The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  Surely the salmon was running out of steam on its umpteenth attempt? Human naivety. The fish had simply been plotting its course, working out the weaknesses, the faults and lines of least resistance. With each move calculated and carefully tested, it was time for the final push.

  Once more it emerged and our excitement threatened to overspill. Fists, palms and brollies belted the iron bridge we had gathered upon. A mighty leap brought a skittering zig-zag run that closed the distance to the top lip of the weir. An arching sweep, so uniform it could’ve been drawn with a compass, placed our fish directly below the top pool, and a simple dip and flick of the tail propelled it neatly up and over the lip. Noiselessly it continued into the next stage of its life. We let out a collective sigh of relief and drifted our separate ways.

  As Michael Wigan describes in his 2013 book The Salmon, both the Pacific and Atlantic salmon are facing multi-pronged threats today. Man’s lack of foresight in the construction of weirs and, in particular, monstrous dams, as well as unregulated salmon netting, poaching, pollution, and the same manmade climate change that thwarts the eel’s navigation, is overpowering the salmon species. On the West Coast of the States, the Scientific American claims, salmon numbers are down by as much as 99.9 per cent since European settlement began, and, industrial pollution had all but wiped out the salmon on Britain’s Taff, Tyne and Clyde rivers by the 1980s. If you thought that farming salmon in pens might provide an easy solution to the industrial-scale harvest of the wild population, then I am afraid the unfortunate plague of parasitic sea lice released as a by-product of that practice has put paid to that. In 2012 the Royal Society estimated that a shocking 39 per cent of wild Atlantic salmon were dying from this parasite alone. They simply attach themselves to the wild fish as they pass the pens, tear into their flesh, and slaughter them in their thousands.

  It might seem yet another boorish example of man’s commercial ambition trumping that of a lowly fish, but it is worth bearing in mind that the value of recreational salmon fishing to the economy is hardly chump change. In Canada every single freshwater rod-caught salmon is estimated to be worth over £700, and in Scotland salmon fishing represents almost 3,000 local jobs and generates some £120 million a year. Big money by any marker, but when you also consider that salmon fishing is taking place in some of the most remote and rural areas on earth, where money and secure local employment are increasingly hard to come by, then the value of this fish really cannot be overstated. For many, salmon fishing is a vital lifeline in a world of diminishing opportunities.

  Without question, commercial salmon harvesting and intensive salmon farming practices need to be curbed and regulated. New dams and weirs should have fish ladders built into their designs as a mandatory part of any construction agreement, or, better yet, they should be torn down altogether. The United States has dismantled over 150 dams since the turn of the century, to no small benefit for the salmon, and on my home river the simple acts of deconstructing weirs and thoughtful restocking have made the Taff salmon the most resurgent population in England and Wales put together. The banks of Scotland’s River Tweed, which contains the largest salmon population in Europe, have been protected from cattle and sheep overgrazing by fencing along the river’s length. This has allowed the river to mature more naturally and has resulted in some of the largest catch returns in recent history. Even in the absolute worst-case scenarios nature has an unerring way of filling a vacuum when it is given the chance. In my lifetime the salmon of both the Tyne and the Clyde have also made a comeback on rivers that were salmon-free deserts in their industrial heyday.

  Having hatched and successfully completed the transformation from small salmon parr to finger-sized salmon smolt (a feat that is only achieved by one fish in every ten), the young fish then enters salt water for the first time. Here it must avoid a phalanx of marine predators, everything from grey seals to skates, sharks and seabirds, while making its way north to the great pelagic feeding grounds off Greenland and the Faroe Islands. If the smolt successfully runs the 3,000-kilometre gauntlet, without being killed, then it can expect to seriously pile on the pounds. Protein banquets of shrimps, sand eels, fish fry and krill funnel into the extreme parts of the northern Atlantic, allowing the salmon to fatten up over a period of up to four years. They can reach weights in excess of 50lb, several hundred times bigger than their size on leaving the rivers, but eventually a hormonal release will call them back across the ocean. All the way home to the very rivers that once gave them life.

