West Ollay – A South Uist Machair Loch Obsession

South Uist’s West Ollay – I’m determined that one day this will be my favourite loch. This should be the place where my dreams come true.

It should be the loch where my personal best for a wild brownie is set at an unbeatable high. This fish should tip the scales at a level that’s like one of those drug fuelled 1980’s East German women’s world records – untouchable.

I say this because West Ollay’s fish are spectacular, huge and do get caught. By huge, I mean really big….  I spoke to a fellow (trustworthy) angler last year, who had landed a fish of over nine pounds!! Before you get too excited, this was exceptional, even for West Ollay.

I use the phrase “do get caught” but unfortunately, dare I say tragically, not by me. Instead of being my loch of destiny, West Ollay has become my loch of despair, disappointment and above all frustration.

You see, as I’ve got older, I have gone down the ageing angler’s well-trodden path of being much more interested in catching the odd memorable big fish, rather than a few unremarkable decent ones.

Alarmingly, I’ve also begun to see a worrying trait develop in my personality, the harder I find somewhere to catch a fish, the more obsessed I become with it.

These two traits align with a vengeance in West Ollay – big fish that I can’t catch!

It’s a worrying sign of my obsession that as I write I can visualise every rocky outcrop, submerged stone and weed bed, I can imagine fishing each of the loch’s myriad of drifts, there’s only one thing I can’t see – the fish!

When I book my week’s fishing, West Ollay is now always my first choice, but I’ve noticed that recently I’ve started approaching its shores with trepidation rather than with my old tingling sense of anticipation. This is meant to be fun, I may need to get some perspective, get a grip!

So what makes West Ollay so special?

West Ollay lies amongst the string of famed machair lochs which stretch along the Atlantic coast of South Uist. 

For those that haven’t had the pleasure of time spent in the Hebrides, it may be worth a brief diversion into the geographical history of South Uist’s west coast lochs.

Through the millennia the Hebridean seas have been unusually rich with crustaceans – cockles, mussels, clams and the like. Over the centuries, the torrid conditions at sea have ground down their shells into a fine white sand. This is none of your common-or-garden beach sand that is found on most of our coasts, that comes from eroded rock such as quartzite; this is a special sand, shell sand.

Centuries of Hebridean storms and tides have tossed this shell sand onto the beaches, from where the winds have blown it further inland and deposited it to form the machair, a strip of flat flower meadow extending at most a mile from the coast.

In the summer it’s a vision of orchids, red clover, oxeye daisies and buttercups, and according to my very good crofting friend, Angus MacKellaig, it produces the best salty, creamy potatoes on the planet.

Any available depressions are filled with shallow sandy bottomed lochs with their alkaline and calcium rich waters providing the ideal breeding ground for the insects, snails and freshwater shrimp that make up much of the diet of the machair trout.

All the machair lochs hold good fish, most hold the occasional trophy fish, but none can compare to the sheer number of truly specimen trout that swim the waters of West Ollay.

These lochs are fascinating to fish, but even I have to admit that some of them aren’t the most picturesque. 

The machair landscape is essentially flat and featureless with South Uist’s peaks of Hecla, Choradail and Beinn Mhor three miles distant to the East. Given the prevailing weather, these mountains are often hidden behind a curtain of leaden cloud and rain. So although I love these lochs on a dreich day, even I have to admit they can be a bit drab, even nondescript.

But not West Ollay. It’s a loch of variety and intrigue. A place where your next cast could give you the angling memory of a lifetime.

I’ll give a brief tour of the loch, and hopefully convey some idea of what makes a day afloat here so tantalising.

As you push the boat back from its moorings, you are into an area of very shallow water. The loch floor is carpeted with stonewort, above which lie vast blankets of pond weed which grab the oars at every stroke.

You look over the side of the boat and know that you are peering into a nutritious soup that must be teeming with life.

In these first few hundred yards there are rare areas of open water, but mostly you are surrounded by the beds of pond weed that are such a feature of West Ollay.

As you venture further, you come to not only my favourite part of the loch, but for me just about the most intriguing area to drift in all of the highlands and islands.

Yet another large weed bed sits to the left, and it doesn’t take much imagination to picture large trout cruising along its edges, languidly picking off snails and shrimps.

Facing you are a couple of small islands, rock and stone, capped with straggling grassy tops. Row past these, and you are into another area of tempting shallows.

To the right are a series of rocky islets, beyond which lies an extended area stretching to the eastern shore. A substantial piece of water littered with rocky channels, submerged rocks, stony shallows and numerous weed beds.

