 |
| A Typical Tay Brownie... |
The pretty town of Kenmore lies at the eastern end of Loch Tay in the heart of the Highlands and we arrived here just as summer was ending with a late, warm flourish as if to give us a final reminder of how lucky we have been with the weather this year. Temperatures soared all over the country, but in Scotland that just makes early September just a little more special.
it was a mild, still morning as I drove through the village at 6 am towards the river which runs out of this end of the loch towards Pitlochry further east. The baker was parked outside the hotel, but apart from a lone dog walker, the village seemed sleepy and slow. The sky was a pale pink in the east as the sun began its gentle ascent into the Scottish air and I struggled to see the fishing line in the early light as I threaded it through the rod rings, but within five minutes or so I had squeezed myself into the chest waders like too much sausage meat in too little skin - but they do still fit after all these years - just, and they don't leak either - and was headed towards the river Tay and a few brown trout, I hoped.
It was a calm day, but the river is wild and fast in places so I carefully eased my way from the bank and, as always in these times, my main concern regarding the inevitability of my falling in was the welfare of my iPhone - a sad indictment of how these small items of technology have become absolutely indispensable - in fact as I sit here writing this blog on my iPad, my laptop is loading up some Show Of Hands CDs we bought at the Folk Festival last weekend in order to add them to my iPod and my iPhone is buzzing next to me as my e-mails start to come through - and I'm in the heart of the Scottish Highlands using Paul's dongle to connect.
My father won't have understood a word of that last sentence!
 |
| Technology..... |
For an hour or so I tottered around the river striving to remain upright, casting across the river and allowing the flies to drift to pretty much no avail. Time for a rethink.
I sat on the bank and re-tied my leader with brown chameleon, which was much finer and darker than my previous line, tied on two smaller flies - a nymph on the point and a pennell on the dropper. I wobbled and slid my way back out into the flow and cast diagonally into the centre of the river and on this first cast I hooked a trout of about 10 inches in length - I love it when a change makes a difference - it makes me believe I am thinking like a real fishermen....
I had three more in the next 40 minutes, one fish slightly larger and two smaller, on both the point fly and the dropper - this latter fish giving a startling, splashy take that almost caused me to topple over backwards - so the re-tie was a useful exercise in the end. It was time to drive back to home made bread and a bacon and egg breakfast in a wonderful house looking down on the placid loch and with two dogs trying to stare me into submission of my sandwich....
 |
| Early morning stillness... |