  Scientists believe that the remarkable journey could involve a mix of celestial navigation, magnetic fields, ocean currents and even chemical memory. Some salmon have even been known to locate the precise pool they were birthed in. Truly extraordinary behaviour that is without parallel in the animal kingdom; just last week I couldn’t even find my way back to a house I’d lived in for over a year.

  The sheer bloody-mindedness of the breeding salmon cannot be underestimated. Not only will they surmount all manner of obstacles to achieve their goal, but once they return to fresh water they will not eat another thing. The homecoming adult salmon is entirely reliant on the seafood reserves it built up in the north, so much so that the stomach actually begins to disintegrate to allow the fish to pack in more eggs or sperm for breeding. The suicide pact has been made: from that point on it’s breed and die. Which prompts the question: if they don’t feed, just how do you convince them to take a bait?

  Wilson comments in the Encyclopedia that a salmon ‘instinctively’ snaps at ‘worms, spinners and particularly shrimps’, but when it comes to the purist, tactics begin and end with the artificial fly.

  There is a blistering array of painstakingly designed and hand-tied flies, crafted from natural furs, silks and cottons to imitate everything from tiny nymphs right up to palm-sized baitfish, but, whatever you choose, fly-fishing is unique in that the weight of the cast comes from your line and not your end tackle. It means your chance of catching a fish of any description relies heavily on your ability to cast well.

  The perfect fly cast begins with you gradually releasing line from a reel while making false casts overhead, extending the line, and your fly, out across the river incrementally, without ever losing a metronomic rhythm to your casting arm. Sounds hard, but all being well, you release your line in the final cast and watch it unfurl like the striking arm of a darts player, hitting a bull’s-eye on the far bank and sweeping your fly upstream towards the fish in a single, beautiful arc.

  In other forms of fishing you may well be able to glean a lot from the armchair, but the fly cast is so much more about ‘the feel’ than it is about careful study. The best fly casters I’ve ever met struggle to articulate what makes them so good at the sport: they sort of stammer through a few platitudes, and might even offer to cradle your arms from behind as you try, but it never really works. The fact is that, much like throwing a dart at a board, when you are learning to cast and finally get it right, it feels so fluid and natural that you will wonder just how you managed to get it so badly wrong for the previous 4,000 attempts. That’s the thing with fly-fishing. It feels utterly improbable, from the weird casting technique to the fact that you are trying to convince a fish that a piece of fluff is worth having, but when it all comes together, the thrill is almost without parallel in angling.

  I could cast well enough on a short rod and had spent some time fly-fishing with Dad on several occasions. My best trout on the fly might have been a 6lb humpbacked Franken-fish from a stocked pond, but I had experienced what it was like to ‘get it right’ on a river on a couple of occasions. An evening fly-fishing above the town bridge at Pontypridd allowed me to borrow the feeling of what it must be like to actually be quite good at fly-fishing, when your cast and choice of fly come together at just the time the fish really decide to feed en masse, and earlier that same season, while I was flicking a fly armed with a small golden bead, a large brown trout had done me a huge favour from deep within a concrete pipe nestled in front of Merth
yr Tydfil’s central bus station. In both instances I had been fishing under the wing of truly skilled operators, though, lifelong fly-fishermen who instinctively knew the habits of the trout. When it came to casting for salmon I was completely in the dark.

  Bill Currie notes in Days and Nights of Game Fishing that ‘trout fishing is much more reasonable, more logical and in every way a more delicate art … It would perhaps be better if I gave no explanation for wanting so much to fish for salmon.’ Although trout fishing might sometimes be very hard, at least you know the fish must eventually come on to feed. Salmon fishing is absolutely ridiculous from the outset, so when Dad called to invite me onto his annual trip to Scotland, that gave me pause for thought, but, then, I’ve never turned down a fishing trip, so …

  There are over 300 salmon rivers to discover in Scotland and my dad, alongside a small group of his fly-fishing friends, had visited a fair few of the most legendary rivers. Lately, however, they had gone fairly static at one location, the River Findhorn, where, if they were to be believed, they had discovered something of a sweet spot, at which the quality of fishing, natural surroundings and après-fishing verged on perfection.

