Читать книгу The Speyside Way. A Scottish Great Trail, includes the Dava Way and Moray Coast trails онлайн

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Fishing

Fly-fishing, the premier sport on the Spey, has been practised for thousands of years. One of the earliest descriptions of fly-fishing appeared over 2000 years ago in De Animalium Natura, where Claudius Aelianus reported that ‘fishermen wind red wool around their hooks and fasten to the wool two feathers that grow under a cock's wattles’. The first British book on fly-fishing was written by Dame Juliana Berners in 1496: Treatise of Fishing with an Angle.

The young salmon spend a few years in the river in which they were born before swimming out to the salt-water feeding ground of the Atlantic. Only a tiny percentage of those hatched survive to return up-stream to the waters of their birth to breed, but it is these that provide the sport for fly-fishing. Keen fishermen and women will spend many hours in waders, standing in the deep waters of the Spey and hoping that the salmon will rise to take the fly at the end of their rod and line. The season on the Spey opens on 11th February and closes on 30th September. The cost of fishing on the Spey varies from moderately reasonable to extremely expensive, depending on the time in the season and the location of the beat.