A Fly Fishing Season in Scotland

It’s nice to see the Clyde River Foundation and others getting school kids to understand something about rivers. The BBC have an article about one such project in Clackmannanshire. Check it out.

Ansel Adams was one of the greatest photographers ever. His landscape photos of Yosemite in the west of the USA really did set the standard for black and white photography of that genre. Photos like `Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico‘ have a kind of magnetic power to draw your eye around the frame. The sharpness, depth, tonality and composition of such photos remains unsurpassed. The fact that many of his great photos were taken in the early part of the last century does sometimes seem hard to believe.

Folks in the UK now have a great opportunity to see a wonderful selection of his own hand-printed photos at the `Ansel Adams - A Celebration of Genius’ exhibition which is now on display in the centre of Edinburgh. If you stand at the east end of Princes Street and look south across the top of the station you’ll see a big poster proclaiming ANSEL ADAMS. The exhibition is on at the City Art Gallery, which is right below the poster.

I’ve been twice, and it really is absolutely fantastic. It’s also a very rare chance to see the real thing, hand-printed by the Master and simply incredible to behold. Well worth the trip from Glasgow, Fife or anywhere in the UK really.

The photo in the first link above link is a horrific JPG version of the original. If you go to the exhibition and see the original you will be truly amazed at just how good a hand-printed black and white photograph can look.

Have a look at the (slightly poor) promotional website here.

Included in the exhibition is a display by a Scottish photographer called Lindsay Robertson. I hadn’t heard of him before, but his photos are also wonderful. He shoots using large format black and white film (like Ansel), and some of the prints are more than 5 FEET wide. You stand in front of them and truly feel like you could step into the frame and feel the cool breeze creeping across Rannoch Moor. His contribution to the exhibition is really excellent.

What else can I say? GO!

At the moment I’m getting more and more interested in photography. My new dSLR has really opened my eyes, and now I’m photographing more with my old manual gear too. During my internet browsing I’ve come across a few great photographers, but Bruce Percy has stood out as particularly excellent. Have a look at his site here. He seems to be based in Scotland, but his photos are from all around the world. Well worth a look.

It was one of those sunsets tonight. The light crawls right through the cooling air and onto the skin. No longer was I a passive observer of a distant photograph. The light fell onto me and everything around. Deep orange and red, oozing across south Edinburgh and coating everything. It’s the kind of sunset impossible to capture on film or pixel, for the light is everywhere except inside my camera. I snapped away gleefully, but I hope the feeling will last longer.

People say: “they don’t make stuff like they used to”. I say this, my pals say this and my dad certainly says this (though I secretly think he’s referring to people as well…). It was rather nice this evening to see that in some quarters, at least, they actually DO make stuff properly, like they used to, good and hard.

I’m always on the look out for a hook to turn a bad situation into something positive, and hopefully something to write on the blog, and this momentous event certainly falls into this category. This afternoon I bought (or rather, WAS bought) a rather cracking bottle of fine single malt whisky. Having taken a good while in the shop carefully sifting through a few malts, I decided on something I hadn’t tried before, from the west coast of Islay. It was a Bruichladdich, and mighty fine she was too.

As I climbed out the car this evening, I put the shining silver case on the roof of my car. Unbeknown to me it was upside down, so after locking the car and turing to gather the whisky and other faff I hoisted her briefly into the air only for the bottle inside to quietly slip out and roll off the roof. I’m sure the scene was comical: a bottle of fine malt careering off the roof, with a stupefied punter moving in comical slow motion to try and grab it whilst simultaneously grasping a large potted plant and two cameras.

The bottle hit the deck with a bone crunching, slightly eye watering `ting’ before quietly rolling up against the pavement. I dashed over, picked her up and cradled her in my shaking arms. Unbroken, just slightly chipped. That is some hard-ass glass man shit. It’s nice to see something made good and proper.

I raised a quiet toast this evening to a fine malt, a solid bottle and good the old fashioned tough stuff spirit. It’s important for fly fishing too, of course. Not long to go now…

There has been some incredible weather this winter. Wild rain, freezing fog, bright sunshine and snow. One of the most memorable days was the 12th of January. I drove up through the central highlands, and took loads of photos. I thought I’d share my favourite one.

I recently got a new camera, and it’s been a bit of a beauty. Photography provides a nice distraction from winter fishing blues. I suppose taking photographs of rivers is about as close as I can get at the moment..

A while back I was musing about the great fly tying problem of `waste stuff’. Every time I tie a deer hair emerger a great plume of trimmed deer hair finds its way down onto my bedroom floor. This is not exactly a universe-ending disaster. However, with my new-fangled portable fly tying system, I know I’m going to be doing a lot more tying on the road. That means my tying bench will be B&Bs, campsites and my car steering wheel. With all that waste, I could end up causing a kind of world war with the neighbors, and that’s definitely not cricket. What was needed was a catcher. A Catcher in the Hookeye, in fact.

