This will be my last opportunity tae fish for seatroot afore the close o the season at the end o the month, so I rise early and drive the owld Skoda tae the shore. It’s an unnaturally warm October morning; the kind of day weather presenters announce in bright voices, but which to me confirms imminent environmental catastrophe.
I assemble the fly rod and fumble with line to attach a hook and a strip of salted mackerel belly, struggling to remember a knot shown to me thirty year ago by friend fae Stromness. Eventually, I get it, and the bait locks tae the hook. On the last of the flood, I step into the shallow water at the edge of the beach.
Passing over the edge of the sand, I roll cast oot beyond the clumps of bladderwrack that frightened me as a boy fisher: what could lurk among them; a conger, maybe, that would wrap round my leg? But the sun is bright in the late harvest sky, and I cast beyond into the deep. I raise a fish, so I ken I have the tide and the presentation of the bait right, but I fail tae hook it. There is nothing on earth to match the thrill of connecting physically with this wildest of creatures, a sea troot, with nothing but the pliant fly rod and a slender line between my hand and the rampant energy of the fish. I’m satisfied.
I’m retrieving the line to cast again and a massive selkie emerges within three meters of me, like a block of weet granite. I feel more than hear the plunge of its mass as it panics and dives deep, leaving a great boiling on the surface. I won’t write what I said, but it makes me laugh when I realise what has happened.
You’d think this turmoil might gluff the fish, but they are back within a matter of minutes, boiling on the surface, ripping the tail off my bait, leaping in the sunlight. When they are on, they are on. I raise another, and another, but I’m too slow to strike, or the hook is too rusted, or the tail of the bait is too long. I don’t ken.
I recall another piece of advice given to me by an expert sea troot man from Kirkwall: The fish will lie in very shallow water. I cast away from the pellucid deep water ahead of me – the very margin of the North Atlantic – and try a cast way back into the shallow miso soup of pounded, shredded ware on the water’s edge behind. And yes, there’s a fish there; it steals my bait again and is gone.
If it was all about catching, it would be called catching. But it’s fishing, and that’s the Zen of it, I remind myself, as the fish go off at slack water, and I bulder clumsily back tae the Skoda in leaky neoprene.
brisknortherly 