SEA TROUT NIGHTS
Half a Century of Night Fishing on Scottish Rivers
by John Gray
John Gray was born in 1949. From an early age, with like-minded pals, he would pester the fishy residents of any local burn, pond or canal within a bike ride of Bo’ness, with occasional eagerly anticipated weekend trips on the Kinneil Pit Angling Club bus to highland lochs, fishing the fly and bubble float through the summer nights for wild brown trout. Increasingly the focus was to shift, when time and opportunity permitted, to sea trout and the occasional salmon. For half a century, the pursuit of sea trout during the hours of darkness has been the author’s abiding passion and he has caught them now on more than twenty British rivers and lochs.
After some years as a schoolteacher, in 1983 he opened a tackle shop in Kilsyth, which moved online in 2002, keeping the name Grays of Kilsyth, now specialising in the manufacture of Needle Tubes and Needle Tube Flies, which are to be found today in fly boxes the world over and have accounted for many notable catches, including Welsh sea trout to over 16lb, Scottish salmon to over 20lb, Norwegian salmon to 38lb, Canadian salmon to 34lb and North American steelhead to 16lb.
The author has contributed the occasional article to fishing magazines, in particular Trout & Salmon. He is indebted to the editor, Andrew Flitcroft, for his kind permission to include, in this first book, extracts from several articles which have appeared in that esteemed journal over the years.
