On Fishing
Brian Clarke

SOMETIMES, when sitting out there by the river alone, especially at dusk, I begin to fold into myself and my thoughts. Then even thinking fades away. I seem to liquefy, to melt into the physical world shawled about me, to dissolve into the water’s curlings and slidings, its soft easings and crinklings, its twiddling little vortices and its washes of light. I go, though not consciously, to some other place.

Later, as if unprompted, the world takes form again, sounds separate and become distinct again and I look at my watch. Ten minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. I do not know where I have been, but it has been somewhere deep down and I suspect far back, perhaps near that place where everything began.

Wherever that place is, I go there gladly. It is somewhere deep-healing and it makes me whole. It is to that place and space that I dedicate this book: to that place where the physical passes through me like ether – and to fishing, which magics me there.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

One Long Morning

Which Fly, When

A Second-hand Book

A Shattered Dream

Wildlife, the Media and Us

All You Need to Know

Arthur Ransome

Coarse Fish on the Move

Buying Tackle

Dry Fly, Wet Fly, Nymph

Fun in the Grass

Arthur Oglesby

The Weakest Link

Always and Never

Barbless Hooks

Bernard Venables

The Power of the Close-up

Best Day, Worst Day

Big Noreen

Brain-boxes on Fins?

Frank Sawyer and Oliver Kite

The Man Who Dressed as a Tree

A Definition of the Impossible

The Beatrix Potter Syndrome

Fishing at Night

Flies, Hooks and Leaders

The Lady Gives it a Go

Fred Buller

Getting Stocking Levels Right

Stalking Fish on Lakes

Giving Logic a Chance

Chub, Dace, Roach, Barbel

Halford and the Dry Fly

John Goddard

Just Going Fishing

Life and Death in the Arctic

A Perfect Day

Making Fishing Too Easy

Morality Tale

Size and Relative Size

Reet Queer Trout

My Way with Carp

Need, Ego and Addiction

Grafham – and Alex Behrendt

Pig Eats Rod

Sex in Angling

Skues and the Nymph

Staying Silent and Still

Strike Indicators

Swans

Tench on a Fly

The Arte of Angling

Reading the Rise

The Boatman

The Dame and the Treatyse

The Dry Fly on Lakes

The Falklands

The Grannom and the Mayfly

The Hair Rig

The Itchy Wellie Factor

Francis Maximilian Walbran

The Otter

The Professor’s Big Trout

The Benefits of an Aquarium

Too Many Deaths

Which Fish Fights Hardest?

Promises, Promises

Champion of Champions

Yippee!

Faked Orgasms

Angling and the Future

Index

Acknowledgements

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

AS I NOTE in the acknowledgements this book contains a mixture of new essays and writing of mine that has appeared in various publications over the years. The new pieces are in the main, the longer pieces. The shorter pieces, though not exclusively, are from The Times.

All of the latter, no matter where originally published, have been amended in some way, whether to include points that I did not have the space to include first time around, or to take account of new information, or to accommodate changes in context or circumstance. One or two have been completely reworked.

Because these pieces were individually written for publication at different times, each needed to be self-contained. One consequence is that from time to time information that appears in one article to make it complete appears in another for the same reason. I thought it better to let these very occasional, minor duplications stand than to introduce cross-references which, in my own reading, I tend to find a distraction.

In choosing what to include I have tried to convey something of the diversity of angling, its practices and its refinements; of the absorptions and passions it gives rise to, the places it takes us to, the literature it has stimulated and the threats to it that crowd in all around – many of them, it seems to me, alarmingly unnoticed by the average angler on the bank. Mostly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the book reflects my own greatest interest – fly fishing for trout – but there are enough other subjects to justify, I think, the generic title my publisher suggested.

The pieces do not appear in any particular sequence: indeed, with minor tweaks I have let them run in a broadly alphabetical order. As I wrote in the introduction to my previous anthology, Trout etcetera, I dip into collections like this as though into a bran tub and I am not deceived that my own work will be treated differently by others. However, I began with ‘One Long Morning’ because I wanted to convey, at the outset, something of what the experience of fishing means to me and does for me. I have ended with ‘Angling and the Future’ because it self-evidently looks ahead.

I hope that readers will find both essays of interest – and maybe the odd paragraph that comes between them.

Brian Clarke

July, 2007

One Long Morning

THE appeal of angling is about as easy to define as beauty or truth. We might as well try to weigh what fishing does for us, or measure it with rulers, as reduce it to words – especially for someone who has not fished. To get any sense of it at all, a non-angler would have to be in the one place he cannot possibly get: inside our heads. After all, that is where the real action is.

There are not many places in Britain where the water is as bright and clean as the day God poured it, but this is one of them.

The road winds down the valley, hemmed in by hedges. Over the hedges, unseen and mostly unknown, the little stream flows scarcely casting-distance away. Looking at it over the old iron gate where I parked the car, I could see how short the fishable length is: maybe 300 yards from the wood just behind me to the place where the sedges grow out so far that they close the water off.

The meadow between the gate and the water is tussocked and flower-strewn, baked by the drought, pitted with the impressions of remembered hooves. Across it, deep within it, the stream hides. It is full of wild trout and it has never been stocked. Never. The great attraction.

Even when I was almost on top of it the water was difficult to see, the only clue it’s here at all the line of sedges and rushes, the bright heads of purple loosestrife and the lollipops of reed mace that nod and sway.

The stream’s a tiny thing, a rod’s length wide here, a rod and a half there and it is extraordinarily deep. At some point, I guess, it must have been dug with a view to draining the land but nature has used the years well. As the reeds and sedges have softened the banks, so starwort and ranunculus have softened the bed. They orchestrate the water and the light.

I’d been told about the depth and the way the rushes and high sedges make bank fishing impossible. It’s why, for all the stream’s size, I’m waist-deep in chest waders, now.

It’s not going to be easy. There’s a strong, upstream wind. From down here, deep in the water with my head at meadow height, the sedges and tussocks are rearing high overhead, flailing and thrashing, ready for every back-cast. A procession of ripples is being pushed upstream, as though by an incoming tide. The sky is leaden; the low, grey clouds as long and uniform as plumped feather bolsters, flattening the light. No, it’s not going to be easy.

Actually, it’s not just the wind and the sedges and the lack of light that are the problem, it’s the angle I’m at. This isn’t a water for speculative casts. Here, you don’t cast until you see a fish, a convention that has a practical edge because by casting blind you’d frighten unseen trout and reduce your already-slender chances still further. But to cast to sighted fish naturally means being able to see them which, if they’re not rising, means being able to see into the water.

Which today I cannot do. Not much, anyway. The light and ripples are one thing, the fact that I’m waist-deep is another. This deep in, my eyes are not far above the water and the angle between them and the surface upstream where I need to look, is shallow. It means that, looking more than two or three yards ahead, all I can see is the grey, reflected sky. It’s only when I look steeply down, close to my wadered legs, that I can see into the water.

The water is as clear as I’d been told. It’s so clear and bright it almost might not be there. It’s as clear as melted time.

On the bottom, between the dense growths of the waterplants, channels of flints and chalk gleam up. I can see the roughs and smooths of every stone, every chip and angle. They’re so sharp and fine-edged they might have been picked out with scalpels. Caddis cases cover every one. The weed’s alive with shrimps, nymphs, the larvae of this and that. This would be a fabulous place in a hatch, but there’s little likelihood of one this morning. This morning, it’s going to have to be the nymph.

The green canyons between the weed beds and the channels along the bottom will all have fish in them but, because of the angle I’m at, I’ll be on top of any trout before I realise it’s there. It’ll be on the open gravel patches that I’ll mostly be concentrating and there aren’t many of those. The gravels and chalk reflect the light and any fish on them should be visible from a distance.

I say should be.

I’ve got company. A water vole sniffle-snuffles towards me on some busy errand, realises that it has got company as well, and dives. A pair of buzzards kee-kees across the narrow strip of sky I can see between the sedges to my left and the sedges to my right. A flock of crows rises like black ashes above one bank and disappears behind the other, leaving its cacophonous caw-cawing behind.

I tuck the little 8ft three-weight under my arm, slide a hand into a pocket and grope and trace among the bottles and spools, seeking the fly-box. I’ll start small and change as I need. A size 16 nymph goes onto a 2lbs point.

I put a smear of flotant on the thick end of the leader so that it rides high on the surface, where I can see it. Normally, I’d put a sinking compound onto the leader near the fly as well, to get it off the surface, but the compound is opaque and will make the leader more visible in these conditions, so I’ll do without it today. I click the fly onto a rod-ring, loop the leader back around the cage of my reel and tighten up. Ready. The trout have my attention.

Of course, I won’t be looking for a trout because I know I won’t see one – not an outlined, clearly defined one, anyway. I’ll be looking for hints and winks of trout, for linear shades and brush-strokes, for sepia suggestions; for patches of gravel or chalk where, at some point, the stones seem curiously straight-edged. I’ll be looking for faint lateral movements, for suggestions of rhythmic pulses that might resolve into a tail. No, I’ll not be looking for fish. I’ll be looking for water, but in a firmer form.

If finding fish today’s going to be one thing, catching them is going to be another. These fish won’t only be difficult to see, they’ll be hair-triggered, as well. It’s not just the clarity of the water and the fact that they are fished for. What’s going to make them edgy is that everything else knows they’re here and wants them.

This valley’s full of otters and herons and cormorants. No-one has a problem with the otters because they’re a part of our heritage and here in natural numbers and it’s good to have them back after so long. But the herons around here come in vast numbers because of the fish farms on the streams nearby. The cormorants have a roost just a few miles away. The numbers of both birds are unnatural and they take an unnatural toll. A bright thread of tinsel like this, so difficult to see from the road, must glint and beckon from the air.

The fish I’m looking at is up there to the right. It’s lying on that patch of gravel at the foot of the little alder, a sepia brush-stroke in front of the stone. It’s a half-pounder, maybe a little more. A nice trout.

I can’t cast from here. It’s not just that the sedges will snatch at my back-cast, it’s that any line I throw will fall across that bed of starwort breaking the surface. The line will catch on the weed and the current on the far side will swing the leader around. The leader and the fly. Drag. Fatal, in this place.

That’s what I’ve got to do. I’ve got to get to the foot of the little alder on my own bank and cast from there. From there, I’ll have a diagonal of clear water between myself and the fish. I’ve got to get up there without disturbing it.

It takes an age. It’s not just the weight of weed I’ve got to push through, or the weight of the water clamped around my legs and middle, it’s the need for caution. Every step is so slow and laboured, coiled and taut. Bed my left foot down, take my weight on it, lift my right foot and ease it forward. Push against the weed, push against the water, touch down. Grope and trace over the bottom, reading it like Braille. Find a purchase. Set it down. Take the weight. Now my left foot, ditto.

It’s taken five minutes to move five yards, but I’m in position. Me here, the fish there. I’m wound up and locked on, joined to the fish by ancient choreography, by thousands of years, maybe millions.

Crouch lower. Move slowly. Turn my head slowly in case my Polaroids catch the light and semaphore a warning. Keep the rod down. Watch my backcast, watch the flailing sedges, watch the fish, watch everything. The new world fades and the old closes in. The forest and the glade enfold. I am alert for the grunt or the rustle, for the parting of the grasses and the glimpse of fur or hide.

A coot creaks. My eyes are burning through the water, burning into the fish, which still hasn’t moved. I drift the rod back, draw the bow tight, take aim along the arrow. I’m at home with this. I’ve been doing this since I first stood upright. I haven’t needed to do it for food for thousands of years but the tug of it, the old compulsion, is still deep inside. Don’t tell me this is a game or sport, this is the real thing. I am. The fish is. This is hunting, one on one.

Now! I let go the fly, flick the line into a low, controlled backcast and flick it forward again. It straightens – and the trout does an astonishing thing. It bolts. It bolts, just like that, leaving a little puff of silt drifting down on the current, as if to prove it had been there, once. I’m stunned. How could it? How could it have known? What had I done – or left undone?

I’m also not surprised. This is the way this fishing is. It’s the difficulty that’s the great attraction. I smile, say ‘well done, fish’ out loud and without embarrassment and move on.

The morning dissolves. Other patches of gravel, other sepia shades, other sudden boltings and compact dispersals. One fish, pricked and lost. More than two hours gone in a kind of limbo. I’ve come 250 yards, have maybe 50 more to go before the sedges and the rushes make progress impossible. Now I’m looking at another fish, the one that looks like a tear-drop because I’m right behind it, looking along its fuselage tail-edge on. He’s in the gap between the upstream edge of the first weed bed and the tail-end of the one just above. He’s a couple of feet down and just three rod-lengths away.

Time for another change. I’ve been ringing the changes all morning, constantly switching the size and weight of the nymph according to the fish and its depth and the speed of the current. I’ve been shortening and lengthening the leader according to how exposed I am to the wind and the place in the water where I have to put the fly down and yes, I can see I need another change, now. I take off the size 14 pheasant-tail, rummage through the fly-box and take out a size 12 shrimp, one of those tied with pale green silk, my colour-code for three turns of lead wire under the dressing.

The buzzards are back again. So are the crows. A squadron of swifts is on its way back to Africa. The high grasses thresh and the reed-mace waggles.

Being sheltered here, chest-deep behind this huge bed of starwort is like standing in an aquarium. The surface is as still as glass and the leader’s drooped across it. I can see the surface tension curving in along the nylon, exaggerating its width. It’s putting a crack in the mirror. Beneath it, far down in the deep, green cave, first two minnows, then a few, then maybe a dozen come out of the weed-wall on one side and sidle across to the other, right in front of my waders, showing no sense of my presence. It’s a God-moment, looking down like this. Such tiny, other-lived lives. They’re so separate and contained, close and towered-over, so vulnerable and unaware. So watched. Is something up there, watching me?

No need to cast. I let the shrimp fall into the water, wriggle a couple of yards of line out through the top ring and let the current to my right carry them downstream behind me. Then I bring the rod forward, the leader straightens over the fish – and the wind blasts it to one side.

