Full Circle
- Details
- Published on Monday, 03 March 2008 05:46
- Written by Brian Tulloch
Like a lot of youngsters in Scotland my fishing apprenticeship took place on the local burns. The two burns I fished were the Murieston water known locally as the Bog burn and The Linhouse water known as the Linnise. I remember my dad taking me down to the Murieston burn after tea one night, and with his help catching my first trout on a free lined worm. Despite that being over thirty years ago, I still know the exact spot beside a big boulder on the playing field stretch.
I had no fancy tackle in those days. My brother had a wee white spinning rod that he received after saving tokens from the back of cornflakes packs, and I had an even shorter blue rod with a plastic handle. These rods came with equally nasty spinning reels loaded with what must have been eight pound nylon, a mepp type spinner and a bubble float. I wonder how many would-be anglers started off with one of those outfits before moving on to better things or giving up? I would venture of to the burn from time to time with little or no success, the only thing certain was wet feet and a sigh from my mum after going in over welly depth.
Fishing really kicked of for me when I started fishing with Trevor. Trev lived around the corner from me and, despite being a few years older, put up with my immaturity and showed me the ropes. The first thing he sorted out was my line and terminal tackle, eight pound nylon and size 10 hooks just wouldn’t do. Three pound nylon and size sixteen hooks were more the order of the day. We used to get our hooks and stuff from Woolco down in Livingston centre where you could buy Woolworths own brand tackle; imagine a supermarket selling fishing tackle now. Most of Trevor's tactics were straight out of his Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing book: ledgering with maggots or brandling worms. It amazed me the number of big trout he could catch with this method, especially after a spate. When I say big trout I’m talking half pounders, anything above nine inches was a good one.
Around about the same time I started fishing with Trev’s pal Owen and it would be fair to say we fished one or other of the burns almost every day of the season, weekends or after school. We became quite proficient at catching trout using a variety of methods and baits. Float fishing with a wee grayling type float was probably our favourite method using worm, stick grubs or maggots if we could get them. I remember doing well with leather jacket grubs on one occasion. The Murieston burn trout seemed to like them.
We later moved on to fly fishing. My dad took me down to the sports shop in Livingston to buy me a fly rod where you would have thought I might have had the sense to choose a nice wee rod suitable for burns. Not me. I ended up with the biggest rod in the shop, a Shakespeare Alpha I think it was called. It had a blue blank with a matching blue eathafoam handle, measuring nine and a half feet and taking a six to eight line. This thing was more suited to Rutland water than a burn. Still, despite my poor choice of rod I grasped the basics and was soon catching fish on down and across spiders. Our fly fishing skills developed and tackle improved, and as the years went by we mastered the basics of upstream wet and dry fly. Thinking back the fishing on the burns was quite challenging, bad casts were punished because the burns are so overgrown in places.
Whenever fishing up near the Linhouse estate itself, we were always creeping about trying to avoid the attention of the gamekeepers. Eventually Owen wrote a letter to the head keeper asking for permission to fish and it was a surprise to us when we were summoned up to the entrance of the house to talk to him, I remember being a wee bit nervous in case we got a ticking of, but he was very fair and after questioning us granted permission to fish as long as we stayed on the opposite bank from the house.
Owen and I now also started tying our own fly’s. I had a Veniard’s starter kit that came in a plywood box. This contained a vice, some basic tools and a selection of materials to get going. If I remember correctly the first fly I ever tied up was a black and peacock spider. Not having a lot of money we were always on the lookout for feathers lying around, I remember being horrified when I went down to Owen's house one day, he had found a dead Shrew which he had gutted and pinned to a board to dry out for fly tying purposes.
In 1983 Morton reservoir opened as a put and take fishery. I would have been 13 at the time and still hadn’t caught anything above half a pound or so. Owen and I cycled up to Morton for a look around one day, wow, Barbour jacket clad anglers were catching rainbow trout, a fish I had only seen in books up until then, and they were big, averaging 12 oz to a pound. This was the start of a new chapter in our angling careers, suddenly the fish from the burns seemed quite puny in comparison to these magnificent creatures. I couldn’t honestly tell you anything about the first rainbow I caught, but it would have been on some kind of lure I guess. Going back to limited fly tying materials, the Ace of spades was a very popular fly back then. I didn’t have any black chenille for the body so used…..purple instead. The rainbows went daft for this purple ace on a couple of occasions and everyone wanted the tying. We still fished the burns from time to time, but also made regular trips to Morton, Crosswood, Harperrigg and Cobbinshaw.
I guess that for a few years trying to catch girls became my number one past time and fishing trips became fewer. If they did happen, it was always for rainbows, never on the burns. Owen and I only bumped into one another down the pub from time to time, and by now he had stopped fishing altogether.
Nowadays I‘m as daft about fishing as I was when I was a youngster, but at 37 my fishing has gone full circle. I cant remember the last time I frequented a local rainbow dub, much preferring to fish for wild fish. This season I plan to revisit the burns and I’m genuinely excited about the prospect of working my way up these streams once again When I do I would like to tell you how I get on.