David Profumo will be reading a world exclusive from his forthcoming book ‘The Lightning Thread: Fishological Moments and The Pursuit of Paradise’ on March 18th supporting the Missing Salmon Alliance
Orvis UK is excited to bring you the fifth in a series of virtual event evenings with David Profumo reading a world exclusive from his forthcoming book 'The Lightning Thread: Fishological Moments and The Pursuit of Paradise', as well as answering your questions, next Thursday 18th March at 7pm. David is the long-standing Fishing Correspondent for ‘Country Life’, also a novelist and journalist, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The event can be booked here with an optional donation to the Missing Salmon Alliance. David’s new book is published May 27th and a signed copy can be pre-ordered here.
“My heart sometimes sinks when I see the announcement of yet another book about fishing – can there really be that much new to say on the subject? My approach in The Lightning Thread is to mix personal memoir with essays on different aspects of angling (the weather, drink, disaster, superstition) as a way of exploring that old maxim, ‘There’s more to fishing than the mere business of catching fish’.
Since the age of five – that’s six decades ago, now – I have been in thrall to our pastime, and it has acted like a running thread connecting so many of the stages in my life. This book is therefore the anatomy of a passion. As a journalist, I have been lucky enough to fish in some forty different countries, yet I am still as thrilled by a day’s burn fishing, or a trip after mackerel, as ever I was. The Lightning Thread is my attempt to communicate something of this magic; and not just to preach to the converted, but perhaps to those puzzled outsiders who have never understood what all the fuss was about.
Prue Leith recently offered these kind words about the book: ‘An angling master who wears his knowledge lightly, and a dazzling writer. Everyone remotely interested in fishing, or writing, would love this book’. (That’s probably enough trumpet-blowing).
Although it ranges from minnows to marlin, bleak to bonefish, the book has quite a lot to say about salmon – both here and abroad. This excerpt is from ‘Borderland’, my chapter on fishing the river Tweed in its heyday”
David Profumo with a fish from the River Shin
The Royal Burgh of Peebles has had as its motto since 1473, ‘Contra nando incrementum’, emblazoned with three salmon – ‘growth by swimming against’ – and for centuries the nomadic lifestyle of this mysterious migrant has snagged the popular imagination, inspiring much metaphor and myth. It’s not hard to see why, as Salmo salar is one of the few fish to have the charismatic appeal of certain rare birds, or some of the terrestrial megafauna.
After thousands of miles at sea, he comes forging up from the dark tide towards his natal headwaters, navigating somehow by starlight and gravity, using his miraculous sense of smell to home in on the particular terroir that spawned him – the clan chief of the Salmonidae, with the vigour of the deeps still upon him, anadromous, philopatric, euryhaline, a lustrous creature from our ancient past, dwelling between two worlds, a changeling as in so many tales of faery. He begins life as a smudged tiddler, then disguises himself in a smolting jacket of silver and pipe-smoke blue before slipping away by night, running the gauntlet of predators and disappearing into a marine life about which so little is yet known. From the once secret larders beneath the Greenland ice he then returns, with all the panache of a successful exile, arrayed in the gleaming mail of a knight-errant, mercurial, muscular, his body packed with fuel for the fasting ordeal ahead, which may last many months. At dusk, he glances across the tail of pools. He can travel 15 freshwater miles in a day. Shows as a blade at the falls – the river’s hero.
As spawning time approaches, they swap silver for sackcloth. The hens grow sooty and gravid, the cocks turn to epigamic rust and develop a cartilaginous kype on their jaws for seizing rival suitors on the redds, where the hen with her tail aquablasts ridges in the gravel, laying nectarine-hued eggs that her mate, quivering and mouth agape, fertilises with his squirts of seminal milt (D. H. Lawrence became typically ecstatic about this process: ‘Who is it ejects his sperm to the naked flood?’ he asks in his breathy poem ‘Fish’).
Sexually precocious male parr – Nature’s failsafe against dynastic disaster – often nip in and do their bit too, consorting with females some fifty times their size. And so the hydraulic saga continues, with its essential elements of love and death – for most Atlantics die after breeding once (and all Pacific salmon perish, their corpses enriching an immense food chain).
The spawned kelt is, in its own way, a remarkable iteration of this protean fish – a ghost of its former self, a ghastly, emaciated revenant. The ‘long salmon’, ‘strike’ or broken fish is a spent force of Nature, once pitchforked out for pig food, considered a mere irritant when one takes your lure in among the snowbroth currents of early spring and gives up easily with that distinctive, disappointing wobble. Personally, I admire them – poignant yet still heroic as they attempt to make it back to the salt, though now more scabbard than sword. You might also encounter an unspawned female – known as a ‘baggot’ (‘bagged’ signifying pregnant), ‘thwarted matron’, or ‘rawner’ (from the Nordic word for roe) – which would be taken for the table and were regarded as ‘gillie’s fish’. These days, for conservation reasons, none of our salmon is killed in spring, irrespective of which direction they are heading.
In Britain, the kelt is an accidental (though sometimes welcome) bycatch for the hunter of increasingly rare fresh springers, but in April 2007 I joined a party on Canada’s mighty Miramichi, where such ‘black salmon’ are deliberately targeted immediately the debacle of winter ice breaking up has occurred. This river system (about 100 miles of main trunk, plus several serious affluents, similar to Tweed) boasts the largest run of salmon in the western hemisphere, but they don’t arrive until June; meanwhile, the kelts linger in river to intercept an upstream migration of smelt – Osmerus mordax, a cousin of our O. eperlanus, once very numerous, popular as a breakfast dish, and supposedly redolent of violets. The Canadian salmon are, therefore, most unusually, feeding actively in fresh water, putting on valuable weight for their perilous transit to safety across the Bay of Fundy, with its legions of ravenous seals. The commencement of ‘black salmon’ season signals something of a free-for-all: it marks the lifting of the winter siege locking in the valley. All manner of precarious local canoes and watercraft are launched, and we did have to dodge the odd ice floe. As they become mended, the spent ‘slinks’ tend to strike your streamer +y with agreeable determination, and one chill day I boated a dozen, the longest almost at the magical 40-inch mark. It is not all catch and release, either (or prise et remise, as it is sometimes elegantly termed in the Maritimes): a state provision dating back to the times when fresh meat was scarce during these months allows you to keep some, but one grizzled guide, asked for his recipe, replied, ‘Now boys, if youse cooks ’em just right, with ’erbs and spices in ’is belly, youse can gettem to taste almost as good as shit!’ We drank in Tom Thumb’s favourite inn, were feasted by the Mi’kmaq First Nation tribe, and at the annual Ice Out ceremony (where seasonal !sticuffs occurred) I was mistaken for the prime minister of New Brunswick, since I was the only guest wearing a tie.
‘Fish in the Reads’ concludes it’s current series on Thursday 18th March with David Profumo reading from his book, The Lightning Thread. All events are free and can be booked here. There is an optional donation to the Missing Salmon Alliance so please give generously.
As an Alliance of five organisations, we will build on the existing work of our partners and maximise our impact by taking a coordinated approach and vital action in order to halt and reverse the decline of wild Atlantic salmon.
The goal of the Missing Salmon Alliance is to build an evidence-base to influence national and international decision-makers to regulate activities that adversely impact wild Atlantic salmon.
The Missing Salmon Alliance
The MSA is comprised of the following members:
Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Atlantic Salmon Trust, the Angling Trust with Fish Legal, The Rivers Trust and Fisheries Management Scotland.
https://www.missingsalmonalliance.org