Viking Lars | Saturday, 31 August 2024
In April I had the pleasure of fishing River Dee in Scotland. Something I have always wished to do and which turned out to be all in all a wonderful experience. I’ve had some unfortunate experiences in the past travelling with groups of people I didn’t know and I had sworn never to do that again. Howeveer, this team was put together by a very good friend of mine and I had no doubts that he had a good team. And indeed he did. We had a cabin to our selves, shared cooking, dishes and breakfast evenly and naturally. Apart from that, apart from fishing the famed and hallowed River Dee I fished with a proper and professional ghillie for the first time.
Ghillie is obviously not a proper word, since autocorrect keep changing it to “grille”. Being a ghillie is is proper job, though and I think most know the term. So how was that? A wonderful experience all in all, even though something I was slightly uncomfortable with. We fished with Sean Stanton, which apart from being a ghillie, in his waders and in the water 225 days a year, also runs a small fly tying business, which we visited the last day. It’s a bit of a paradox that he deals mainly in materials for predator flies (pike flies, in general) and he stocks materials in very, very good quality. I’ve preached it over and over again - when you stumble upon good quality natural materials, stock up. Yet I was so happy to finally come over excellent nayat (another word autocorrect doesn’t like) that I completely forgot about bucktail. Next time… Take a look at Sean’s shop here.
Back to Sean the ghillie. It’s not an easy job, that much was clear to me. There were six of us fishing two long beats and Sean made a point of coming by to check up on all of us, at least twice a day and we were all fishing alone. He’s the old type ghillie. If you don’t hurry out of the car, he’ll carry your rod to the river and lend you his shoulder wading out. Then he stays with you long enough for a detailed description of the pools you’ll be going through. Where to land the fly, where to pay extra attention, where to watch out for tricky wading, maybe some casting advice. He knows every foot of water and one thing I learned about River Dee is how small changes in water level can change a pool and its potential lies quite a lot. I thought he was mad when said: “Ah, this pool is very good now, but wait till tomorrow when the river had dropped three inches”. As if that made a difference, I thought. But it did - not dramatically of course, but even I could see how I’d change the way I fished certain spots just a little.
His extremely intimate knowledge of the river shouldn’t be a surprise as such, yet the level of detail was astounding. Then his level of service. One thing in the river, but I know for fact that had I asked him to make me tea in one of the huts, tea would be ready in 15 minutes. And of course he’s a very nice person as well. I saw other ghillies (this time autocorrect changes it to chillies) who took their clients to the river, got them in the water, pointed and waved their arms around a little and then got back in the Land Rover and left. With the numbers of salmon declining I know that ghillies are being laid off on several estates and the amount of knowledge and experience disappearing is sad. The better a ghillie is, there more likely it is that his (or hers, Sean tells me that hid daughter is interested in becoming a ghillie) clients will return.
I had a wish to visit Cairnton (Carlton, as autocorrect believes), where A. H. E. Woods fished and was the first to fish for salmon with small flies on a floating line. His hut is till standing and I’d just love to stand there, in his foot prints. That wasn’t possible this time, but maybe next, if I get the chance to go there again.
Go fish with Sean and…
Have a great weekend!
Lars
PoD: If on the 8th day someone had asked God to create the dream river of every salmon fisher, the Dee is it.