The trout does nothing. I flick the shrimp again and the same thing happens, but this time the trout turns a fraction towards it before resuming its line. It may have seen the fly, the leader going down, a herringbone of drag, I don’t know what. But it certainly saw something. I change pattern, put on a little black-hackled beetle with a little more lead in it. The lead, if I get the cast right and the wind plays the game, will help the leader straighten and give me the entry I want. I pause for a while, waiting for a break between the gusts. My leader puts a crack in the mirror again. Another troupe of minnows. The buzzards and the rooks are back. Again, somewhere, the coot creaks. Creak on, coot.

This time as I cast, I check the line as the leader straightens and the momentum of the weighted nymph loops it suddenly forward and down. The little fly makes a hole in the water and it sinks at once, taking a foot of leader straight down with it. Perfect. A fast sink entry, right for line, right for depth. As the fly’s about to pass the fish I move the rod six inches and the nymph rises as though alive and trying to get away.

Again, the inexplicable. The moment I move the nymph the trout hurls itself forward, smacking the fly so hard that the fish comes clean through the surface. I glimpse its head clearly, glimpse its open mouth and its eye, see the leader stab and I tighten. No contact. Nothing at all. How? How? More questions. No more answers than before. Take my weight on my left foot, lift my right, push against the weight of the weed and the water. Move on.

Move on some more. Now I’m 20 yards from the end of the fishable water, the place where it becomes too deep to wade and where the sedges crowd in and make casting impossible. I’m also standing on a hump on the stream bed, which gives me more height and alters the angle of my view. I can see further from here.

Upstream a couple of bushes and a tree are cutting out the surface glare and there, to the right, there’s a long patch of open water, really long, the biggest clear area I’ve seen all morning. It’s maybe eight or 10 yards long and a couple wide. A shaft of sunlight, the first of the day, lights it up as if an inspiration.

Half way up, a shadow’s sidling sideways over the bottom. That’s a fish. So is that sepia brush-stroke to the right of it. Further over still, near the ranunculus, there’s a steady throb and pulse. A trout’s tail. Three fish together. Riches.

The closest fish is the biggest, maybe a pounder and he’s in a crease on the bottom, a fast little run. I’ll aim to put the fly two or three yards beyond him and on his line. First, I’ll let it sink and trundle loosely back along the bottom. If he ignores that I’ll cast again and try inducement.

I snip off the little beetle, knot on a size 12 shrimp tied with orange silk – my colour-code for eight turns of lead under the dressing – look up at the fish, look back at the shrimp and re-read the current. Hmmm. I snip the fly off again, fish a spool of nylon out and add two more feet to the leader. Now it’s maybe 11 feet long. Eight or nine have been tricky enough so far, but instinct and experience tell me this is what I need.

Left foot planted and comfortable, right foot likewise. Stay still. Don’t take my eyes off the fish. Wait for a pause in the wind. Wait. Wait. The old world creeps up again, the forest’s silence enfolds. Any second now. Now! I slow the line as it zips through my left hand and the leader begins to unfurl. The heavy nymph straightens it, dives vertically over and goes in cleanly, right again for line, right again for depth.

The trout scarcely moves. One moment he’s riding the water like a slim, tethered kite, the next he’s drifting marginally to one side, the next he’s back on line. It’s a subtle movement, scarcely perceptible, but I’m not fooled. I’ve seen that a thousand times. I didn’t see his mouth open but I know he has it, I know he has to have it and I tighten. The rod goes down, there’s a moment’s thrashing and splashing then he’s charging upstream, doubling back downstream and lodged deep in the weed to my right.

Damn. It all happened in a flash. The only fish of the day and I could lose him in seconds. I wind down, lock tight and the little rod hoops. The weed surges and heaves but he won’t come clear.

An old trick. I edge a little nearer, wind in as I go – and then let everything go slack. Sometimes, if you let everything go slack on a weeded fish, it will start to make its own way out. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes and then, suddenly, from directly behind him, I put maximum pressure on again. The rod jags, jags again, the starwort surges and he’s out, weed on the leader, weed over his head and eyes. He stops struggling, drifts towards me on the current, heavy and limp the way an unsighted fish always does. I bend, slip my hand under him and turn him upside down as I lift. Another old trick. He lies perfectly still the moment he’s belly-up, again as they so often do. Then I peel away the weed, slip out the barbless hook and look at him.

He’s the colour of light honey and pure-white bellied. Red spots and black spots freckle his sides. Each fin is clean-edged and sun-shot and perfect. His pectoral fins are as big as paddles. His tail, for his size, is huge.

What a privilege. Here I am alone in this wild, wonderful place, holding this wonderful wild creature in my hand. I’m conscious I’m maybe the first human to touch him, conscious in that moment that in that touch, I’m taking something from him that can never be replaced.

Time to put him back. I take a last look, lower him upright into the water and little by little loosen my fingers. I watch as his gills slowly open and close, feel the steel start to come back into him and the first, faint shrug. Another shrug or two and I let go completely and he slowly slides away. I watch him going, going, going.

How marvellous. I’m thrilled to have got him in this place, in these conditions, and doubly thrilled to see him go. I feel replete and calm. I’ve tapped into my roots again, trodden that ancient way again, swum again in those womb-waters dimly remembered.

I bite off the fly, reel the line in and turn to climb out. It’s been a long, long morning. Three hours long, 300 yards long, maybe three million years long. Ask me now why I go fishing, ask me now.

Which Fly, When

THE flies I use now are very different from the flies I used when I first started out. Indeed, they are unrecognisable from those early patterns. There are also far fewer of them.

I was idly musing on this one day when I realised that my entire fly-fishing career could be plotted through this transition: through my choice of flies as an out-and-out beginner, to those I tied in the middle years, to the sparse collection in which I place all hope, now. Also, I realised, something else could be plotted: not just evolving choices of flies and ways of fishing them, but changes in fishing philosophy and even ultimate goals. Many others will be able to do likewise, for themselves.

In my case, frustration was the catalyst.

ALTHOUGH I had been an angler since childhood, I did not take up fly fishing until I was in my twenties – and did not take it up seriously until I reached my thirties. As a consequence, I found myself in much the same position as others who discover this wonderful activity at the time of life when they are at their busiest.

Life was so hectic that all time for fly fishing (though, naturally, not all time for gardening, washing up, interior decorating, exterior decorating, undertaking minor structural repairs, taking toddlers for walks, helping with the shopping and the school run and earning a living – there seems always time aplenty available for these other delights) had to be squeezed in. Whenever I went fishing, which was infrequently, I found myself beside some huge, intimidating lake, not knowing where to start and relying on shop-bought flies that I knew nothing about.

Naturally, my results reflected this. Most outings ended in disappointment. I would blank, or catch a small one, or miss two offers.

Then, eventually, it dawned. If I wanted better results I could only achieve them on the basis of greater skill, resulting from a better understanding of the business I was about. Only by submitting to that austere, top-hatted and frock-coated taskmaster Effort, I realised, could I hope to capitalise fully on my outings when they came.

And so I decided to stop my mechanistic, chuck-it-out, pull-it-back-and-hope approach. I did not like the drag and dead weight of sinking lines. I did not enjoy stripping lures. I did not know why fancy flies were taken or which to use when, where or how. I did know, though, that to survive a trout had to eat; that it ate flies and bugs; that it could only eat the flies and bugs available to it at a given time of day at a given time of year; and I knew, too, that if I could discover something about these bugs and how they might be imitated, I could improve my chances on the basis of thought and logic rather than on lucky dip and chance. I resolved, from that point on, to concentrate wholly on fishing artificial flies that imitated the real flies that trout regularly consume.

And so, as I recounted fully in The Pursuit of Stillwater Trout, I began to autopsy my own fish and to seek out the results of autopsies conducted by others. Then I constructed a small aquarium and stocked it with the kinds of insects I was finding inside fish: that is, with the kinds of insects that I knew for sure, trout ate.

It was as though the road to Damascus had become floodlit. Now I could see close-up not only what important nymphs and bugs looked like but how they moved, lived and hatched. I saw how pathetic as imitations the shop-bought articles were and what sensible representations would need to look like. I saw, as well, how those representations needed be moved on the end of my line: it was, of course, in the way the naturals themselves moved in my aquarium. In other words I began, for the first time, to understand what imitation and presentation were really about. I saw them not as some horns-locked, competing alternatives as much writing of the time seemed to suggest, but as necessary coconspirators in the deception process.

Before long I was creating my own stillwater patterns and was moving them in the way I had watched the naturals move – sometimes exaggerating this movement to attract attention to the fly or to prompt a predatory reflex from any following fish. My results improved and my confidence improved. The more confident I became, the more fish I caught. In that first year on stillwaters – the only kind of fishing available to me – my catch rate went up 600 per cent.

Then fate stepped in. My work moved out of London and took me to Hampshire. Rivers as well as lakes – many of them glassclear – became accessible for the first time.

New circumstances, new opportunities. I was able to get close to trout and to study them in their natural habitat. I watched how they responded to natural insects in and on the currents and began to imitate these river insects as I had imitated the bugs of stillwater. I watched how fish responded to the artificial flies cast by my friends and I amended my tactics and presentation in light of what I saw. I continued an interest in feeding behaviour and rise-forms because of the clues I realised they could reveal about the insects being taken. Over time, I took thousands of photographs and studied each one to see what it revealed. Gradually, almost unrecognised, a new factor was creeping into my fishing: it was the fascination of study and experiment in its own right.

It was around this time that John Goddard and I began to fish together and before long we decided to collaborate on a book. We decided from the outset to study not only the fish’s behaviour, but the underwater world in which the fish lived.

We constructed large tanks with specially angled sides so that, crouched down beneath them, we could see the world as perceived by the trout: more particularly the fly, the angler and his equipment as perceived by the trout. We set cameras in waterproof housings onto the river bed.

We photographed flies from every angle, from both above water and below. We even, on a few memorable occasions, photographed flies’ feet from under water, at night. (Yes, really. We were trying to understand how trout could go on rising unerringly to flies floating on the surface at night when we, peering down at the surface in the dark, could see no flies at all. Obviously, the fish could see something – but how and what it was we did not know).

With this work, for each of us, the search had moved from dressings that might catch trout or dressings that looked broadly like certain species of fly. Now, the goal had become the creation of dressings – and especially dry fly dressings – that would give a fish everything that we believed it might look for or expect to see. Dry fly dressings, we had realised from the outset, posed a special challenge: because they sit on the water’s surface (i.e.in air) and are seen by the fish from below (i.e.through water), any view of them must be distorted by refraction.

Refraction influences the trout’s view of the world in several ways. One of the things it does is to make it impossible for any trout below the surface to look up and see the world outside the water as clearly as we can see the world below water, when looking down at it from the bank. For reasons too complex to go into here, refraction turns most of the underside of the surface into a mirror that reflects the river or lake bed – or the water’s gloomy depths. So in most places the ceiling of the trout’s world is green or brown or sombrely dark. The exception, again for complex reasons, is a circle of daylight above the fish’s head that acts as a kind of porthole. The trout can see out into the world above water, but only through this porthole – and everything it does see is distorted. The common term for the mirrored area is, unsurprisingly, ‘the mirror’ and the round porthole through which the trout can see above water is ‘the window’. (All of these extraordinary effects, and some of those that follow, are clearly shown in photographs in The Trout and the Fly, the book we eventually published).

John and I were keen to take account of these effects in our fly designs. In particular, we wanted to provide the trout with two visual features which are present in any fly sitting on the surface when it is viewed from below. The first was a tiny prickle of light spots that the feet of a fly transmit through the darkness of the mirror where they touch it. The second was wings that would appear to become separated from the body (rather in the manner of a flame from a gas jet) when the fly drifted from the mirror into the window.

One result of this work was a fly that was aerodynamically designed to land upside down, with the hook point uppermost, when cast. We did not set out to design a fly that landed upside down. Our aim was to design a fly that gave out the signals described above, to a trout looking up at the surface for approaching food: light dimples on the surface and wings that would flare over the edge of the window.

However, as we worked on such a fly, it became clear that the only way we could achieve our goal was by turning the fly upside-down. We were almost surprised – though more sensible men would not have been – when our end-product looked quite like a real fly, even to us.

John and I both knew, of course, that such refinements were not necessary for 99 per cent of the trout we tackled. Indeed, I believe that any effort to turn the hook upside down as an objective in its own right is wasted, offering aesthetic appeal but no observable, practical advantage. However, our upside-down (USD) patterns did bring about the downfall of some of those tantalising, pernickety, wary fish in the 1 per cent category – and that had been our aim.

This whole period was fascinating for us both. We had rummaged through the technicalities of fly design and presentation to an extent which, it is probably fair to say, few others had done. We had photographed much of what we had seen; we had documented it meticulously and we had put our work, through the resulting book, on record.

The period also marked a particular stage in my evolution as an angler: my absorption with the most difficult fish. Soon after the book was completed – and perhaps even as a reaction to such a long period of locked-away, esoteric study – my interest began to turn in the opposite direction. I began to look for simplicity.

The flies I have carried in the years since have become fewer and fewer and ever-more simple. They reflect my belief that appearance (i.e.pattern) in a dry fly is vastly less important than most writers would have us believe – and that the only really important requirement of a dry fly is that it be of correct size. Colour comes a distant second. I fish these few flies in the knowledge that most feeding trout are catchable if they do not know they are being fished for and are presented with flies that look as though they might be food, in a natural and unalarming way, when and where the trout expects to see them.

And so, these days, I do not drive to the waterside towing a trailer burdened with copies of every fly and bug known since Genesis, in triplicate. I do not carry representations of Centroptilum pennulatum. Nor of Heptagenia lateralis. Nor of Rhithrogena haarupi. Ecdyonurus torrentis is not in my box. Hydropsyche pellucidula has slung his hook. Leptophlebia vespertina might be in Argentina.

If anyone looks in my box these days – even fly box was an overstatement for years because I actually used those little plastic tubs that rolls of 35mm film come in – they will find only two kinds of general-purpose dry flies: little brown jobs and little black jobs. All the brown patterns are identical to one another and all the black patterns are identical to one another: it is only the hook sizes that differ.