It’s a patchwork of angling obstacles infilled in with short ten, twenty, thirty yard drifts over clear water. A beguiling but testing angling heaven.

The western end of the loch, which is really a large bay, is very different in nature to the rest of the loch. It consists of a large expanse of open water where you can relax and enjoy long uninterrupted drifts. Dare I say, I find this area of the loch a bit boring, but only because the rest is such a delight.

I shouldn’t dismiss this area, as according to John Kennedy’s “70 Lochs,” the bible of South Uist angling, fishing the drop off on the western shore can be very productive, especially on a summer’s evening.

I am embarrassed to admit that I must have fished West Ollay at least seven times and the sum total of my efforts to date have been two very plump, but unfortunately very small fish, caught on the same cast.

To be fair, on my last visit I rose a very good fish, but he missed me – not my fault at all!

Given my record of abject failure, I’m not going to presume to offer advice on how to fish West Ollay; all I can do is relay my various failed efforts and let you be a witness to my frustration.

I started fishing West Ollay alone as my wife tends to spend the day strolling Uist’s beaches with Lexi, our border collie. For all the other lochs it’s not a problem and I cope quite happily, and dare I say I’m fairly successful.

Anyone who has fished West Ollay knows this solo approach is bordering on madness. I really enjoy the constant manoeuvring of the boat, negotiating the narrow channels and short drifts onto weed beds.

It’s fiddly with lots of playing around with the oars, but if, like me, you enjoy messing about in boats, there aren’t many better ways to spend a day, and the time just flies by.

The flaw in the plan is that if I were lucky enough to hook a decent fish, it’s pretty obvious I would have no chance of landing it. Within seconds there would be panic and chaos, the boat and fish would be tangled in the weeds, a recipe for disaster.

So for my third outing I needed a new approach. 

I recruited my wife as the ghillie for the morning, the deal being she would be released at lunchtime. I have to say Heather did an excellent job apart from the bit about putting me over a taking fish, I don’t think she’d read this part of the job description.

Nevertheless, I can’t deny that I was able to fish West Ollay’s mosaic of rocks, weeds and fishable water, covering any number of impossibly fishy spots – as ever all to no avail.

I even had a new cunning plan for the afternoon, once Heather had disappeared off to enjoy the excellent coffee and cake laid out at the Kildonan museum’s café.

I would land on the tiny islands, making very sure the boat was secured, paddle among the rocks and from there cast over some of the rocky channels. It worked like a dream, and I covered lots of fishy areas, and doubtless trout, and caught……nothing!

A word of warning, in May this isn’t an option, as the best island to fish off is alive with nesting Arctic Terns. If you drift anywhere near them they vent their ire, shrieking, twisting and twirling above your head, making it clear that they really don’t want you anywhere near.

My next trip was in the following year with my mate Alan. As I’ve written before, he is my ageing protégé fulfilling the Bob Mortimer role in our angling relationship. 

Normally I’m pretty selfless and am genuinely much more interested in Alan catching something than myself. Above all, I want him to catch a really good fish on one of our South Uist ventures. We could start with perhaps a two pound brownie or a really nice three pound sea trout.

But when setting out the plans for the week I can’t deny self-interest bubbled to the surface. I made it clear that this one day on West Ollay was to be mine, the rest of the week could be Alan’s, but this was to be my day. 

Feeling a bit guilty, I made myself the martyr, and gave Alan the first drift down my favourite rocky channel.

You know what’s coming next and yes, sod’s law, on Alan’s first drift ever on West Ollay, he hooked a fish. The fish that rightly should have been mine, I’d spent years in its pursuit!

I was saved from having to mutter my congratulations through gritted teeth as the union was short lived and the trout escaped, taking Alan’s Mallard and Claret with it.

There was no doubt this had been a proper West Ollay trout. 

So, to the future, I’m not giving up – us retirees need an aim in life.

I think I also need to return to confront my twin headed demon of obsession and now even more concerning jealousy. But we all know it just wouldn’t have been right for Alan to land a West Ollay goliath before me!

I’ve tried most things. All the traditional wet flies, dry flies, even dapping, I’ve fished early mornings and late into darkness, I’ve even tried different times of year, early summer and autumn. I’ve fished on flat calm sunny days and perfect, overcast, rolling wave days. 

I’m sure my time will come.

So, if later this year you see me posting a follow up blog on West Ollay, you’ll know that at last I’ve triumphed over my nemesis, and that West Ollay will finally be rivalling Fada as my favourite loch on the wonder that is the Isle of South Uist.