SALMON-FISHING 2 2 1 



Harris. This little river flows through a chain of lakes, in 

 which most of the angling is carried on by means of boats. 

 The great run of fish salmon, grilse, and sea-trout is due 

 towards the end of July annually ; but in that year (it was 

 somewhere in the 'eighties) so great was the drought that, 

 although many thousands of fish thronged the fjord into 

 which the river flows, none of them could ascend into the 

 lochs. A party of five anglers waited wistfully for rain to 

 carry the fish up, and at last two of the party left the island 

 in despair. The remaining three set their wits to work 

 and established a noteworthy illustration of what may be 

 effected by judicious use of natural resources and water 

 storage. As the lesson is of first-rate importance to managers 

 of fisheries, I prefer to quote Mr. Hansard's own description 

 of the operation as communicated by him to the Field news- 

 paper (November 8th, 1902). It should be mentioned, in 

 order to give a right impression of the pluck and enterprise 

 of these three gentlemen, that their lease of the fishings was 

 to end on September ist. 



" From the formation of the lochs it struck us that an 

 artificial spate might be made by cutting away the river bed, 

 and letting down water from one of the upper lakes. We 

 explored all the likely places, and at last hit upon the lower 

 end of Loch Langabhat as being a suitable place for the work. 

 This was easier to do than it sounds, as some years before a 

 hatchway had been made there, with a grating to keep the fish 

 from running into Loch Langabhat. Unfortunately, this 

 useful work had gone to ruin, but it was easy to grub up the 

 bed of the stream where the grating had been, and so let down 

 nearly two feet of the big lake, which is ten miles long by half 

 to one mile across. At the bottom of our first loch, i.e., the 

 one nearest the sea, we then made a dam across the river head, 

 some six feet high, as solidly as we could with rocks and 

 turves. All this was rather against the opinion of the gillies, 

 who declared that no salmon would run up except in water 



