Memorable Lost Fish: My Loch Bornish Regret

One of my occasional posts on memorable lost fish, and this is number one at the top of the charts, and the one I look back on with the greatest regret – what might have been! Nothing like as big as the losses in Tasmania and Kinross that I’ve posted about before, but one much more meaningful, because it was from Loch Bornish in the Hebrides.

Nothing exotic or freakish, just a once in lifetime fish from a highland loch, the fish I’ve spent a lifetime and a lot of cash chasing.

To set the scene, myself and my wife-to-be were staying at the Lochboisdale Hotel in South Uist. I can get to the year because I remember being in our hotel room watching Linford Christie win Olympic Gold, so Google tells me it must have been July 1992.

It was our first trip to the Hebrides, and as young love was still in the air, Heather was happily manning the oars just to spend more time with her beloved!

It was a time when the allocation of the machair lochs was a bit of a mystery, with dare I say a rumoured favouritism to certain anglers, but on this day there were no complaints, I had struck lucky – Loch Bornish was mine for the day.

To quote John Kennedy’s guide, “Blank days on Bornish for the reasonably accomplished angler are very few indeed.” I have since proved on many occasions that either he was plainly just wrong, or that more worryingly I’m not as accomplished as I might like to think.

But not on this day! Even though it’s thirty odd years ago I remember the fight. The fish took the top dropper, the trusty Soldier Palmer, and went straight to the sandy bottom where it stayed and sulked. On the stalemate went, only interrupted by the occasional bout of head shaking – by the fish I hasten to add.

I was fishing my trusty Hardy six weight, and for the first time in my experience it wasn’t man enough for the job, I simply couldn’t move the fish – it just hung stubbornly under the boat. I was still pretty confident, the fish was hooked, the fight was a draw, but under control, patience would see the job through.

Remember, this was the era of good old reliable Maxima nylon, unlike today’s fluorocarbon which I trust even less than I do Boris Johnson. It was looking like my personal best was about to be set at new heights.

It wasn’t – an extra lunge from the fish, and genuinely for the only time I can remember I was broken fishing Maxima. Despair.

How big? I never saw the fish, but my guess was around the four pound mark, which I didn’t breach for another twenty years on a wondrous May morning on Corrib.

Is four pound so special? To me from a place such as Bornish an unreserved yes!

Useful Links :

To book fishing on Loch Bornish contact South Uist Estates