One thing I would say to anyone going out on Hope for the first time...
Don't go without doing your homework first. It's a decent-sized loch, and famous for weather that kicks you in the arse. 'Middle Bay', as it is known, is 780 acres. The distribution of fish throughout the loch is about as uneven as an uneven thing. It's largely a case of keeping close to shore, except at the shallow ends... but even there, you don't want to be fishing in 30-odd feet of water, when the fish are all lying in 10 feet or so.
The two ends are divided into beats, so if you are fishing either end, you will be confined to a small area. Beat 1, south end, has about 20 acres of productive water...
The yellow lines are the boundaries. Beat 1 is bottom right. That was the beat we were meant to be fishing, the day I took that GPS trace. Everything south of our trace was unfishably shallow - 2 or 3 feet, when we were fishing for seatrout that are in 8-18 feet of water. Come on guys - get a feckin' grip! It tends to work OK, because the Beat 2 boat (bottom left area) is focusing on the west shore, and the boat on Beat 3 (above the high line) is away up the loch.
We find the best way to approach anywhere on the loch is to have a sonar device with us, so we can keep the boat in a productive depth. It's a case of concentrating on the good depth for seatrout (8-18 feet a lot of the time) and if a salmon comes, it's a bonus. On some lochs, the salmon will all lie in shallow water (down to 4 foot), but the two I had off Hope last year came from seatrout-depth water!
Pearls of wisdom from folk who fish it are priceless. There is a famous mark on Middle Bay called 'The Castle' - a submerged island about 100 yards offshore. While everyone does drifts around it, I got told to take a drift through the deeper channel between The Castle and the shore. We did this, and I picked up a good seatrout when the sonar was reading 27 feet. That is about the deepest water I have knowingly caught a seatrout.
We had a decent catch that day, but we were seeing another boat fishing out in the middle of the loch and we were thinking: 'Do they know something we don't? They must be over nearly 100 foot of water there.' It happened their boat and ours went in at the same time and we had a chat. They had blanked. It was their first time on the loch and it became clear they had not consulted the fishing maps, or had any sort of game plan or intel from folk who fished it regularly.
South End beats are electric motors only. This can be an issue if it suddenly blows up a hooly out of nowhere. Something to be aware of, as it catches everyone out sooner or later!
One minute you have this...
And then, minutes later, you have this...
That shot doesn't do justice to the fact we had to run for home and the shelter the shot was taken from. Those are serious white horses out in the middle.
It's a place you have to work your way towards getting to know...
This gives a starting point...
It's 2472 x 3488 pixels, so if you can't see it well, save a copy and look at it on a bigger monitor or print it out.
Col
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