  My salmon from the Taff was caught on coarse tactics, and although I was mightily pleased with the capture, I had to admit I was curious to try and catch one as a purist would. More than anything, though, I wanted to learn why my dad was so enthused about salmon fishing in particular. Whatever it was, it went far beyond an adolescent desire to find something other than table tennis that Grandad couldn’t do; the way he spoke of the Findhorn was as if he had had some sort of a spiritual awakening. Believe me, from a man armed with the brand of analytical mind that my dad had it was quite something to hear.

  For the last couple of years he had returned from the Findhorn with beautiful stories and pictures, and although he would be the first to admit that salmon fishing could never fill the void in his life left by scuba diving, it was clear that in the Findhorn he had found something which ran it pretty close.

  With no spinning tackle, no coarse tactics – in fact, no rod, line or tackle to call my own – I hopped into the van and began the very long journey towards salmon fishing’s tweed-covered heart. I considered the chances of a record-breaking salmon as I made my way north. Wilson notes the salmon-fishing record stands at a whopping 64lb, but this entry in the Encyclopedia does little to conjure up any of the sentiment or the story behind this remarkable fish or the woman who landed it.

  Etched into my memory is a faded sepia image of Miss Georgina Ballantine. She is wearing all tweed, a wrap-round jacket partnered with a long woollen skirt, and is leaning up against her rods with what might appear to be a practised nonchalance. Her spare hand is casually placed in a pocket, but her expression, the slight angle inwards of her head, her lips, pressed together but almost upturned, in something of a Mona Lisa smile, seem to me to be screaming: ‘Go on then, lads, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’ Lying on the floor, just in front of her, is the longest-standing record in British angling history.

  The image was taken on 7 October 1922, the date she landed the 64lb fish from the Glendelvine stretch of the River Tay. Georgina was simply the gillie’s daughter, drafted into the trip at short notice as the local laird had pulled out with a headache, but that trip was to be life-changing.

  She later gave a wonderful account of the fish’s capture in a letter to her rod builder and friend, Mick Glover, in which she describes the ‘Homeric battle’, where her reel ‘screeched as it had never screeched before’, and mentions how at one stage she became so desperate she suggested pelting the fish with stones to get it to move closer to her boat. Her father, one of the finest rods in Scotland, gave her a stiff rebuke: ‘Na, na, will try nane o’ thae capers.’

  After two hours and five minutes she finally landed the fish, feverishly recalling: ‘What eloquence could do justice to such a moment in one’s life, better left to be imagined … two hours and five minutes of nerve-wracking anxiety, thrilling excitement and good stiff work.’ Her arms were so swollen afterwards that they took two weeks to recover.

  Of all the things written about this fish, Bruce Sandison, a writer and longtime contributor to Trout and Salmon and The Scotsman, reveals perhaps the most telling story of the woman. ‘When Georgina’s salmon was displayed in the window of P. D. Malloch’s shop in Perth, she stood at the back of the crowd who had gathered to admire it. Two elderly men were particularly overawed by the size of the salmon and Georgina heard them talking: one said to the other, “A woman? Nae woman ever took a fish like that oot of the water, mon. I would need a horse, a block and tackle, tae tak a fish like that oot. A woman. That’s a lee anyway.” She said, “I had a quiet chuckle up my sleeve and ran to catch the bus.”’

  How cool is she? What strength of character! What modesty! What reticence and patience, in the face of such intolerance. Female anglers are just as good as men – many are far better – yet fewer than a quarter of licences purchased each year are bought by women, and I can count on one hand the women I see regularly on the banks I fish.

