PAYBACK ON SCOTTISH WATER

BY MARSHALL BISSETT

Youthful confessions are rarely dramatic and often self-serving, especially where fishing is involved. But here goes. As a wee boy growing up in central Scotland I was taken to Loch Leven, the ancestral home of America’s brown trout. There, in violation of the loch’s ancient laws, my two uncles, whose angling skills were limited to drinking Scotch in a boat, handed me a fly rod with a tiny worm added to the hook of the fly. Their wives expected fish, and someone had to catch and keep them—a practice that has outlasted all catch-and-release lobbies until the present day. No casting was involved, and dinner was secured. In the glorious 1960s, pristine native browns would eat a dangled worm in any depth of water. In 1929, 53,598 trout were caught and registered in the loch’s ledger.

The second confession, while not illegal, has (I believe) jinxed my Atlantic salmon fishing forever, and perhaps into the afterlife. At age 16 I took a job netting salmon on the mighty River Tay, a few miles from my hometown of Perth. It was grueling callus-producing work that paid well. With overtime I was earning more than my school headmaster. We netted round the clock in six-hour shifts and learned the art of bashing salmon on the snout without harming their good looks. Years later the last of these netting stations was bought out by angling associations and the practice ended. For perspective, at that time both bodies of water were viewed as an infinite resource. The Tay fed the appetites of the wealthy before salmon became a supermarket commodity and Loch Leven produced breeding stock for the Western world.

More than 50 years later, it’s time to re-visit Loch Leven and the River Tay fair and square—no nets and no live bait. I’m ready to apologize and move on. I’m hoping for redemption, but I would settle for a good day on the water. Water, or its lack thereof, is a hot topic in the British Isles, where rivers were recently closed in South Wales. Many of England’s rivers are repositories for raw sewage and the hallowed chalk streams contain mainly stocked trout. When Scotsmen complain about a dry, hot summer, you know something is seriously wrong with the world.

The River Tay

Scotland’s largest river flows from Loch Tay to its estuary in Dundee on Scotland’s East Coast. It holds the British record salmon caught by Miss Ballantine in 1922—a monster of 64 pounds that took two hours to land. Today I am fishing the nearby Benchill beat with an American friend and my ghillie, Bob White, who in fairness does not oversell our chances. With characteristic Celtic understatement he tells us, “The water’s very low and it’s not exactly wide open.” He approves our gear (7-weight, 13-foot two-handers with Skagit lines), but suggests 18-pound tippet. “The fish we have seen are big,” he adds, “get your fly in the slick water and let it hang.”

A ghillie, unlike a guide in the U.S., shows you the likely lies, checks your gear, chooses a fly and leaves you alone to pound the water. If steelhead are the fish of a thousand casts, new math is needed for Atlantic salmon. Seeing the occasional large fish roll gave purpose to our cast, step and repeat routine, but no fish were “touched” or hooked. At the end of a long day, Bob granted me some absolution. “Netting was never the problem—it’s the North Sea getting warmer every year, and the seals.” He explained how the Greenland fleet could track salmon into international waters and net them legally. “It’s so unfair—these are our Scottish fish trying to come home to spawn—what chance do they have? It’s a miracle any of them make it back alive,” he adds grimly. That statistic was confirmed by an angler who joined our beat for the afternoon session. He told us, “I just spent 12,000 pounds ($15,000) fishing Norway’s best river for a week and didn’t touch a fish.” The Tay is stunningly beautiful; wild blackberries line its banks and its tannic tints perfectly set off the firs and cedars of the nearby forest. It has lost none of its allure but most of its fish since my fish netting year.

The Tay is stunningly beautiful; wild blackberries line its banks and its tannic tints perfectly set off the firs and cedars of the nearby forest. It has lost none of its allure but most of its fish since my fish netting year.

