Salmon Manoeuvres from Westerfjord by Colin Campbell and the Bracadale Collective

My uncle Alasdair and his brother, Donald, both retired to Camustianavaig in central Skye where they'd been born and brought up. They owned a little boat together and put a herring net out in the bay to try to catch salmon (not very practical and highly illegal). One day, my brother, Graham, and I spotted a float down on the net, suggesting that there was something big in it, and a seal cruising around nearby. My uncle's brother tried to scare the seal by discharging a shotgun into the air (not in the direction of the seal) and we all made a beeline for the boat. Out at the net we found a salmon being held in the net by a gill and when my uncle tried to get it into the boat it slipped between his fingers onto the bottom of the bay. The water's not that deep and my brother Graham run up to the house to get a long fishing rod that we rigged with a bit of wire to make a 15ft gaff. As we pulled the fish into the boat and headed for the shore, we saw the local policeman waiting for us. We carefully put the salmon in the front of the boat and covered it with my brother's jumper. Being local, the policeman knew my uncle (also and ex-polis) and his brother, and I'm sure that he didn't believe any of our stories about fishing for mackerel or scaring crows away from the lambs with a shotgun. He did leave us with the suggestion that we might want to be more careful with the gun since it was mostly the tourists that it was scaring, and that we might want a shorter rod for boat fishing. This track recreates the underwater scene beneath the mayhem.

I'm a scientist and musician making music at the interface between indie and Scottish traditional music. My album Westerfjord is a love letter to Loch Bracadale and melds diverse influences from indie guitars to the classical music of the bagpipes and blends them with in-situ field recording, archival sound and scientific data.