The tour is over. Three months. More than 50 gigs in the UK and Europe. Not one river fished. Not one line cast. Not one trout grabbed up. Not a single salmon molested. Fuck. This here’s the final installment of FUKRIDF. If you’re up for this sort of misery, we’re most likely headed back in April for a whole new batch of not fishing. So what’d I learn? Well lots, really, like when you’re not fishing and being forced to watch other guys fishing one has the opportunity to practice patience. So there’s that.

I also learned that Black Bottle, a blended Scotch, is mixed only from Islay malts! For half the price of an Islay single malt, it’s pretty goddam excellent. Check it out, holmes!
–Thee

A bit of a history lesson if I may: A long time ago, well after the Romans were like, “fuck this place, man,” some British dudes were like, “wouldn’t it be a cool idea if we got together and claimed all this land for ourselves? Lord Mountbaten said, “Hey, fuck that, Im’a claim nobility and take all this land for me!” So he ran some solid gangsta shit and thus it came to pass that Mountbaten became the landlord of Southwest England. What this means for anglers is that if you’d like to fish Thee Olde and Faymous Rivere Test, you’ve gotta pay the man — Mountbatten. For the Test is, without a doubt, his river. He owns it. He runs it. His posse strung the razor wire and patrols that shit like Silvio patrolled the Bing.

All this would be fine if the Test were just some dottering and middling English trickle, but alas, from the side of the road, behind the barb wire and just out of the way of the attack hounds, Lord Mountbatten’s river looks like a pretty great stream. The Test is only about 40 miles from start to finish and it’s upper reaches are chalkstream and jammed with big fucking brown trout. I saw them as I stood on a bridge, trucks, tour busses and bikes whizzing on by. Upstream they were rising to tiny white mayflies even as a goofy lab splashed around in the water. From the looks of it, the Test is jammed cheek to jowl with trouts. You can’t catch a fish in the test, maybe it’s time to take up bowling.

There they were, dozens of trouts, all locked up, guarded and patrolled by a bunch of Royal dicknobs.

So let’s just say you’re feeling flush, or a wave of Anglophillia washes over you (Mountbatten, was after all, grandson of Queen Victoria, uncle of “Phil the Greek, a.k.a Prince Phillip and mentor of the current Prince of Wales, whose name I have forgotten.) well, it’s gonna cost ya, pal. In the UK they don’t use dollars, they use these things called pounds and to fish the Test is up to around 650 heavy-ass pounds per day. In American, that’s about 1000 bucks. Yeah, I know — a straight G — fuck that.

As mentioned, cross a bridge over the Test and you can see big browns down there swimming around. Take a walk down a riverside paths and you can scope the quaint bank-bound fishing huts. Linger for a bit streamside and the goddam history of the place is palpable. There are no dirtbag fishermen on the Test. There is no sleeping in the back of the truck. Hanging around the parking lot crushing beers, spitting dip and chewing jerky as the sun sets is probably a rather rare occurance. Lordy, what a waste of a perfectly good river.

The Tweed, Coldstream, Scotland/England border
Aug 26, 2010
Rod had to take a leak, so convincing him to stop along the banks of the River Tweed was a cinch. The Tweed, for at least part of its journey, forms the border between Merry Old England and Grumpy Olde Scotland. And even though Scotland is, indeed, grumpier than England, I tend to like Scotland more. Sure, the food is just as horrific and the beer just as crummy, but Scotland is funnier, more scenic and the whisky is, well, it’s Scotch, fay fook’s sake. Sounds great, huh? In fact, you may even be thinking of thumbing it out to the Boise airport and booking a cheap flight to the highlands. Well, think again, Angus. Scotland is expensive as fuck. There’s no fishing on Sunday and if, unlike me, you actually get around to fishing, be prepared to take out a second mortgage on your home.

We were heading north, up to a gig in Edinburgh, and I hopped out of the car on the English side of the Tweed and high-tailed it down a path toward the water, camera in hand. I had just crossed a gate and was 25 yards from the river when I came up short.  Ay! Fay Fook Sake. Wha thay bloody fook? But there it was, the sign that confirmed my worst fears regarding fishing in the UK — all that permitting, private water, upstream, dry-flies-only-on-days-ending-in-y business. There it was — finally — proof!

