Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Scotland's salmon-fishing season opened a few weeks back – it runs from mid-January to mid-October. The county's trout season opens in two weeks, so the salmonids, generally, are on the march. But it's fly-fishing for big salmon that's the unrivaled sport of the global fishing-moguls who restrict themselves to no nation because they know and they fish every nation, both hemispheres, and every sporting season. Why are the boys with the deep pockets so much in the salmon demographic? Well, first, it's an extraordinary animal, spirited to catch, most exhilarating to fight, especially on a fly rod, and if you can keep them for the pot, they are delicious. But salmon-fishing requires one other thing: money. Permits for a good, productive beat, as a section of river is called in Scotland, can run up to six hundred dollars a day. A week of slammin' the salmon in the high season later this year? It's an easy three grand, permits alone. The guide fees will run north of that, depending on the number of anglers and the length of stay, and the accomodation is, also, on you.
The spring salmon run on Perthshire's legendary River Tay, about forty miles north of Edinburgh, has not yet begun – Edinburgh being approximately on a latitude with Göteborg, Sweden, or looked at from North America, on a Hudson Bay latitude about twelve hundred miles north of Montreal. But the more productive lower stretches of the Tay will wake up in a few short weeks, as the homing instincts of the much-sought mature fish, swirling in and surfing the currents in the North Sea these last few years, kick in, and they turn their infallible noses back to their own idea of fresh, sweet river water. It's estimated by the ichthyologists that less than five percent of mature salmon run back up the wrong river. That is nature's fabulous instinctive molecular-level compass at work. It's an exercise, in the lives of fish, of the idea of home.
So, this is when we'll see the Ted-Turner-equivalents, or perhaps even Uncle Ted himself, practicing an equally instinctive human version of the salmon's homing process by having their pilots file the flight plans to Edinburgh. The permanent, unforgiving irony of the globally-sporting mogul is that, despite how much of their business environment they absolutely rule, they are the most willing migratory slaves to the prey they love so much to chase. When the prey is there, the sporting set runs.
Here's what the humans that love to chase the Scottish salmon know: At 120 miles long, with a huge watershed area and many fine fishable tributaries that feed it, the Tay is the longest river in Scotland. Its brackish estuary is, also, vast and just a few miles north of Edinburgh. The Tay salmon are North Sea-run fish, and are, as we might imagine, big. The largest salmon on record caught in the Tay ran to 65 pounds – in 1922. Now the biggest catches are more in the 40-pound range, but more common are the 10-to 20 pounders. A 20-pound fish on a fly line is, trust me, a magnificent fight.
Les Brandie, the most genial and accomodating founder and proprietor of Fishing in Scotland, a bespoke guide service that does much of its business on the Tay and on the tributaries of its watershed, puts it this way:
"The Tay has over fifty different salmon beats, from the less-fished upper beats to the middle and lower beats. It's also got the largest catchment area and volume of water of any river in Scotland, so its water levels fluctuate less. Other rivers that we fish, such as the Spey, North Esk and South Esk, have excellent catch rates, but they're regarded as spate rivers, which means that they usually need a few days of good rainfall to raise the water levels so that the fish can get up them. That's when they can be fished at their best."
Rain being, in Scotland, absolutely no problem. Brandie's outfit also offers Spey-rod casting lessons, which is a great athletic treat, and in these waters -- in Scottish weather, with Scottish winds -- the lessons will come in very handy for the angler unfamiliar with this rod. (Think of the long history of the PGA stars' wind-borne nightmares at the British Open when it's held at St. Andrew's, and then multiply that by about five orders of magnitude, and you'll have approximately what a fly fisherman faces in trying to punch a fly line out across a river to a fish in the face of a stiff Scottish breeze.) A "Spey" rod is named for a river in this country -- upon which Brandie and his business partner and head guide Moray Macfarlane can arrange to guide you -- for good reason. The Spey rod is several feet longer than an ordinary fly rod and has more of what we might call muscle – it takes two hands to cast it, but it can punch a fly line out into an oncoming breeze that would defeat any one-handed rod.
It's tough fishing for tough fish, in other words. Scotland's salmon are highly managed, in the sense that most all of the angling is catch-and-release. That said, you don't need to cook this fish to enjoy catching it. The salmon is one of earth's more poetic animals, spending a few early years in its river, heading out on its life's journey in the big salt water, and then homing in after a few years back to the sweet water. They mime Odysseus. You catch them when they most want to get back home.
The link is: www.fishing-uk-scotland.com
To reach Brandie directly, for bookings, the link is: enquiries@fishing-uk-scotland.com
