It wasn’t the best of starts, really.
Here I was, with the bride to be, in the heart of the Scottish highlands, trying to pronounce the Gaelic names of my dad’s Scottish ancestors and getting to know the new Pommie in laws.
In a lay bye café en route to Loch Rannoch, we had seen our first kilts, casually worn in an everyday fashion, by large, bearded, redheaded men. Standing behind another, more conventionally dressed redheaded couple chatting away in the coffee queue, I observed to my future father in law that, despite my genealogical research, I couldn’t understand a word of this local Gaelic. I was trying to be modest. You know, to make an impression.
He replied, deadpan – “That’s not surprising, really John, they’re talking in German”. Ouch.
The Rannoch region had been devastated by English government troops after the 1745 rebellion, when the Redcoats built their barracks at the headwaters of Loch Rannoch, on the River Tummel.
This barracks, presumably with a few more recent add-ons, is now the home of Lord Pearson of Rannoch. Fortunately for me, Lord Pearson has a ghillie called Ian Nelson, who told me that a pike, in Barracks’ Pool, near Lord Pearson’s home, had been ‘creating merry hell’ with the local trout.
So, the next afternoon, armed with a new fluorocarbon leader, complete with wire trace and my best Aussie Murray Cod frog fly, I appeared nervously at the Barracks’ Pool. Also in tow were Jeanine’s parents, out for the drive, and looking a little sceptical.
It looked up to four to five metres deep, and had some huge brown boulders right in the middle, easily visible in the whiskey-coloured water a metre or so down below the surface – exactly the right sort of cover for an ambush predator like the Australian Murray Cod, and, I guessed, for some Tummel pike.
I flicked out a floating line from my eight weight Loomis and popped the artificial frog behind, and then in front of, all the biggest rocks in the middle of the pool, working my way systematically upstream, trying to arouse the territorial instincts of the creatures I knew were down there. I gradually became totally absorbed by that wonderful combination of science, nature and art that is fly-fishing.
Nearer the banks, I’d plop the frog fly gently down on the water, like it dropped from a branch, then two bloops, drift downstream, slow retrieve, then pause like the frog was injured or tired … then repeat a metre further upstream.
It was one of those days when my cast seemed to work, no snags or tangles, the line shot out perfectly, the fly hit exactly the right spot … one bloop, two bloops, then BANG!
One of the nastiest looking predator pike I’d ever seen hit my little frog fly with such upward force it was momentarily airborne, starting a 20 minutes tug of war between me and what can only be described as an underwater thug, which had to be turned and then steered away from every underwater obstacle in the pool, until he was finally pulled onto an exposed ledge of the rock I’d been standing on, with his massively disproportionate jaws still trying to chew his way through my wire trace. Seven pounds of angry trout-eating pike were out of the pool for good. I could almost hear the trout cheering.
The deer haired body of my fly had been mangled and it had lost one eye, the wire trace was kaput, and I was exhausted. But I’d proved a point. I was fishing with a fly I’d picked myself, in untried waters, with a totally different species, based only on what I’d been able to learn in another country on the other side of the world. It felt great.
When I got home to Australia, I asked my beloved how I was travelling with the in-laws, after the trip, what with a few minor hitches, namely that I was 20 years’ older, divorced, with three adult children, protestant, and an Aussie to boot. Little things like that.
Apparently, I was fine. I’d passed muster. The reason?
The fly fishing afternoon on the Barracks’ Pool had convinced the in laws that anyone who could master such a graceful form of artistic endeavour as fly fishing, was good enough for their only daughter.
Yet another reason, dear reader, to go fly-fishing whenever you can. And try to take, not only your beloved, but the in laws as well.
Copyright John Black 2007. Pictures by the lovely Dr Jeanine McMullan. First published in FlyLife Short Casts.