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Every spring six pals come to Tomich from all quarters for a week's fishing on the Hill Lochs. It's the only time they meet.

Forbes, at 80, is the oldest, broad in the shoulder, stocky, slightly stooped, with a quizzical eye. A doctor from Manchester, he has fished in the Highlands for more than half a century. His son played with Dennis at Knockfin when they were boys.

Mark, 40-ish, is the youngest – a detective sergeant in the Met who lectures at Hendon Police College. Like all of them, he came to the sport early. An uncle in Dingwall took him out in a boat, handed him a rod and hey! – he had a bite. In time, he guessed that the fish was already on the line when his uncle put the rod in his hands but he never asked: ‘Let me live with my illusion.’

Mike, an engineer, is the heavyweight of the party. The boat settles when he steps aboard. The legs in his breeches are like young tree trunks. He lives in Carlisle where his father was a haaf-netter – wading out into the Solway Firth with a net draped from a yoke on his shoulders like an aquatic Angel of the North. His face is framed by a short grizzly beard.

David's grandfather had a boat on Loch Leven in Fife. David lives in Manchester and travels the world as a consultant in ‘enterprise architecture’ (I don't know what that means but it sounds impressive). A man for the great outdoors, when young he was a climbing instructor at Glenmore Lodge outdoor centre at Aviemore. He's about to become an alpha-Munroist, having set out to climb every major peak in the Highlands not just once but once in each season. He's on the last lap: ‘Eight in summer and seven in winter still to do.’

Howard, a pathologist in Edinburgh, has known this area since boyhood. (He caught his first fish, a perch, in the city's Duddingston Loch.) He spent school holidays with his family in a cottage in Cannich.

Richard, the newcomer to the party, is in business in Suffolk selling kitchens and bathrooms. A chance meeting six years ago led to his adoption by the group.

The catalyst for some of them was Kyle, the man who organises fishing parties on the lochs. ‘I wandered into Tomich, was introduced to Kyle and the rest is history,’ says Howard. Kyle's eccentricities are legendary. Mike came to Tomich after a planned fishing trip to Ireland fell through. He wrote for information and Kyle's reply was ‘so off the wall that I thought, that sounds like my sort of thing’. Mark agrees. Twenty years ago he received a sheaf of glossy bumf about the area, amongst which was a scrap of paper torn from a notebook bearing a badly typed message – the letter e was missing and a heavy hand on the keys had punched holes in the paper. It was signed by Kyle and the significant phrase was ‘I liv· and br·ath· fishing’. Mark was hooked.