Orkney

Orkney's relationship with the sea is older and more central than that of almost anywhere else in Britain, and it shows in the ordinary texture of the place.

THE OLD SAYING IS THAT AN ORKNEY MAN IS A FARMER WITH A BOAT and a Shetland man a fisherman with a croft, and it captures a real difference. Orkney's fertile land supported farming to a degree Shetland's did not, so fishing here was historically part of a mixed livelihood rather than the whole of it — which produced a population comfortable on the water without being wholly dependent on it.

THE SEA IS THE ROAD. With around twenty inhabited islands, boats are transport before they are anything else, and a familiarity with tide, weather and passage is general rather than specialist.

RECREATIONAL SEA ANGLING HAS A LONG AND SERIOUS LOCAL FOLLOWING, with an established festival and competition history and a strong association with big fish from deep clean water. Shore angling from the cliffs and voes and small-boat fishing in the sounds are both ordinary activities rather than visitor pursuits.

THE TROUT FISHING IS THE OTHER HALF OF THE CULTURE. Orkney's shallow, fertile, wind-swept lochs support wild brown trout in a fishery that locals treat as their own, fished from boat and bank, largely with wet flies, and organised through angling associations rather than through commercial lettings.

AND THE ATTITUDE TO THE WEATHER IS PRACTICAL RATHER THAN ROMANTIC. Wind is a constant, plans change, and the local expectation is that a person reads the forecast and adjusts. A visitor who treats an Orkney forecast as pessimistic will lose days.

Orkney supports three quite separate fisheries and a visitor should know which one they have come for.

SMALL-BOAT SEA FISHING IN THE SOUNDS AND FIRTHS is the mainstay. Sheltered water between islands, hard ground, strong tidal streams and deep clean water close in produce a boat fishery for cod, pollack, ling, haddock and coalfish that is genuinely good by British standards, and the tidal flow through the sounds is the feature being fished.

SHORE FISHING FROM CLIFF AND ROCK reaches deep water directly, because the geology puts depth close to land in many places. It is a serious discipline here and it is conducted on exposed ground receiving Atlantic swell.

LOCH TROUT FISHING IS THE FRESHWATER DISCIPLINE AND IT IS DISTINCTIVE. Orkney's lochs are shallow, alkaline and fertile — quite unlike the acid peat waters of much of the Highlands — and they support wild brown trout in numbers. Traditional loch style from a drifting boat with a team of wet flies is the standard method, and bank fishing works the shallow margins.

SEA TROUT FISHING AROUND THE COAST is an underrated Orkney discipline, working the shallow tidal margins and voes for fish feeding in salt water.

CREELING AND SHELLFISH WORK IS THE COMMERCIAL PICTURE. Lobster, brown crab and velvet crab creeling from small boats is the mainstay of the local commercial fishery, alongside scallop diving and dredging.

WHAT IS NOT HERE IS A COARSE FISHERY of the kind an English visitor might expect: the fresh water is trout water and nothing else.

Orkney's fishing vocabulary is substantially Norse in origin and several of the terms name features that English has no single word for.

A VOE IS A NARROW INLET OR SMALL SEA LOCH, from the Old Norse. It matters to a fisherman because a voe is sheltered water with a restricted mouth, which concentrates tidal flow at the entrance and holds different species inside from outside.

A ROOST IS A TIDAL RACE, and Orkney has some of the most powerful in Britain. The word names exactly the phenomenon the Portland record describes — fast water disturbed by flow over uneven ground past an obstruction — and it is used routinely rather than technically here. A roost is a fishing feature and a navigational hazard in the same breath.

A GEO IS A NARROW STEEP-SIDED INLET CUT INTO A CLIFF, frequently where a sea cave has collapsed. Geos are the access points to cliff fishing and are also where swell concentrates dangerously.

NOUST NAMES A BOAT-SHAPED HOLLOW CUT INTO THE SHORE ABOVE THE TIDE, where a small boat is hauled up and stored. They are visible all round the islands and they are a physical record of how ordinary small-boat ownership was.

SILLOCK AND CUITH NAME YOUNG COALFISH AT DIFFERENT AGES, and the fact that a fish has separate names at separate life stages is a good indicator of how much it mattered: sillocks were caught in quantity from rock and pier and were a genuine food source.

AND THE FLOW STATES HAVE NAMES TOO, because a fishery conducted in tidal streams this strong needs vocabulary for what the water is doing rather than only for where it is.

Orkney's fishing history is exceptionally long and exceptionally well evidenced, because the archaeology here is among the best preserved in Europe.

THE NEOLITHIC EVIDENCE IS DIRECT. Excavated settlements on the islands contain fish bone and shell in quantity, showing that the coastal resource was being used systematically five thousand years ago. Orkney is one of the places where the prehistoric use of marine resources in northern Europe can actually be measured rather than inferred.