Take one coat hanger, one old teeshirt, a little inventiveness and a friend with a sewing machine. Boil together in a large pan with garam masala, tomatoes and a Saturday afternoon. Add a chunk of metal, sprinkle with a little Disney magic and out pops this wee gem.

The Catcher in the Hookeye is my version of the waste material bin. It fits snuggly onto most vice shafts with that wee chunk of metal I mentioned, which I found lying around my lab at work. I’m not sure what it’s called, but I call it `the wee chunk of metal’. The frame is made of a bent coat hanger. Of course, coat hangers are normally bent when you buy them, so the idea of bending one is almost ironic. Bending the bent. It’s like asking a duck to quack with a Swedish accent. It’s a bent idea that.

The catching bit is the back of one of my oldest teeshirts. My mother tried for about five years to get me to chuck it, but my line was always “Ma, there will be some use for it eventually, I’m just not sure what it is yet.” Well Ma, here it is. The catcher of the Catcher in the Hookeye.

I like the fact that all my waste gets trapped now. I’ve always found that waste fly tying material is a bit like a dream: if you don’t grab it whilst it’s fresh, it’s lost forever. And that, my friends, is a little sad. Now there’s a right and proper place for waste, and it’s in the Catcher. Every now and then I’ll delve into the bowls of this humble servant, and it’s amazing the bits and bobs of old material that can be used for other flies. As I am an ethnic mix of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Scotland, I’m about as tight as they come. So don’t blame me, it’s genetic.

The Catcher falls nicely in line with my increasingly obsessive policy of home-made fly tying paraphernalia. It functions perfectly well, and cost -£2.50 (that’s the money I saved by not wasting time and petrol on taking my old teeshirt and coat hanger to the recycling joint). I tried for about three months to find something similarly decent in the fishing tackle shops, and the cheapest thing I found was almost a tenner. Ridiculous. Get yourselves a flaming coat hanger and a good old fashioned chunk of metal. Take half an hour on a Saturday afternoon (other days are less reliable) and churn one out for yourself. Then get down to the local newsagent and spend your saved cash on 250 penny sweets. Glorious.

Well folks, as if writing insightful, humorous and curry-pumping blog posts wasn’t enough, there’s now a new and exciting Gallery page to behold. I’m hoping to greatly expand this section of the site in the coming months (with the tiniest possibility of offering some of them for sale as prints..) so watch oot.

At the moment there are six sections covering a wee selection of my photographs. Most of the photos won’t have appeared on the main blog either, so why not head over and check it out.

I’ve also updated the About page so you can learn all you need to know about your hard-working blogger. Have a great weekend.

There’s a pool I know. Get into the river by the bridge, and go past the grey tree. The water deepens and is slightly brown and opaque. Look for the shopping trolly in the mud by the broken wall, and the orange traffic cone twenty yards further on. Take a look around you. The fresh green leaves, the twinkling new spring sunshine. Feel the early breeze pinch at your face.

Now you’re close.

Find the bush which wears the supermarket bags as leaves. Bright red and blue, a flash of the rainforest in the central belt.

Now you’re very close.

The water is clearer here. It gurgles and slides around two jagged rocks, then slows and dives a little deeper. Glance upstream. A little blue thunderbolt streaks across your line of sight. A deepening furrow in your brow. Kingfishers, here?

A bus thunders along the road, beyond the trees that hide your river. A thousand engines churn in neutral. Two million people take a breath, exhale, and continue their work. You feel like a sneaky twelve year old truant going into town, peering past the school gate whilst everyone else learns to conjugate verbs. The furrow is a smile now. You know a secret, and it’s very, very close.

The pool. It’s the best one anywhere on this river. It’s like ten pools really, full of streamy seams and pockets and little bathtub hollows. It’s the kind of place that might take two seasons to explore. A true hidden gemstone, in between crumbling walls and flowing through an unknowing city. There are trout here. Wild brown trout with red spots that eat dark olives, kebabs and grey dusters. You gratefully oblige and tie on a size 16. A favourite fly, perfect for searching the foamy runs. If things get desperate there’s a good chippy a hundred yards along the road. The urban river is an amazing place.

Happy new year.

Long hours of quiet meditation. Days of ingesting inordinate quantities of super-curry. With-holding toilet use for three days. There are many things we can do to try to change ourselves. I tried to change, I tried to be a Tuesday-night-tier. I tried to set targets and to stick to them. Ten muddler heads a week, how hard can it really be? Sadly, it just doesn’t work.

I’ve since come to accept that my erratic fly tying behaviour is probably a reflection of something rather unchangeable and hard-wired into my brain. I’ve heard it referred to as ‘personality’, and it ain’t half an arse at times. My newfound zen-like self acceptance means that some kind of permanent solution has had to be found for the issue of fly tying gear transportation. The Stand of Majesty just wasn’t going to cut it on the road, not with all those bobbin antennae. What was needed was a way to transport everything I could possibly need for any possible situation. Fluff, feathers, bobbins, the whole shebang. The system needed to be hardwearing, reliable, small and most importantly, easily transportable. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you… the Far-reaching And Ridiculously Tenacious fly tying System (FARTS to you and I).
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