  Of course, attitudes have progressed markedly since Georgina’s time, but I still believe there is a lingering prejudice that angling is a man’s game. This falsehood, based on much the same narrow-minded thinking that led to the game and coarse divide, seems to play to the idea that as fishing requires countless hours in the cold, handling smelly baits, and, very occasionally, smellier fish, it is not something that would be attractive to women. Well, let me be the first to say that if this is all fishing boiled down to then it wouldn’t be attractive to me either. I don’t actually like having hands and fingernails that stink like the Seven Seas, nor do I enjoy being frozen solid to my fishing seat, and I’m not exactly ‘loving it’ when a bream or eel decides to coat me in its mucus, but have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps the barrier to more women in the sport, as well as young people and anyone else who might like to try one day, is the appalling job we do of presenting fishing as an appealing way to spend your time? Perhaps instead of allowing the focus to settle on the aspects of fishing that even we don’t enjoy, we should be promoting what it is we all love about getting outside with a rod and reel. Better still, take a friend fishing, get them onto a fish, and then see how they feel. More than that, even if fishing is occasionally cold, smelly and boring, who is anyone to tell someone else what they can or can’t do, or what they are supposed, or supposed not, to like? I do believe there are some male anglers still out there who place an unhealthy amount of their ego and, dare I say, manhood, on their ability to catch fish. This minority, and they are a minority, might very well be threatened by the idea that a woman could come along and catch a bigger fish than them, but ultimately it is of far greater importance that fishing as a sport is allowed to progress in spite of these Neanderthals and their opinions; the very future of angling could very well depend on it.

  Long before I had reached the Scottish Borders I had deduced the chances of me breaking Georgina’s British Atlantic salmon record were practically zero. Even if I overlook my novice’s knowledge of salmon fishing, and that is a very big ‘if’ indeed, the Findhorn has never really been a renowned big-fish river. The Scottish crown probably still rests with the Tay, with the very occasional big fish cropping up on the Tweed, but there has been nothing substantiated on any British river that has ever come close to touching that fantastic 1922 fish.

  I was easy with that, though: some records are not meant to be broken.

  I left my vehicle at Mum and Dad’s place in the Yorkshire Dales so Dad and I could make our way up into Scotland together. We were travelling on a Sunday, which Dad explained was the traditional ‘no-fishing day’ as it was when all the anglers turned around from the fishing marks, or ‘beats’. There really was no rush then, which was fortunate as the A9 above Perth is a treat to savour, or, as Dad put it: ‘This is where it starts to get really good.’

  The further you press up into Scotland’s
far north the more you feel you are shedding the trappings of the rest of our densely populated island. It was cold and dry as the snow-dusted Cairngorms loomed large over our car. The hilltops had a scrubby, stripped look to them: iced at their summits, with bilberry, heather and sheep clinging to the slopes. The valleys were cut by clear rivers, the flow hefting hard over clean stones and exposing gravel beds. They looked low. ‘Ignore that, just enjoy the scenery,’ scolded Dad. It was like being thirteen years old again. We plunged on into a large forest and a trio of plump-looking red deer scattered behind a curtain of Scots pines.

  The fishing cottage finally emerged after a final eighteen miles of real wilderness. A classic highland landscape strewn with lochs, lavender, gorse, more pine, larch, and a patch of birch trees with blistering white trunks. The satnav simply read ‘road’.

  I had it in my head that Dad’s trips up here were something of a wilderness survival epic. That the lodgings would be one-roomed, mud-earth-floored, bothy-cum-bunkhouse affairs, where they were probably forced to forage to survive. In fact, the multi-roomed house contained several bathrooms and bedrooms, a large kitchen, an expertly tended garden and no fewer than three boxes of luxury Scottish shortbread awaiting our arrival. Dad’s friend Dave had arrived ahead of us and was already in the process of unloading enough rations to last us for several weeks more than required. Dad, misinterpreting my wide-eyed astonishment as one of concern, sought to comfort me: ‘Don’t worry, Will. We will have food in the pub on at least one of the nights and Nigel will soon be here with his wife’s homemade lasagne.’ I wondered, seriously, whether I would still fit in my waders at the end of my time in Scotland.

  Dave was far and away the most experienced salmon angler I had ever met. He organized the trips to Scotland and had a wealth of knowledge; as such, I hung on his words, and his words weren’t that great. ‘They took seventy-seven fish last April, a new Findhorn record,’ he began positively.