Caladail – the Limestone Jewel of Caithness

Loch Caladail, a setting where the fish are the stars. Muscled slabs of silver, flanks highlighted with a hint of gold. Athletic, feisty, and sometimes enticingly large.

Every star deserves a stage, and Caladail’s is its extraordinary crystal clear water allied to the sandy loch floor over which it laps. The slightest hint of sun transforms Caladail into a turquoise paradise bringing a hint of the Mediterranean, or dare I say Caribbean bays, rather than a typical impression of a wild highland loch.

Against this backdrop with its outstanding clarity, playing a good fish becomes memorable. At first distant flashes of submerged silver, and as the fight closes the angler is witness to an HD picture perfect view of the fish’s fin clear gyrations. 

I came late to Caladail and have only fished it over the last decade or so. For all the time I’d spent in the north, the Durness Marl lochs had stayed tantalisingly out of reach, as in those early days they were the domain of the legendary Cape Wrath Hotel.

The hotel is now sadly a near derelict shell, so I can write candidly. As a teenager I had on one occasion stepped over the hotel’s threshold, through a time vortex, and as if back into some dark Victorian drawing room.

The hotel lounge was filled with ageing moustachioed gentlemen, sunk deep in ancient armchairs, all in their uniforms of tweed and twill. I thought of them all as military men, a mixture of Colonel Blimps and Fawlty Towers Majors. It may seem harsh, but the guests seemed to be as equally stuffed and portly as the huge fish that carpeted the walls. There was even one doddery guest hidden away in an alcove hunched over his fly tying vice!

It’s safe to say that whatever my dad thought of the fishing, my mum certainly wasn’t going to stay in this Dickensian hostel!

So I only knew of these distinctive lochs by reputation. Caladail, the most famous, and I believe in Bruce Sandison’s top three highland favourites, Borralie intriguing, the less challenging Croispol, and finally Lanlish, surely the most enigmatic.

Lanlish sits on the right hand side of a par four fairway on the most northern golf course in mainland Britain. It could be an unremarkable hazard on any golf course, it’s small, shallow, weedy, and contains truly huge but very rarely caught trout. This one is a challenge for the future, so far my only interaction with the loch has been through sliced drives off the adjacent tee and failed carries over its waters to the green!

Caladail is unusual in that although its waters are exceptional to drift, its setting is mundane. The loch, which is basically an elongated oval, sits in a featureless shallow depression with gentle, grassed, sheep dotted banks, the exception being one small rocky outcrop on its northern shore. 

At some point in the early 20th century the water level was raised by the addition of a small dam.

This provides Caladail with its own bizarre feature. Running down the length of the western side of the loch is, somewhat ironically, a sunken dry stone wall. 

It adds a weird geometric element to the loch. The wall can be up to 75 yards offshore, striking like a mathematical chord across the large western bay, always just deep enough to drift the boat over. It emerges from the depths to bisect a headland half way down the loch, before sinking back below the waves to continue its journey to the southern shore.

I’ve taken many fish shoreside of the wall. I’m always dreading hooking a big fish that decides to be played on the far side of the wall, lunging deep, as the boat drifts ever shoreward – what do you do? An unusual problem likely to be unique to Caladail.

Everything I had heard and read told me that fishing Caladail would be exceptionally challenging, but ultimately potentially rewarding. Though set only a few miles from the hill lochs of Caithness and Sutherland, the required approach was said to be very different. The accepted thesis was that the crystal clear waters demanded very small flies fished on light long leaders, all done with exceptional stealth and care. The flies should be imitative, dark tiny wets, or diminutive nymphs.

My own experience somewhat dispels the myth of the difficulty of fishing Caladail. On my first sortie I decided I would start traditionally, and if that didn’t work I would take more extreme measures. So my set up was simple. Drifting wet fly, a team of Black and Peacock Spider, Kate McLaren and a Black Pennell on the point, all size 12 on a 15 foot cast fished on an intermediate line.

To my surprise it worked, and has on every one of my visits to the loch. On what must be a dozen outings I have consistently caught fish, and I don’t think I’ve had a single complete failure. Even on cloudless sunny days the trout have obliged.

My results have been so consistent that I’ve never been tempted to experiment with other flies; I think the only other wet fly I have fished is a Mallard and Claret which also caught me fish. When the wind has been lacking, I have on occasion fished a couple of small black dry flies, and once again they were successful.

The loch has a remarkably consistent depth, probably 10 feet at its deepest, with shallows around the loch’s single island. The loch floor is uniformly sandy with dispersed weed beds and the odd sparse sprouting of darker bottom hugging growth.

Fish can be caught everywhere, but unaccountably the big fish seem to inhabit an impossibly small area.

The loch’s sweet spot seems to lie between the island and the southern shore, and in my experience I would narrow it down to a very short drift, a matter of a few yards off the east and north shores of the tiny island. 

Literally within a minute of taking this picture, I hooked and lost a very good fish, which I’m sure would have been at least three pounds. Previously, and annoyingly, I have lost a very similar fish in exactly the same place. Around this island I have caught a good few two pound fish.

Pretty much everywhere else I’ve drifted I’ve caught trout, but always much smaller, up to a pound and three quarters with the average being perhaps a pound and a quarter.

I can only report my own experience as to the size and whereabouts of the fish, and can offer no explanation as to why the large fish appear to be so localised. It may be that I haven’t fished the loch enough to give a reliable comment, but I do note that when another boat is on the loch their concentration also seems to be around the island.

Not only does this tiny isle attract the specimen trout, but it is also home to a colony of nesting common gulls.

Perhaps nothing remarkable in this, but I’ve always believed that nature rewards you for the time you spend in its presence.

Just as with my fishing, I don’t want to step out knowing what to expect or what I’m going to experience. On special rare occasions you get to witness some nugget of nature, even if it is sometimes cruel.

And so to last May, as I drifted towards the patch of weeds with the island beyond. For much of the morning I had been vaguely aware of a brood of tufted duck chicks paddling and feeding amongst the weeds.

There was a commotion with spooked, alarmed, ducklings scattering in all directions, their clearly distraught mum scurrying and skating erratically across the water, her webbed feet barely skimming the surface. The cause was clear, above them half a dozen common gulls were circling menacingly.

The gulls began to feint left and right, up and down, before swooping low as the ducklings took despairing evading action. They literally ducked and dived, but I guess being chicks they couldn’t stay submerged for long, and they’d quickly pop back up like corks. Clearly too young to take flight, they were trapped in this deadly patch of weeds. The gulls would dive, the mother would screech and fling herself in front of the plunging assailant, the targeted chick skittering to temporary safety.

This deathly dance continued for a good five minutes, but watching, you knew there could only be one ending. The chicks and the mother were tiring.

With one last swoop the deed was done, a gull rose clear with its fledgling victim clamped limply in its beak. Everything went still, the mother bereft, and the skies once again clear.

I’d started videoing the attack on my phone, and as the inevitable happened, you can hear my erudite two word commentary – “You bastard!”

The last word on Caladail should go to its stunning inhabitants, those incredibly sculpted trout. I can best sum up the quality of these fish by relating them to my rod. I have a beloved wt6 Sage Z-axis, it has effortlessly handled many large brownies and seen off a good few sizeable sea trout. On a couple of occasions I have hooked fish on Caladail, and my trusty Z-axis has been transformed from being my utterly reliable partner to an ineffectual underpowered wand – such are the power of these Caladail stars.

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