Great Site

First off,I have just discovered your great site after reading an article in one of my monthly fishing mags.
Coming originally from Perth in Scotland I grew up fishing for trout and salmon on the river Tay,whenever we saw a course fisherman on our banks with all his gear we though typical englishman,surrounded by game fish and here's this guy fishing for roach,we all though we could never do that,needless to say now that I have found myself living in Yorkshire for the last 19 years I have finally found out that course fishing can be great fun too,it took me 17 years to find out but at last the penny has dropped.
Keep up the great work.

your the first scotsman I know who dropped a penny ! Welcome to the site Drew.

Drew..I used to fish Perth harbout for the roach...best fishing I have EVER had! 100 pound bags of 2 pound roach

Are you still up here...??

Plenty of pike baits then Rob LOL.
Seriously though, is the roach fishing really that good.
I might just have to start planning a holiday in Bonnie Scotland then!

Drew, welcome to the site. You'll find a friendly and good natured lot here.
Lots of excellent articles and a lively forum as well.

Richard, Perth harbour used to be a mecca for the Roach angler. What used to happen was that in the winter, the roach from the river tay would migrate down river to the tidal stretches and move into Perth Harbour. The reason was because grain barges used to unload there. Naturally a hell of a lot of grain would find itself in the water, and the Roach loved it.

Anglers would come from all over the UK to fish, I once met Dave Coster, the Anglers Mail writer there. He had driven up from Essex for a weekends fishing.

It was a rather unique place to fish. the tidal drop was perhaps 7 feet, and you were perched anywhere from 6 to 13 feet above the water...unless u fished the mud flats, but they are gone now, replaced with a harbour wall. The water was up to 14 feet deep and you could take roach for a couple of hours either side of the tide.

What has happened is that the harbour was extended and the grain ships moved away, as did the roach. There were rumours that the roach were netted and spread on the fields for fertiliser or that the shoal were pushed out to sea in the big floods of a few years past. Certainly, it would appear there are no roach in the harbour these days.

We used to go down for livebaits, but never caught anything small enough! I know many of those Roach were taken to be stocked into lochs all over Scotland, but they never seemed to survive. It would seem they needed brackish water to survive.

Its possible to catch much smaller roach, up to about a pound, when trotting for grayling, but the shoals are nomadic. Loch Tay now contains roach but you will never find them on such a huge water.

So, in summary, the glory days are long gone, but if you do come to scotland, there is still plenty of good coarse fishing available, but dont set your sights on the Tay roach