Loch Stack – Memories of Fishing one of Scotland’s Great Sea Trout Lochs

Fishing Loch Stack in the early 1970s I judge myself to have been amongst the lucky ones. Privileged to witness Stack in its final years as a great loch. One of the giants of Scottish Sea Trout fishing alongside Maree and my own favourite, the magnificent Dionard.

Our family’s journey to Loch Stack’s shores ran through a disastrous family package holiday to Majorca, during which Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon provided the only highlight.

On his return my dad, filled with fresh resolve, wrote to as many fishing hotels as he could find in the pages of Trout & Salmon. He came up with the only one that was fully booked for the following year – Ian Hay’s Scourie Hotel. Undeterred, he booked two weeks for the year after that.

So finally, in July 1971, Dad found himself tackling up by the boathouse on the far end of Sutherland’s Loch Stack. Brought up fishing the Wharfe, I very much doubt whether he had caught a trout over a pound and a half in his life. Salmon and sea trout were from a distant and previously unvisited land.

That first morning must have been quite daunting, this world of grizzled ghillies and well-heeled clients. My dad set up his totally inadequate nine foot trout rod, totally underpowered for what lay in wait.

Felix, who I always thought of as the doyen of the Stack ghillies, bent his back and rowed to the distant and rarely visited Arkle shore. They returned triumphant at the end of the day with a dozen sea trout – and that was it – Dad’s Summer holidays were sorted for the rest of his days.

I was eleven and must have been thought of as too young to venture out, but over the next ten years I was lucky enough to fish the loch three or four times a year. The following decades saw occasional visits, but I found the loch’s decline too painful to witness.

To me Stack had three wonders, the first being its setting which was, and of course remains, spectacular; the second was its fishing that was challenging, sometimes rewarding, but tragically transient; and third was its cohort of ghillies that in my memories seem to be as much an intrinsic part of the loch as its famous drifts.

The Setting

Loch Stack’s setting can only be described as dramatic, dominated by Arkle with its rising whaleback extending along the length of the loch’s northern shore. The mountain’s lower slopes are a green and brown heather clad deception. At a height of a few hundred feet the true nature of the mountain emerges as it transforms into ramparts of forbidding quartzite scree.

Two thousand feet of unforgiving rock and loose stones without the merest hint of vegetation visible to the distant eye. Arkle’s twin peaks providing a fitting home for an eagle’s eyrie hidden somewhere high amongst that mass of stark grey rock.

To the south, the pyramid peak of Ben Stack glowers over Loch Stack’s Lodge End (L). A brooding sentinel keeping watch over the headwaters of the River Laxford before they spill out of the loch and into the glorious spate river below.

The Lodge End, with its picturesque stone bothy, is really a long narrows running up to the far Dogger drift beyond which the loch becomes much more open. 

The bothy overlooks an islet, graced with its own granite Celtic Cross; a memorial to Constance, the first Duchess of Westminster, a society beauty much admired by Queen Victoria.

The far end of the Loch, Stack (A), Airdachuillinn, is immortalised in the photo opportunity which adorns many a highland postcard. The boathouse in the foreground, the majestic Arkle providing the backdrop.

I’ve always thought this viewpoint misrepresents the true character and nature of the loch.

The picture depicts the sheltered Boathouse Bay, with the Airdachuillinn pier on the far shore. On the postcard it’s always sunny with blue skies and calm waters. Of course there were days like that, but for the most part my Stack was a world of dark, foam flecked water, surging waves, all under angry skies.

To add to the delusion, most of the loch and its fishing lie hidden behind the far headland. This is the main body of the loch, a vast area of open water, with some drifts obvious along its shores and others hidden over sunken banks.  

The Fishing

Of course Stack’s second wonder was its fishing. It was often hard, but if you were in luck, and your prayers for rain had been answered, the Laxford would be in spate delivering its fresh run of fish into the loch. 

We fished the loch from the Scourie Hotel which was blessed with what seemed to be an almost endless array of superb beats, many of which are still very dear to my heart, but the days we fished Stack were different, special. On these days you felt you were fishing in a different league – this was the angling version of the Premier League.

This feeling wasn’t down to the number of fish you caught, it was much more because of the challenge that Stack presented, it could be demanding, a real test. Over the years there was a fairly clear pattern that emerged amongst the regular anglers, the cream rose to the top – the same people were successful year after year.

We favoured Stack (A) over Stack (L), Airdachuilinn was on a grander scale than the Lodge End and had more variety in its fishing, although the Lodge had the fantastic Dogger, a sea trout shallow of your dreams.

Airdachuilinn could be a wild, inhospitable place, with its wide open expanses often the home to formations of foaming white horses racing across its drifts. It wasn’t a rarity to be blown off the loch completely, or at least to have your day restricted to drifting the relative shelter of Boathouse Bay. At its worst, it could be brutal, even capable of producing erupting waterspouts which would spiral skyward.

