At The Crack Of It
- Details
- Published on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 17:18
- Written by Bruce Sandison
Dawn breaks. First birds sing as fox and badger slink to the safety of their lairs. A gentle breeze ruffles the surface of the stream. There is a sudden movement in the forest. A green-clad figure steals stealthily from cover and crawls silently towards the riverbank. Weak sunlight glints of the dull metal of a landing net.
The angler inches forward, making use of every scrap of cover to obscure his progress from the fish in the river. He freezes at the sound of a splash. A late owl blinks and flaps homewards, ghost-like through the gloom. The angler’s right hand feels for the cork handle of his fishing rod. In a single, well-practiced move, the thin wand bends then whips forward. The tiny dimple of his fly appears on the water. The moment of truth.
Catapulted into the ever-increasing chatter of the burgeoning day comes a mighty crash as the river erupts in a shower of sparkling spray. The angler rises to his feet, rod firmly grasped, reel screaming. The fish runs for the tail of the pool and leaps. It ‘bores’ on the bottom. The trout runs and leaps again and again. Finally, the angler skilfully nets the huge fish, removes the fly and kills the trout. It is done, finished.
Pretty gripping stuff you will agree, and I am sure you recognised the angler? Yup, that’s right, it was me and I like to think I played the part pretty well. Eat your heart out, Robert Redford and “A River Runs Through it”. Not everyone has either the skill or patience to be up at sparrow-fart to hook and land a 4lb wild trout in a narrow, tree-lined stream. It takes dedication to duty and an intimate knowledge of your quarry. But, I suppose, after all, someone has to show the way?
But it is just fancy, a story, a figment of my imagination, an unattainable dream. How I like to think of myself up at the crack of whatsit and down to the river before bat bedtime. The reality is that I could no more get out of bed in time to greet the morning rise than I could play Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto to ecstatic applause on stage in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Even as a child the advent of morning filled me with such horror that it took the combined efforts of the whole family to prise me out of my pit.
At weekends they didn’t bother to try. I would happily have spent the whole day in bed had it not been for the lure of the Saturday matinee show at the Ritz Cinema, Rodney Street, Edinburgh. At the age of 12, I was marched off to our medical practitioner, Dr Henderson, to try to discover what was wrong with me. The assurances my long-suffering mother received did nothing to alter my habits. I continued to behave as though I was infected with some rare form of Scottish sleeping sickness.
Service in the Army, you might be excused for thinking, should have cured me. It didn’t, I simply altered my sleeping habits. When I learned that, in the Middle East, HM Queen’s finest worked only from 7.30am until lunchtime I immediate volunteered for duty in Southern Arabia. This was a highlight of my military career. Come noon, I indulged in a positive orgy of mind-bending, relaxing, undisturbed, beautiful sleep. It wasn’t until I returned to civilian life and the necessity of earning a crust that I reluctantly began to rise at a reasonably respectable hour.
So I do have a problem with the dawn rise. The spirit may be willing but, alas, the habits of a lifetime are hard to break. Before getting hitched, like most sensible men, I made sure that my intended partner was as devoted to angling as she claimed to be devoted to me, and it was largely due to her influence that “things” began to change in the early-bird stakes. She talked knowingly about the dawn rise, which fascinated me, because, of course, I have never actually seen one. I wondered if it really was as exciting as people said it was?
Several serious expeditions were therefore launched in hot pursuit of the phenomena. In 1965 (I think?) we missed the dawn rise when we arrived two hours late on the banks of Derwent Reservoir on the Northumberland/Durham border. We then moved to a haunted house in the South Tyne Valley, a couple of minutes walk from the river. In spite of the proximity of the stream, I never managed to hit it at first light. By the time I had done with the week’s work and rampaged through the garden, I was good for nothing other than sleep. At least that is what I claimed.
When we moved to the far north there was so much wonderful trout fishing available during civilised daylight hours that it never occurred to me to leap loch-wards in the middle of the night. But my better half is made of sterner stuff and, eventually, I succumbed. She devised a fail-safe plan to ensure that even I could not be late. We would hike out to a remote loch the evening before, sleep in a convenient shore-side fishing hut and thus be insitu come the first blink of the new day.
It was mid-May and we set off after work on the Friday evening full of hope and steely resolve. Ah! Spring in the Highlands! It began to snow at about 9.30pm and by 10pm the wind had reached gale force 10. Spray from the loch lashed the side of the hut as we shivered inside, crouched over a single-burner stove. After supper we huddled on the hard floor in damp sleeping bags listening to the storm raging about our ears.
It was impossible to sleep. My back ached. I felt as though I was trapped in Caliban’s riven oak tree. Out of sheer exhaustion we eventually dropped off. As you will no doubt have guessed by this time, we slept right through the dawn rise. Dispirited and fishless we retired home stunned and hurt. Dawn rise? What dawn rise? I don’t believe such a thing exists.
However, this year I intend to make a special effort to be in the right place at the right time, come what may – well, June really. It never gets dark up here in June. My cunning ploy is to start fishing at midnight and then simply wait for dawn to come to me, rather than the other way round. I am much better at staying up late than getting up early so I can’t fail to be there when first light breaks. Must get into training with a short nap, right now. Close the door quietly, please, when you leave?
Bruce Sandison is a writer and journalist and author of nine books, including the definite anglers' guide, 'The Rivers and Lochs of Scotland' which is being revised and updated prior to republishing.
He contributed to 'Trout & Salmon' for 25 years and was angling correspondent for 'The Scotsman' for 20 years. Sandison writes for the magazine 'Fly Fishing and Fly Tying' and provides a weekly angling column in the 'Aberdeen Press & Journal'.
His work, on angling, Scottish history and environmental subjects, has appeared in most UK national papers, including 'The Sunday Times', 'The Telegraph', 'The Daily Mail', 'The Herald', 'Private Eye', 'The Field' and in a number of USA publications.
Sandison has worked extensively on BBC Radio. His series 'Tales of the Loch' ran for 5 years on Radio Scotland and was also broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and on BBC World Service. His series, 'The Sporting Gentleman's Gentleman' and his programme 'The River of a Thousand Tears', about Strathnaver, established his reputation as a broadcaster.
Sandison has had extensive coverage on television. He wrote and presented two series for the BBC TV Landward programme and has given a number of interviews over the years on factory-forestry, peat extraction, wild fish conservation and fish farming.
Sandison is founding chairman of 'The Salmon Farm Protest Group', an organisation that campaigns for the removal of fish farms from Scottish coastal and freshwater lochs where disease and pollution from these farms is driving wild salmonid populations to extinction.
Bruce Sandison won 'Feature Writer of the Year' in the Highlands and Islands Press Awards in 2000 and in 2002, and was highly commended in 2005. Bruce lives near Tongue in Sutherland with his wife Ann.