The little black flies have a black seal’s fur body with a short black hackle at the head. Nothing more. I carry these in sizes 14, 16 and 18. I use the largest size when hawthorn flies are about, the middle size to suggest black gnats and the 18s to suggest smuts.

The other flies are all sedge-style dressings. They have a seal’s fur body, the overall hue of which is a warm olive-brown (I do not agonise over the shade of olive brown: each mixture varies and I do not find it matters a jot). The wings are fibres taken from a brown saddle hackle, tied horizontally along the back and clipped off square just beyond the hook bend. A short, brown hackle wound just behind the eye completes the job.

I do not carry a dun pattern at all for the smaller upwinged flies, because I know I do not need to. I know that virtually every surface-feeding trout that is eating small duns will accept the sedge pattern – and the sedge pattern has marginally more bulk (which makes it easier to see), floats longer (all those tiny bubbles trapped in all that seal’s fur) and will last for several fish because it is more robust than a dun.

The only other brown fly I carry is a spinner pattern in sizes 14 and 16 and again, all are identical. They have the same olive-brown seal’s fur body, a few brown hackle fibres for the tail and a strip of very thin plastic tied in the middle, just behind the hook eye, to suggest the spread wings of the egg-laying or dead natural. There is no hackle. If the wings are nicked at the base with scissors, on the rear edge, close to the body, they will not take on a propeller shape and cause the leader to kink. They will also collapse as though hinged when a trout sips the fly in.

Beyond these, the only dry flies I carry are for use on special occasions: mayflies for when the mayflies are up, daddy-long-legs for when the naturals are on the water. And that’s it.

My nymph box is similarly sparse because, again, just a handful of patterns meets most of my needs.

To cover any deep-lying fish or to explore a likely lie on a rainfed river, the fly I most commonly use is an artificial shrimp. I tie these shrimps mostly on size 12s, with a few size 10s. I tie them with different amounts of lead wire under the dressing and distinguish one from another by tying each weight with its own colour of tying silk: in other words, I colour-code them. Unweighted, these dressings are deadly for fish on the fin, high in the water. Weighted, they are also useful for fishing deep down from reservoir banks – and as stalking flies on clear stillwaters.

The shrimp usually has the same seal’s fur mix for the body as my dry flies. I rib the fur with gold wire and tie a thin, clear strip of plastic along the top of the body to suggest the natural shrimp’s shell-like back. Other nymphs I use for general river fishing are size 16 and 18 midge pupa-style dressings, which have a tiny tungsten bead behind the eye. These little flies, attached to ultra-fine leaders, can be very effective when used against difficult fish – and when fishing for coarse fish, which I do quite often. If I need to get down fast in deep, heavy water, a hare’s ear with a large tungsten bead head, often fished on the end of a long leader, does the job.

For fishing on lakes I am never without a range of midge pupa dressings in sizes 16 to eight, variously weighted. I also have a couple of long-hackled spider patterns which can be fished slowly while still suggesting life on a large scale; a damsel nymph; an absolutely deadly, weighted mayfly nymph that I tie with a marabou tail, dyed ivory; and a short, highly mobile black leech dressing that I will try if all else fails.

Add to these flies a few others accumulated over the years – those that have been given, bought or removed from overhanging branches – and you have my entire collection. Honest.

The pleasure I now take in simplicity does not mean that I need not have gone through all those earlier stages. Rather, it is something that I have arrived at, having been through all else. The early frustration, the resolve to learn more, the experiments with tanks and underwater cameras and, yes, those photographs of flies’ feet from underwater at night and the rest have been, for me, essential. They have provided me with hours of fascination and have given me insights that I would not otherwise have achieved. They have, above all, taught me something about trout and have given me, as a consequence, a degree of confidence when I tie on one fly in preference to another and fish it this way instead of that.

But now I am content to follow a sublimely simpler path, dipping in and out of intensity as I please. Sometimes I do get locked-on and involved, but mostly I sit and watch, soak up the wonders of nature and all her works, talk with my friends and relax.

At the end of A River Never Sleeps, Roderick Haig-Brown wrote that ‘perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers.’ Like many others, I suspect, I know exactly what he means. The only difference between us is that I wouldn’t go that far. Not quite that far.

Just yet.

A Second-hand Book

I ONCE met a man who told me he collected fishing books. He had 35,000, he said. Later – and maybe not surprisingly – I learned that he was well-known in collecting circles and that his library was one of the most valuable in the world. He had agents and scouts everywhere looking for rare volumes to buy. He kept some in his house in Washington, DC, but most of them were in vaults in a bank.

Most of us are not like that and could not afford to be like that. Lots of us have a few titles, many of us have dozens, some have hundreds. But we do not collect on an industrial scale. We find our books ourselves, one by one. We find them in jumble sales and charity stores and little local auctions. We find them in tucked-away corners of second-hand book shops and we are tickled pink if we find something exceptional.

That, anyway, is how it is for me. I found an exceptional book, once.

NO SPORT has a finer literature than angling and no sport’s great works are more avidly sought.

The market in second-hand and antiquarian angling books is immense and world-wide. Some dealers handle little or nothing else, their catalogues offering hundreds of titles and thousands of volumes. There are periodic auctions in London, New York, Paris and elsewhere. Prices regularly reach four figures, sometimes five depending, naturally, on an individual book’s significance, rarity and condition.

In a small way, I dabble myself. I am not on the London–New York–Paris circuit. Like lots of others, I am at the ‘tenner, go-on-then, twenty’ end of the market. My haunts are second-hand book shops, ideally tucked away and dimly lit: the kinds of places where time stops and all sound fades; cocooned places where the world resolves to spines and titles, dates and editions; to the whisper of turned pages and the occasional creak from a bare floorboard in the room overhead.

Everyone in such shops is hunting a bargain as he or she defines it, the angling collector’s equivalent of landing a whopper. I have landed one or two – only one or two – myself. One of them was a seemingly ordinary reprint of Sir Edward Grey’s classic Fly-Fishing. It is set to stand as prominently on my shelves as books of far greater historical importance and value.

Viscount Grey of Fallodon was Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916 and the man who, shortly before the First World War, famously saw the lights going out across Europe. Grey published his sensitive insight to his fishing life, times and philosophies in 1899 and it has been much sought-after ever since. A nice first edition of Fly-Fishing would, at turn-of-millennium prices, have fetched £200-plus. The 1928 reprint I have just acquired cost less than a tenth of that.

It seemed, as I reached it down from its tucked-away niche in the tucked-away little shop, just the kind of thing that would make a present for a friend. Then I noticed that it had a couple of dents on the cover and, on ends of the pages when the book was closed, a couple of faint red stains where water, presumably at some time splashed onto the cover, had run.

I was on the point of rejecting it when the edge of something inside the back cover caught my eye. It was a cracked, yellow-and brown cutting from the Liverpool Daily Post dated Tuesday, August 29, 1933. The headline read ‘Sinking Yacht Rescue’ and then ‘Liverpool Men’s Thrilling Escape’.

Beside the cutting there was an inscription, written in handwriting that was scarcely bigger than the print used in the book itself. I started to decipher it but my eye was drawn relentlessly back to the cutting and I began to read.

It told how Mr A. McKie Reid, clearly a prominent Liverpool medical man, had set off on a sailing holiday with his friend Mr Leo Gradwell, a barrister. They had left Mostyn, in Wales, on the hired ketch Lalage, with two professional deckhands aboard. The plan was to sail up the west coast to Scotland but, in high winds and heavy seas in Caernarvon Bay, they found themselves in trouble. They used the engine for a time, then it broke down. Eventually finding themselves being driven towards the Skerries and with the seas running higher and higher, they made out to open water to run before the wind.

McKie Reid told the Daily Post how, as darkness fell, the boat began to take in water and they had to bail continuously. Finally, after what must have been a terrifying night, a trawler was sighted. Someone on the Lalage managed to flash a lamp briefly and the vessel – itself far off its own intended course – turned towards them.

Once alongside one another, the two boats rearing and plunging on the waves, McKie Reid made what he called ‘the biggest jump of my life. The two deckhands jumped next and Mr Gradwell made fast a towing line before he jumped. By this time the vessels had drifted apart and he nearly fell between them. About an hour after the trawler had taken the yacht in tow, it foundered. But for the trawler’s arrival, we should have been lost.’

Dramatic stuff, all right – but why was the cutting here, in this fishing book? I flicked to the front and looked again at the name and address I had noticed written inside it: ‘A. McKie Reid, 86 Rodney Street, Liverpool.’ I turned back to the inscription alongside the cutting. Deciphered, it read: ‘This book was with me on the Lalage. I threw it inside a rucksack, on board the trawler, before the boats were near enough for me to jump.’ And then the initials ‘A. McKie R.’

What I was holding in that shop – and what will now stay in my own collection instead of being passed on to someone else – was a book of little cash value yet one containing a text that generations of anglers have prized; a volume clearly so loved by its fly-fishing owner that in that dire, life-and-death situation, he took the time to grab it and hurl it to safety before jumping himself, even as the boat beneath his feet was making ready to go down.

I closed the book, went to the counter and handed over the £15 that was being asked for it. It was a bargain to me, if not to anyone else: this collector’s whopper literally in the bag. I’d have been happy to pay twice the price for a book with that kind of history – and for the tell-tale water stains, extra.

A Shattered Dream

THE affection that many of us hold for our rods can border on the irrational. There is something about a rod that, once owned, can make it highly personal whether mass-produced or not. I don’t mean carbon fibre rods, marvellously functional though they are. I mean cane rods. Once cut and tapered, glued and varnished, cane comes to life again in the hand. Or, at least, we fancy it does. We fancy we can feel the throb and pulse of it clean through the corks.

With carbon fibre, all this wonderful subjectivity is lost. Carbon fibre performs better. It can be manufactured to produce any action required of it. We can abuse it constantly without impairing its performance. Carbon fibre has replaced cane for very good reasons. But still it is synthetic stuff, inert and characterless. It cannot tap into the emotions the way split cane used to do.

To lose a cherished split cane rod – worse still, to break one – can be a shattering experience in every sense. I know it only too well.

I HAVE many fishing rods, but I have only ever loved three. All were made of cane. One is a Wallis Wizard, the brilliant wholecane butt, split cane middle-and-top design by F.W.K. Wallis, the legendary Avon barbel specialist. I bought it as a lad by doing a newspaper round. I have it still. It is still in good heart and, more to the point, still in its original number of pieces.

The second rod is a Fario Club, one of the great creations of Charles Ritz, the famous hotelier who, in fly-fishing circles, is infinitely more famous as a designer of trout rods. I bought this 8ft 5in piece of honey-coloured delight with the first royalty cheque from my first book, half a lifetime ago.

I did most of my dry fly and nymph fishing with the Fario Club for ten years after that. Eventually, I broke its back – literally – when trying to keep low on a treeless bank while casting to a fish in distant mid-river. Down on one knee, while concentrating hard on the fish and reaching for distance, the line fell too low on the back cast, snagged a meadow buttercup – and did not come forward.

The third rod, a 6ft 9in aftm-4 brook rod built by Constable, was as light and delicate as a fairy’s wand and it cast spells as well as lines. It was as crisp and precise as a rapier – and as deadly. My wife gave it to me on one of my Big Zero birthdays, and I was thrilled to have it.

Cliff Constable was one of the finest builders of split cane this country has produced and his staggered-ferrule brook rod was his finest achievement. I asked my friend Stewart Canham, master fly-tyer and furnisher of cane rods so exquisite that they would not have looked out of place in a Bond Street window, to finish the cane for me.

Now Stewart is an extraordinary man, a big, multi-talented man with hands the size of bin lids. For all that he has an exquisite delicacy of touch and specialises in creating delicate things. One of his one-time interests, for example, was icing cakes and he iced the wedding cake he made for one of my daughters. It was so wonderfully done, so decorated about with sprays of flowers he had made from icing that guests were peering at them this way and that, wondering if they were real. His fly-tying was, a doctor friend of mine said, more delicate than brain surgery. At one time, interested in butterflies, he bred them by the hundred and produced cases of them so delicately spread and pinned that they could have been exhibits in the Natural History Museum. Everything that Stewart Canham decides to do, he does to perfection.

When it came to my rod, he never produced a more personalised thing. All the usual restrained touches were there, from the subtlety of the matt varnish instead of gloss to the near-transparent whippings, tipped with black. But it was the rest, the attention to so much tiny detail, that made the rod truly unique.

When he delivered it, I found that Stewart had got Constable to autograph the cane. A tiny ephermerid nymph, beautifully drawn in Indian ink, was crawling up the butt amid the details of rod length and line weight and the like. The 20-inch stopper that extended the butt section to the length of the top section for carrying purposes was wound about with ivy, drawn in Indian ink, in-filled with white. And so on and so on. He had produced less a rod, more an artwork and it carried a freight of sentiment for me.

Mayfly time in Dorset. A friend invited me down. It was a lovely day, warm and sunny but with – note it – a downstream breeze. The hawthorn blossom was out. The ranunculus was in flower. Swifts curved and sculpted the air. From time to time, wagtails wagged and kingfishers skimmed. In a sidestream, we saw a fish lying awkwardly just downstream of a tree. Mike suggested I give it a go. I slipped under a barbed wire fence and slid into the deep water.

It took several minutes to get into position and feel comfortable. All the time, the fish went on rising and moving steadily upstream towards the tree, narrowing the angle where my fly would have to go. To have any chance, the leader would have to overshoot the fish and be squeezed into the space between the water and the branches. It would take a driven cast, all wrist, to create the tight loop I was going to need. And I would have to take care with the back-cast to avoid the alder that grew over the water behind me. I studied the situation and looked back at my friend. ‘Thanks a lot, Mike,’ I remember saying.

It must have been on the fourth or fifth attempt that the breeze suddenly strengthened. In mid false-cast I took account of it. I tightened the loop still more. I applied yet more wrist. I let the final back cast straighten and then drove it forward.