It fished best for salmon in a big wave and some of the lies were quite specific. No matter what, the ghillies held you on the drift, there was no compromise, which often meant you weren’t square to the wind. I was always in the bow casting over my left shoulder, often angled into a gusting wind, casting across the wave.

For a youngster as I then was, this was all quite technical, a real education under the expert eye of the ghillies. I owed them so much and I loved it!

As to flies, our choice largely stuck with the advice Felix had given Dad on that first day. “Watson’s Fancy on the point for the salmon, Teal Blue & Silver in the middle for the sea trout, and a Black Pennel on the bob for either.”

After a few years, there came something of a revolution as we all started fishing Gold Muddlers on the top dropper. In a wave the Muddler was undoubtedly the most lethal fly for salmon, and its use became a tactic that apparently worked equally well on the highland spate rivers.

A lasting impression I have was that these outings could be quite tough, tiring, even physical. You would fish hard from ten till six, landing for a brief half hour lunch, probably spent on the beach overlooking the Dogger.

Those early days were before the advent of graphite rods, and so you would spend your day wielding an eleven foot fibreglass seven weight. I can still remember how by late afternoon you’d have a throbbing ache in your wrist and how between drifts you would furiously shake out your casting hand to try to ease the pain.

It was always thought important to be the first boat out so you could have the initial drift down the far side of the bay opposite the boathouse. It was here that the salmon would congregate before making the mile long run up the stream into the much undervalued Loch More.

The longer it had been since the last spate, the more fish would be massed here waiting to run. It was a pretty commonly held view that the first flies over fish stood the best chance of moving them. So the four boats would be rushing to get out onto the water without making it too obvious what they were up to!

Despite the urgency, we would likely have failed on that first drift, and we would then be rowed into the main part of the loch to have few runs over The Table, which was a favourite sea trout drift. Moving on we would slow our retrieves over the salmon lies of Red Rock and the mouth of the Lone Burn, hoping to entice the slow roll of a taking fish.

If the waves weren’t too daunting, we may get to the Blackstone Shore, or if we were really lucky we might make it to the North Bay, or even the Arkle Shore, to drift over more sea trout.

As I’ve said, this place wasn’t easy, but the quality of the sea trout was superb. We thought a fish over two pounds to be a proper sea trout, anything much smaller we dismissed as a finnock. There were a good few bigger sea trout around, and of course the lure of a real chance of hooking a salmon. 

Most years we would have at least one salmon from our four days on the loch, and they provided some epic battles. To the uninitiated, it’s impossible to convey the thrill of that initial realisation that you’ve just won the jackpot and hooked a salmon.

The Collinson family had a fair few entries from Stack in the Scourie Hotel fishing book. Many of them weren’t that impressive, but there were a few golden days. Dad’s favourite always remained that first day with Felix.

Mine came a few years later, with a rare outing on the Lodge End with Sandy on the oars. There had been a deluge the night before, and waterfalls were spouting seemingly everywhere off the flanks of Ben Stack; even the boathouse was half under water.

By lunchtime I had two salmon in the boat, and according to my fishing diary the first fish, hooked off the Sandy Spit, took me forty minutes to land, “because of the tremendous current running through the lower end of the loch” – it must have been wet! Two salmon in a day was a very big deal to the fishing obsessed teenager that was me. 

As I went to University, and no longer thought it cool to be holidaying with my parents, my younger sister increasingly took my place in the boat, and sort of became the dapping queen of Loch Stack. She ended up catching far more big sea trout than I had ever managed, proving to me beyond all doubt that the dap really does catch the bigger fish.

The demands of a day on Stack didn’t end when your boat was moored and the ghillies had been gifted a bottle of their favourite tipple.

On your return to the hotel, there remained a very public appraisal of your success – the (now thankfully outdated) ritual of laying out your catch on the trays laid out in the hotel foyer.

The Stack fishermen would be the last back to the hotel, arriving just before seven. Most of the other guests would be off the hills and enjoying a pre-dinner drink. As the Stack fishermen returned, there would be a mass exit from the bar to review the catch.

It seems quite sad now, but as a fourteen year old, this part of the day really mattered! There was either the basking in the glory of your catch, or the muttered excuses and embarrassment of a still empty tray.

The Ghillies

Just as it was a privilege to fish Loch Stack during the 70s, it was also an honour to share it with what I think of as its golden era of ghillies. The Stack (A) ghillies were all probably in their 60s, sharing the same weather-beaten faces, ancient threadbare tweed jackets and a common healthy lack of respect for their clients – until they thought they’d earnt it.

