SALMON FISHING IN SUTHERLAND
Rain and River Levels
The week beginning 20th September was a very wet week in Sutherland and followed an equally wet one the previous week. This meant that, totally different to the previous couple of years in this part of Scotland, there was a lot of water in the rivers and lochs. Too much for good fishing.
In the Lochinver area salmon enter the rivers at any time from April onwards with the best runs in the Summer and early Autumn. This depends also on water levels in the rivers. Too low and the fish hang around in the estuary or lie disinterested in deeper pools; a few good downpours sees them shooting up the rivers to the spawning grounds and, en route, they stop for a rest at well-known and well-defined pools along the river before facing the next section of their watery migration.
One of the arts of salmon fishing is to find the pools where the fish rest briefly on their journey up the river. These fish are the ones likely to take a fly rather than the fish that linger for days or weeks in low water conditions. However, when the rainfall is sustained over a couple of weeks the volume of water in the river flows at such speed and height that these pools disappear and become very hard to identify. This was the case last week in Sutherland – see, I’ve made my excuses for blanking already!
Last September I saw thirty fish in little over half an hour on the Inver river one morning following several heavy showers overnight. This year I saw only two salmon in two days on the neighbouring Kirkaig river.
The River Kirkaig
I spent a week at the Inver Lodge Hotel in Lochinver and the manager, Nicholas Gorton, arranged some fishing for me on the Kirkaig. The hotel has fishing rights on three rivers and can also arrange loch fishing for a modest fee. The Kirkaig river is quite short and runs a distance of just about four miles from Fionn Loch to the sea at Inverkirkaig.
I fished the lower beat of the Kirkaig on Tuesday. The beat runs from just above the road bridge near the bookshop-cum-caf
