news/editorial

14 May 2017 News/Editorial

With little to say this week about our beloved Tweed….. except that it is drought ridden, clearly fish are wanting to come in if the (tidal) Tweedhill results last week are anything to go by, I imagine Gardo is still netting/killing some of what few fish there are, and YES substantial rain is in the forecast at last…….I have had quite a week.

Starting, last Sunday, with a visit to Trump-land, to the Trump International Golf Links, just north of Aberdeen. Built in amongst the great dunes of Scotland, huge 50 ft high dunes border almost every hole, it is a truly magnificent course.

We played it in a stiff northerly, making it mega testing for ordinary hackers like us, but we acquitted ourselves more than adequately.

Trump says it is the greatest golf course in the world. He would, wouldn’t he?

Rather annoyingly, I have to agree that it is a fantastic course, a “must” experience for every golfer, but the greatest in the world?

Probably not.

But definitely right up there.

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From Trump over to the Dee, bar the Lochy in the west, for me the best fly water of all our great salmon rivers.

And Cambus O’May amongst the most perfect of all beats. No better time to be there than early May, stunningly beautiful, the weather glorious….perfection.

Thanks to lack of melting snow from the winter, and the same drought as us, the Cambus pools were showing their bare bones.

Not only that, but, resulting from the unprecedented (perhaps bar another one in the 1820s) deluge of 18 months ago which destroyed much of Ballater, many of the pools are unrecognisable. Some of the great ones (The Long Pool and Tassach) are shadows of their former selves thanks to massive gravel and boulder movements. But then there are now new (good) pools, where there were none before.

Our absurdly generous hosts, John and Clare Carson, lost 3 of their 4 fishing huts in the tsunami, but they have all been replaced, some slightly higher up the bank, and everything looks exceptionally tidy and normal again, testament to the large amounts of time, effort and (of course) money spent in bringing things back to something like normal.

Expectations on the fishing front were low, but that most charming of all gillies, Fergus, was quite bullish, as all perfect gillies are, on Monday morning, despite it all.

I was despatched to Sheerless, one of the pools that has not changed much, Fergus and John having selected my, hitherto nameless, No 10 fly, blue and white in colour, which John called “the moth” (!), full floater (who needs a sink tip?) despite the frost overnight.

Ten casts into Sheerless, the line starting going the other way, oh so slowly and gently, as my “slack” quietly slipped through my fingers. Five minutes later a 6 lb cracker (I looked for sea lice even though 35 miles from the sea) lay in the water as I extracted the hook, and slid it back whence it came.

“Too easy”, I hear you cry, to which I would have added, “too lucky”, for so much of salmon fishing is being in the right place at the right time.

Others had a few pulls and one loss, more fish were seen, but nothing more was caught, despite some diligent fishing and the compulsory diversion under a blazing Tuesday afternoon sun to the Ballater links.

Until Wednesday morning.

I was sent to Fergie’s Pool, so named after gillie Fergus, who both found and christened it with a 21 lber shortly after its post-deluge creation in 2016. 50 yards long, it was full of fish, most not in the first flush, but fish nonetheless.

I gave “the moth” a run, but nothing doing, and then the two little pools below, but again no good. Malcolm had kindly given me some skimmers/hitches, tiny wee, for just such an occasion…..fish there but won’t look.

So small I could barely see the wake as it skimmed through the surface, and looking into the sun, the light was far from perfect.

Then suddenly I saw something, a sort of “flick” in the water where my skimmer had been skimming….but was no more. “Do nothing” I said, despite all that training with brownies and dry flies to strike at the sight of a rising fish or disappearing fly. Slowly, again oh so slowly, the line began to disappear into the depths.

Catching a salmon on what is effectively a dragging dry fly just doesn’t seem right, but catch it I did, 8lbs of marginally less than perfect silver. It gave a very good account of itself, Malcolm’s skimmer firmly embedded in its scissors.

More perfection.

That night I had a dream, that those who spin in low water on the Tweed, had got to Fergie’s Pool before me with their upstream flying condoms. Maybe they would have tried it first with a fly, maybe not, and then they would have spun it to death.

They would never have had the extraordinary satisfaction of catching one on a hitch/skimmer, and they would have ruined it for anyone else who wanted to try it.

I do not enjoy saying anything bad about the Tweed, but in the matter of spinning, or rather not spinning…….

…….. I wish we were more like the Dee.