Luke Gartside

When Colin Macleod was ten years old, he caught his first salmon. It was a Sunday, sometime in the summer and he’d wandered to the bottom of his parent's croft on the Isle of Lewis, to where the grassy slope fell away into the sea. In a pool revealed by the low tide, he spotted a large silvery fish swimming around in circles. In one hand, he clasped a bit of wood with a metal hook bound tightly to it, usually used for prying crabs from their hideouts. Scrambling to the edge of the pool, he lay down and fixed the frantic salmon with a wide-eyed stare. As it approached his perch, he raised his arm high and struck it with the hook. 

“I was so scared that someone would see me that I shoved it straight up my jumper and ran up the croft as fast as I could,” he says, chuckling at the memory. His mum still recalls the look on his face when he burst into the kitchen and let the fish drop onto the floor. Nowadays, wild salmon are a notoriously exclusive catch. Passionate anglers exhaust thousands of pounds and countless hours for the chance to cast in their direction, employing specially crafted flies, made from the feathers of exotic birds. To happen upon one stranded in a tidal pool is unheard of. To catch it with a hook and board? Well that was “one in a million,” says Colin. An exceeding stroke of luck that began a lifelong obsession.

Colin still lives on the Isle of Lewis – the largest of the Outer Hebrides – in a croft, just next door to his parents’, that reaches down to the same stretch of shore. In the summer months, he works as a ghillie, guiding sports fishers around the lochs, dispensing tips and snapping trophy photos of each catch before they throw them back. From June through September, the job sees him living in an old green bus, parked up where a sprawling loch meets the sea. The purpose of this placement is to deter salmon poachers. But, it also happens to be the site of one of the island's finest surf breaks – a cobblestone point aptly named ‘Bus Stops’. It’s often cold in the bus and the midges are full on, but the role affords Colin many long summer evenings riding waves just outside his front door. In the winter, he tends to his sheep on the croft, corralling them with a pair of loyal working collies who accompany him everywhere he goes. Sometimes – as long as it isn’t lambing season – he’ll abandon his quiet bucolic life to jet off on tour. Because as well as being a ghillie, fisherman and crofter, Colin is also a world-famous musician. Over the course of a 15-year career, he’s toured with rock royalty like Van Morrison and Robert Plant and released several studio albums, including the latest, Hold Fast, which features a series of critically acclaimed collaborations with Sheryl Crow. 

To travel the island in his company is to access a dizzying trove of wisdom and anecdote. With a little prompting from the passenger seat, he can provide illuminating insight on everything from the giant birds soaring overhead to the exact conditions required for that little reef around the corner. He knows the grazing spots that produce the best-tasting lamb (the heather on the moor, or, for a saltier finish, the marram grass on the point) and the loch where the British record for most salmon caught in a single day was broken (it was 54, achieved by Mr Naylor in 1888, who on returning home hung up his rod forevermore).

With a little cajoling, he’ll switch to stories from his other life, recounting a soundcheck with Bruce Springsteen. Or the time he almost suffered Morrissey’s wrath for sitting in his chair backstage at a gig. Or sharing dreadful whiskey with Jamie Lee Curtis in the green room of James Cordon’s Late Late Show, where he performed a few years back. Whether it’s fish facts or showbiz tidbits, all are delivered in his signature Scottish cadence; self-effacing and succinct.

It was late November when we visited. I’d travelled up from Cornwall with poet, surfer, and Colin’s longtime friend Mike Lay and filmmaker Seth Hughes. The trio had just started work on an amorphous new art project, that will eventually resolve as a film and an album, featuring a blend of Mike’s words and Colin’s music. 

This was the first of what will be many trips made to each other’s homelands, where they plan to explore a connection to place, surfing, and the landscapes’ shared neolithic history.

Continue reading in Longboarder Magazine Volume One