Botany And Boulder Creek
- Details
- Published on Thursday, 28 October 2010 19:22
- Written by Fred Carrie
I have said it before and I’ll say it again; if you are an adventurous, exploring kind of fly fisher, then a little botanical knowledge may give you the edge. It can often provide a reasonable indication of the fertility of a river or loch and the quality of the fish one might expect to find living there.
Of course high fertility does not always equate to big fish, there are plenty examples of quite fertile waters with massive populations of 8 inch trout, Loch Urigill in Assynt immediately springs to mind. However, it’s fair to say that the bigger, insect eating fish, are more likely to be found living in water with a pH that does not dissolve your waders.
Anyway, quality and size are not necessarily the same thing and if you believe that to be a binding rule you may as well stop reading this and get on the phone to book a session at one of the many amorphous rainbow trout fisheries that are almost certainly close by you. You’ll find lots of ‘quality’ fish there and you won’t need to know much about fishing, far less botany to catch them.
Now Boulder Creek might, at a casual glance, look pretty unpromising. For a start the hills of its source look to be, by and large, composed of hard igneous rocks, boast vast areas of peat, an acidic heather monoculture and for a few months each year, from about the 12th August onwards, are hosts to scarily armed grouse extermination squads. Seldom a good sign.
But the knowledgeable amateur botanist might tell you a different story. Way up, high in the hills something changes. You don’t need to be a geologist to see this and even if you don’t know the difference between a cabbage and a chrysanthemum the change in the vegetation is immediately apparent. Now if you do know a bit about plants you’ll recognise straight away that the underlying rock here is alkaline. Rare alpine plants grow here, calciphiles, that only grow in soils on alkaline rock. Alkaline rock = higher pH, heather doesn’t like that. Plants, insects and fish do.
In many respects Boulder Creek is a North Eastern Scottish version of the River Braan in Perthshire. A bit wilder and certainly far longer and higher sourced, but in many respects it’s pretty similar other than the fact there is no insurmountable barrier to fish migration. Like many mountainous streams it has a lot of thin, boulder strewn pocket water as well as some decent pools.
Now, Boulder Creek is not an easy place to fish or get around. Lower down it’s pretty much tree lined, and can run very fast and deep. The wading verges on lethal. I have come close to taking a fully clothed bath there on a few occasions. The only way to fish much of this water is to get in and wade. It‘s pretty hairy at times.
Some of the banks really are mountain goat territory, thick with trees both standing and fallen with dense under-shrub. A rope would be useful in some parts. No I’m not kidding.
It’s classic rod breaking terrain, so when I fish there I tend to use very inexpensive tackle. 
On my last trip I left the £600 Sage in the boot of the car and fished with a £30 Snowbee plastic reel, an 8 foot #4 Fladen rod that cost £20, over-lined by 1 “stop” with a fly line that cost me nothing. The line was a DT #5 River Don heron grey Wildfisher prototype I was testing. It performed wonderfully as did all the gear. These Fladen rods are extraordinary for the money. Yes, the build quality is pretty awful, but so what? Let’s keep things in perspective.
There was the odd fish rising first thing, but they steadfastly refused to look at my offerings. I tend not to thrash away with the same fly for long if it’s not doing the business, so I tried a few different patterns including a yellow may dun when I saw a few of them fly past. They refused those too, just as they refused beetle patterns, nymphs, Royal Wulffs, Balloon Caddis, big things with legs and even bigger things with even more legs. They wanted a size 18 parachute Adams. In fact they took any small fly, it was the size that was important to them.
Casting, or rather, presentation and line control, on water like this is interesting. Very few glides here. It’s mostly complex pocket water, so if you cast a straight line the fly will drag instantly. The fish holding pockets can be so small and surrounded by complex currents that a straight line cast, even directly upstream may drag almost straight away. Slack line casts are essential. For this kind of water I invariably find ‘wiggle’ casts work best. Fish short, with as little line as possible on the water and get it onto the surface slack and unevenly while still maintaining the accuracy needed to land the fly in the pocket. That usually buys you a few extra seconds of drag free drift that make all the difference. Try to keep as much of the line as possible, that is close to you, off the water by keeping the rod up. This requires practice and can’t really be fully mastered on grass or still water. You have to see the problem in order to learn how to solve it. Also don’t forget that drag applies as much to sunk flies as it does to floating flies. Think natural drift; if you throw stick into a river it seldom goes sideways. Fish know this.
In this kind of turbulent pocket water if no fish are showing, and you can’t spot them lying in the water, they are actually easier to locate. With bit of experience you will soon get a feel for where the invisible fish are likely to be lying. That’s not so obvious in wide, evenly paced glides or riffles. Prospecting in pockets tends to be more productive than doing the same thing in glides, where you’ll probably be spooking more fish than you can imagine. Just get the line under control and you’ll have cracked it.
Now I didn’t catch any lunkers that day on Boulder Creek, but what struck me about the fish was their condition and colour. Perhaps some of the fittest, bonniest trout I have caught. Very light in colour with small heads. This tells me the feeding is good here. They were quality fish.
Remember to check out the botany if you go there. It’s important.
That’s all I’m saying about Boulder Creek and I’m certainly not going to tell you where it is. It’s best to try to figure that out for yourself.
But this is not really about Boulder Creek anyway, it’s about trying to do things a bit differently and looking at a bigger picture; widening your horizons. Thinking. There are lots of Boulder Creeks if you bother looking for them and some of them are seldom if ever fished.
Yes it may all seem like a lot of hassle. All that clambering about, rock climbing, abseiling, falling in, the 4 year botany degree you’ll have to take ( just kidding), but if you find it or others like it by your own research and effort, you’ll appreciate them a lot more and the experience will be vastly more rewarding.
Depending on who you are, it could even change your mind about what a quality fish is and your local, predictable old rainbow trout fishery could well end up feeling the draft.
Fred Carrie started fishing in the mid 1960's, hillwalking in the 1970's and has been combining the two on and off ever since.
Fred runs the successful Wild Fishing Scotland family of web sites and enjoys the hike up to the wild hill lochs as much as the fishing itself.