Orkney Olives & Sea Trout

Book Extract

Fishing tales don’t necessarily need massive fish to make them stand out in the memory. They can stem from ordinary days that were spent seeking nothing more than the chance of a few fish and some solitude, especially if nature intervenes.

Every year, I used to go to Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland. In fact, I think I went for 12 consecutive years, fishing with the same ghillie, Geordie Leonard, each time. I even ended up being Geordie’s best man at his wedding, giving a speech to the assembled company in Stromness on the day England beat Scotland in the European Cup, thanks to a wonder goal from Paul Gasgoine. That was a particularly daunting job for a Sassenach to carry out, but as I had caught my first ever Orkney 2-pound trout that morning, fishing at dawn with Geordie on Swannay Loch, I wasn’t too concerned. And I needn’t have worried anyway; the Orcadians are far too decent to hold being an Englishman against anyone for very long.

Harray is the main freshwater loch on the Orkney Islands. It runs into the brackish Loch of Stenness, memorable not only for its fishing but for the ancient standing stones on its shore. The trout fishing on Harray is legendary: buttery brown and brightly spotted fish which fight incredibly hard for their size taking the fly in the shallow water around the shores and myriad skerries throughout the loch. In the pan for breakfast, they are some of the best-tasting fish I have eaten anywhere in the world.

This day on Harray started much like countless others. Geordie picked up my fishing colleague, Peter, and me in his heavy fibreglass boat, which I have to say my back problems of the time helped to design. Few people now go afloat without smart factory-made boat seats, but in those days they were little more than a thwart board across the gunwales to get you a bit higher and make casting easier. My back was such that sitting in a boat for an extended period became agony, so a couple of years before, Geordie had produced an old kitchen chair for me to put on the floor in the stern, which was a brilliant success. The only interesting moments came during long Harray swells, when the boat’s broadside motion would sometimes tip the chair to a dangerous angle, although I never actually ended up over the side. Geordie had been hard at work over the winter and the boat now boasted fixed bow and stern swivel seats, which made fishing a delight in any weather, and us the envy of everyone else on the loch.

We started catching brownies in front of the Merkister Hotel, Geordie quietly edging the boat out into the main body of the loch as we did. Then something huge swirled some 30 yards in front of us, not at anyone’s fly, just completely out of the blue.

‘Salmon!’ shouted Geordie. ‘You don’t see many of those in here.’

Then it swirled again and we saw it more clearly this time.

‘Looks a bit coloured,’ I said.

‘Positively brown,’ agreed Peter.

‘And furry,’ Geordie added. ‘That’s a flaming otter!’

And so we watched the otter fishing for a few more moments until it finally caught a brown trout, considerably bigger than anything we had brought to the boat that week. The animal ate it quickly on the surface and dived back under. We didn’t see it again, as hard as we looked for it all around the boat. Unbelievable as it seemed in that expanse of water, the otter simply disappeared.

We caught plenty more fish during the morning and decided to go back to the Merkister for lunch, rather than our normal habit of landing on one of the many islands in the loch. There were plenty of people in the bar to hear Geordie’s account of the morning, but it was soon obvious that no one believed a word of it.

‘I’ve lived on this loch all my life,’ said an octogenarian Orcadian from his favourite chair by the window overlooking the water, ‘and I’ve never seen an otter. They’re there, I have no doubt, but you never see them, especially in broad daylight.’

He was supported by everyone else, including the Merkister’s proprietor from behind the bar, who professed that he had been at the hotel for donkeys’ years and had never set eyes on an otter either. And so we endured the good-natured banter and suggestions that the sloe gin must have been liberally passed round the boat early that morning. We finished our lunch and went afloat again.

We usually caught the odd sea trout in the loch, but we often had to look very carefully to spot the difference from the freshwater variety, as they were usually coloured by the time they made it through Stenness into Harray. This afternoon, we started a drift from Cutlass Point right across the main body of the loch’s northern end and all of a sudden olives began to hatch. The air was full of them, as often in those days, and fish were moving to them, breaking the surface in a feeding frenzy. We started catching them on Greenwell’s Glories, that old favourite invented for just a moment such as that. But the fish weren’t coloured, they were all bars of silver between 12 ounces and 1 3/4 pounds. We were experiencing yet another first for us on Harray: a shoal of fresh-run sea trout that must have made it through Stenness in record time and swum just as quickly to this end of the loch.

The magic went on for perhaps an hour, with Geordie bringing us back for drift after drift over the same ground.

‘Just once more,’ he said each time. ‘They won’t still be there, but we’ve got to give them another go.’

They were still there, though, gorging on the olives, so don’t let anyone tell you sea trout won’t feed in fresh water. These ones were doing so as though their very existence depended on it.

It was probably our fifth drift over the same ground when Geordie spoke about something other than olives and sea trout, and how he had never seen anything like this in more than 10 years as a ghillie.

‘Strange, that skerry’s high out of the water,’ he said.

Skerries are small outcrops of rock that poke above the surface of the loch, often as tiny stony beaches in the middle of otherwise seemingly deep water. Despite being 3000 acres in area, Harray is seldom more than 6 feet deep and these shallow areas were always the best for fishing back then. This one seemed peculiar, though. Geordie was right: it was too high out of the water. We were about 100 yards away when the stones started to move, then slid off the back of the skerry.

‘I do not believe it,’ shouted Peter. ‘It’s a seal!’

‘No,’ said Geordie, ‘your perspective’s all wrong. It was that otter again.’

Then the most remarkable thing happened. No more than 20 yards in front of us, the otter came up just like a seal, bobbing in the water and looking straight at us, as though it had never seen humans before and it was fascinated by what we were doing there.

‘It’s huge,’ I said. ‘No way is that the same animal we saw this morning.’

‘It’s a dog otter, ’Geordie agreed. ‘Definitely different from this morning.’

The otter kept watching us, although we never seemed to get any closer, despite the fact we were drifting. He must have been backpedalling to keep his distance while he studied these strange people invading his watery habitat, and then, like the earlier encounter, he simply slipped below the surface and was gone.

‘I’m going to enjoy hearing you describe this one in the bar tonight,’ I told Geordie. ‘It might be better to keep quiet about it, because no bugger’s going to believe us.’

They didn’t, of course, and still don’t to this day, I’m sure, even though they were all pretty impressed with the bag of sea trout, which must have signalled to them that something out of the ordinary had happened on Harray that day. I’ve discussed it with Geordie many times since and the conclusion we’ve come to is that the otters were probably sea dwellers, and had followed, or even frightened, the sea trout into Harray. This may also account for the feeding frenzy, perhaps because the fish would normally have stayed to feed longer in the brackish Stenness before coming into Harray, although that probably hasn’t much foundation in proven fisheries science.

Whatever the reason, it was one of the most remarkable day’s fishing I have ever had the privilege to experience, and it taught me, if I needed teaching, that catching monsters isn’t the only ingredient necessary to enjoy this fantastic sport of ours.

 

© Not to be reproduced without written permission from Fernhurst Books Limited.

Amazing Fishing Stories is written by Paul Knight. Paul Knight is a hugely experienced fisherman and leading figure among UK anglers, who has travelled to remote parts of the globe to reel in stories with rod and line. He has worked on offshore trawlers as well as fished idyllic salmon streams. Paul has written for a range of fishing magazines for more than 20 years. His wide experience, remarkable network of fishing friends and wonderful writing style make him the perfect author of such a collection of unforgettable tales.