THE NORSE PERIOD SHAPED THE LANGUAGE AND THE BOATS. Orkney was Norse for centuries, and the vocabulary, the small-boat forms and the pattern of settlement round the shore descend from that.

THE HERRING BOOM CAME AND WENT WITHIN A CENTURY. Orkney participated in the great nineteenth-century North Sea herring fishery, with curing stations and seasonal employment, and the collapse of that fishery in the twentieth century removed an industry that had reorganised the islands' economy.

THE WHITE FISH FISHERY FOLLOWED AND ALSO DECLINED, under the general pressures on North Sea and northern demersal stocks.

SHELLFISH BECAME THE COMMERCIAL FISHERY. Creeling for lobster and crab, and scallops, are now the mainstay, worked from small boats, and it is a fishery with a very different structure from the herring one: many small operators rather than a fleet.

AND SCAPA FLOW IS THE UNDERWATER HISTORY. The scuttled German fleet and the wartime blockships left one of the world's most significant wreck diving sites, which is why Orkney has a diving industry as well as a fishing one, and why parts of its seabed are archaeologically protected rather than merely fished.

Orkney sits inside the Scottish framework and has some local features worth understanding.

SEA ANGLING IN SCOTLAND DOES NOT REQUIRE A ROD LICENCE, which is a structural difference from England and Wales and surprises visitors. That does not mean it is unregulated: national and European measures on minimum sizes, prohibited species and gear apply, and the marine directorate is the responsible body.

SHELLFISH AND CRUSTACEA ARE WHERE THE RULES BITE. Lobster, crab, scallops and other shellfish carry size limits, gear restrictions, licensing requirements for commercial take and, for filter feeders, a separate sanitary and biotoxin regime administered for public health rather than for fisheries.

FRESHWATER FISHING IS A MATTER OF PERMISSION RATHER THAN A NATIONAL LICENCE. In Scotland there is no general rod licence for trout, and the right to fish is attached to the water; on Orkney the trout lochs are in practice administered through local angling associations, which is why the sensible first question is to them rather than to a government body.

INSHORE FISHERIES MANAGEMENT INVOLVES REGIONAL GROUPS as well as national government, and local arrangements over creel grounds and inshore activity matter to what happens on the water.

MARINE PROTECTED AREAS AND HISTORIC WRECK DESIGNATIONS cover parts of Orkney's waters, including Scapa Flow, and they constrain activity for conservation and heritage reasons rather than fisheries ones.

AND FISHINGHQ DOES NOT STATE WHAT ANY OF THIS CURRENTLY PERMITS. The bodies above are the durable answer.

Orkney's fishing calendar is set by light and wind far more than by temperature, because the sea here changes temperature slowly and the daylight changes enormously.

MIDSUMMER HAS ALMOST NO NIGHT. At this latitude the sun barely sets in June, and there is usable light around the clock. That extends the fishing day dramatically, allows loch fishing late into the evening when trout are most active, and is one of the genuine attractions of an Orkney summer.

MIDWINTER HAS ALMOST NO DAY, with a short window of light and long nights, and the practical fishing year contracts accordingly.

THE SEA WARMS AND COOLS SLOWLY AND LATE. Surrounded by deep Atlantic water, Orkney's sea temperature lags the air by months, so the best sea fishing tends to come later in the year than a southern angler would expect, and autumn is more productive than early summer.

THE TROUT SEASON RUNS THROUGH THE SUMMER, opening in spring and closing in autumn under Scottish arrangements. Early season fishing on the shallow fertile lochs can be excellent because they warm quickly; midsummer can be difficult in bright calm conditions; and late season produces the heavier fish.

WIND IS THE CONSTRAINT AT EVERY SEASON. Orkney is exposed and windy year-round, and which loch or which sound is fishable on a given day is a wind question. Local knowledge is largely knowledge of where to go in a given wind direction.

AND THE COMMERCIAL SHELLFISH SEASONS follow the animals: crab and lobster are most active and most catchable in the warmer months, which is when the creel fishery concentrates.

Orkney sits at the top of a funnel. The Atlantic and the North Sea exchange water through the gap between the islands and the Scottish mainland, and because the gap is narrow and the volume is enormous, the resulting tidal streams are among the fastest anywhere on earth.

WHAT THAT PRODUCES PHYSICALLY. Named races and roosts where the stream meets shallowing ground or an opposing sea, standing waves that appear and disappear within the hour, and overfalls that are flat water at one state of tide and a wall of broken water at another. These are charted features rather than local knowledge, and they are the reason the tidal atlas here is primary information rather than a supplement to the weather forecast.

WHAT IT PRODUCES FOR FISHING. Ground that is unfishable at one state and productive an hour later, and the difference measured in knots rather than in inches of range. Fish position themselves relative to the stream exactly as a river fish does relative to current — in the slack behind structure, along the shear line at the edge of the fast water, and on the downtide side of anything that breaks the flow. An angler who reads the tidal stream is reading the fishing.