It did not come. There was an odd sensation, impossible to describe, but something, somehow, somewhere seemed to grate. In the concentration of the moment, I assumed that I had snagged the alder. I have snagged trees a thousand times. Foolishly, I did not bother to turn. I flicked the rod again, expecting either the fly to come free or the branch to give and cushion the movement. I have done that and seen that a thousand times, too.

Nothing. No give. Absolutely no give, but again a grating feeling and this time a sound. I turned and instinctively looked for my line and fly. The line was well clear of the alder and to the right. The fly was on the barbed wire fence that I had forgotten about. My eyes followed the line back from the fence to my rod. I saw the oddity of an angle in the silken curve, two rings back from the tip. I saw the cane splintered and light shining through the long, loved fibres.

For a long time, I could not take it in. I suppose the realisation of what I was seeing, the pain of it, was somehow dulled, the way that the shock of an injury sometimes can be. Then, all the things I had loved about the rod – its exquisite beauty, the occasion it commemorated, the scores of magical moments I had experienced with it – rushed through my mind in a torrent.

Mike said it was two minutes before I spoke. I simply stood there uncomprehending, staring at one of the three or four possessions I treasured most in the world, now utterly ruined. I know we all have such moments, but that gives no comfort. It was – it still is – terrible.

Wildlife, the Media and Us

AS SPORTS GO, angling is well-provided with media. Coarse, trout and sea anglers all have several magazines apiece and fishing as a whole has long supported two weekly newspapers. Together, they help us to keep abreast of developments in and around the waterside and to stay on top of new tackle and techniques. By and large, they serve us well.

But not always. Every now and then an editor has a rush of blood to the head. Then, it is as though he loses all sense of proportion. It is as though he sees angling and our small world as the whole world – or else he consciously disregards the wider world completely. Neither is a great idea, but for the most part this matters little. In the main, no-one in the wider world cares much about what anglers think and say – and why should they?

When angling editors go overboard about something which the public holds dear, though, everything changes. Then, real problems can arise – some of them profoundly damaging.

PRETTY well every issue of every publication in Britain is bought by news agencies as a matter of course, angling publications not excluded. Journalists – mostly freelance journalists who live by the column-inches they can generate and the air time they can clock up – read them in the hope of picking up a snippet here, a story there. Insofar as angling is concerned, they know that the British public is besotted with the furred, the feathered and the cuddly and if some angling editor’s rush of blood appears to put him at odds with this, then the telephones ring, news editors get busy and a view that was originally aimed at an angling audience alone hits several million breakfast tables overnight.

This is why, whatever concerns might exist in angling’s media about creatures other than fish – and concerns do arise from time to time – a cautious and measured response is wisest. The temptation to rant to readers for the sake of short-term impact, needs to be tempered with a realisation that outside eyes will be watching and that long-term damage might ensue.

We have seen it over the years with swans and otters– and with cormorants in particular. All three, at one level or another, can have an impact on our sport but the article that begins with pointing this out, that moves on to an indignant ‘something should be done about it’ (always, note, by someone else) and that then demands that populations of whatever it is be controlled, is destined to become ‘Anglers demand cull of swans/otters/cormorants/ babies/old people/the halt and the lame’, or whatever.

It is then that the perceived, short-term editorial satisfactions of ‘making a stand on behalf of our readers’ as fishing editors love to put it, can lead to huge and lasting damage outside angling. Then it is not swans/otters/cormorants or whatever that is most likely to end up in the dock, but angling itself.

Because of one particular incident I want to focus on cormorants, but there are a couple of points on swans and otters to be made, first.

Swans (dealt with at more length elsewhere) can create two problems when, as sometimes happens, they descend in their scores and their hundreds on a short length of water. The first is that they can make fishing, even the simple act of casting, physically impossible. The second is that they can so denude the water of the plants on which they feed that they devastate the cover and bug life on which fish depend.

Given the right of swans to exist, their grace and beauty, the affection in which the public holds them and the power of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, any approach to problem flocks has to be measured and thought out. It may well be possible to get the public to recognise the birds’ impact on fish and fisheries, but that progress will only come through education and negotiation and it will take many years to achieve.

The same principle applies to otters, which have made a dramatic recovery after numbers collapsed in the second half of the 20th century. This recovery has been stimulated by the release into the wild of artificially reared cubs over a period of years. Through natural breeding and because there is so much virgin territory to be reoccupied, numbers have gone up significantly.

Otters eat fish, but they also have huge territories and so the impact on a given section of a river is likely to be small. It is a different story on lakes, especially if an otter occupies a holt near a commercial stillwater fishery stocked with carp and rears her cubs there. Then, significant numbers of carp – some of them costing thousands of pounds apiece – may be taken, the quality of fishing is likely to decline and the owner’s livelihood may well be threatened. The answer is not for anglers and editors to demand impotently that ‘something be done’ (as some have) but for us all to recognise that the otter, like the swan, is an iconic species much loved by the public and that, if push ever came to shove, the public would unhesitatingly back otters against smelly old fish and those who support them.

The only sensible course of action for anyone concerned for fish and fishing is to accept that the otter is here to stay – I, for one, am delighted about it – and for fishery owners to take whatever steps they can to protect their waters. If fencing and the like cannot be afforded and no public funds are forthcoming to help build them, then the loss of fish will need to be offset through the prices charged: and if the market will not stand that, then the fishery, like any other enterprise caught by changing market conditions, is likely to close. We may think that brutal but the public is likely to see it as simply a fact of life. The only safe and effective solutions to concerns about swans, otters or any other form of wildlife are ones that public opinion will support.

Enter cormorants. If anglers want to see the potential for damage that can be caused by editors getting it wrong, let them consider the impact, many years ago, of a rant against cormorants in a national angling newspaper.

In 1996 a campaign against cormorants was launched by the publication concerned. The report, over several pages, set out the damage that cormorants can do to fisheries, was headlined in huge type on the front page ‘These birds must be killed’ and was accompanied by a picture of a man crouching down with a shotgun at the ready.

The story implied that anglers were shooting cormorants on a large scale and that large numbers more needed to be shot; that organised bands of militants were roaming the countryside blasting at every black bird in sight and that many of their fellows condoned it. The whole episode was a text-book example of how not to handle an emotive issue and, not surprisingly, a national outcry resulted. Many of our fellow-conservationists rightly deplored it. Politicians of varying hues leapt on the bandwagon. Animal rights extremists whipped up the horses. The entire sport, along with its furious and hapless spokesmen, was put on the back foot.

Then the inevitable happened. The media spotlight fell onto something else and the row calmed down. But it left dreadful damage behind. Those images and headlines and that whippedup outcry had gone deep into the public psyche. In the minds of many, the image of angling as a harmless and rather dotty pursuit had been tarnished. We are continuing to live with the consequences. In a climate in which, increasingly, all creatures are seen as fellow passengers on planet earth, angling – given the demise of foxhunting – is now in the sights.

It was all so short-sighted and unnecessary. The issue is not that cormorants do great damage – there is no doubt that, locally, they do – but how best the problem might be tackled. If we are to make real progress on this, as on other sensitive issues, rants must be avoided and loudly condemned when they occur. We need to deal with the world as it exists and not as we would like it to be. We need to deal with facts. Here, in relation to cormorants, are a few.

First, there is no doubt that cormorant numbers are rising rapidly. By the year 2000 it was estimated that there were up to half a million birds in Europe, of which around 15,000 nested in Britain, many of them inland. This indigenous population was even then being steadily supplemented by an influx of birds from the mainland. These incomers boosted the number of birds overwintering here to around 25,000. Around 10,000 of these birds wintered inland and it was recognised that even birds living on the coasts will fly many miles inland to find food. Cormorant numbers have gone on rising ever since. There are single colonies of many hundred of birds close to some of our biggest lakes.

A range of factors is likely to be involved in this population growth. The first is that the free control of cormorants was banned under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, a piece of uk legislation giving effect to the European Union’s Birds Directive. Other factors include the fishing-out by commercial boats of inshore waters where cormorants would normally hunt; the creation of more and more self-stocking reservoirs and lakes as a result of gravel extraction and the like; a growth in the numbers of waters artificially stocked with trout both for food and for sport; a growth in the numbers of heavily stocked commercial coarse fisheries and a reduction in poisons like ddt in the food chain which, in the past, have kept cormorant numbers down.

What has it all meant for anglers? It has given us two problems. The first is the sheer tonnage of fish that cormorants eat. The second is the vast number of fish that the birds injure and kill but do not eat.

At the most conservative estimate (conservative estimates are best because exaggeration simply undermines our case) the average cormorant eats 1lb of fish a day, which means that in a year six birds will eat one ton, 600 birds will eat 100 tons, 6,000 birds will eat 1,000 tons. While grossing up figures gives staggering totals, the net impact of this predation is not easy to calculate, not least because no-one knows what freshwater fish populations are, overall. What we can assume, however, is that the birds will get their food from the easiest places (most likely small, heavily stocked waters of the kind anglers have created); and what we know is that the damage comes in the particular, not the general – that is, that the damage done to individual fisheries, whatever is happening to fisheries at large, can be dire.

But that is only part of it. While natural mortalities in fish stocks, spawning failures, predation by other creatures and the like all have to go into the negative mix, so do all those fish not eaten but fatally injured by cormorants. When hunting, cormorants often behave like pack animals or sharks: they seem to go into a feeding frenzy. Then, anglers’ concerns become even more clear. Cormorants have large, sharp, hooked bills and will chase most fish that swim, other than the very largest. The injuries they inflict are quite unmistakable – lines across the sides of a fish showing where the bill has taken hold and one or more short, deep slashes, usually in the belly, where the bill hook has gone in. Fish injured in this way but not eaten, are likely to die quickly from their injuries or to die later from disease.

I can speak of it all personally. For some seasons, many of the fish I have been catching from my local river have shown signs of cormorant damage. I have caught many trout weighing around 3lbs that have had cormorant wounds across their flanks, indicating that they had been attacked by birds even though the birds could not cope with their size. One of the biggest grayling I have ever caught – it came from a stream so small and overgrown I cannot imagine how a cormorant got into it – weighed 2lbs 13oz and had cormorant marks across its sides. On another river I found a 6lbs salmon kelt dying in the margins, with cormorant slashes deep in its gut. A fish farmer I know was able to walk right up to one bird because it had so gorged on small trout that it could not take off.

Many a regular angler has similar stories to tell. There is no doubt that cormorants are not just one more big bird. In large numbers they are an obvious menace to waters within flying distance, whatever statistical evidence might currently be lacking.

Politics, however, is the art of the possible. If the birds cannot be fully controlled – and under both British and European law they cannot – then anglers and those who represent them must make the best use of circumstances as they stand. This is what angling’s representative bodies have been doing, with some limited success. Thanks to their efforts, where significant damage to a fishery can be proven, a licence to shoot a small number of birds as a means of scaring away others (albeit only to make them fly to someone else’s water nearby) can now be obtained.

To gain further concessions will take a steady accumulation of credible case histories, wider research (when did researchers ever recommend less?), bridge-building with other conservation groups, reasoned explanation of our concerns to them, to the public and to the politicians who hold the levers of power and, not least, education of the angling community itself.

An important part of this effort must be to win public recognition of the fact that our environment needs to be seen in the round. Specifically, we need acknowledgement of two points. The first is that, of necessity, we have created on our island a landscape that is wholly artificial – and hence everything within it needs to be managed to maintain balances that, for better or worse, we have long since upset in our search for food, shelter and diversion. The second is conscious acknowledgment that, although they may not be as cuddly or as photogenic as their furred and feathered friends, fish are a part in our wildlife heritage and have a place in that wider equation, too.

In the meantime, any relief from cormorants that can be achieved – tweaks to legislation here, alleviations there – are likely to fall short of what anglers would like to see. High bird numbers, and the problems that come with them, are here for years to come.

They will be around longer – and maybe longer than angling itself – if the hotheads have their way.

All You Need to Know

I READ somewhere that more books have been written about angling than about any other subject except mathematics. I have no idea who made the calculation, but it was probably a mathematician – and not a very good one, at that.

Even so, there are many thousands of angling books in print and they have come in all guises: factual books, fishing guides and diaries, reminiscences, anthologies like this. A few, among the very best, break new ground – not an easy thing to do in this ancient sport. Others, also among the best, have a literary quality that makes them timeless. Lots, alas, add only to the word mountain.

I WAS fishing with one of my closest friends, a man who, because of his many excellent books and articles, has become a household name in the fly-fishing world. We fell to talking about the tide of angling literature – the hundreds of books, the thousands – that has been published since Dame Juliana Berners gave us the first work on angling in English, in 1496.

My friend and I were as one. We agreed that while there had been works of technical brilliance over the years, and many sublimely written texts, vast numbers of books had contributed nothing, at great length. ‘In fact’, I said, ‘it would be interesting to go the other way, as an exercise – to see how much information you could squeeze into the fewest possible words.’ A light bulb pinged in my head. ‘Actually, the really essential things about angling can be very simply stated. I think I’ll write a new book, myself. It will be called All you Really Need to Know about Fly-fishing. It will be about seven pages long.’

My friend’s stride faltered and his jaw dropped. ‘Blimey’, he said, somehow conveying that his entire past life – all those books, all those articles – was passing before his eyes, ‘you can’t do that, you’ll put me out of business.’

It was a joke, of course, but for all that, the essentials of fly fishing would consume very few trees. I once tried to squeeze quite a few of them into a reply to the youngest reader of The Times to have written to me up to that point. Peter was 13. He enjoyed coarse fishing but, on a holiday in Wales, had seen someone catch a grayling on a dry fly and had been fascinated. His father had suggested he write to me. What exactly was dry fly fishing and how could he get started?

Here, more or less, is what I told him.

Dry fly fishing is a way of catching fish – mostly trout or grayling, but plenty of other species as well – on imitations of the kinds of natural flies they are accustomed to taking from the surface.