Like most right-thinking individuals, I cannot abide the notion of “private water.”  The phrase kickstarts my inner anarchist, compelling me to jump fences, deface signs (BWTF stickers are great for this, btw!) and pontificate on the internet. My indignation springs, I guess, from my general anti-authoritarian mindset. However, this was the first time I’ve been confronted by a sign marking that strangest of UK fishing regulations: beats.

This was, to me, an entirely new sort of outrage/affront/injustice and I rolled its sour taste around on my tongue. Fishing a “beat” is absolutely foreign to the constitution of a Western angler. We are built to ramble. We are inclined to strap on a pack and load it with water, cans of Rainier and beef jerky and get the fuck away from the assholes fishing right next to the road, at the boat launch or any of the various “idiot holes” found so easily along American fly water. We love taking off into the outback for the mere fact that 1) we can. 2.) well, what the hell is around that corner, anywho? 3.) i am not the type of angler who’s gonna be seen fishing with the likes of the fucking rabble. Sorry, it’s just my issue, man.

Needless to say, I was hopped up and I fairly stomped the rest of the way to the river, high off the delicious self-righteousness of it all. There she was. The great river. So much history, so much tradition. So much of our sport flowing inches in front of me. I could smell it all, mixed with the water, the grassy bank and the trees spilling pollen. She was much broader than I had imagined, but we were by the coast. It was an impossibly scenic river — castles, old rowboats, a stone bridge. Off in the distance, two old dudes sat in a boat, rods in hands, waiting. Directly in front of me, ya know– in the good water — a fish jumped. Fuck.

What were those dudes doing sitting in the goddam frog water? Just what the fuck are they thinking?  I dunno. I never know. Yet every time I see a dude fishing the frog water I think, “What the fuck are you thinking?” It’s like driving down the road and seeing a cow and not thinking “cow.”

The fish that jumped right in front of me was, of course, nice and big. I am certain I would have caught it if I had actually been fishing the Tweed, which I was most certainly not. I walked back up the bank, past that stupid goddam sign, got in the car and drove over the river and back into Scotland.

The River Tay, Scotland, Aug 21 2010
After last night’s gig up in the highlands one of the staff at the joint we were staying got a little too deep into the scotch resulting in, so we heard, an offense to some ancient clan, the muttering of disagreeable oaths and inevitably, a bit of a dust up. The Royal Order of thee Hee-lund Coppers were summoned, tears of regret were spilled and some punter was hauled off to the clink. Amidst all that donnybrook sleep was tough to come by so I took a wee doze on the drive down to Crail, on the SE coast. To get to Crail, you gotta drive right through St. Andrew’s, which is where a lot of serious golf is performed. You can tell it’s a golf town by the incredible numbers of “slacks” people wear in combo with those those tasteful shirts golfers are so fond of. St. Andrew’s is “quaint” and “charming” and, just to make sure one is aware that it is also “historic” and “Scottish”, they like to spell the word golf “gowf”. Yeah, that’s fooking hilarious, Alisdair!
I woke up about halfway to the gig, outside the town of Pitlochry, just as we were crossing over a big, fishy looking river. Generally there are no signs in Scotland telling you where the fuck you are, where the fuck you are going or how long it’s gonna take you to get there, but for some reason there was a sign and that sign said, “Hey, Fuck You Thee, Here’s The River Tay And You Ain’t Fishing It.” Shit.
To make an already shitty situation even shittier, just as we were crossing the bridge there was a dude stepping into the drink with a spey rod locked and loaded. We, of course, drove right on by. God. Fucking. Dammit. As they are fond of saying over here, I was gutted.
I bribed our driver with a cold, half-eaten chunk of Steak and Ale pie that I had been saving for my lunch and we were able to pull over about 20 minutes later. We pulled into a sorta high-end subdivision and I jumped out of the car, ran down a dog-shitty path, found the river and took a pic.  If, like me, you’ve never fished the Tay before, you might be a bit surprised to find that it’s one huge fucking river. The bit I saw — which I now believe was pretty cost to the Firth (estuary) of Tay — really didn’t have any discernible features other than it’s bigness, and to tell ya the truth, it looked a lot better up by the bridge where the dude with the spey was about to battle the constant — and I mean constant — 40 mph winds.
I got a magazine-thing called “Fish in Scotland” from the Scottish tourist board the other day. The word on the Tay is that, “It is one of the best Salmon rivers in the United Kingdom, and therefore the world.” I had a chuckle and thought, “yeah… sure” But who the fuck knows. It didn’t believe it because I am incredibly bitter and to accept that a river I crossed without fishing may, indeed, be one of the finest salmon rivers in the world is simply too close to self-flagellation. I am in enough pain.
In all honesty, the Tay really could be one of the finest rivers in the world. It could totally suck. Don’t ask me. I didn’t fish it the goddam thing.
We drove away and after a while we passed over the River Earn. I only got a quick glace and really have nothing to report about this sweet little river for alas,  there are only so many rivers that I can’t fish in a day.

