"AND ONE WITH MY NAME ON IT", published in Trout & Salmon

June 2007



Sitting on the rear deck of the Tortuga, watching the sun slide into the golden waters of the Caribbean Sea, I demolished another icy ‘mojito’ and tossed the last of my lobster to the ravenous hordes of flamboyantly coloured fish that live in the shadows of the huge houseboat. Looking around, the grinning, babbling, sun-weathered faces told the tale of yet another fabulous day’s tarpon fishing in Cuba’s Jardinas de la Reinas Archipelago.

“How big was that last one?” asked John, a fellow saltwater addict, breaking my reverie. “Guide reckons eighty” I grinned back. “Mine was ninety!” John yawned theatrically. He paused:” I tell you what - if you could fish anywhere in the world for one day before you die – anywhere at all - where would you go?”

Fishermen like questions like this, and the banter around us subsided. I knew the deal – I say “right here” and we all follow suit and congratulate ourselves on being clever or lucky enough to be in the world’s greatest fishing spot.

The question was directed at me: I thought about it, and gave an answer that was provocative but straight from the heart. The wrong answer: “Northern Russia for salmon”

“You’re joking!!” spluttered John, astonished at my heresy. “Salmon? They’re not as big; they’re not as strong. They’re not as plentiful…”

“AND it’s blind fishing, AND it’s cold, AND it’s hard work, AND it involves a lot of luck… AND it’s BLOODY expensive!!!” I contributed, as if to further debase my own argument. But…well, its hard to explain or justify, but for all the exotic thrills and spills to be had in saltwater, that sudden heart-stopping connection with a really big silver salmon way out in the icy, rushing waters of the Northern Kola peninsula is still the most magical moment I’ve ever experienced with a fly rod.

The conversation deteriorated into arguments about size and strength and numbers, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that other allies around the table knew what exactly it was that I was on about. I was already half-dreaming about my upcoming trip to Russia and the chance of hooking one of the northern Kola’s famous ‘crocodiles’.

This year, I was privileged to fish Peter Power’s Atlantic Salmon Reserve for the first time. You’ve no doubt heard of the mighty Kharlovka River that flows through the reserve. There can’t be many more magnificent salmon rivers anywhere – but there is at least one: the Kharlovka’s little sister, the Eastern Litza. The Eastern Litza is surely the most perfect salmon river there is – wild, foaming, tannin-stained water comes skipping and dancing through the most faultless glides and pools, each studded with boulder-strewn lies that fill every cast with tension and hope. Unlike its bigger brethren, the Kharlovka – and the Yokanga, further down the coast - it is an intimate, manageable river, where huge long throws with shooting heads are not always needed. It is an unearthly, mystical place and anglers lucky enough to have already fished it will know the spell it can cast. And the fish…In the Main camp on the Kharlovka, two mighty salmon are represented by exquisite carvings hanging on the wall – both fish weigh in the mid-forties, and both came not from the Kharlovka, but the notorious Flat Stone pool of the Eastern Litza. This year, Michael Daunt’s son, Will, managed to land a 41-pound fish after an epic struggle, and a Norwegian angler, Espen, landed a fish estimated to weigh around 50 pounds. Both came from the lower Litza.

As I sit at my tying desk, fashioning my templedogs and willy guns in preparation for the trip, I often picture those big silver salmon far out there RIGHT NOW in the frigid arctic seas, starting to desert their feeding grounds as the homing instinct starts to take hold.

Out there in the dark, under the ink-black waves is a leviathan, a huge silver salmon that is shouldering its way through its lesser brothers on its way back to its birthplace on the northern Kola.

I imagine the perfect co-incidence that will bring it nosing into the estuary as I touch down in the big, bullet-pocked Mi-8 from Murmansk, and gliding into the lie above the rapids for a breather, just as I start to lengthen the line to make my first cast, thirty yards upstream.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch a few big salmon, but that fish – that true monster – is the one that holds my imagination more than any other: the behemoth that we all dream of, and that the lucky band that fish in northern Russia and Norway have a very real chance of catching.

My first glimpse of the waters of the Atlantic Salmon Reserve was astonishing. The heaviest winter on the Kola for around 15 years had left a huge, snow-swollen river that left the anglers peering out of the helicopter’s portholes groaning and deflated, as we contemplated a week of long, frozen, fishless hours while we waited, quite probably in vain, for the water temperature to climb. The helicopter pad was around a foot underwater, and all the high hopes nursed all through the spring evaporated in seconds. This is always a risk with early season fishing, but the flip side is that you get a first shot at those big springers that come in early. And the risk element lowers the price, of course…

Despite the pessimism around me, I resolved to put in the hours – one big fish can rescue any trip, and there are also the remarkable Osenkas to save the day – salmon that have come into the river the previous autumn & stayed under the ice all winter, not intending to spawn until the following autumn.

