The Carranoch

All these meetings. The memories among patent-mops, plastic folders. I met the skipper at the goodie counter. All roads meet here in December. If you don’t see someone out at Marybank Garage, waiting for a tyre or exhaust, you’ll see them in the Woolies. I was looking along the presentation boxes for Terry’s Spartan. The olaid had never gone for soft-centres.

This was F W Woolworth, not long before the sign changed to Woolworth and the cheques had to be made out to Woolworth PLC. The skipper was Angus from Garyvard. Kenny’s uncle. It might be enough to be all Jock Tamson’s bairns in the rest of Scotland but in the Outer Hebrides, we need to know the details of the relationships.

The round face was even more round. A trace of white stubble coming through the red. The thick glasses. No Sellotape. The ones he had to hand on the boat were held together with the stuff. These must be his best wear. I’d first met this man, amongst others, in a fishing boat chartered for a sea angling competition. Then again when he bought my olman’s Morris Traveller. He put the brush over it with Charlie Morrison’s Paint – yacht enamel – wooden bits and all and it did him a couple of years. But that was as far as my track went. I didn’t know he was Kenny F’s uncle, till that first time out in the sea angling boat.

‘Do you still go fishing?’ It was his question, direct, no smalltalk.

It was like we were in the movies. Marbled vinyl of the floor going wavy. Here we go. We’re away. A bit like LSD. But that’s how it was. The shoppers passing us by like other vessels in transit. I was afloat.

Kenny F and me took turns being anchor-man and mate. A bristling rivalry between us. Usually, it was Kenny who was up the pecking order. He was ahead of me in seamanship. A guy who knew what he wanted to do. But we’d work as a team to start the Lister. One on the handle, the other ready to pull over the lever on the first cylinder when she was turning over fast enough. Then the second two got recompressed when she was chuntering. Since then, I’ve never fully trusted an electric start.

Kenny’s uncle Angus gave us the marks once. Then he let us argue between ourselves until we remembered them and found anchorage uptide from the pinnacle. Quite a knack in judging the slack so you’d hold but not drift too far down. I learned not to coil that warp, on the way out, but to flake it, end for end, loose so it would run.

All around The Carranoch it’s thirty fathoms and then it climbs. Twenty, then eighteen and you’re right on it. Abeam the tits up on the hill over Loch Erisort, the mark open on the island – Tavay. We couldn’t wait to get the lines down.

A real Christmas tree rig, Angus called Kenny’s set of lures. I blame all these angling magazines.

But there was something to be said for hedging your bet between the bigger hook on the bottom and a smaller one on a snood. You might get something interesting half a fathom up. Maybe because the three of us fished a different set of terminal tackle, the box would fill with colours. Twelve species was nothing out of the ordinary and sometime we’d be struggling for names, between our town English and the skipper’s Gaelic. Was a red bream the same as a Norwegian haddock? He would often start to sing but composing in English, for our benefit.

‘If you catch a Balallan Wrasse,

You can stick it up your ass…’

Cuckoo wrasse had the tropical colours, ballan wrasse, often larger fish, had a soft shift of shading from kelp red to a green I haven’t seen anywhere else. The ling coming up, mottled like pike but a valued fish in our parts. All sure signs you were over the hard ground. Every village in North Lochs would have its own set of marks for the reef. Balallan was further up Loch Erisort, almost inland. Not taken too seriously by guys like our skipper from further down the loch.

All gasping colours, darkening on wrinkled skins as the day went on. The light always seeming to be refracted so it came from the clouds as rays from a protractor. Spreading to link us, over The Carranoch, spreading further west to Eilean Calum Chille – St Columba’s Isle. If that Irishman visited half the islands that bear his name, he’d have got around as much as Bonny Prince Charlie. The Prince’s cairn was another of our marks, muddy ground for thornback ray, in his case.

‘Did you ever see such a fluke as –

A skate on a haddock hook?’

It was only a matter of time before Angus’s big rod would go right on over, as far as the water and we’d think he had the bottom and was winding us up. But no, nine times out of ten, a grey slashing conger would come up on his single Scandinavian hook. Mustad. Best forged Swedish steel.