To do it, I told Peter, he would be best off with a fly-rod about 9ft long, rated what is called aftm-6. He would need an aftm-6, double-tapered, floating flyline to use with it and a reel to put the line on. This outfit would do the job he wanted and be versatile enough for lots of other fishing as well. He should persuade his father to buy him a couple of lessons with a professional fly-casting instructor. The instructor would teach him how to cast correctly and practice would take care of distance and accuracy. He would also be shown how to do fiddly things like joining a nylon ‘leader’ to the line and a fly to the leader. He would be using only one fly at a time and it would be treated to float. At the water, the aim would be to get that fly to the surface in front of a targeted, rising fish, in a natural and unalarming way.

When Peter approached a river, I said, it should be in the knowledge that a fish is a wild and wary thing, easily ‘put down’. What is more, he should know that in a river fish have to face the flow and so, when they are hungry, they look upstream for the flies and bugs the current brings downstream towards them.

What did all of this mean? It meant that he should avoid alerting the fish to his presence either by the way he dressed or the way he moved and that the best approach to a fish looking upstream was from downstream – from its blind side.

On the flies to be cast, I explained that most of the natural flies fish eat are not much more than a centimetre long and that if Peter wanted to maximise his chances, his artificial flies should be tiny as well. This question of size, I wrote, was the single most important factor where artificial flies were concerned. The only other important factor was colour and because most natural flies are drab as well as small, his flies needed to be drab also: browns and blacks would cover most situations.

With all of these matters taken care of, the need was to ensure that the cast fly floated towards the fish as daintily and unhindered as the naturals all around it. That meant avoiding drag. Drag is what Peter would often see, after casting out: the current would push on the line and leader floating on the water and would create a downstream curve in them. Sooner or later and sometimes instantly, this push on the line and leader would pull on the fly and cause it to skate across the surface in an unnatural way. Minute amounts of such drag, quite invisible from the banks, could be enough to kill all chances.

Drag can best be avoided, I wrote, by having the minimum amount of line lying on the surface in the first place and by careful choice of the position from which the cast is made. Most often, the best place will be from just behind the fish and a little to one side of it; but often, paradoxically, it will be from directly opposite the quarry, as well.

When he had got everything right and his fish had tilted up, opened its mouth and taken his fly, I told Peter he should give it a moment to close its mouth and tilt down again before lifting – not yanking – the rod end upwards and setting the hook. A few words about landing the fish, fishing barbless, the value of joining a local club and – well, all right, then, recommendations for a couple of books, my own astonishingly among them – rounded the letter off.

I knew that success would not take long if Peter followed these simple suggestions – and so it proved. I also know that in my letter I have the makings of Chapter 1 – All you Really Need to Know About Dry Fly Fishing in that seven-page book I had talked about. Chapter 2 – All You Really Need to Know About Wet Fly and Nymph Fishing – surely cannot be far behind.

Naturally, I told my famous writer-friend. He was gratifyingly appalled.

Arthur Ransome

IT MUST be fascinating to have someone we thought we knew well, cast in a new light by a sudden turn of events. The mere possibility that long-held assumptions could be wrong would have us sitting bolt upright and curious.

Even news about someone remote can, we all know, have this effect: for example, when damaging allegations surface about a national figure. The charges do not have to be based on fact to set the weevils at work – all they need to do is to appear. Ideally, for the media, they should surface about a revered figure who is long since dead and so cannot lodge a defence. Tarnished Idol Syndrome always makes news.

IT’S NOT EVERY day that I get to think kindly about Lenin or Trotsky or even, come to think of it, about certain personages in mi5 and mi6. I mean it wouldn’t be, would it? We angling correspondents have plenty to do without getting mixed up in politics and revolutions and counter-intelligence, thank you very much.

Still, credit where credit is due. Had it not been for the foregoing folk, Arthur Ransome would not have been making the news the way he has in recent years, at first identified and then exonerated as a possible Bolshevik spy – and then I would have had no peg on which to hang my own information about him.

Of course, it had long been known that the famous foreign correspondent and children’s author got close to the revolutionary leaders while reporting from Russia around 1917. And we can assume that he got a lot closer still to Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, because he had an affair with her before the two eventually married.

Yet the fact that Ransome might, just might, have been a spy or a double agent was not aired until some of his private papers came to light in 2002. In 2005, the National Archive released mi5 files relating to the time Ransome was a journalist in Russia, between 1913 and 1925 – and raised similar questions.

The mi5 files made it clear that Ransome had been watched by the security services because they feared he had become a propagandist for the Bolsheviks while working in Petrograd, then the Russian capital. One informant claimed that Ransome was expected to move into the Kremlin to live. Another report said that Ransome had been considered such a potential risk to British interests that a top-secret paper on him was circulated to the ‘King and the War Cabinet’.

As late as 1927, by which time he was back in England and domestically ensconced, a ‘confidential source’ was reporting that ‘Arthur Ransome is a traitor, married to a Bolshevik woman, he is an undoubted Communist and in the pay of the Russian Secret Service’.

While all of this was being filed away by mi5, other material was giving rise in the agency to the contrary view: that Ransome was not only not a traitor but actually a spy for mi6, working against the new Russian leadership. (How, it must have seemed as reasonable to ask then as now, could mi5 not have known for certain, one way or the other? What does it tell us of communication between the two in those tumultuous times?).

Whatever the truth, such exotic possibilities in Ransome’s background will have surprised many a reader of Swallows and Amazons. More prosaically, perhaps, some others may be surprised to learn of Ransome’s background as an angler. Ransome was not only a passionate angler but wrote extensively about his sport. He became one of the finest angling correspondents to write for a national newspaper in the 20th century.

Though many aspects of Ransome’s life have been extensively chronicled, Ransome’s work as an angling correspondent has been as submerged from view of late as split-shot beneath a float.

Fishing and fishermen stimulated some of Ransome’s best writing and led to one of the best collections of essays in a sporting literature that goes back to 1496. It led to a second collection of angling pieces and to a fine exploration of Ransome as both writer and angler by Jeremy Swift – Arthur Ransome on Fishing – published in 1994.

Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884, the son of an angling professor of history who was himself the son of an angling father. Early family holidays were spent near Coniston, in the Lake District, walking, boating and learning to fish – experiences that were later to be deeply mined for his children’s books and which, between his travels, constantly drew him back.

A somewhat chequered education that took in an unhappy spell at Rugby, eventually led to a place at Yorkshire College – later Leeds University – where Ransome surprisingly began to read science before dropping out. He headed for the bright lights of Chelsea, having determined to become a writer and threw himself into it with huge energy. By the time he had reached his mid-20s he had a string of books behind him – including a critical study of Edgar Allan Poe – and had married for the first time.

This marriage, to Ivy Walker, of Bournemouth, was a disaster and Ransome was soon looking for an escape. From 1913 on, Ransome spent much of his time in Russia, writing the kinds of insider reports for the Daily News and the Observer that caused the security services to take an interest, dallying with Evgenia – and fishing wherever and whenever he could. He returned to England with Evgenia in 1925 and settled in the Lake District. The same year he began an angling column for the then Manchester Guardian.

Between August that year and September 1929, Ransome produced 150 pieces, most of them as polished as gemstones. He wrote on people and places, tackle and trout, wet flies and the weather. He wrote on ‘Bulls and Kindred Phenomena’, on ‘Talking to the Fish’, on ‘Failing to Catch Tench’ and on scores of other subjects besides. He wrote about them all with knowledge and insight and warmth and wry humour. He crafted every piece in a style that engaged the non-angling reader as well as the smitten.

Fifty of the best pieces, plus a translation of angling passages from Sergei Aksakov, the great chronicler of Russian life, appeared in Rod and Line (1929) – a book which Sir Michael Hordern, another keen angler, brought memorably to life for television.

The opening sentence of the first piece in Rod and Line, is a corker: ‘The pleasures of fishing are chiefly to be found in rivers, lakes and tackle shops and, of the three, the last are least affected by the weather.’

Among several later penetrating essays is one on the theme that angling is ‘a frank resumption of Palaeolithic life without the spur of Palaeolithic hunger’. In that piece, as often elsewhere, Ransome goes to the heart of it: ‘Escaping to the Stone Age by the morning train from Manchester, the fisherman engages in an activity that allows him to shed the centuries as a dog shakes off water and to recapture not his own youth merely, but the youth of the world’.

Ransome’s second collection, which included the scripts of some of his radio broadcasts, was published as Mainly About Fishing (1959). A portrait of Ransome tying one of the flies shown on the cover of this book, his favourite Elver Fly, still hangs in his old club, the Garrick, in London.

Ransome finally gave up his angling column when he decided that the pressure of producing it weekly was beginning to take the edge off his own fishing. He gave his editor three months’ notice of his intention to quit in March, 1929. By May he was well into Swallows and Amazons.

Ransome fished – and on and off wrote about fishing – late into a life that was increasingly plagued by ill-health. He caught his last fish, a salmon, in 1960. By 1963 he was confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1967, aged 83. Among the papers he left were parts of a new novel. It had, like so much else in this public man’s private world, an underlying angling theme.

Coarse Fish on the Move

OOFFICIALLY it is the salmon and the sea trout that are the ‘migratory fish’ – the fish that begin their lives in rivers and that go to sea before coming back, in turn, to spawn. The rest – eels excepted – are the ‘non-migratory’ species: the stay-at-homes and the moochers-about; the sidlers from this side of the river to that; the fish that limit their forays to a trip to the shallows downstream from time to time, or just occasionally to the deeps around the bend.

That, anyway, is the official view and, as it happens, the view of many anglers. The reality, though, is more complex – and surprising.

BIOLOGISTS have known for years that coarse fish, for all their stick-around reputations, are given to travelling astonishing distances – often at astonishing speeds. It is just that somehow the results of their researches rarely reach the riverbank and even long-established facts will come as news to most on it.

Like, for example, the fact that barbel can range tens of kilometres upstream and downstream in a single season. Like, for example, the fact that bream can leave their daytime swim at dusk, roam several kilometres during the night – and be back where they started off by next morning, leaving the local anglers no wiser.

Research into behaviour like this is highlighted from time to time at fisheries management conferences and when biologists get together, but not on many other occasions. In fact, an Aquatic Animal Research Group at Durham University has been studying fish movements for years. Scientists there have tagged and tracked barbel, chub, dace, bream, roach and a range of other species on the Nidd, the Ouse and the Derwent in Yorkshire, and on other rivers and lakes further south.

Much of this work has been undertaken in an attempt to understand the effects on river life of man-made interventions – from the building of weirs and fish passes to flood prevention works and significant water abstraction. It is the insights into fish behaviour coming out of it all that will fascinate anglers most.

Barbel have been tagged and tracked five and even ten kilometres upstream and down again in a single season, with individual fish undertaking round-trips of 60 kilometres to find suitable spawning gravels. Chub heading upstream for places to spawn have been found to make repeated attempts to use fish passes built for sea trout and salmon – one memorable fish on the Derwent entering a pass seven times in seven nights before finally giving up.

A study of bream on the River Trent revealed that individual shoals covered beats of up to six kilometres long in the course of a season. Within a shoal, different fish would behave differently as dusk approached. Some would leave the ‘home’ reach occupied during the day and move several hundred metres upstream and down in the course of a night. Others would range three and even four kilometres afield and still be back before morning. The extent to which a given reach meets the needs of the fish in it is likely to dictate when, how far and how often fish will travel.

Studies have thrown up other fascinating insights – like the disadvantage of being released into the wild after being bred in captivity. Stocked coarse fish, it seems, can travel at the wrong times. Whereas native fish lie doggo while the sun is up and travel under the cover of darkness, farm-bred fish will shift location in broad daylight.

‘Presumably there is an advantage in native fish moving at night – they may be less susceptible then to predation by birds, pike and otters’, one of the study team has suggested. ‘The movements of reared fish – if they’re looking for food – may reflect the times of day when they’ve been fed in captivity and that could prove a disadvantage.’

It is not only the extent to which fish move and when that is surprising, but also the speeds at which they move. Twelve-hour round-trips of six and eight kilometres by bream are startling enough, but the speeds of other fish – and especially the speeds of small fish relative to the speeds of large – can leave the portly bream standing.

Whereas a metre-long adult salmon can swim at better than two metres a second for hours and days on end – a formidable feat of strength and endurance – tracking has shown that salmon smolts a sixth of that length can sustain close on half a metre a second without difficulty. River lampreys have been recorded travelling 10 kilometres a night upstream, against a steady current – a distance and speed many would find surprising in a fully grown sea-trout.

What does it all amount to for the angler on the bank? In the case of swimming speeds, probably not much, other than to cause him or her to marvel yet again at the wonders of nature. In the case of in-river migration, it will be to cause anglers to see coarse fish in a new way – and to encourage them to be more adventurous in their choices of swim as daylight fades and each season progresses.

Fish movements also throw two of angling’s most commonly heard statements into a new light. The fact that a fishless day for one angler is followed by a night of frenzied action for another in the same place might not be simply because ‘fish come on at night’ – a well-known saw – but because a hitherto fishless swim has had travelling fish come into it.

And the heartfelt ‘there are no bloody fish in this bloody swim’ might sometimes not only be an excuse of a kind but that rarest commodity in angling – the truth.

Buying Tackle

I AGONISED over my first fly-rod. I was a wholly self-taught fisherman and, when I became interested in the sport, I had no-one to guide me. So, like countless others, I went to a tackle shop to seek advice. This was not a local tackle shop, because I did not have one. This was a big, posh tackle shop in a big city.

The staff saw me coming. I ended up paying far more than I should have for a big-name rod that in the event, was an indifferent performer. It is a trap that newcomers especially can fall into. Every beginner would benefit from independent advice on what rod, reel and line to buy. Here is some.

A FEW years ago I went to buy a new fly-rod. I did not need a new rod – I have accumulated more rods than you could shake a wading stick at – but I had convinced myself I needed one. All anglers, I know, will have sympathy with this sensation. Perceived Tackle Deficit Disorder (PTDD) is a kind of medical condition and tackle shops are the places where it is treated.

