Another slamon season is ritually ushered in on the Tay where anglers gather for the drug of the tug when a fish takes
• Lee Conway (main) caught the first salmon of the day on the Tay at Kenmore, where the start of the season drew many anglers. Photograph: Robert Perry
THE Perthshire village of Kenmore, early yesterday morning. The drone and keen of bagpipes carries from the historic square across the river to the cloud-shrouded hills. Behind the band, around 100 anglers gather, rods aloft like quivering antennae. This is the opening ceremony of the salmon fishing season on the Tay. Here, as it passes under the old seven arch bridge, the river begins its journey from loch to firth.
Salmon, remarkably, find their way back from the Atlantic to the place in the river where they were born using their sense of smell. What, I wonder, does the Tay smell like at Kenmore today? Damp plaid and tweed, perhaps; tobacco, bacon, whisky and - most of all - hope. Everyone here today hopes to catch a salmon, the first of the season or the best fish, for which latter achievement a trophy is awarded. Mostly, though, people hope there will be plenty of salmon in the water this year. That is what this ceremony is about, at heart - a prayer for abundance. The quaich of whisky poured into the boat from which the ceremonial first cast is made is a sacrifice to the river spirits.
This is a grand event, much loved by regulars, of whom there are many. You might expect the ceremony to attract only the blue-blooded and green-wellied, but in fact there are a great many gallus west-coasters, bringing with them a whiff of the Clyde. Tommy Donnelly, a forty-something railway worker from Glasgow, has teamed a Barbour jacket with a "Baw Bag" T-shirt. He glares heavenward at the teeming rain. "Welcome to Scotland," he says.
Christopher McVey, 31, is a wood machinist from Hamilton, a big, solid man in a camouflage jacket with "Donna" tattooed in elegant curlicues on the ring finger of his left hand. He's excited by the prospect of a good day on the water. "Buzzing," he says. "I love it. The pipe band and all that. That's been seven years I've been coming here. I caught the biggest fish of the day last time. Just down there under the second arch of the bridge. Sixteen and a half pounds. Some feeling."
Kenmore enjoys, if that is the word, something of a rivalry with nearby Dunkeld, which holds a Tay opening event on the same morning. Last year, in fact, Dunkeld is thought to have got a line in the water first, causing some gnashing of teeth in Kenmore. However, the villagers comfort themselves with the knowledge that they have tradition on their side. The opening of the salmon season has been marked here, on the riverbank behind the Kenmore Hotel, since 1947.
At around 9.40am, local ghillie Rob McIntyre is rowed out into the middle of the Tay and makes the ceremonial first cast.
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