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.
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
