I've only recently found this forum having focused too much trying to keep up with an academic/research workload. I've been fly fishing for what seems like a long time and fishing even longer but I've neglected it in recent years, often sending blank end of season returns in much to my embarrassment. I’ve the pleasure of access to some wonderful stretches of small rivers and becks on the North Yorkshire Moors and others more inland in Yorkshire. Whenever I get the opportunity Scotland, the land of my father, calls me and with a 6 piece fly rod strapped to my rucksack I fish the remote and small high lochs amongst the Munros. I’ve been doing this for years and my daughter caught her first wild brown trout in a tiny lochan high above Loch Maree with an osprey circling overhead and eagles offering their haunting call in the distance.

For me fishing is about the places it takes me to, not the size or quantity of fish – well, okay that would be good as well. My head’s normally stuck either at the computer writing, or preparing for conferences or I’m reading heavyweight theoretical texts. This summer though I decided to have some more ‘me time’ and I picked up a few angling books I’d neglected. I found a recent quote elsewhere that in essence was that in buying a book we assume that we’re buying the time to read it, which seemed quite apt in my case. I know that John Gierach, who I’ll come to soon, offers some nice short succinct comments on an angler’s life but on reading the introduction of The Habit of Rivers by Ted Leeson the following rang true.

Every life has its point of fixity, certain small stillnesses in the incessancy of the world that anchor us with a sense of continuity and location. They are points of vantage and reference, places to stand from which the patterns of the past might be read and those of the future, perhaps, dimly inferred. For whatever reason, by karma or coincidence, such points of my own life have always centred upon rivers and streams and above all, upon fly fishing for trout.

Okay, Leeson may not be to everyone’s taste but I was in Torridon very recently and fished Loch Coire Mhic Fhearchair, which is around 2,000 ft above sea level and a few hours walk in and sited right below the triple buttress on Sail Mhor/Beinn Eighe. It has an impressive waterfall running out of it on the final steep climb up and I've been there a few times now but always had low cloud so I've never yet managed to see the full triple buttress but it’s a place of magic and for me that’s what fishing is about. It was my small stillness, my point of reference that perhaps in the pace of the world we live in we need to have times like this to stop and readjust our priorities- and here I tempted to add from David Applebaum’s notion of the Stop, but perhaps for another time another audience. This time to turn to John Gierach on the qualities of being in such a place: ‘You’d tell yourself that even a blank day on the water could be a beautiful thing and sometimes it was’. No matter what I’ve been doing in my life fly fishing is always there and to end on Gierach again: ‘There’s nothing I can do about it and nothing I should do’.

Andy

Nicely said Andy.I had some superb Quality fishing time up in Wester Ross Recently.really did recharge the run down battery.And revitalise my weary soul.


Jim

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The Fishermans Friend is the Flirty Fly,Fickle Food for Fleeting Fish.

If anyone wants any pics - around 3mb each - of this wonderful loch in Torridon send me an email address and I'll send some out.

Andy

Some on their way Matt - may take a few minutes to download.
Andy

Hi Andy, welcome to the forum. Wouldn't it be great if we could all distil and articulate our thoughts as well as the likes of Leeson and Gierach? We all have those '........and a river runs through it' moments; but making sense of them, let alone comitting them to paper is another matter.

Anyway, back to your original point... which reminded me of the following lines from a little lady who also has the knack for getting things down on paper. I often listen to this when I'm off for a days fishing... when maybe I shouldn't be!


A cold wind against my shoulder woke me up in the middle of the night
An Autumn leaf was scraping against my window
like it was trying hard to get inside
and then a ghost that I had met before kept me up 'til dawn
and everything I thought was right was suddenly all wrong
He said, "Your score is looking pretty bad"
and then he asked me what it was that I had to show

So I went running down a list of things
some were real, but on some of them I lied
'cause I felt I had to justify each breath that I'd been breathing in this life
Then I realized I was playing it to someone else's rules,
trying to keep my score up in a game I did not choose
Then I looked that ghost straight in the eye
and said "You'd better not be coming back by again"

And it's true that I don't work near as hard
as you tell me that I'm supposed to
I don't run as fast as I could
but I live just the way I want to
and that's the way I should

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Too much Saturn, not enough Moon.

Buzzers 2012


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