My Poaching Paradise – it’s OK Honestly!

I love a bit of harmless poaching. It has to be with a fly rod, not impact anybody else’s days fishing and preferably be from a bit of water owned by some absentee English aristocrat.

It appeals to the Angela Rayner in me that most of my nefarious casts have taken place on the Duke of Westminster’s estates or those of his almost equally affluent relatives. As an aside why do a few English families own most of the north of Scotland?  According to Caroline Lucas’s new book it’s part of the “neo feudal power dynamic,” I haven’t a clue what this means but I’m sure she’s right!

It’s really OK. My poaching forays are very occasional and rarely successful. In reality I wander just a little outside my beat to fish that next bit of water that is so enticing mainly because it’s forbidden fruit.

I’m a nervous poacher, it’s pathetic.  I can be miles off the nearest road, halfway up a remote Scottish crag, with the only risk of having my collar felt being by a passing stag. Yet as I cast, my heart races, I semi crouch to hug the ground, seeking protection from imagined disapproving eyes. I even dread hooking a decent fish in case I’m caught in flagranti? What do you do? Try to lose the fish? Run? Concoct some spurious alibi involving an inability to read a map?

I once had the opportunity for some real elite John Mcnab level poaching. To set the scene the river was the Laxford. The clue’s in the name and in these times the only way to fish it was if you were a Westminster or one of their guests – I hate to namedrop but Prince Charles was on their guestlist and strangely I wasn’t. In short it was the Westminster family’s private river much beloved by the lady known as the Old Duchess. If Robin Hood had been a fisherman this is the river he would have poached.

Now the Duchess had a hard life. Once the salmon were running she had to be down to the river by 10:00 a.m. where she stayed until 6:00 p.m. no matter the weather. Given this was quite a demanding schedule she was always accompanied by her Lady in Waiting and assisted by Victor her formidable Head Ghillie.

To recover from her Summer labours the Duchess would relax through the long days of Winter by racing her horses two of whom she named after the peaks overlooking her river and lochs and as luck would have it these weren’t your average nags – Arkle and Foinavon both had their moments in the sun.

It was only six miles from the estuary to the brooding Loch Stack which lay at the river’s head. Six miles of swirling peat stained pools and dark foaming glides, in spate all stacked gill to gill with fresh running salmon. A perfection of piscatorial privilege.

We would fish Stack three or four times a year and were well in with all the ghillies. We weren’t their typical guests. We didn’t have titles, army ranks or even a large Norfolk farms.  We were a bit more down to earth and I think they quite liked that. These were the same ghillies who grudgingly spent their nights watching the river to protect it against the professional poachers – the ones who used dynamite.

After a few years they started suggesting that it may be worth our while to wander down to the river in the evening.  They would point us in the right direction and turn the proverbial blind eye.

There were only two problems with this generous offer.

First, Victor wasn’t in on the plan. I earlier described the Head Ghillie as formidable – fearsome and downright scary may have been better adjectives. I remember seeing him relieve one of his guests of their double handed rod and effortlessly cover the pool flicking out a long line single handed.  When he wasn’t on the river he could be found loping across the Estate in pursuit of a stag – a man not to be taken lightly and more importantly not to be outrun on a rock strewn heather clad riverbank.

Second, my Dad vetoed the idea when he found out that in theory your car counted as part of your poaching equipment and could be confiscated – given he had a Company car I couldn’t see the problem!

But to be honest we never did it because we just didn’t have the nerve. Ironically a few years later we did get to fish the Laxford legally.  One of the Duchess’s guests died the day before and she offered it to the Hotel (at a price) and it came to us. Sods law it was mid drought and I think the nearest salmon was still taking a tour round the estuary.

I have to confess that I did have a long term poaching project which I returned to year after year. I was blameless, the true culprit was an impossibly large trout which gazed imperiously down on the Scourie Hotel guests from its glass sarcophagus mounted high on the lounge wall.  This fish may have been caught back in the mists of time but each year it lured me back to its watery domain high in the Sutherland hills.

The loch ticked all the boxes of my poacher’s code. It was owned by English landed gentry, I was causing no harm, only a few of us in the know actually fished it and the trout though difficult were stunning in hue and stature.

One year justice was done as I was actually caught poaching the loch or at least seen by what I assumed were a pair of legitimate anglers clambering down from the ridge high above the loch. I scuttled off and made a lengthy and I mean lengthy detour back to the main road.

Exhausted I got back to the Hotel and in the bar found a fuming pair of guests recounting how they had slogged up to their favourite loch which wasn’t quite legal only to find someone had the audacity to be already fishing it! I stayed silent.

In three successive years my first identical cast on the loch resulted in three fish.  The first two weirdly weighing exactly the same at two pounds ten ounces and the third being the plumpest twelve ounce trout you have ever seen.

This was way better than  my poaching compatriots were managing. They hardly moved or saw a fish. The consensus was that the loch still held the odd good fish , but its halcyon days were long gone.

But I knew different. One teenage summer I had made a late evening sortie. There in front of me a proper evening rise was in progress. I was stunned, fish, big fish and lots of them were rising and rolling in the gentle ripple. Annoyingly, all the action was in the middle of the loch frustratingly beyond my casting limits, I briefly connected with one but although fishless I left the loch obsessed with the possibilities.

I spent the Winter plotting, I could take a tent up there and fish late and early, I could miss Dinner at the Hotel and spend the evening fishing, I could dap it off some of the high banks, I could lug my float tube up there, I could tie my special bushy dry flies cast into the distance and just leave, I ………

Over the years I haven’t camped there but I’ve tried pretty much everything else. I’ve caught the occasional good fish but not seen much else, so when I visit as I still do all these years later, I ask myself are those fish still there?  Because way back when, nobody but me thought they were but just maybe ……….