Alastair Robertson: Fishing & Shooting

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Any minute now we shall be subjected to the sight of men in beards and kilts playing the bagpipes in a blizzard and throwing whisky into the Tay at Kenmore to celebrate the opening of the salmon season.

The Tay is generally thought to be the first river to open but this is only because it gets in the papers and on TV if there is nothing else going on, which there often isn't on 15 January.

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The thought of fishing in January leaves me cold. All the same, the silvery Tay is a river of big fish and it flows, as McGonagall observed, from Perth to Dundee every day. And Perth was the home of PD Malloch, the legendary tackle-maker. He was also a taxidermist and author and probably the first person to study the importance of scale markings on fish.

This coming June, when at least it is unlikely to be snowing, will see the first presentation for ten years of the PD Malloch trophy for the largest fish caught on a Scottish river. It is being presented to Sandy Walker from Fort William who caught a 32lb fish on the Lochy in June.

What is particularly satisfying is that he caught his fish on the local association water where his ticket costs 90 a year, which is roughly 2 a week and rather less than the 2,000 a week you can pay on the best Lochy beats.

There is a photo of Mr Walker, 70, hanging onto the enormous cock fish just before putting it back.

For the record, he caught it in the Tailrace pool of the Lochy's tidal estuary on a rather dowdy home tied Waddington pattern fly he had nicked from his fishing pal's fly box.

The Lochy is one of those rivers that have been much improved thanks to a certain amount of cooperation between river managers and fish farms with cages near the mouth in Loch Linnhe. With plans to release 200,000 smolts over the next few years it is pretty crucial to make sure they don't get eaten alive by lice from the fish farms as they head for the sea each spring.

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But the improvement has been remarkable – from 32 fish in 1998 to around 1,500 in the last few years. In 2005, Sandy Walker had 300 fish himself, including another 32 pounder out of the same Tailrace pool as his winner.

The Malloch Trophy disappeared after the Malloch shop was sold. Tennents, the lager people, took on sponsorship, but ran out of replica trophies with the result the last two winners ended up with carry outs instead and the competition fizzled out.

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The original trophy was rediscovered by Lorna Bromley-Martin from the Tay Foundation in a Malloch family cupboard and the competition revived with sponsorship from Savills, the estate agents.

Mr Walker gets a miniature replica and 250 to spend at House of Bruar and a free dinner. Can't be bad.

• This article first appeared in the Scotsman on Saturday 2 January, 2010

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