As luck would have it, first day saw me on Julian’s Rock on the lower Kharlovka. At a charity bash some months before, a friend of mine, the irrepressible Jeremy Herrmann, told me that Julian’s was THE spot in high water. Jeremy was, as usual, to the point: “get on Julian’s Rock and DON’T BUDGE”. Fairly unambiguous. Unfortunately, the vagaries of the rota system mean that this potentially rather unpopular tactic wasn’t really viable, yet here I was, on day one, with the ‘hot ticket’.

Three times I went through that pool – the icy water rushing around me, and the savage Siberian easterly snatching my breath away. My fishing partner, Chris Dayer Smith, decided that enough was enough and battled his way to the bank, before trudging over to Alex, our guide, who was already brewing the coffee. I wavered – I admit it – but decided to make do with a nip of Lagavulin from the hip flask. I fished out an even heavier sink tip –15 feet of T14 Tungsten – and looped it onto the Skagit line I had picked up from a steelhead guide in British Columbia for fishing big flies deep in heavy flows.

As I lengthened the line, I saw a sight to lift the heart – a huge broad-shouldered fish leapt around two hundred yards downstream, refuting my gnawing suspicion that there weren’t any fish in the river just yet.

Another slug of the fiery malt, and I started to fish down carefully, the black and green templedog swimming round with just a semblance of control in the heavy water. Alex suggested that I should strip the fly, a tactic that has brought me some big Russian salmon before now, and although I felt that the fly was coming around plenty fast enough, I bowed to my guide and did as I was told.

Suddenly I experienced that magical moment – the moment that I’d tried to describe to John on the Tortuga – that fizzing crackle of life as a salmon suddenly refuses to allow your fly to make its way back to shore. I felt the line stretch in my icy fingers and everything went very solid. I lifted the rod and the line drew off steadily downstream. Then something astonishing happened. Right in front of me, slightly upstream and perhaps fifteen yards out, a colossal silver salmon broke the surface. An absurd freak of a fish. How big? Certainly forty – maybe even fifty pounds – the fish that I have dreamt about, and that has driven me to endure long hard hours of early-season fishing on the Kola, when I could have been slurping down Cuba Libras and toasting another double digit day on big Cuban tarpon. I uttered an involuntary, reflexive expletive that caught Alex & Chris’s attention, and I was gratified to hear the echo of their own colourful expressions of astonishment as we saw the huge fish roll again. Only then, as my line changed direction and ripped up off of the surface to follow the salmon we’d all seen, did I realise, in a moment of sudden and ecstatic clarity, that I was attached to this huge creature. My heart thumped hard in my chest. This was it: my chance - quite possibly a chance that would never come again – to catch a genuine monster.

The initial excitement dissolved almost instantly into a thumping wretched terror as the line melted relentlessly off of the big saltwater reel. The fish was utterly unstoppable. It skidded away from me and swam in a straight diagonal downstream line from one side of the huge, brawling river to the other, seemingly oblivious to the torrential current and the powerful drag of the reel. I stumbled out of the river and sprinted along the treacherously slippery rocks in a futile attempt to keep up with my quarry, which was now already nearly two hundred yards away, and seemingly intent on returning to the sea.

As I slithered desperately down the rocky bank, I tried to fight off the irrefutable realisation that the game was up almost before it had begun. Without a boat to follow the fish, I could only watch helplessly as the fish raced towards the far side of a midstream island that would surely spell the end.

The rod bucked furiously as I tried to prevent the fish rounding the far side of the island and in a sudden, sickening moment, the fish was gone. I could have wept – the adrenaline was quickly replaced by a jolting wave of nausea as I wound back the long, long yards of backing to find that the hook had simply ripped out.

I sat down, sullen and dejected, doing my best to acknowledge the commiserations from the anglers on the far bank, who’d, watched the whole thing happen. I felt like a lovesick teenager with a broken heart. Over a fish! Ridiculous! I knew I’d recount the tale a hundred times, on a slow afternoon at Grafham or a drunken night in a pub by the banks of the Dee, but it just wasn’t enough – I wanted that fish in my hands and on the cover of this magazine. I felt physically sick: there was only one thing to do…wade back in and start again.

As I distractedly replayed the event in my head for the umpteenth time later that afternoon, I was dragged violently into the here and now, by a beautiful 24-pound fish from one of the pockets upstream: rock-hard, chrome silver, sea-lice…the whole deal. I want to say I didn’t care, but I did – like every Russian salmon, it was imbued with a special wild quality that defied you not to fall for it hook, line and sinker. After Alex had gently unhooked it, we admired it briefly and then watched it kick powerfully away into the heavy flow. Magnificent. I checked the hook, and went straight back in for more.

The following morning, I fished the Eastern Litza for the first time, and it was everything that the rumours had promised it would be. In the fabled Reindeer pool, I had a 21-pound salmon and lost another fish, beaten and wallowing inches from the net, estimated by the guide at 35 pounds– a fish that would have equalled my personal best. I sulked, but soon got over it. I’d have given a dozen fish that size for the one I lost the previous day. The main thing was that, despite the high, heavy, ice-cold water the fish were, remarkably, starting to run the river.

