Fishing

“Och, Wattie, fishing?! You go out full of hope, you come back full of whisky.”

                                                                  Dr. Harry Heddle

There were a couple of moments this week which transported me back to my youth. A friend of mine was heading off to a retreat in Washington State. One of his activities was going to be fly fishing. Then yesterday I received the traditional, annual post card from my brother, Bill, who is fishing in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. He does this every year at this time.

The early morning journey from Nairn to Inverness is a straight road for 16 miles. The fishing shop was in the heart of the town. In the mid-1960s it was there that we would stop to pick up the keys to the boat on Loch Ruthven. Then our father would continue the drive out of Inverness over the top of the east side of Loch Ness past the lochs of Duntelchaig and  Ashie and finally to the south end of Loch Ruthven. There we would park and walk the short distance to where the rowing boats were moored.  My brothers, Bill and George, and I would help rig the two fly rods (I remember rubbing the  rod joins  vigorously on the back of my neck so that they would be greased and easier to pull apart!). One of us would row gently out into the loch. There would be one rod at the bow and one at the stern. We would take turns casting our lines on the water. The rower and the other would wait their turns. Occasionally Wattie would light one of his Henri Winterman’s cigarillos, a not unpleasant smell. The boat would rock gently as we drifted on a beat. At times the oarsman would dip his oar slowly into the water to keep the boat broadside to the wind. And the flies would be cast and as the line landed it would be fed slowly through the fisherman’s fingers as it moved along the surface of the water towards the boat and then was cast out again. The rhythm, the lapping of the water, the sound of the rowlocks, the sheep bleating on the hillsides, are with me now. Occasionally the wind would get up and we would have to battle our way against it when the drift came to an end. Sometimes the calm of a day was disturbed by the gentle beginnings of a shower of rain. And, rarely it seems, the routine would be broken when somebody hooked a brown trout and suddenly we were clambering to reach the landing net, stumbling off balance on the rocking boat to get the empty line out of the way, noting the bend on the rod, feeling the wriggling  of the fish and hoping that it would not escape. Then the brown trout would tire and would surface and gently the net would be underneath him and he would be scooped on board. If he was small he would be released back into the water, if not his destiny lay elsewhere.

Lochindorb was a different journey. There we drove out of Nairn along the Grantown-on-Spey road on the old bridge over the River Findhorn and up onto the moors. There we would drop down to the right of the moor  along a narrow B road and then up a farm track to the crofter’s house where the lady, ever friendly and ever ready to chat, would produce the key to the boat house. And the routine would be the same as on Ruthven and the waters would lap and the oars would break the silence and we would move through the ripples, sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it and we would find a beat and  a drift and hope for fish. The silence would be companionable, broken only by the rasp of the reel, the fluid cast of the line, the lap-lapping of the water, the sheep bleats and the bird cries.

There is no escape from our youth so you who are kind enough to read my new book, “Fatal Frailties”, will find that I have returned to many of those places with a story that is fiction but a memory that is real.

So I have fished infrequently since those days  and my brother, George, I doubt at all. Yet Brother Bill was hooked then and is hooked now. Those days of our youth have not left us, the sights and sounds are with us still. And yet, Dear Reader, I am no longer drawn to be in a boat trying to catch a fish. I am, however, pulled to those lochs, moors and hills. I have been back on occasions and, over the last few years, to Lochindorb with my brother, George. I feel an almost atavistic pull to walk on the heather clad moors, to look out on these places of a bygone age, to climb the surrounding hills, to stumble among the rocks and rowan trees and silver birch on the shore lines but, Dear Reader, I am stangely not drawn to cast a fly on the water.

I think that I understand the pull of fishing, the slow calm of being; the quietude  that soothes; the peace that stretches out its hand; the balm to the soul. I do comprehend the excitement of a fish on the line. So when Harry Heddle offered my father, Wattie Davidson, his homespun philosophy at the beginning of a day on a Hebridean loch all those years ago, then I, in time, have come to realise that fishing has little to do with catching fish and everything to do with calm, with tranquillity, with the joy of gentle movement, the peace of whispering nature, the sense of being a part rather than apart and, perhaps, a wee dram at the end of the day!