I had the opportunity to visit Scotland. Years earlier I had met a guy fly-fishing in the Catskills on the Willowemoc Creek. He said he was from Scotland and made the journey every year to fish here. He described the fishing in Scotland as being different, having a mix of rivers and trout ponds; and said I should visit sometime.

So here I was in Scotland and looking for somewhere to fish. So I easily persuaded Michael, a colleague that I met up with in Aberdeen, who resides in Ireland and fished as a kid, to accompany me on this adventure. The great thing in Scotland is that in the summer the days are longer which provides for some excellent evening fishing opportunities.

We did some research looking for the closest opportunity to fish and ended up speaking with Mike at Raemoir Trout Fishery.
Mike said if we got there by 7:00 pm, we would have almost 3 hours to fish. I inquired if we could get a taxi back to our hotel Adore House and Mike offered to give us a ride back. This was starting to sound as though it was meant to happen.

We were treated to a scenic taxi ride from downtown Aberdeen to the Raemoir Trout Fishery. Passing rolling green pastures and grazing cows and sheep.

Like many other fisheries that we investigated, Raemoir offered the option of catch & release or catch and keep. For a few English pounds we were given several hours of catch and release fishing with a 7 wt fly fishing outfit with a hand tied dry white and black flies, tied by Mike.

Michael fishing with a black dry fly had caught 2 beautiful rainbow trout, each weighing about 4 pounds each. I was so busy taking in the scenery and pinching myself to make sure this was real, that I was startled when a trout whose tail seemed to weigh 4 pounds attacked my white fly.

In my daydreaming daze I had moved to another place to fish and forgot to bring the net. After about a minute or so of indecisiveness as to how to land this big fish to release him, the decision was made for me as the fish spit the fly at me and swam off. A local Scotish fisherman who was taking in my battle from not far away, smiled and said “I saw you fighting that fish”.

In the past I have had many missed opportunities to land fish and became upset when I was not successful. For some reason a calm had come over me this day and I was just grateful for the 60 second thrill and somewhat relieved that the trout “self released”. It must have been the “magical Scotland experience” that allowed me to enjoy the moment even though I knew when sharing this story with my non fishing friends back home, I would be given grief. I wonder if that local fisherman would be interested in making a trip to the states to backup my fish tale?

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