All told, I hooked seven fish for the week, and landed only four – all bright, silver, sea-liced fish averaging a shade under twenty pounds – the three I lost were all reckoned to be over thirty pounds by Alex – one of the most experienced guides on the Kharlovka - and I’ve no reason to argue with him. Infuriatingly, I lost all three due to the hook coming free. Lifting the rod too early? These things pull your arm off before you’ve even had a chance to react, and my hooks were strong and razor sharp, but it didn’t stop me agonising about it as I fished the home-pool in the perpetual half-light of another arctic night. Was stripping the flies to blame? As Alex pointed out, you WILL lose a lot of these big, early season fish – they’re just too strong, the water too heavy and the current too powerful, to give you more than a fighting chance. Justin McCarthy, the camp manager, reckons only around one in seven of the true early-season leviathans are landed, but that’s scant consolation. The guys on the later weeks do land some very big fish, but the water is considerably lower and the fish are perhaps just a little less savage, having often been in the river for just that little bit longer.

By the end of the week, our eleven rods had had 27 fish, including John Shaw’s magnificent 32-pound fish. Given the extreme conditions, I’d say we did rather well. Needless to say, the last day was the best and allowed us all a glimpse of the sport that we might have been afforded had the weather been just a little kinder.

I went back to the Kharlovka in September – a huge contrast to the early season. The river was low, and a lot of the fish more than a little stale, but the riot of autumnal colours and the magic of the northern lights – along with the chance of connecting with one of the river’s legendary Osenkas when they first enter the river, made for a fantastic week’s fishing. I fished with Richard Whiteman, great company and an excellent salmon-fisherman, who comprehensively outfished me by using two tiny flies, often dibbling the dropper to raise the fish. Knowing what these rivers are capable of, I counselled against this tactic, as I feel that a big fish dragging a second fly around in low water is a recipe for disaster. But what did I know! When the score got to nine-one, I finally capitulated and adopted Richard’s style! After that, we stayed roughly neck and neck, and enjoyed an excellent and absorbing week’s fishing. Richard absolutely wiped my eye 16-7, although I did manage the only “twenty”, a big old ‘croc’ of a fish that came to a tiny size 14 red francis from the home-pool just before supper one evening, and that would have weighed somewhere in the mid-twenties.

All through that week, I was haunted by that huge fish I’d lost earlier in the season – undoubtedly still in the river, hiding out under one of the waterfalls perhaps, or menacing the lesser fish in one of the inaccessible canyon lies, as spawning time drew near. I didn’t really know if I wanted to hook it again, undoubtedly a big, tartan-coated, kype-jawed “crocodile” by now, and surely eminently more “landable”. What I did know is that the fish I do want to hook again and the one that I’ll continue to dream of, is that huge leaping silver springer from the wilds of Northern Russia. I’ll dream of that fish no matter where my fly rod takes me. I love to fish for anything that swims, from the huge brown trout of New Zealand, to the rampaging Peacock Bass of the Amazon jungle, and I’ll be fishing for tarpon in Cuba again, make no mistake. Yet one fish is still the most remarkable, the most captivating and the most mystical of them all.

He’s out there, right now, under the ink black waves of the arctic seas, terrorising the baitfish, as he packs on weight and muscle to see him through his final, fantastic voyage: another leviathan salmon bound to one day come back home to the Kharlovka River. And perhaps that fish has my name on it. Or yours.



Contacts:

Apply to fish in the Atlantic Salmon Reserve:

Peter C Power
The Atlantic Salmon Reserve
Eynsham Mill
Oxford, OX29 4EJ
01865 883 063
E-Mail: Peter Power peter@ryndariver.com

Peter’s camps on the Kharlovka and Rynda Rivers are both excellent, and represent a holistic approach to salmon fishing on the Kola peninsula. Peter employs almost entirely Russian staff and guides, and the camps are extremely well-organised and well-run.







Kit:

For early spring fishing, use the excellent Guideline LeCie 15 ft 10/11 Spey rod, coupled with Guideline shooting heads or Rio’s excellent Skagit lines.
Reels should be Tibor Gulfstreams or similar. Gelspun backing will cut through heavy flows better than thicker alternatives.

Later on, in low water, a slightly lighter 14 foot 9wt rod will suffice, with a full floating line, such as Bill Drury’s Impact line, being all you need.

In spring, fish with Seaguar Fluorocarbon in not less than 30 pound test, and use hefty Loop doubles in sizes 2 to 6.

Successful flies for early season include Black/Green tungsten-cone Templedogs and “Ice Maiden” tubes. Despite the high water, the rivers of the Northern Kola are fairly shallow and run very clear. I rarely fish really large flies.

Low water requires more finesse, and I found that 18 pound copolymer with small red and black Frances flies dibbled through the surface worked well. Fluorocarbon sinks faster and makes it harder to keep the flies in the surface in slower flows.

Always use a wading staff – and ration nips from the hip flask to a minimum. The rivers of the Northern Kola are treacherous and savagely cold.

Brian Fratel or Sean Clarke at Farlows can advise on all aspects of fishing for salmon on the Kola peninsula.

Farlows
9 Pall Mall
London SW1Y 5NP

Telephone: +44 207 484 1000
Email: info@farlows.co.uk





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