I went to a well-known store and told the dealer what I wanted – a fast-actioned, 9ft five-weight. He listened sympathetically and made soothing noises. Then he turned to a glass case behind him, opened it with a key and lifted out a 9ft wand. Naturally, this was not any old fast-actioned, 9ft five-weight, he explained. This was the Dollar-Sign Flabbergast fast-actioned, 9ft five-weight. It looked fabulous. It was made of deep-green carbon fibre and was wonderfully varnished. It had lots of gilt lettering on the butt and the kind of maker’s name that evokes candles and incense.

The Dollar-sign Flabbergast – the dealer turned and angled it so that it flashed in the light – was made of the latest High-Modulus, High-Five Technology. It provided faster back-loading of the thingy than any rod before it. In tests, five spindles of torque had been achieved. This rod was practically guaranteed to improve my casting distance by 50 per cent and my Accuracy Quotient Factor (AQF) by very nearly the same.

How much did it cost and where could I try it, I asked? Naturally, the dealer inferred, a rod like the Dollar-Sign Flabbergast did not come cheap but I was clearly a man who not only appreciated the best but would positively demand it.

Yes, but the price? The figure he mentioned sounded like the distance to Mars. Outside, the rod cast like a piece of wet string. Caveat emptor can be as good advice in the fishing business as it is in the motor trade – especially at the start of a new season. Then, spring is in the air, cuckoos are on the wing and the air is filled with the song of tackle-dealers pushing wheelbarrows to their banks.

When choosing tackle it is essential to keep function in mind, above all. The principal job of rods, reels, lines and the rest are to help an angler put his fly where he wants it and to handle effectively any fish hooked as a result. Many an angler buys tackle for other reasons – for example, assumed status – but among the sensible the ability to do the job required, comes first. The truth is that many a lowly priced outfit will do that as well as some top-priced kit, though the actual rods may appear much the same.

A fly fisherman on small streams will want a rod in the 7ft to 8ft range, carrying maybe a 4-weight line. An angler tackling larger rivers and many stillwaters will want something between 8ft and 9ft 6ins, carrying 5-weight to 7-weight lines. For some lake fishing and angling for sea trout, rods of up to 10ft or a little more carrying lines up to 8-weight or so, will be useful.

Large numbers of rods for all these purposes are priced at astronomical levels while entire and wholly serviceable outfits – rods, reels, lines, leaders and flies together – can be bought for a third of their price. The two rods I use for virtually all my own stream and lake fishing cost £120 apiece in 1990 – a fraction of top prices, even then – yet they have had the users of rods costing four times as much gasp at the silken ease with which each puts out a line. My favourite loch-style rod cost me £25 second-hand and its original owner £70 new. When, in the mid-1990s I wanted a salmon 15-footer, I sought advice from a hugely experienced, money-no-object salmon angler. What did he recommend out of all the rods available, most of which he had tried? Why, the same rod he used himself – a product costing less than half many on the market. That is the rod I bought – second-hand, again – and it performs like a dream.

The reality is that few rods and anglers are born for one another. Often enough we buy a rod that feels good in the hand and that gives the impression of being up to the job we want doing. If, having bought it, the rod shows a less-than-fatal quirk we often fish on and find we adjust to it. More often than not, the rod we fish with ends up becoming the rod we know and learn to love. When the time comes for a change, use of the old rod will likely have made the next new rod feel strange – and we repeat the cycle.

It is much the same with fly reels. Plenty of fly reels now cost hundreds of pounds. I have never spent more than £50 on a fly reel and the two of that price I do own both incorporate superb disc drags. Some of my expert friends are wedded to reels that cost between £20 and £40 apiece. The reel I use on my 7ft 3-weight cost £14 in 2003 and does everything I ask of it, which is not much.

On the high-priced reel options, this or that gizmo justifies a little extra cost and hype delivers the rest. Statements like ‘the days are long gone when a reel was regarded largely as a place to store line’ are now heard repeatedly – and are wrong. The prime function of a reel will always be to store and, of course, dispense and recover line. The essential qualities – lightness, reliability and an exposed rim – cost very little in themselves.

In truth, the rod has not yet been priced that will turn an indifferent caster into a good caster and no rod-reel-line outfit has been assembled that will make up for a lack of fishing skills. Unless the angler behind the rod knows the value of a cautious approach to the water, can read the currents when he gets there, knows where a fish is likely to lie and can present the right fly in such a way that it comes to his quarry’s attention naturally, every penny spent on gear will be money down the drain.

This is not to say that much expensive tackle is not superb or that good tackle will not give a good fisherman an edge: simply that expensive tackle will not necessarily be good tackle and that quite superb gear can be had at a very modest price. Telling the difference in the shop or from the products in the catalogue is, of course, the problem.

For the angler who can be persuaded that he needs the most expensive in anything and can afford it – or who just wants the top names regardless – the issue is neither here nor there. For many more – and especially gullible newcomers confronted by honey-tongued salesmen – the issue is often central.

My advice to anyone inexperienced who wants new gear is to seek independent, experienced advice if he or she can and to spend any money saved on instruction.

Dry Fly, Wet Fly, Nymph

FISHERY managers love rules. On some trout waters, the list is as long as your rod. There are rules about fly sizes, net and mesh sizes, the distance one angler must stay from another on the bank, the distance boat anglers must stay from the shore. There are size limits and bag limits, guidance on how fish should be returned and when not to return them; directions on when fishing may start and must stop and all else.

One of the most common rules, applied almost exclusively on rivers, is whether a water is dry-fly only or whether nymphs may be used. Naturally, this invites definitions of what exactly an artificial nymph is and what exactly constitutes a dry fly.

Quite rightly, everyone has a view.

MY OLD English master might well have shed a tear. Cyril Pybus was not only one of the great influences on my life but the man who named two kinds of question, frequently raised in his classes, after me.

One was the ‘Clarke’s Worrif ’, as in – when he was putting forward some proposition or other – ‘Sir, worrif this or worrif that?’ He would sometimes use the other to cut short a classmate, as in ‘Bloggs, this is beginning to sound suspiciously like a Clarke’s Worrabout’.

Both questions were hijacked on a fly-fishing web site I once dipped into. Someone foolishly asked ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ Or, in angling-speak, they asked ‘exactly how do you define a dry fly?’ The hair-splitters and devil’s advocates, the leg-pullers and the ayatollahs were out in force. The Worrifers and Worrabouters had their hands up in a flash.

Frederic Halford is to blame. Up to the late 19th century, the flies anglers used on rivers were motley collections of feathers that were mostly cast out across the current in the hope that a fish would make a grab as they swung around, below the surface.

Then, in the 1880s, Halford and his pal George Selwyn Marryat embarked on an intense study of the kinds of winged flies most often taken by trout. Two books resulted. The first, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (1886), described how these winged, natural flies could be imitated more precisely on hooks. The second, Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889) described how these imitations could best be fished to individual trout that the angler could see.

The advantages of Halford’s new ‘dry fly’ strategy over the old, random, underwater ‘wet’ approach, caused a sensation. Halford found himself at the head of a ‘dry fly cult’ – a position he reinforced by eventually declaring that dry fly fishing was not only more effective than wet fly fishing, but more sporting. Before long, extensive reaches of rivers became restricted to ‘dry fly only’.

Then G.E.M. Skues bobbed up. Whereas Halford and Marryat had studied the adult, winged flies at the surface, Skues studied the underwater nymphs that the adults had hatched from – and developed wonderful imitations of several species. Like Halford, Skues cast his flies only to fish he could see and he, too, attracted a large following. The Halfordians were unmoved. They classed Skues’ underwater nymphs with the old-style wet flies, declared they were just as ‘unsporting’ – and banned them from their waters. Battle was joined between the two camps and raged for decades.

The cordite still hangs on the air. Even today, some fisheries restrict angling to the dry fly in the belief it is more sporting. Hence the short fuses on the web-site when someone asked what is and is not a ‘dry fly’ – a question complicated, of late, by the arrival of new flies designed for fishing not on the surface film or under it but actually in it, part in and part out of the water. Could emergers be fished on dry fly-only waters, as well?

Internet hackles were up in a flash. We had this response, that response, the other response, some of them extraordinarily acrid. They went on and on. The high point for me came when someone decided he could cut through it all. When is a dry fly a dry fly? No problem. You dropped your fly into a glass of water. If 50 percent of it floated above the surface, then it was dry and okay to use on dry fly-only streams. If not, it should be kept for wet-fly waters.

Cyril Pybus would have groaned. He’d have seen it coming a mile off. Worrif, someone said, a fly is 50.1 per cent above the surface in the tumbler test and 49.9 per cent below – or, if it comes to that, vice-versa. Where did these flies stand – or in the latter case, sink? Worrabout eddies and flows, another wanted to know. There were none of these in a glass but they were all over the place on rivers and these could influence the way a fly appeared. Exactly, said someone else – and worrif the glass itself influenced the thickness of the surface tension, and made it different from the surface tension in open water? That could affect a fly, too. And, and, and.

The debate went on for pages and pages, but I eventually fell asleep at my terminal. Many of the contributions – they ran well into three figures – were inordinately long and split every previously splat hair, several times over. Thousands of visitor-hits had been recorded, leaving many readers – no doubt like me – variously fascinated, appalled and amused.

My own view? In my experience, the best fisheries are those that have no rules at all and where the rods can be left to fish as much in the interests of the river and other members, as in their own results on the day. These waters tend, however, to be in the hands of small syndicates whose members are carefully selected and who get to know one another well.

Most other waters do have rules. It is clear that an owner or fishery manager can make any rules he chooses and that if an angler doesn’t like them, he can go elsewhere. There are excellent reasons on some rivers – reasons not connected with prejudice but with conservation – for limiting techniques and catches and the pressures on the water. Restricting fishing to dry fly-only is one of them, but there are others. Finally, where a rule like dry-fly only does exist, it is incumbent on the fishery to make any special refinements crystal clear.

Speaking personally, I carry no tumblers of water and no measuring devices. Where an unelaborated dry fly rule exists, anything I can see on the surface is a dry fly and anything I can’t is a wet. That’s it.

And as to angels on a pin head, who said they can dance, anyway? I mean, sir – worrif they’ve all got two left feet?

Fun in the Grass

FISH will, on their day, take pretty well anything. There is scarcely a comestible you can think of that has not, at some time or another, caught them. Undeniably, though, some baits are more consistently successful than others and we all have our favourites.

Many of the best baits can be bought from tackle shops and lots of others come free from the wide outdoors. Acquiring the former is straightforward. Getting our hands on the latter can lead to excitements and delights, not all of them obvious or expected. I once risked the censors to write about them – and in a family newspaper, at that.

ONE of angling’s weeklies marked the opening of a new coarse season on rivers with a supplement devoted to the ‘Top 50 Baits’.

The supplement was structured rather in the manner of the dance-of-seven-veils. The revelations came little by little. They were made from the outside in. It was only at the very end that the Top Two – the tit-bits, so to speak – were revealed. Before them came as extraordinary a smorgasbord of fishy temptations as can have been served up in one place at one time.

Squid was Bait No 50. Marshmallows, the ‘Floating Kings of Confectionery’ as the weekly described them, came in at 49, elderberries at 46, beef steak and mince at 45. Potatoes came to the boil at 35, artificial spinners and spoons wobbled into view at 34 and cheese got a sniff in at 19. As might be expected whole fish, fillets of fish, bits of fish littered the list of delights for the carnivores and plenty of cereals, fruits and cooked pulses were there for the veggies.

When the last veils were whipped aside, we found ourselves ogling The Big Two. Top Bait No 1 was maggots, Top Bait No 2 was bread. It was the lack of detail on Top Bait No 3 that was surprising. Top Bait No 3 was that anaconda of the lawn and vegetable patch, the lobworm. What was missing was an appreciation of the sporting opportunities the lobworm offers in its own wriggly right. It is an omission I want to make good, now.

Only a masochist digs for worms. Every angler knows that lobworms aplenty will be found lying right out in the open, on top of the lawn at night. All that is required to catch them is a torch, a tin, the stalking skills of a Kalahari bushman and the fastest forefinger and thumb in the west.

I don’t know why lobworms come up at night, but I can guess. Some say it’s because they are attracted by the cool night air. Others say they want to drink the dew from the grass. More likely, I suspect, is the prospect of getting up to what nature expects all of us to get up to on the grass under the cover of darkness at some time or other – only faster and more cheaply.

When it comes to courtship, remember, lobworms have little use for chat. When pursuing their wriggly ends, they have no need to splash out on drinks and dinner, quite possibly wasted. There are no clothes to be fumbled off. All they have to do is lie out there in the buff, waiting for a touch from another pointy nose and they’re away. So lobworms are on the top because they’re on the pull.

Which appears to leave them vulnerable. To the uninitiated, it looks the simplest thing in the world to bend down and pick them up. But the lobworm has lots of tiny little hooks in the sides of its tail and while its body is in the open, it usually leaves its tail in its tunnel. The challenge is to spot the worm, grab it and whip it into the can before it can set the hooks into the earth and pull itself down to safety – which it can do at reflex-defying speed. Obviously, easier said than done.

Also, because lobworms are light-sensitive, the torch beam cannot be shone directly onto one for more than a moment or it will be gone. One solution is to point the beam into the grass and to look for your quarry in the periphery of the light it throws. The other is to soften the beam’s glare.

A friend told me about his preferred way of doing the latter, long ago. He recommended – you can see why no-one digs for lobworms any more – covering the torch end with several layers cut from a woman’s silk or sheer nylon stocking, ideally still warm (‘they’re more stretchy, then’) and taken from the thigh end, which for some reason was ‘better’. Tights, I remember him saying fervently, ‘just aren’t the same’.

There is no doubt that the thicker, thigh end of a sheer nylon stocking doubled and redoubled over the end of a torch, diffuses the beam nicely. The problem is that the time taken to negotiate one from the wearer’s legs can sometimes leave little time for fishing itself. Which, my friend said, was okay by him.

But let us say that these preliminary challenges have been risen to. Let us say you have your stocking-tops, that your worm has been sighted, that it does not bolt and that you have managed, with a lightning stab down of forefinger and thumb, to grab it. Now what?

