This song brings back memories of driving down the A75 road along the coast of Dumfries & Galloway in the South West of Scotland.
We had a few family holidays there when I was in my mid-teens. We would usually visit in spring and the weather was invariably very kind to us.
We would stay at a long-since closed hotel and fish a short, but very pretty beat they had on the River Bladnoch. There was also a beautiful, gorse-fringed loch where you could take a boat out and catch some beautiful trout.
I caught my first (and to date only) fresh run salmon on one of those trips – a ten pounder, grassed on an a misty April morning just downstream from Spittal Bridge. There was a boulder mid-stream that created a lovely bit of slack water behind it and I vividly remember the salmon rolling on the spoon exactly where I thought he would be lying.
A few years later I took my then girlfriend back up there for a short break. The hotel had closed and we stayed in a small cottage in Bladnoch. We walked along the beach at St Medan and enjoyed a great day afloat on the loch catching several brown trout to nearly three pounds, including my now wife’s first fish on fly.
I proposed that holiday, and we drove back to Leeds in glorious sunshine and played this track again.
A girl’s first fish is always special!