These extraordinary living torpedos are making a comeback after decades of decline
One of the tougher aspects of fishing Highland rivers is that the water is coloured by peat. Unlike in, say, Iceland, it's hard to spot the fish as they rest, but you know whether the salmon are there. It's almost psychic. The river feels fishy. And then they show themselves, as they have this spring, jumping, slicing up through the white water and flashing their silver flanks.
I love salmon fishing. A spring run Atlantic salmon is as extraordinary and precious a creature as the Siberian tiger or the osprey (only one of which I am pleased to see on a riverbank). A strange quirk of evolution fated this perfectly shaped torpedo to spawn high in the hills, so that after an epic journey to sea and then to the Arctic feeding grounds, it returns ? weighing anything up to 40lb (the bigger fish have gone from Britain) ? to breed in streams often no more than a foot across.
But there's something else. One of my few memories of my grandfather is of him turning away, an old split-cane pole on his shoulder, as he went towards the river.
I remember my mother better, although she's been dead 22 years. She was a superb angler, and I can still see the water exploding from her long, looping casts. Then there's my friend Richard, who drowned with his father in the Yokanga river in Russia chasing big salmon.
So fishing for me is a form of prayer. In fact, it is the only time I pray. Usually when I have gone all day without hooking up I'll look up to heaven and shout: "Mother, why have you forsaken me?"
Because that's the thing about salmon ? you rarely catch them.
I now fish mostly with Richard's brother-in-law, Robert. He is my fishing guru. Robert says things like, "Ruaridh, try what I call 'disciplined micro-concentration' on presentation. It can avoid too much damaging macro 'Why are they not taking/ is it me/ is it conditions' questioning." Then he'll pause and add, "It's like cricket..."
Diving under the nets of the salmon farmers on the Scottish West Coast to pull dead fish from the bottom of the cages is not a nice job. The salmon farms destroy wild fish stocks because they are hives of disease and sea-lice. Their fish are ugly, drugged, flaccid and fat, with Norwegian genes and none of the sleek power of their wild relatives. That is the salmon you buy in supermarkets. But it is also those farms that employ thousands of people in the Highlands and preserve fragile communities. That is the hook we find ourselves caught on.
My grandfather caught lots of fish. When he was growing up, the rivers teemed with so many salmon the stories were like Robert Burns' poems. Then, because we netted, polluted, hunted down their feeding grounds, killed everything we touched, built salmon farms and generally acted like vandalising scum, they disappeared.
But now they are back. I noticed it first in early March. It was snowing. I was fishing an Ailsa's Elver, named after my god-daughter, a gorgeous fly of blue and black with a vulturine guinea fowl feather running its length. The salmon were turning on it like sharks. Many were kelts, fish that had spawned and then spent the winter in the river, but there were four fresh-run salmon glistening silver from the cold waters of the North Sea.
Four fish! That is astonishing.
As each of the salmon finally gave up the furious battle and came to my hand, I carefully took the hook from their mouth and then held them, nose to the stream as they regained their composure. After a few minutes they beat away, dropping into the darkness to recover and then continue their journey upstream. These days every salmon fisher I know returns their fish ? it's unacceptable not to ? and that, I believe, is what has made the difference.
This year I have fished the Cassley, the Carron, the Findhorn and the Teith, all Scottish east coast rivers. Everywhere I have gone, there have been fish. They jump over my line, power through the shallows in schools of five or six, but refuse to take.
My pal Donald Morrison, who ghillies on the Cassley, told me the other day that he thought we weren't catching "because there are too many fish", which is an excuse I've never heard before. But that's okay, because we're seeing the salmon, and if it was catching fish that mattered I'd go after mackerel.
Lately, I have been thinking a great deal about a Buddhist monk who fishes without a hook so he does no harm. That might seem mad ? and it is ? but I know he wouldn't be there beside the river, plugging away forlornly day after day, if there weren't any fish.
Because fishing, while it is about friendship, nature and memories, is also about hope. And this spring has given me hope.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/26/salmon-back-in-scottish-rivers
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