Usually, not much. The worm will have its hooks firmly set into the sides of its tunnel. You will be pulling with the aim of extracting it. But you cannot pull too hard in case the worm snaps – and you want the whole worm. So you find yourself in a protracted battle of finely judged strength and wills.

What is required is a steady pull that does not slacken for an instant. If the pull does slacken, the worm will sense weakness and take heart. If the pull can be sustained, the worm will over time begin to give up hope and little by little its grip will ease. Eventually, if you judge things aright, the lobworm will release its grip all of a sudden and the prize will be yours.

So yes, though the Top 50 Baits supplement did not mention it, there is more challenge in getting your hands on a lobworm than in acquiring the 49 other baits put together. It can take ages. That is the down-side. The upside is that in getting the requisite gear together – the stocking-tops especially – you can end up with more than one kind of result. Which, as my old friend would say, has always been okay by me.

Arthur Oglesby

ANYONE who reads the angling press regularly sees the same writers featured, time after time. If they go on long enough and have enough to say, such writers can acquire a kind of fame – though it is fame only within the closed world of fishing. Then, sooner or later, they disappear: either they lose interest, or they are displaced by younger, fresher writers or else, naturally, the man with the scythe intervenes. And that is that.

Every now and then, though, a fishing writer reaches a wider audience and is remembered by the national press when he dies. Arthur Oglesby was one of them. Oglesby was not a mover of mountains in angling, like a Falkus or a Walker, but he was a skilled writer and teacher who featured in the game fishing magazines for over three decades. He also lived in an exotic way. Oglesby had Brylcreemed good looks, money and social connections. Together with his fishing and writing skills, they took him to places, and into company, of which most anglers could only read. And he caught fish. Boy, did he catch fish. It was because of all this that I obituarised him in The Times.

WHEN Arthur Oglesby died on December 2, 2000 – the same day as his long-time friend Jack Hemingway (son of Ernest) – British angling lost a legendary salmon fisher: a man who repaid the privilege of a private income and the ability to fish pretty well when and where he pleased, by passing his encyclopaedic knowledge on to thousands of others through four decades of teaching and writing.

Oglesby was able to enjoy the cream of Atlantic salmon fishing on the international circuit in the days before disease, loss of habitat and pollution took its toll of this heroic fish, reducing it in many places to the point of extinction. He amassed a tally – it was over 2,000 fish in Britain alone – sufficient to take an ordinary mortal’s breath clean away. He counted among his friends many glittering names inside and outside the sport.

Indeed, Oglesby had been due to fish with Hemingway in Alaska earlier that year, but looming heart surgery prevented him from going. Then Hemingway himself underwent heart surgery and it was complications following their operations that claimed both men’s lives.

Arthur Victor Oglesby was born into comfortable family circumstances in December, 1923 and lived the early part of his life in York, close to the family business of Harvey Scruton Ltd., a firm of manufacturing chemists. He started to train as an industrial chemist immediately on leaving school, enlisted with the Black Watch at the age of 18, led his men into battle in the D-Day landings as a young officer – and was wounded in both chest and leg.

Oglesby left the Army as a captain and went into the family firm, which had been built on a widely known product of the time, Nurse Harvey’s Gripe Water, the first gripe water to come onto the market. In 1955 his father came into the younger Oglesby’s office – and collapsed and died in his arms. Arthur was catapulted into the managing director’s chair, struggled to overcome the burden of heavy death duties – and built the business up. By the mid-1960s he was able to hand over the reins to his brother David so that he could do what he had always wanted to do: devote his life to angling. Soon after he moved to Harrogate, where he settled.

Oglesby had been a passionate angler since childhood. In the 1950s he took to fishing the Yorkshire Esk, in those days an excellent salmon and sea trout river – and it was there that he met the man who was to prove, he was later to write, the greatest single influence on his fishing life: Eric Horsfall Turner.

Horsfall Turner, then Town Clerk of Scarborough, made an international name for himself in the late 1940s and early 1950s as captor of a string of giant blue-fin tunny – fish weighing 500lbs and 600lbs apiece – that put in a brief appearance along the north-east coast: but he was also a brilliant salmon angler, knew everyone in the business – and introduced Oglesby around.

In 1957 Oglesby went to Scotland with Horsfall Turner and there found himself introduced to Captain Tommy Edwards. Edwards was, by common consent, the finest fly-casting instructor of his day and had a fishing school on the Spey. Oglesby went back several years to act as Edwards’ unpaid assistant – and took over the fishing school himself on Edwards’ death in 1968. In 1969 he helped to found the Association of Professional Game Angling Instructors, the body that put until-then unregulated game fishing tuition onto a formal footing. He went on to run fishing courses personally until close to his death, teaching over 3,000 students on the Spey alone. Over the same time he regularly led paying clients on fishing expeditions to Russia, Alaska and Iceland.

By the time he started teaching, Oglesby had already made a name for himself through journalism. He first began to write for angling publications, then additionally for The Field and Shooting Times – at one time producing so much copy that he had to adopt a nom de plume to spread his name more thinly. He became European Editor of the American Field and Stream. He edited the Angler’s Annual for three years. He taught himself to fly and regularly presented field events for Yorkshire Television, from time to time adding glamour for participants and audiences alike by flying in and out on his own aircraft.

Like many successful anglers in their later years, Oglesby found that he needed to fish less and less, but he did not become the outstanding performer he was without being fish-hungry at the outset. This fish hunger – and resulting success – bred some jealousy and led others to spread rumours of how his captures might actually be achieved. In Oglesby’s case it led to some wonderful stories. A family favourite is of the time he arrived at the Yorkshire Esk for a day in the middle of what was proving, for him, a terrific season. Another angler, who did not recognise him, was on the bank when he arrived and saw that he was about to head upstream. ‘I wouldn’t go up there’, the other angler called, inferring by his tone the possibility of nets and maybe a little dynamiting, ‘I hear that bugger Oglesby’s up there’. A pause. ‘Oh, good’, Oglesby replied – ‘I think I’ll go and join him.’

It was in 1966 that Oglesby’s international career took off. Again, through Horsfall Turner, he met Odd Haraldsen, a Norwegian who had a prime beat of the Vosso, at that time the finest big-salmon river in the world and one on which spring fish averaged 28lbs apiece. Oglesby and Haraldsen hit it off and Oglesby came home with an invitation to return every year ‘until you catch a 50-pounder’.

He did not quite make the 50lbs but over the years pictures of Oglesby and his amazing Vosso captures became part of the page furniture of the angling and sometimes of the national press. At the time of his death, among the stag heads and books and other mementoes of a 60-year sporting life that looked down from the walls of his study were four salmon. They weighed 45lbs, 46lbs, 46lbs and 49lbs-plus. The biggest fish was caught on June 17, 1973. The three others were, remarkably, all caught on June 18 of their respective years. In 1981 Oglesby caught a bag of four Vosso fish that weighed 151lbs – an incredible total and one which now seems unlikely to be beaten anywhere.

Oglesby’s fame and wherewithal took him to many exotic places – and as a result he made many famous friends. Hemingway was one. Another was Charles Ritz, the Parisian hotelier and a man who, in private life, was a brilliant designer of fly rods. He fished with the Americans Joe Brooks, Lee and Joan Wulff and Al McClane. In Britain he knew and fished with pretty well every famous angler who wafted a salmon rod, most important among them being Hugh Falkus, with whom he made a number of films. It is a point of interest that it was Oglesby who first taught Falkus to Spey-cast – a fact that Falkus did not publicise widely.

Arthur Oglesby wrote several books, among them Salmon (1971), Fly fishing for Salmon and Sea Trout (1986) and an autobiography, Reeling In (1988). But it will be for his extraordinary captures – and the whirl and the world he lived in – that he will be remembered by most.

The Weakest Link

FOR most of us, the challenge of the fish alone is enough. Just getting a fish onto the line and then onto the bank takes all the knowledge and wristy skills we can muster. It also takes the tackle to do the job, properly maintained. There is nothing worse than losing a fish through carelessness or through tackle that, in one way or another, has been allowed to deteriorate. Everything is hostage to the weakest link.

A FORLORN friend, relatively new to angling but mad keen, told me how, on one of the first casts of his first outing of the new trout season, he had hooked a substantial fish that came unstuck in seconds. When he wound in, the leader had broken a little above what had been a well-tied knot.

This sad little everyday tale, garnished by the fact that – naturally – not another fish was touched all day, will strike a chord in us all. Every new season brings its crop of challenges. Mostly they are concerned with the intransigence of fishes. For the newcomer or the inexperienced, they can concern tackle as well.

The breaking leader problem is typical. Quite often, when a leader breaks under the circumstances described, the problem is not that the nylon chosen was too fine – though, of course, it can be – or that the breaking strain marked on the spool overstated the breaking strain of the line wound onto it. It is that, in the months since last used – or in the time on display in the tackle shop – the nylon has steadily weakened.

The problem is light. I am not sure what the process is, but the ability of light, and especially sunlight, to weaken spooled nylon is well-established. A few days’ use at the water is one thing; continuous exposure for weeks and months on end is another. The answer is to store leader material in the dark. I keep my spools stacked one on top of another in a long, old sock.

The sock lives in my fishing bag. At the start of each season, every spool in the sock is tested and any suspect nylon is discarded. Then, the spools I will need on my next outing are transferred from the sock in my fishing bag to the pockets of my fishing jacket. If the same spools are needed for the following outing, they stay there. If others are required, the appropriate switches are made. At the end of the season, all spools are socked up and rebagged. It is a simple, if somewhat inelegant ploy that ensures no spool is left open to the light and every spool is available when and where needed. The nods and nudges in the car park, when a loosely jointed leg is noticed hanging out of the boot, add to the ploy’s attractions.

Flylines can present problems, too.

A line that has had some use and that is then left wound on a reel through a close season, tends to acquire ‘memory’: that is, when it is taken out and used again, it does not cast silkily and lie flat on the water. Instead, it casts like wire and spirals across the surface like a loosely wound spring. This is especially true of the inner coils, which have been wound in the smallest, tightest turns around the reel spindle.

The problem this time is not light but lubrication. Modern lines are coated in plastics to which a form of lubricant – a plasticiser – has been added. The job of the plasticiser is to keep the line supple. In preventing the line from becoming stiff the plasticiser assists casting and reduces the risk of cracking. But over time – and especially, it seems, if stored in high temperatures – plasticiser leaches out.

One way of alleviating the effects of stiffness in a line is to stretch it. The permanent answer is periodically to replace the plasticiser that has been lost.

Replasticising agents are available from any good shop that deals in fly-fishing equipment. The line is laid out straight or coiled in wide, loose loops and the plasticiser is smeared along its whole length. After five or six hours the line will have absorbed as much as it needs and the surplus can be wiped off. That is it. The line is ready for use. The effect of this simple operation is magical: it not only abolishes memory and transforms the line’s casting ability but lengthens line life. I treat my lines once a season and they behave perfectly for anything up to five or six.

There is another little wrinkle about lines and leaders. At the waterside they have to be threaded through the rod-rings. Ninety-nine anglers in 100 take the fine tip of the leader and poke that through successive rings, drawing the much-heavier flyline behind it. On most days that works perfectly well. But every angler experiences the other days: those days when, in the eagerness to get started or some moment of distraction, the leader-end is accidentally dropped. Then, pulled by the weight of the flyline behind it, the whole ensemble rattles back down through the rings into the grass – and the process has to be started again.

A far better method – and one that does not demand the eyesight of a hawk before fine nylon can be guided through tiny rings – is to thread the flyline up the rings and not the leader.

How? The leader, plus a few feet of flyline, are pulled straight off the reel. The end of the flyline is doubled back on itself to form a tight loop and the loop is passed through the rings, in the process pulling more line and leader behind it. Held between forefinger and thumb, the loop can be closed tightly enough to pass through even the tiniest rings on the top-piece.

Done this way, getting a line up a rod is not only far easier for those with less than nimble fingers and good eyesight, it overcomes the falling line problem as well. If the line is inadvertently released, the held loop springs open and jams in the last rod ring to have been threaded. In other words, line and leader are held where they are so that threading can be continued as before.

With the line on the rod and a reliable leader on the end of it, all is ready. Only the challenge of the fish remains: that, and finding a strong, sharp hook.

Always and Never

IT HAS been said many times that the two least appropriate words in angling are ‘always’ and ‘never’. We can say that this or that usually happens or almost always happens – even that we have never known it not happen – but the moment we become dogmatic and absolute, the exception will pop up to prove us wrong.

Likewise with ‘never’. Fishing is so wide and deep a sport, conditions and circumstances so infinitely variable, fish so varied and unpredictable that, sooner or later, the highly unlikely, even the seemingly impossible, will occur. You can bet on it.

A well-known angling writer and professional biologist, a man whose work I know and admire, wrote in an angling journal that ‘grayling always lie on the bottom. Always! There is no reliable scientific observation published of a grayling resting, like a trout “on the fin”, just below the surface.’

ON THE afternoon of September 16, 1983, I was walking upriver looking for trout when, on a bend I know well, over seven feet or so of water, I saw a big fish on the fin, inches under the surface. I naturally assumed it was a trout – this was a big trout lie – but before I could cast to it the fish saw me, turned and rushed downstream. From high on the bank on that sunlit day, I had a perfect view of it. I saw every detail of the fish as it passed. It was a huge grayling.

The incident was so remarkable and the grayling so big that, for future reference, I marked precisely the position the fish had been, by drawing mental lines across it from features on my own bank to features on the bank opposite. Then I went downstream, waded across the river and came up the other side to find a position I could cast from, while keeping well below the skyline.

A week later, on the afternoon of September 23, I returned to the bend in the hope of finding the fish there again, high in the water, because I knew I would not be able to see it if it were deep. This time, though, I crept unseen up the opposite bank and went straight to the casting position I had marked. I could see nothing of the fish from that place and so cast a small shrimp ‘blind’ a yard or two upstream of the fish’s previous lie. I got it at once. The shrimp could not have sunk six inches before the fish took, indicating that again it had been just under the surface. It weighed 2lbs 14oz and remained my biggest grayling for the next 20 years.