Loch Leven

Most of the brown trout in the U.S. can trace their ancestry back to this 3,200acre loch in the town of Kinross. They were shipped by sea container or as eggs to the eastern United States in

1884 and populated almost every state where they could reproduce. As a thank you, America sent its famed McCloud River rainbows over to Europe. For good measure the castle where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned by the English in the 1560s lies on an island mid-loch. Again, no shortage of scenic beauty, but would this historic loch offer forgiveness or at least a trophy brown trout?

Our guide is the legendary Dave Downie, a record holder on Leven and a member of the Scottish International team. “If you want big numbers of stocked rainbows, you’re in the wrong place,” he greets us with a grin. “I hope you can cast, or it’s going to be a long day.” The 10-foot 7-weight is the go-to rod for U.K. loch fish ing and on this day, we fished full sink Airflo D7 lines to a pair of streamers. The pair of Humongous patterns (see photo) are fished five feet apart on a 12-foot leader. Dave believes there is no species of fish, fresh or saltwater, which cannot be caught on a variant of this fly. The loch is fished in a series of long drifts from depths of 20 feet to shallows of 3 feet. The original 100-year-old wooden boats weighing almost a ton were famous for holding perfect course (anchors were not permitted) and being almost impossible to row. Dave insists we perform a figure-eight as the flies reach the boat.

“These huge fish follow the fly to the bitter end,” he says as a menacing dark shadow appears under the point fly. We meet his approval: “I get a lot of so-called experts who can’t cast the length of this boat.” After 10 minutes of long casts and fast strips, a beautiful native brownie comes to the net. In keeping with loch tradition, this fish is quickly dispatched. “This will keep me in the wife’s good graces,” says Dave as he delivers the fatal blow. That would be our only trout of the day, but some fair-sized perch keep hopes alive.

As our upper bodies start to yearn for chiropractic help, the fishing takes second place to Dave’s stream of consciousness on the loch’s history, famous anglers who now hate it, Brexit, the international competition circuit and the lake’s owner who wants to turn it into a theme park. As our energy wains he produces a mid-morning snack—a cream cake with strawberries. “Scottish health food,” he quips. An ardent Americophile (“I love Walmart”), he has fished throughout the United States from Pyramid Lake where he wants to return to fish it “Scottish loch style.” Not a fan of the Madison, he loves Montana’s Big Hole which he considers highly underrated.

The day ends with a trip around Dave’s SAGE RPL rods that he keeps just for competition. A man of strong commitments, he treasures these above any later releases for any manufacturer or in his words, “There’s a lot of crap out there.”

If age teaches you anything, it might be that slow days on the water are just fine and that fish don’t care how much your trip cost, especially those snooty Norwegian salmon. You can’t spend time in Scotland without being entranced by the locals who will chat to you in the stores, in the tea shops or pubs and on the water. Their belief that the good old days might return is palpable and touching. If my next visit to the homeland is for fishing or forgiveness, I win either way.

BY CHRISTINE PETERSON

The wind at our back, we cast our lines down the deep granite lake, letting our teal, blue and silver flies rest on the surface, agitating them just a bit. The casting felt effortless, the wind doing the bulk of the work. I was fishing for brown trout, but not at home in Wyoming where the nonnative fish dominate rivers and lakes with their hooked jaws and red and gold spots.

In this 4-mile-long lake in the far northwest corner of Ireland, wild brown trout are native. They’ve been here forever, since the ice caps melted, pulsing back and forth across the island more than 10,000 years ago.

It’s an ancient fish to look for on an ancient island full of signs of ancient history, of peoples who have flowed in and out leaving behind castles and tombs, stories of fairy folk and battles lost and won.

On this day, we secretly hoped for one of those sea run browns, the fish that will spend four or five years in the oceans before coming back to spawn, similar to salmon. But feeling a tug of any kind at the end of my line would satisfy, and I’m not even sure I required that tug. For fishing in Ireland, just like fishing almost anywhere else in the world with clean water and stunning views, is more about the place and the people than the grip and the grin. It’s about stories and the landscapes that shape the stories.

