A Lost Trout From Loch Leven – frustration, the one that got away!

A lost trout from Loch Leven, a painful experience from an evening last August. Perhaps it would be a good time to admit that the biggest wild brownie I’ve caught is a mere four pounds. Given the time, effort, and let’s be honest, straightforward cash I’ve expended trying to catch a really big one, you could say that a Corrib four pounder is a pretty poor effort – you may have a point.

You see my real passion, mission, whatever you want to call it, is trying to catch big trout from really wild places somewhere in the British Isles. That for me is what it’s all about.

So this one almost doesn’t count, as it was from Loch Leven which has transformed itself into the home of freakishly large trout which don’t seem quite real. Another point that makes me a touch uneasy is that they seem to fall to buzzers often fished from an anchored boat which is pretty much of an anathema to me, the stick-in-the-mud traditionalist.

Anyway, last August I found myself talking to one of the old boatmen, and his advice was music to my ears – hearing I was on my way north to the Hebrides, he instructed me to fish in exactly the same way and with the same flies as I would on Bornish. So, the choice would be intermediate line, Soldier Palmer on the bob, Kate McLaren in the middle and a Pearly Muddler on the point.

Fate then took a hand. Thinking I would be fishing the dreaded buzzers, I had tied up numerous eight pound casts with various black buzzers attached with just two spare. Setting up in the car park I had managed to tangle one of these before it even got on the rod, and I had graciously proffered the other cast to my mate Alan, with whom I was fishing for the evening.

Foolishly, being anxious to get on the water, I didn’t stop and tie up another cast but delved into my reserves and put on a six pound Uist cast already tied up ready for the week to come – after  my recent failed attempts at Loch Leven the last thing I was expecting was to hook anything.

Early evening, perhaps our third drift onto the back of Castle Island. A boat running behind us, engine at full throttle. Perfect wet fly conditions, warm, cloudy and a steady breeze. I cast, started to retrieve and a fish took. Something huge exploded out of the water, charged off left, leapt again, ripping the the loose line through my fingers. This was nothing like a trout, it was salmonesque!

I glanced down, and to my horror saw that I had a loop of fly line coiled round my left leg – why now? There was no time, this thing was racing away too fast, the die was cast. Sure enough the loop tightened, snagged, the fish surged into the air one last time, hit the water, and snapped my cast as if it were the proverbial cotton.

The inevitable had happened, the fish was free, taking my Soldier Palmer with him back to the depths.

I treat my rods with reverence, but I have to admit that in a fit of pique and frustration I found myself slamming the butt of my treasured Hardy into the gunwale whilst letting loose with a tirade of profanities.

This is honestly out of character – but you rarely make contact with such a fish!

To be fair, I don’t think another two pounds of breaking strain would have saved me from my incompetence, and if I had been in control, I’m not sure a six pounds cast would have held this leviathan.

When we got back to the pier, the young boatman putting the engines away turned out to be in the boat motoring behind us when the fish took. I’ll leave the last words to him. “F**k, that was a big fish!”

A Tribute to the Loch Leven Boats

Looking back a year on, I now realise that my greatest regret from that August evening wasn’t the losing of that fish, annoying as it was. Something of much greater personal significance was happening, without me even knowing. 

I didn’t realise that this would be the last time that I would fish from one of those truly magnificent Leven boats. I believe that since that evening, the last original boat has been retired.

From my youth, Loch Leven is seared into my angling conscience, and when I summon up my memories from that now distant time, I always see the same distinct picture.

A big rolling wave, Castle Island in the background, thirteen year old me fishing from the bow, and my Dad casting his favourite split cane Lennox from the stern, but I also see the boat. Eighteen feet of clinker solidity, crafted in the early 20th century, dressed in its uniform of gunmetal grey paint, capped with black trimming.

Loch Leven is the only place where the boat is an integral part of my fishing memories. Their sheer size with their still ludicrously large cut down oars, once described to me as “baby telegraph poles,” the roughly painted black numbers on the seats, stern and bow and even the distinctive bailers, oddly shaped like small handled woks.

Many years ago, I heard that they were reducing the size of the fleet and selling off some of the boats. I had my version of  the classic mid life crisis, the one where middle aged men decide to buy a motor bike – mine was different, I really wanted to buy one of those boats. Impractical, and I didn’t, but I sort of wish I had.

To the boats:-

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