In July, 1987, I was on a camping and fishing trip in the Swedish Arctic with a group of Swedish friends. On a river one evening – there was, of course, still plenty of light in those parts at night – we found a great raft of fish lying just under the surface, again over deep water. The fish were smutting, tilting up to sip down flies with the regularity of metronomes, again just like trout. We could see that they were grayling. We got only one – a monster, 3lbs 4oz – before the wind got up and the fish went down.

One evening in July, 1989, immense numbers of fish were lying just under the surface on a Hampshire carrier. Although it was evening I could, with the light behind me, see them clearly. They were almost all grayling – again, all smutting, simply tilting up, taking a fly, realigning themselves horizontally and then taking again. I caught several. They were grayling in the water and grayling on the bank.

I have seen similar behaviour several times since: two or three times below a particular hatch pool on a river in Dorset where, over very deep water, the fish will range about on the fin, only two or three feet below the surface. I have even taken a photograph of a grayling on the fin, again just below the surface over deep water, in the back-eddy downstream of a hatch-pool on a river in Berkshire.

The writer of the article on grayling also mentioned barbel. I have not seen it myself but I know a wholly reliable barbel fisher, another professional biologist, who has watched these archetypal bottom-hugging fish feeding from the surface when it has been worth their while. Faced with a continuous stream of floating bread, he tells me, some fish will rise right to the top to take it. They deal with the underslung mouth problem by rolling at the last moment, so that the mouth is uppermost.

Even more improbably – I have written about it elsewhere in this book – I have watched video footage taken by a keeper on the Test, showing a group of eels lying just under the surface like trout, wholly preoccupied with a heavy fall of mayfly spinners. That, it seems to me, is the coup de grace in this debate.

The explanation? I am personally convinced that all fish are opportunistic feeders and that when everything comes together to make ‘abnormal’ behaviour more productive and energy-saving than ‘normal’, they will adopt it. Not always or frequently, but when it pays dividends. Dense hatches of smuts, which might not always repay repeated journeys from bottom to top and back again for each single fly, would clearly be a starting point for such a combination of events. On the other hand the 2lbs 14oz fish, like the fish I photographed in the eddy, was not smutting: it was simply near the surface, over deep water, on the lookout for food exactly like a trout.

Perhaps part of the problem for anglers may be that grayling are so obviously bottom-dwellers, and the received wisdom has so long been that grayling never lie on the fin, that in the main we never expect anything else and so do not look for it. And if we are moved to look for it, either circumstances might not be right to induce grayling to lie high in the water or visibility might be such that, if they are high, the fish cannot be seen.

Either way, in angling, the lesson is the same: ‘always’ and ‘never’ should be given a wide berth.

Barbless Hooks

WHEN, in the late 1970s, John Goddard and I were working on our book The Trout and the Fly, we conducted all manner of experiments. One was to test the efficiency of barbed hooks versus barbless: did we lose more fish with the latter than the former, we wanted to know.

It was the welfare of the fish we had in mind. Though the barbed hooks we used for our flies were tiny – sizes 12 to 18, mainly – they nevertheless, like all barbed hooks, had to be wriggled and teased out. Fish often had to be lifted from the water during the process and the possibility of stress on the trout was further increased.

If we could use barbless hooks without greatly impacting our results, most fish could be set free without being touched. Once beaten they could be brought to the bankside or the wadered leg and the hook could be slipped out with the merest twist of the fingers. The fish would benefit and so, through the sheer convenience of it, would we.

Appropriate barbless hooks were not available so we started removing existing barbs, ourselves. We hooked fish, then gave them every opportunity to escape. We let the line go slack when the fish was in open water, we let it go slack as usual when they jumped, we allowed them to get into weed beds. It made little or no difference to the numbers of fish we banked. We were happy and the fish were happier. We both wrote about it extensively. But for some, old habits die hard.

A TRAWL of tackle shops has confirmed yet again what a hidebound, tradition-driven and often unthinking animal the average angler is. It was almost impossible to find a suitable hook for fly-tying that had no barb. The reason so few shops stock barbless hooks is because so few anglers demand them. And it makes no sense.

It is now decades since I last fished with a fly tied on a barbed hook. Indeed, even when coarse fishing, I almost always fish barbless because the advantages are so obvious and significant.

A barb on a hook serves only two purposes. The first, in coarse fishing, is that it helps to keep a bait on board. The second, in any fishing, is that it gives some anglers peace of mind. The idea that a bait is less likely to have wriggled or fallen off the hook is, of course, comforting to a coarse or sea angler – though the notion is irrelevant to a fly fisherman, who is not using bait. The thought that a hook with a barb on should in theory not be able to come out, can comfort some in the middle of a fight.

It is worth setting against these ideas, some facts. Chief among them – as anyone who habitually fishes barbless knows – is that no more fish are lost from barbless hooks than from barbed. Many will say that fewer fish come adrift.

Anyone in doubt should consider what happens – and can test the principles involved with a short length of line, a hook and a piece of wood into which the hook point has been clicked.

A fish rises to a fly or takes a bait and the angler responds by striking. In an instant the line tightens, exerts its pull on the hook eye and the hook point begins to go home. Alas, it does not always arrive. A barb sticking out from a hook just behind the point creates a wider part of the wire that slows penetration. Sometimes it stops penetration completely and the hook gains the merest purchase.

All sorts of things can then ensue. One is that the fish, held only by the tip of the hook point, comes off instantly – it has ‘been pricked’. Another common occurrence – especially for dry fly anglers, who need to use fine-wire hooks in the interests of lightness – is that as the point slows penetration and the pull of the line on the eye increases, leverage causes the hook bend to open, again enabling the fish to slip free.

There is a third possibility. A barb is not added to a hook, but is cut into it and the spot at which the cut is made naturally represents a weak-point. Too often the result – especially with cheap, fine-wire hooks – is that the great leverage exerted on the point by the pull on the hook’s eye, causes the point to snap clean off. Another lost fish.

With a barbless hook, none of this happens. Without a barb, a hook has no weak point and no wider point to slow penetration. If a barbless hook gains a purchase, the odds are that it will go home, first time.

Once home, it is much less likely to come out than might be imagined. Any angler playing a fish needs to keep a tight line to stay in control – which helps to keep the hook in place. But even if the line is allowed to fall slack it is extremely unusual for a hook to come free. The mere action of a fish swimming means that it tows the line, which exerts enough drag on the hook to keep it secure. In a river, even if a fish stops swimming and the line is allowed to fall slack, the hook stays in place. The reason is that in a river the fish is obliged to face upstream, into the current and the current carries the line downstream behind the fish – again exerting drag on the hook.

There is another, overriding consideration why I not only always fish barbless with a fly but almost always fish barbless when using bait. It is because even the tiniest barb can make a hook difficult to remove and the fish often has to be taken from the water to get the hook out. Any time a fish spends out of the water adds stress for it and, in inexpert hands, there is an added risk in the process of the fish being damaged.

In contrast, a fish taken on a barbless hook can be set free with ease, the hook simply sliding out. Indeed, there is rarely a need for a fish taken on a barbless hook to leave the water at all – a reason why, when trout fishing on most rivers, I not only do not use barbed hooks but do not carry a landing net, either.

It is in spite of all of this that anglers keep on demanding hooks with barbs and why the trade, not unnaturally, keeps on supplying them to the exclusion of pretty well all else.

There are fixes: a barb on a hook can be pressed flat in the vice before fly-tying begins or – caught at the waterside with a shop-bought article – the barb can be pressed down with a pair of small, flat-nosed pliers, a tool that has many other uses besides.

Both actions are the work of a moment, but still that weak spot remains and the odd point snaps off. If only more anglers would recognise the benefits of barbless hooks and would ask for them, the problem – and not the fish – would go away.

Bernard Venables

ASK A NON-ANGILER to name the best-selling angling book of all time and the most likely answer will be Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Ask a fisherman – one over 40, anyway – and the one-word response will be ‘Crabtree’.

It is hard to find a middle-aged angler who does not have Bernard Venables’ marvellous book. In the 20 years to 1970 Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing was almost a compulsory buy. My own copy – yellowing, frayed and dated ‘Christmas, 1952’ in a childish hand – is beside me as I write.

No-one knows how many copies Izaak Walton’s pastoral hymn has sold, though in the 350 years since it appeared it has run to more than 400 editions, printed in dozens of languages. Anglers know that Venables’ paperback story of father showing son how to fish through the angling year – largely through wonderfully executed, cartoon-style strips with informative bubbles – sold hugely. Few know what the true figure was. All knew its impact on them. Its importance, the way it enthralled two generations of young angling minds, was so great that, in later life, Venables became positively revered, the first Izaak Walton since Izaak Walton.

I got to know Bernard quite well. I first met him in the early 1990s when I interviewed him for one of my columns for The Times. Subsequently we found ourselves, quite independently, guests at a fishing dinner in Wales and we jiggled the place-names about so that we could sit together and talk. The next meeting was at a small lunch party, held in a mutual friend’s home, to mark Bernard’s 90th birthday. I met him several times more before he died on April 21, 2001 – and subsequently was invited by Eileen, his wife, to speak at the memorial gathering held to celebrate his life. It was one of the greatest gatherings of anglers – eminent anglers – that can have ever been brought together in one place. I did not write about that, but I did write about his extraordinary burial.

ON MAY DAY, under a cherry tree just breaking into blossom and not a fly-cast from one of the rivers he lived much of his life for, the most-widely known and best-loved angler since Izaak Walton, was laid to rest.

Bernard Venables, creator of Mr Crabtree and author of the extraordinary Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, a work that sold over two million copies and that lit the torch in two generations of young angling minds, was not a religious man and there was not a trace of formal religion in the two events of the day.

The first was a simple, private gathering of family and friends – if it had been public, there would have been thousands there – in a village hall deep in Hampshire. Friends recalled their memories of the man they knew and one read a marvellously crafted, humorous piece that Venables wrote in 1953 about the dangers of leaving groundbait in the vicinity of horses. Later there was the simple interment ceremony conducted on the side of the sloping downland hill in the wind and the rain.

For all that there was no religion in the day, it was a spiritual occasion. Venables had lived his 94-plus years in tune with nature, close to the earth, marvelling at its wonders, secure in his mortality. When he died on April 21, after a mercifully short illness, he was ready and content.

Venables was devoid of pretension. He genuinely wanted to be buried in a cardboard box – he saw his own return to the earth as the landing of just another dust-speck on the turning wheel of time and felt that to use anything else would be pointless. But it was not to be. When he was lowered into the pure, white chalk it was in a more startlingly appropriate way: in a wicker basket made to take his own tiny frame, as light and natural a coffin as one of Old Izaak’s creels.

At the precise moment of his burial the heavens opened and a wind-driven rain riveted down. Someone said ‘typical fishing weather’ and we smiled and nodded before drifting away. A few held back. Someone dropped an old cork float onto Bernard’s creel. Someone else dropped down an artificial mayfly. Yet a third old friend dropped down another artificial fly and a fourth a small slip of wood which, he later said, had long-ago been harvested from the garden of Izaak Walton’s Staffordshire cottage.

A couple of minutes later a blackbird, gripping its swaying cherry branch tightly, burst into full-throated song. It was as if the clouds had parted and the sun had come out.

It is impossible to overstate the impact that Bernard Venables had on angling – and on young minds especially – with Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing. Crabtree was not Venables’ first book or his only book – Venables wrote a shelf-full of books, including one on tanks, one on a journey down the Zambesi and one about the open-boat whalers of the Azores. But Crabtree was his masterpiece.

Crabtree the angler hatched from a highly popular strip cartoon that Venables drew for the Daily Mirror in the years immediately after the war. In 1949 the Mirror decided the strips should be turned into a book. Venables pulled several of the strips together, added some new bits, a few watercolours and some linking text. The resulting marriage – of images so vibrantly crafted to words marvellously honed – proved a soft-backed, 96-page publishing wonder. All it seemed to do was follow a father and son fishing through the year – for pike in winter, for trout in spring, for bream, tench and carp in summer, for perch, roach and rudd in autumn. But it sold in its hundreds, its thousands, its millions, earning its author not an extra penny in the process because the Mirror took the view that he was an employee when he did the work and so all rights were the paper’s own.

There is no doubt that, in his later years, Venables came to view Crabtree with ambivalence. In a real sense he lived his later life struggling to get out of Crabtree’s shadow but whatever he did, the shadow lengthened and followed. Venables had much to feel frustrated about: not least the fact that his high artistic talents – ‘I live and breath for my art’, he once told me, ‘I am hell-driven by it’ – did not receive the recognition that was their due. Venables was a painter of a high order in oils and watercolours, a wonderful carver of wood and sculptor of stone. His work was hung several times in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. His cottage near Salisbury was crammed with the artillery of these inner conflicts: paintings, busts, easels, paints, brushes and inks jostled for space with rods, reels, bags, boxes, books and wellies.

The overriding question Venables leaves behind is as much – he would not like this – about Crabtree as it is about himself. Why did that tiny book with its both timeless and dated, working-class yet oddly classless team of father and son fishing and talking, become the publishing wonder that it was?

Acumen on the part of the Mirror Group obviously played its part. The timing was perfect. After the war, in drab days, long before television or videos or computers, most people were thrown back on their own resources for diversion and the reach and promotional clout of the paper made sure that anyone who might remotely be interested in the book, saw it. Venables’ great skill with brush and pen also played a key role.

But there has to be more, something that accounts for the book’s success with, above all, young boys.

A key feature, I believe, is that for the first time Venables took young minds which to that point had been physically marooned on the bank, down into the water and into the world of their quarry. He showed Crabtree and Peter at one end of the rod, fishing to the barrier of the reflecting surface. He showed the fish at the other end reacting to what the pair did and did not do. So Venables, for the first time, completed the circle: he made fishing come alive in the reader’s own mind, in the process giving each action at one end of the rod a visible consequence at the other. Naturally, also, his fish were great fish – and we knew that if we did what Crabtree and Peter did, whoppers would end up in our nets, too.

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