Rich history

When Americans think of fishing for native brown trout, they rarely think of Ireland, says Paul O’Reilly with Inland Fisheries Ireland. Brown trout are native to Iceland, Europe, western Asia and northwestern Africa, though they now live around the globe.

And so anglers interested in an international destination go to Iceland, another island with a wild landscape and wild stories or they think of Norway, Scotland or Sweden. O’Reilly isn’t sure why Ireland rarely comes to mind.

The island’s rich history and dramatic views begin in Dublin as planes touch down. The city’s history is staggering, beginning well over a thousand years ago, before even the Vikings landed on Ireland’s shores, and tracing through wars, battles, revolutions and romances with still-preserved cobblestone streets, ancient city walls and remnants of monastic towers. The famed River Liffey meanders through Dublin offering even free fishing through some stretches for wild trout and salmon. It’s all part of what Ireland refers to as the Ancient East.

Opposite is the Wild Atlantic Way, a 1,600-mile stretch of highway, called one of the longest defined coastlines in the world. Its name is more of a marketing hook than anything else, but worthy of the dramatic moniker.

Cliffs plunge hundreds of feet into the ocean and sea stacks rise from crashing waves. Villages dot green hillsides along with castles, prehistoric tombs and stone circles.

And everywhere in between are lakes, about 12,000 lakes, in fact, on an island not much bigger than South Carolina. They’re pockmarks leftover from when glaciers scraped the island’s surface as they receded. And then, O’Reilly says, “We get a lot of rain, and all that rain has to go somewhere.”

Unsurprisingly, those deep limestone lakes, some 12-miles wide and almost 20-miles long, create abundant habitat for trout, salmon, northern pike and many other species, some native, some introduced like the chub and dace brought by monks in the Middle Ages.

Wild stocks

Go to Ireland for the history, the views and the people and stay for the fishing. But if fishing is what draws you, O’Reilly wouldn’t blame you.

Sea run brown trout, also just called sea trout, can grow well over 10 pounds and run mostly in late spring. In the summer and early fall, rivers and lakes run full with resident brown trout that stuck around and never quite made it to the ocean. They’re smaller, but still worth the trip and the cast.

A day pass for a popular river or lake will only run you $10 or $20 and even a guided trip may only be a couple hundred dollars, O’Reilly said.

Atlantic salmon may first come to mind when you think about fishing in Ireland, and anglers can still chase them in about 100 rivers on the island. But while Atlantic salmon numbered about 2 million in Ireland 30 years ago, their numbers right now are just a fraction, around 200,000 to 250,000.

O’Reilly believes they’ve stabilized, their drop a result of agriculture, water diversion and the general litany of issues facing freshwater species across the planet.

Ireland tracks about 180 salmon rivers. Of those, roughly 50 are open for harvest, 50 for catch and release and the rest are closed for conservation to help rebound their populations.

Ireland has an ever-increasing focus on conservation now, pumping money into their fisheries department where they promote fishing to increase tourism to the island of only about 7 million inhabitants, and also hire biologists and conservation officers to monitor populations and enforce fishing laws.

“We look after the fisheries and the habitats and the water quality,” O’Reilly said. “The fish look after themselves.”

Deep waters

The sky darkened on Lough Veagh nestled in Glenveagh National Park one afternoon in October as our boats drifted down the lake with the wind.

Suddenly, as is always the case fishing, my teal, blue and silver fly disappeared. A little brown trout, no bigger than my palm, slurped it off the surface. It was a far cry from the 2-or 3-pounder I hoped

I might see, but still a thrill to catch a wild brown trout in its native habitat, as exciting as netting a Colorado River or Bonneville cutthroat in one of their little streams in the mountains of Wyoming.

And where my home mountains of Wyoming would tower nearby, here in Ireland we drifted by a castle with its manicured gardens and green hills, through a national park with its legends and ecosystems shaped by one another. It’s a reminder that no matter what lies beneath the water, each stream, each lake, comes steeped in its own regional stories, reason enough to occasionally leave the banks of your home water for those of somewhere far away.