Boat is a 4-Letter Word

If there is a down-side to angling in Scotland it must be that loch-style fly fishing really demands the use of a boat. In bygone times our cave-dwelling ancestors may have cast from a floating log or wayward oildrum and rumour has it that some errant souls have been witnessed throwing a line while ensconced in an inflated inner tube but, at its purest, the style does inevitably involve taking to the water in some form of boat.

Therein lies the essence of the dilemma - not to mention half a dozen impending lawsuits. Boats come in many shapes and sizes, very few of which were designed for flyfishing. When arriving at the water with a heartful of hope and a boxful of black pennels, the odds against finding a suitable craft moored at the jetty are at least 100 to one. Probably worse than that if the experiences that are indelibly etched on the scar-tissue of my brain are anything to go by.

From fibreglass skiffs which plough through the calm given the merest zephyr of a breeze to recycled lifeboats from the Titanic which require to be powered by oars resembling adolescent telegraph poles, all are to be found on our lochs and reservoirs. A brief examination will readily explain why the reverse of your fishing permit inevitably displays an irrevocable disclaimer totally absolving the proprietors in the event of the angler drowning, suffering a strangulated hernia or losing a limb when the 1922 model outboard motor explodes.

Most boats leak. Anglers throughout the UK will testify to that. Worst of all, of course, are wooden craft of clinker construction. The slightest springing of the timbers and there will be a closely fought contest in the staying-afloat stakes between your fishing boat and the proverbial sieve. My money's on the sieve. Paradoxically, generations of loch anglers have sworn allegiance to the clinker-built dinghy on account of its reputedly superior drifting characteristics.

Certainly, on my home water - Loch Leven - the clinker boats are superb drifters and sufficiently commodious to comfortably accommodate three burly anglers and a kitchen sinkful of impedimenta.

The problem with the Loch Leven boats - and I swear I am not making this up - is that the majority of them are over 70 years old. This would be alright were it not for the fact that generations of boatmen have idled away the long, dark Caledonian winters by inventing and installing a relentlessly increasing range of protuberances, all cunningly designed to snag the angler's flyline, ensnare his leader, trap his flies and ensure that every flybox, pair of sunglasses and set of super-duper, stainless steel, teflon-coated angling scissors dropped on to the floorboards will disappear for ever. Or at least until the boatmen dismantle the boat innards next winter in preparation for installing the latest design of protuberance.

Mark you, on other waters the boatmen have even weirder close-season hobbies. For example - and I am not making this up either - the late Robin Kilpatrick, the fondly remembered water keeper at Carron Valley Reservoir, is reputed to have been totally convinced by the claims that fibreglass craft were maintenance-free. The answer he hit upon was to take some of his older clinker boats and give them a solid fibreglass skin - inside and out. Attempting to fit the clamps of an outboard motor to the much-thickened transoms proved to be a smigeon of a trial!

At the end of the day, when the flyrod is dismantled and the expletives deleted from the angler's excuses for an empty creel, it has to be admitted that any boat used for loch-style fishing is bound to be a bit of a compromise. The neatest I have found are produced from fibreglass by a Loch Lomond boatbuilder and they clearly have been designed to handle like a timber craft. They combine reasonably good drifting performance with ease of upkeep and virtual unsinkability. But then, when really pushed, I must confess that they are just a little shallow in draft and just a little narrow of beam and just ever so slightly the wrong colour. (Lesson for boatbuilders: the outer hulls of loch boats should be matt grey. Not green or blue or beige.) Also, as I know to my cost, the thole pins tend to work loose and cannot be tightened up without the aid of one of those 108-piece socket sets which they advertise on satellite television. Anglers accustomed to the windswept waters of Menteith or Gartmorn (both of which use those paragon craft) will sympathise when I aver that thole pins always dislodge and fall overboard when at the farthest point from the jetty in the teeth of a gale.

So far I have belaboured only the physical deficiencies of loch boats and the peccadillos of those trusty retainers who are charged with their upkeep. Yet another matter which I am not making up concerns the supernatural powers which some of those boats have.

Anyone who has tramped 12 miles over the heather moors to reach a remote Highland lochan will know exactly what I mean. You arrive at the water to discover that the surface is boiling with rising fish and the only boat is a 7-foot pram dinghy, constructed from plywood and roofing felt, moored to a large and heavy stone by a length of rusty chain. As you put up your rod and tie on a favourite pattern, the sky goes dark, the trout (or "troots" as they are known in such places) stop feeding and the mini-boulder to which the mooring chain is attached becomes possessed by energy from an extraterrestrial kinetic source. Before you can drop your tackle and run to stop it, the stone rolls down the bank and into the water.
Pulling on the chain, you draw the boat towards the edge. Yet in contradiction of all the known laws of physics, it merely get lower and lower in the water until the bow dips below the surface. Had you not splashed, fully clothed, into the loch to rescue it, the dinghy would surely have been a gonner.

Once afloat, this boat will inevitably drift against the wind, will undoubtedly creak soulfully at every pull of the oars and may even have its own dedicated thundercloud which follows wherever you row despite the surrounding countryside being bathed in sunlight.

You catch no troots and only after the return moorland tramp, which has now stretched to 15 miles, does the barman at your hotel mention that no-one has fished the Black Lochan since old Sandy drowned there in 1952. A final fact that I am not making up is that there are 86 Black Lochs, Black Lochans or Loch Dhu's (Gaelic lesson: Dhu = Black) in Scotland, only 47 of which are known to the Ordnance Survey cartographers.