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Lochisling on Shetland

Our December 2000 contribution from Jon Beer

I have been off Lochisling again. I couldn't resist it. I am not addicted, you understand - I could give it up if I wanted to it's just that I don't want to.

Lochisling is the pursuit of catching trout on islands. A Lochisle is the fisherman's equivalent to the walker's "Munro", those Scottish hills over 3000 feet which healthy types have been bagging since 1891 when Sir Hugh Munro published his Tables of Heights over 3000 feet. A Munro is bagged when you reach its summit: a Lochisle is bagged when you catch a trout on an island. Lochisling serves no practical purpose whatsoever apart from leading the lochisler to unlikely and romantic places. You can bag lochisles over a lifetime or you can binge and bag as many as the tides, ferries will allow in the time available.

I like to binge. Two years ago Philip and I bagged eleven lochisles in five days of foul weather in the Outer Hebrides. This year I had less time but I was in one of the troutiest places in the Kingdom. I was in Shetland.

My favourite newspaper headline appeared years ago in a local Lincolnshire rag. It ran:

SAVE OUR TREES
- they break wind for up to half a mile.

They could do with some of that sort of tree on Shetland. Or any trees at all, come to that. They had trees once but the Vikings cut them down and the sheep finished them off. They still have wind. Lots of it.

Shetland (or The Shetland Islands never "the Shetlands") is an extraordinary place. It is nearly ninety miles from tip to toe but the coastline is so convoluted that nowhere is much more than a couple of miles from the sea and the edges frays off into islands which have smaller islands offshore. And so on. The place is a Lochisler's paradise.

Information is everything in Lochisling. It is quite possible to spend the time between one ferry and the next casting over a loch barren of trout. I have done it. The fishing on Mainland and the larger islands is thoroughly described in a superb publication from the Local Anglers' Association - Angling in Shetland (£9.95) from bookshop@shetland-times.co.uk . Or visit the Lochisle website.

It gets trickier on the smaller islands. I wanted to fish Muckle Roe for the name alone. Muckle Roe hangs like a haemorrhoid beneath the North Mainland of Shetland. It is connected by a bridge which some may think is cheating for an island. (It isn't: see Lochisle definitions).

Kilka Water lies just across the bridge - which is handy. There is a large fish symbol on the map next to it: that means you can fish for trout. And you can. Let me know if you see one: I didn't. Town Loch, on the other hand, lies about as far from any town as a water can get. The tarmac road peters out at the southern tip of Muckle Roe: Town Loch lies at the northern-western tip, at the end of a twisting track gouged into a moonscape of rotted granite and peat bog. The loch at the end of all this nestles in a magical, dramatic setting beside a bay enclosed by cliffs and is stuffed with the small eager trout beloved of Lochislers.

Most islands are not blessed with bridges. Ferries are more fun. Yell epitomises the dilemma that ferries pose for the lochisler. Yell lies between Mainland and Unst with a ferry at either end. It is possible to arrive on Yell from the Mainland ferry, stop at one of several lochs on the island to catch a trout, drive the 18 miles to Gutcher and get on the next ferry to Unst. But the best lochs are not by the roadside (they never are) and by trying a little too long you can miss the next ferry and another hour or more: miss a ferry in some of the Hebrides and you could be kicking your heels for a day or more. We decided to drive straight across the island to catch the Unst ferry. We could see it steaming across the sound as we pulled into the jetty at Gutcher. There is a small loch by the jetty, separated from the sea by a low shingle beach. The ferry was turning in to the dock by the time we had got the rods made up. Gordon's wife had driven the car onto the ferry as we were casting towards a rising fish and we had to run between the closing doors of the ramp by the time we had photographed Gordon's Unst trout. That is pretty sharp lochisling.

I had always wanted to catch a fish from the Loch of Cliff on Unst . It is the most northerly loch on the most northerly island of the British Isles. We drove to its northern end and all was flat calm under a still blue sky. A fish rose near the shore but its heart was not in it and my leader falling on that still, shallow water sent the thing creaming away towards the deeps. Gordon has lived all his life on these islands. He said it had never been that warm and windless for so and then lay down by the unruffled loch went to sleep in the sun. I suppose he thought he had done his bit back on Unst. I was about to give up the notion of the most northerly trout in Britain when I noticed the small stream at the end of the loch: it flows north to the sea. In a pool on that stream I took two lovely little brown trout. I reckoned those two to be the northernmost trout in the land.

See the second part of this article >

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.