Rob Heaps

Rob Heaps Instagram – Salmon fishing on the River Spey in Scotland! Fly fishing is a niche sport but one I really recommend, mostly because it gives you a reason to be by the river all day, which is a great way to spend any day.
If you’ll forgive the nerd-out 🤓 salmon are extraordinary creatures. They’re born in rivers like the Spey, where they live for 2/3 years as ‘parr’, up to 12cm long, before travelling down to the river mouth where they adjust to salt water and turn silver coloured, before entering the sea as ‘smolts’. From here they can spend anything from 1 to 4 years at sea. Those that return after 1 year are called ‘grilse’; the fish we caught in slide 3 is a grilse – about 2/3 kg. What we call ‘salmon’ are fish that have spent 3/4 years at sea, usually feeding off the coast of Greenland, before returning to Scottish rivers. That journey is 1500 miles each way. And here’s the insane part – they usually return to the same river they were born in. After 3 years. They return to spawn in their birth river, in fact the very same part of the river they were born 🤯 and so the cycle continues.
Pacific salmon go on similarly epic journeys before returning to North American rivers and trying to avoid bears etc.
Wild salmon have a tough time and they’re currently in trouble. They face predators in the river and predators at sea including seals, sharks, cod, dolphins, and of course humans hoovering them up in massive trawlers. The rise in salmon farming has introduced a new threat with escaped farm fish interbreeding with their wild cousins and weakening the gene pool, along with an explosion in sea lice populations which is also bad news. Any fly fishers in Scotland will tell you that salmon are becoming harder and harder to catch as their numbers decrease, and it’s now mandatory to throw any salmon you catch back in the river.
I may not be selling a sport in which not much happens and where it’s really hard to catch the thing you’re trying to catch, and which you can’t keep anyway…but in a modern world powered by instant gratification, there’s a quiet joy in standing in a wild river, sending out cast after cast in a steady rhythm, and waiting for a fish to rise. Give it a go 🎣 | Posted on 09/Aug/2021 02:06:39