AND IT PRODUCES THE ISLANDS' TWO COASTS. The west and north-west face open Atlantic and take unobstructed ocean swell against high cliff and rock platform. The sounds between the islands and the enclosed water of Scapa Flow are sheltered, shallower and comparatively calm. There is almost always somewhere fishable; the skill is knowing which side that is today.

THE GROUND ITSELF is kelp-dominated hard reef where the rock is exposed, sand and maerl in the sheltered shallows, and deeper mixed ground offshore. The water is cold, clear and productive.

AND THE HAZARD IS THE SAME FACT. A small boat or a kayak caught in a race on the wrong state of tide faces conditions that no amount of paddling or small-engine power overcomes. Local knowledge of the streams is not a courtesy here; it is the operative safety information, and it is why plans are made against tidal timing rather than against wind.

The fish community here is northern, cold-water and clean-ground, and it is noticeably less diverse than the southern British list while containing better individual fish.

ON THE ROUGH GROUND AND REEF: cod, saithe, pollack, ling and wrasse. Saithe in particular are abundant, are taken from rock and pier in numbers, and are a traditional food fish rather than merely a sport one — the local names for the fish at different ages are evidence of how long that has been true.

OVER THE SAND: plaice, dabs and other flatfish, with the sheltered shallows inside the sounds holding them in numbers.

ON THE DEEPER MIXED GROUND: skates and rays, including species that have become scarce further south and persist better in these less heavily fished northern waters.

MACKEREL arrive inshore in the warmer months as they do everywhere in Britain, and the season here is shorter and later than in the south-west for the obvious thermal reason.

WHAT IS LARGELY ABSENT is the southern and warm-temperate component — bass are at the very edge of their range here and are not a fishery, and the bream, mullet and wrasse diversity of the south-west does not extend this far north.

AND THE CRUSTACEANS ARE COMMERCIALLY SIGNIFICANT. Creel fishing for crab and lobster shapes the inshore ground and is a substantial part of the islands' economy. That matters to a visiting angler for a practical reason as much as a cultural one: creel ground is worked ground, gear is in the water, and a boat or kayak needs to know what the surface markers mean.

WHAT NOT TO ASSUME. That a shorter species list means poorer fishing. Cold, clean, productive water with comparatively light angling pressure produces individual fish that the southern coasts have not held in numbers for a long time.

Everywhere else in Britain the tide is one input among several. Here it is the dominant physical force in the water, it is stronger than almost anywhere in the world, and every other hazard on these islands is best understood as something the tide is doing.

START WITH THE SCALE. The exchange between the Atlantic and the North Sea is forced through the gaps between these islands and through the firth at the south of them. That produces streams that no small craft can make ground against and no swimmer can influence at all. This is not a strong current in the sense that word is used further south; it is a river of sea several kilometres wide.

A RACE IS A PLACE THAT APPEARS AND DISAPPEARS. Where that stream crosses a shoal, meets an opposing stream or turns a corner, it forms overfalls and standing waves. Those are not marked on the water at slack, and they are not there at slack. The same piece of sea is flat, then boiling, then flat again, on a cycle that has nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the clock. Water that was crossed comfortably two hours ago is the hazard on the way back, and that specific sequence — out on the slack, back on the run — is the one to plan against.

WIND AGAINST TIDE IS THE COMBINATION THAT MATTERS. A stream running hard into opposing wind stands up into a short steep breaking sea far beyond what the wind strength suggests, in exactly the places the stream is fastest. A forecast that says the wind is light is not a forecast that says the water is calm.

AND THE WEST COAST IS A SEPARATE PROBLEM WITH THE SAME ANSWER. The Atlantic-facing cliffs and platforms take ocean ground swell generated by weather that is nowhere in sight, arriving in sets. Watching an exposed mark for a sustained period before committing to it is the only useful protection, and choosing the sheltered side of the islands on a given day is the local skill rather than a compromise.

WHAT ACTUALLY HELPS. Treat the tidal stream atlas as the primary document and the wind forecast as secondary — that ordering is the opposite of the habit most visiting anglers arrive with, and it is the correct one here. Get local knowledge of the specific streams before going afloat, because the timing at a particular sound is not the timing at a distant standard port. Do not plan any crossing whose return depends on the stream still being slack. Wear a buoyancy aid. Carry the means of calling for help on the person, and know that coverage is good in inhabited areas and not everywhere on the coast.

COLD IS THE CONSTANT. Sea temperature at this latitude is low in every month, air temperature is a poor guide to it, and immersion degrades useful function quickly whatever the season. Dress for the water rather than for the day. Check the current tidal predictions and inshore waters forecast before going, and treat any decision to go on an unfamiliar state of tide as one to defer.