew Tennant kept no fishing diary but whenever I mentioned a beat, he knew it. Sometimes he had a story about his time there. In the 1960s and the 1970s when the North Sea was swarming with cod and haddock and also salmon, a period scientists call ‘the gadoid outburst’, he was fishing hard and long days. Fishing alongside Ashley-Cooper it was necessary to cast a good line. Andrew Tennant’s casting was a joy to behold. Indeed, many people covertly or otherwise sneaked a peep at him beautifully throwing a long, straight, precision-angled line which landed like thistledown. One time on the Deveron, where he owned the Muiresk beat and had a share in the river’s most revered beat, Forglen, I saw him casting on a pool below a short cliff, hidden in the trees. But from above there was a place you could see the pool and what was happening. Here, a small crowd of people was assembled. Below, unaware of the spectators, was Andrew Tennant looping line over the pool and advancing a step between casts. From above we could see the fish stacked at the shallower end where the pool ran out. As the angler moved down most casts attracted a rise, fish just lazily coming up from below to look at the fly and then sink gently back down again. The pool was completed without any salmon taking. The angler said afterwards he had seen nothing at all. None of the slow rises had produced a single movement on the tranquil surface. The fly had been dead-on the right arc but no salmon was inclined to address it.
Andrew Tennant
