Fish & Fly - Jon Beer - 01/01 - More Shetland Lochisling

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More lochisling on Shetland

Our January 2001 contribution from Jon Beer

People do different things with butter. Some folk are scoopers: they get the end of the knife and gouge an ever-deepening trench in the pat of butter on the dish. Scoopers are deeply disturbed individuals who had difficult childhoods. And then there are scrapers. They use the flat of the knife to scrape off their butter, smoothing out the unsightly wreckage left by a scooper and leaving the world a more harmonious place than they found it.

Glaciers are scoopers. Glaciers gouge out those whacking great U-shaped valleys complete with truncated spurs and hanging valleys and other stuff dear to the hearts of geography teachers.

Ice-sheets are scrapers, filing their way across the landscape and smoothing off the lumpier bits. Shetland has been the home of ice-sheets of late. There are few deep lochs in the islands, no Nessies lurking in unimaginable depths. The lochs of Shetland can be embarrassingly shallow. I felt faintly ridiculous that morning, clad to the armpits in neoprene and standing in the middle of Houss Loch, when I was joined by a small dog who sploshed through the shallows and stood beside me. But then there are sudden drop-offs too: they can be every bit as embarrassing.

Houss Loch lies on East Burra, close to the road that threads the islands of East Burra, West Burra and Tronda to the mainland like beads on a necklace. It is typical of a hundred Shetland lochs. It lies in a shallow depression of moorland, unrelieved by trees of any sort. Everywhere squelches just a bit. These shallow waters can be very rich. On West Burra another shallow loch stands in Grunnasound, the small hamlet beside the bridge to East Burra. There are no supermarket trolleys or old bicycles in its shallows but they would not be a surprise, so close is this little loch to the back gardens of Grunnasound. My hopes were not high. We had not been fishing long when my line, with its Hare’s Ear Goldhead, began to draw away into deeper water in the purposeful manner of large fish. My first Shetland pounder was on the other end. It was still early morning but already that day we had caught two fish from two lochs on two islands. This was serious Lochisling.

Lochisling is the gentle pursuit of catching trout on islands off the coast of Britain. The Shetland Islands are about as fine a place to do this as I have found in all my puff. Of the 100 or so islands, islets and rocks that litter the sea in these parts, at least twelve are lochisles (have at least one loch with a confirmed population of trout). And there are perhaps another dozen or so possibles: each has some form of loch that may or may not hold trout. So far, with the invaluable help local anglers Alec and Gordon, I had bagged seven of the known lochisles. The plane had landed at Sumburgh in the afternoon. Alec had whisked me off to Bressay and Muckle Roe before dark: the next day Gordon and I had bagged Yell, Unst and Whalasay. And, just this morning, we had knocked off East and West Burra before lunch. Seven lochisles in forty hours is powerful lochisling.

The little loch at Grunnasound exemplifies the principal problem with Lochisling. A fifteen-inch wild trout is a good fish in anyone’s book. It is not big for Shetland - they get things four times that every week – but it is still a good fish. And a little loch that produces one of these first fish might well hold something even better. But once the lochisler has bagged a lochisle he tends to push on to the next island. In our case, that was Tronda.

Tronda is the last link in the small island chain before the mainland. There is a small lochan beside a track off the road across the island. It is easy to find on the map: it is not so easy on Tronda itself. We searched high and low for that lochan. We climbed to the highest point and gazed in all directions: we hunted in every fold in the hillside. We did not find it. I do not say there is no lochan on Tronda but I am pretty sure there wasn’t one last June. And so to Oxna.

Oxna lies amongst a scattering of islets off the west coast of South Mainland. It is not all that easy to get to unless you know someone with a boat. But everyone in Shetland has a boat or knows someone who does so it is not all that hard to get to either. Oxna is very special: it is the reason I am addicted to lochisling. I didn’t know this before I went there but as soon as we landed I knew. Oxna is the perfect lochisle. It is uninhabited but a small, whitewashed cottage stands beside a small stone jetty, begging someone to stay there. Birds infest the place and their cries deafened us as Gordon’s boat creamed into the small bay to nestle against the jetty. There are two lochs on Oxna. We climbed a steep slope of comfortable, rabbit-nibbled grass and looked back at the little white cottage against the painful green of the hillside. The small boat bobbed in a turquoise bay rimmed with white sand. It was achingly beautiful. Beyond the crest the sward dropped down to a small loch set in a rocky bowl. We had no idea whether it contained trout. Three hours later we were no nearer finding out.

And here is the second problem for the lochisler. Not only does he spend the shortest time at the best lochs (where he can catch fish straightway and push on), he can also find himself spending the longest time fishing lochs that have no trout at all. Which is the point of the lochisle website. Here lochislers can exchange information about the lochs and islands, how to get to the more difficult islands, what holds fish and what doesn’t.

But look: if anyone reading this knows that there are no fish in that little loch on the island of Oxna, then please, please:

KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

I have every intention of going back to fish in that perfect little place. Knowing it was fishless would put a crimp in this plan.

See Jon's previous article on Shetland lochisling

Jon Beer contributes regularly to publications including Trout & Salmon and The Telegraph. If you have any comments, do not hesitate to g et in touch or use the message board.