Dorbach Burn, Scotland, Aug 21, 2010
Just for the record, “Burn” in Scots-talk means “creek”, but remember that “burn” is pronounced “bahh-err-ne. It’s sorta like in the American west how the word “creek” is pronounced “crick”. See, despite all our differences, we have a few things in common — such as the stubborn refusal of anglers to speak in anything resembling a language that non-fishing pedestrians can understand. In Scotland, this inside baseball shit is compounded by the fact that Scottish is in no way close to the American that I’ve been speaking and listening to for the entirety of my years. Two different languages and never the twain shall meet. Fer’inst: in certain bars — uh, pubs — in Glasgow, the preferred greeting to yr pals is something along the lines of, “Ay, wood ye git ay lood ay dees coonts!” So there’s that.

The Scottish highlands remind me of parts of Wyoming in that both are jammed full of lovely bits of contented, meandering nothingness — although in Scotland the backdrop is without the crushing heft of huge mountains — tho the Scots get a bit fiesty if you refer to their hills as just that — hills. Some advice: Let it slide. If they wanna call their hills mountains, fuck it. Let them. You don’t wanna start haggling over minor shit with a Scotsman as THEY WILL NEVER FUCKING LET IT GO! The other night, right before the gig, this punter comes up to me and says, “Ay… ye know wha laddie?
I dunno, what?
“In Sco-lund, we invented coont-ra music, man.”
Rilly?
“Aye… ’tis troo.”
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The Fucking Spey, Scotland, Aug. 20, 2010

Driving up from last night’s gig in Glasgow up to Kinloss (it’s up in the Scottish Hee-linds near Elgin) I didn’t fish the Spey. Too bad, because from the motorway, at least, it’s a swell looking river with soft green banks, a gentle gurgling gait and bits of ruined castle strewn all over its banks.

To make not fishing the Spey all the more painful,  the A95 travels along the river offering infuriating peeks every coupla miles — like when you’re driving in Montana along I-90 and are forced to gaze upon the Clark Fork every 45 seconds. My traveling companions, of course, do not give a fuck that the Spey is one of the “Big Four” Scottish fly fishing rivers. They do not care that the Spey is home to its own goddam style of fishing. They do not care that there is even a style of fishing rod called a (goddam) spey rod. I attempt to impress upon them the — you know — gravity of the situation:
“Ya know how regular fly rods are like 9 feet long?”
Silence.
“Well Spey rods are super massive, maybe like up to 16 or 17 fucking feet long.”
Silence.
“And they shoot lasers and… other stuff.”
Nada.
It had been raining buckets since we’d left Glasgow and as the Spey gradually opened up into it’s Spey-like size and shape, the goddam sun came out,  exploding the dew on the grass and tossing a spray of diamonds over the surface of the famous river like some bullshit magazine story. I felt sick. We drove right on by.

We drove right on by a few distillareies (Cardhu, Dahlwhinnie) and we did not stop to even glance at the Fucking Spey. It was infuriating, it was frustrating and I consoled myself, as always, by thinking that given a day or two, my own gear and the right flies, I could really do some damage on the Fucking Spey and show these highland hillbillies what’s what.

I’ve cultivated the ability to be really goddam obnoxious in a very short time — it’s like my “nuclear option”. I threatened destruction and finally convinced Rod, the driver, to stop for all of 45 seconds while I snapped a perfectly annoying shot of a perfect bridge over a perfect bend stood sentry by a perfect little fishing shed on the Fucking Spey. Another UK river I didn’t fucking fish.