They clearly liked the odd drink, and in the case of a couple of them, it was evidenced by their bulbous noses, broken veins and ruddy complexions which, if truth be known, weren’t only down to the weather. 

I suspect that they had spent their entire working lives on the Reay Estate, with decades of experience on the loch. 

My era of ghillies, as I like to think of it, were on Stack (A) the four boats of Felix, Geordie, Donny and Doughy. Manning the boats on Stack (L) were the much younger, but still brilliantly knowledgeable, Sandy and Victor.

Over the years, we got to know most of them well, even to the point where a couple of them were very keen on encouraging us to have a late night cast on the Duchess’s river. As well as being ghillies on the loch, they were also river watchers tasked with protecting the Laxford from the night-time attentions of commercial poachers. 

We never had the nerve to take up their kind offer. Victor wasn’t in on the plan, and he was the Duchess’s personal ghillie and stalker, a man with something of a reputation. 

My dad always had a soft spot for Felix after that first trip, and he seemed to be the only ghillie willing to undertake the long pull over to the Arkle shore. 

As most anglers were regular visitors they had built up relationships with their own ghillie and these pairings were pretty much set. 

We fished with them all at some point, and I have warm memories of days spent with Geordie, who was excellent, but our ghillie, as we thought of him, was Doughy.

Doughy wasn’t an easy character, and I’m sure lots of people found him really difficult. You could make out an alternative family of dwarves from the words that best describe him. Infuriating, irascible, irreverent, but to me – wonderful, generous and kind. He was also pretty much blind! He wore thick bottle top glasses, and you were lucky if he hadn’t tripped over a rod before you’d even got into the boat.

Once on the water, by some miracle, he knew exactly where he was. In one of our later years, when he really was struggling to see much at all, I remember him putting us on The Table, a shallow I could never find.

I call it a shallow, but it was deep enough that you couldn’t even see if you were actually on it. The Table lay well out in the loch, and you needed to line up landmarks to find it, at least you did if you hadn’t been a ghillie on the loch for 40 years.

As a young teenager, I suppose it could be best described as Doughy taking me under his wing. He taught me pretty much everything I know about fishing highland lochs for sea trout and salmon. He desperately tried to catch me my first salmon, and I can’t remember a single harsh word he ever said to me.

My dad wasn’t so lucky! The nadir came when he hooked a salmon which raced off, taking him straight down to the backing, and showing no signs of stopping. Panicking, Dad tried to slow it down by fiddling with his reel, but only managed to snag something and immediately got broken.  Client or not, Doughy ripped into him mercilessly, with what could only be described as a tongue lashing.

He’d always be whingeing about the members of the aristocracy he’d had the misfortune to be landed with, many of them being guests from Stack Lodge. Memorably, there was an unfortunate Lord somebody who was crippled and had to be carried onto the boat – no sympathy, only a stream of invectives from Doughy! 

I also think he mentioned he caught Prince Andrew his first salmon, but I couldn’t even hold that against him.

These were the days before outboards, and rowing back into a gusting wind often meant that one of us would share his seat to take an oar. Without fail, he would always give you the outside oar, the one requiring the extra effort as you rounded the long bend into Boatman’s Bay – he wasn’t daft!

Buried somewhere in his jacket he always carried a battered three inch black tube fly that looked as old as himself. After a fruitless day he would insist that after the last drift we troll this thing back to the boathouse. I’m pleased to say it never worked.

I’m always drawn back to Scourie, if somewhat intermittently, and when I do I nearly always visit Doughy’s last resting place which overlooks Scourie Bay. I have quiet thoughts and gently say a few words of heartfelt thanks.

The Demise

As I often write, I find the demise of the salmon and sea trout runs painful, but this can’t compare with how distressing it must have been for the ghillies, who must have feared a way of life, their way of life, slipping away. 

I’m grateful that the gentlemen I’ve written about above only saw the beginnings of decline, and were spared the calamity of what was to come in a few short years after their retirement. The devastation of the West Coast sea trout stocks, and the inexorable but more gradual decline in salmon runs.

As the once prolific drifts became increasingly barren, there was at first confusion, what had changed?

There were rumours of Danish power stations being fuelled by huge catches of sand eels, but for those of us that were there at the time there was a more obvious culprit.

The beginnings of the decline coincided with the initial siting of salmon farms around the West Coast. It accelerated as the cages became a plague, blighting every available every inlet and sea loch.

Not content with poisoning these previously pristine waters, the cages proceeded to rain a contagion of deadly sea lice onto the feeding wild fish below. 

Over the Winter I hope to write something more considered and researched in respect of the collapse of sea trout stocks on the West Coast.

But for now I would leave you with one thought. The sea trout came to our island shores some 12,000 years ago, closely following behind the melting floes of retreating ice. In two short decades we decimated their numbers – we should be ashamed.