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Our November 2000 contribution from Jon Beer

I am one of those blokes they worry about on the internet: I am about to tell you how to do something illegal.

This summer I went fishing in the Shetland Islands. This is not illegal. (Although if you go round calling them "The Shetlands" as I did when I went there you might be pushed to tell the difference. It is "Shetland " or "The Shetland Islands ". So now you know.)

I went to sample the annual Shetland Trout Festival which is open to anyone who fancies a week of fishing with some boozy evenings thrown in. I am one such. I had a great time. The islands are dotted with hundreds of lochs so that you are never far from fishing. Shetland fishermen do not chan their flies when the fishing goes off: they change their loch. It is usually quicker. And some of these lochs can be remarkably productive. In many places along the convoluted coastline the storms of the North Atlantic and the tides that rip between the islands have thrown up a sand bar, sealing off a narrow arm of the sea to create a shallow freshwater loch. These "machair" lochs can be bizarre places to fish, so productive that fish can be found anywhere in the loch and so shallow that the fisherman can wade anywhere to find them. It is a strange feeling to find yourself boat-fishing amid blokes wading two hundred yards offshore. And those fish are worth finding: the best brown trout caught in the week of the trout festival weighed 5lb 7oz.

It was not caught by me. No matter. I spent my days fishing with Gordon Williamson, owner of the Herrislea House Hotel where I was staying. He reckoned he wasn't allowed out to fish much but I saw little evidence of this: we fished from dawn to dusk which is a long, long time in those latitudes in mid summer. Perhaps he was just making up for lost fishing time.

He showed me the croft where he had grown up and we fished the loch at the bottom of the field beyond the house. Here his father had taught him to fish with a fly. It was fly fishing, Jim, but not fly-fishing as we know it.

He was using an otter. This is not the furry thing that is apt to get itself cuddled by Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers in sickly films: this is a method of poaching trout. An otter is a wooden board, weighted to float on its edge in the water. A line is attached to one side in such a position that, when the otter is towed through the water, it angles away from the shore and out into the loch. The poacher makes his way along the shore with the otter following, rippling the surface some distance out in the water. It looks a bit like an otter. The poacher tries to look a bit like someone out for a stroll. In its crude form the otter is armed with hooks on lengths of nylon which dangle worms at various depths. In the sophisticated form of the Shetland Islanders the line that towed the otter was armed with flies on droppers -like fishing a conventional team of flies with rod and line. The otter was just used to hold the far end of the line out in the loch with no need for splashy casting.

What an elegant system! As the fisherman works his way along the shore he is covering fish in a thirty- or forty-yard strip of water from the shoreline the most productive water in most lochs. Nor is he troubled by the ferocious winds that can make fishing in these exposed islands a bit of an ordeal for the fly-fisherman. A child could do it - Gordon did. By raising and lowering the tow-line the fisherman can swim the flies up to the surface and dibble them there enticingly as he makes his merry way along the water. As a method it is perfectly adapted to these windy, trouty waters. It has a single drawback: it is somewhat nefarious. As it stands at the minute, the Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Act (1975) specifically bans the use of otter laths, as they are called. And so the good folk of the Shetland Islands don't do that sort of thing.

The reason I mention this now is that the other day I visited a lake in Gloucestershire. They were fishing for carp. Carp fishermen are technophiles and the latest hi-tech gizmo for tracking down these wily beasts (the carp not the carp fishermen) is a bait boat .

I was enthralled. The Microcat is a small radio-controlled boat that hums its way across the water by silent jet-propulsion. An on-board echo-sounder signals the depth back to the fisherman: an on-board TV camera relays back the view underwater. With this sort of information the fisherman chooses the spot to fish. By the push of a button on the controller he signalas the boat to deploy a small marker buoy to mark the spot. Now the boat returns to carry out the baited hook and line and ground bait to the exact spot and it can do that all day long. It can even pick up its own marker buoy at the end of the day. It is all extremely clever stuff and far more fun than carp fishing. They can spin for pike as well. The spinner is towed behind the little boat and trolled around the water until a fish hits, pulling the line from its retaining clip and leaving the pike attached to the fisherman at the other end of the line. There is no splashy casting to disturb the fish and the boat can work several hundred yards off shore....


Is all this beginning to sound familiar, Gordon?

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