Casting about for inspiration

I went fishing with my youngest brother. I haven't fished for nearly 15 years now, and had to hunt around to see if I still had rods. I did, luckily, there was a glass-fibre fly rod that I use to dangle a cork from to tease the cats, and my old telescopic fishing rod I took round Scandinavia. I decided to get that mended and do some spinning.

"No spinning allowed,' said brother, ' this is a purist's water."
What could that mean, I asked?
Fly-fishing.
Oh well, at least I had a fly rod, could I use a little fly-spoon on it?
No, purists fish dry-fly, upstream.
Uh-oh. Although I did have a fly rod, and amazingly, a fly-reel, with even more amazingly some line on it, I was sure I wasn't going to be able to flip a fly across the room, let alone 30 feet upstream in an overgrown and reeded river. I had a week to practice, a week during which the sun shone briefly for no more than two hours on two days, and the wind never dropped below blustery. I practiced dangling corks in the wind to amuse the cats, and resigned myself to busking when the day came.

So, today arrived, almost cloudless and windless, and I arrived beside the river, nearly clueless and useless.



Looks too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, it was. The banks were six feet high, with an electric fence barely a foot away from the precipitous edge. I was able to practice casting, but knew that if I hooked anything more than a minnow, I was going to have to jump into the water to get it into my small fold-away landing net. Purists don't dangle their fish from the rod and swing it up through the air to land in the grass and the cowpats. Fortunately, I didn't catch anything in that pool, and learned that on this stretch of the river, the policy was catch and release. That means letting them go, to those of you without a purist translator plugin to your google toolbar.

My brother had given me a small selection of flies, a mayfly, an emerging mayfly, a mayfly nymph, and, because he thought the fish might be interested in other flies as well, an Olive, and an Adams. "Is it Morticia or Gomez?' I asked, as if it would make a difference. I discovered that I could still thread the line through the tiny eye of the hook and tie a knot, but it took me a bit longer than I remembered in the past, mainly because of all the fumbling around for reading glasses. My brother produced a pair of pliers and crimped closed the barbs in the hooks. Purists don't like using barbed hooks. Damn masochists.



Downstream from this pool, the river turned into a more typical fast-running weeded up river. I longed to send a pair of flies downstream attached to a bubble float as I had been taught to do in Finland, but of course, there was always the risk of the purist-inspector popping up out of the reeds with scuba gear and a waterproof notebook to fine me senseless.



And we weren't the only ones enjoying a day out in the meadows. Despite what people think, swans do not scare the fish away. They do irritate anglers, however, but that just shows how single-minded you have to be if you insist on catching something no matter what it takes. A few years ago I would have fretted and cursed at the interruption, but now I just get the camera out and wait.



Whilst I was blundering through the chest high mass of stinging nettles and other less aggressive plants, I came upon this.



And the air was full of these.



It is almost impossible to film them in flight, they move so quickly and unpredictably. They have four wings, not two.



And they were obviously up to something that day.



This is the reason that we were down there, a Mayfly, here in the last stages of its life, having laid the eggs somewhere and managed to not be eaten by a fish during the process, it will soon die and fall back to the surface of the water, usually to be eaten by a fish. I wonder what Mayflies think of purist fisherman who put the trout back.

Sadly that day there were no fish around. Well, there were some chub lazing under a tree close to where I took the shot of the swans, but the coarse fishing season hasn't started yet. I worked hard all morning, and was finally able to get a fly out into the middle of the stream. I discovered, after one or two back-cast problems, that the electric fence wasn't turned on, which simplified my task of untangling the fly from it each time I let the line droop too far behind me. I lost Morticia or Gomez, I still didn't know which one, to an annoying tree that just wouldn't keep out of my way in that oh-so-big pool, and had already claimed my mayfly.

I moved further down the river, trying to dap a nymph over the edge of a particularly overgrown bank, and had a brief glimpse of a bronze flash as something rushed up, checked it out, and rushed off again, probably laughing.



After another back-cast problem I discovered I was wrong about the electric fence, it was turned on, it had just been in the resting phase the half-dozen other times I had untangled flies from it. Swearing and cursing from the jolt, I flailed my bare arms through a patch of stinging nettles. I found this in amongst the dock leaves that I went to for help.

Later in the day there was a brief hint of luck for both of us in some pools further down the river as something snapped at the flies half a dozen or so times before losing interest, far too quickly for me to strike and hook. A small grayling, my brother thought, and confirmed it in the last few minutes of the dusk by catching one, five inches long. Apart from being too small to take, it was again a coarse fish and out of season. And anyway, purists don't kill the fish they catch, they put them back again. I suppose I accept that now, there are just too many fisherman for the numbers of wild fish in the rivers.

But don't think I didn't enjoy myself. I did. I walked miles along the banks and through the meadows, without having to rush to be somewhere at a specific time. I could once again reach for and clutch the insubstantial strand of a nylon line, and feel the satisfying swish of a rod through the air. The joy of being out in the open air beside a sweet-smelling and un-polluted river more than made up for the lack of fish, I was able to finally get some good shots of the blue dragonflies which had eluded me all of last year, and I had almost forgotten the drudgery of checking emails and deleting masses of spam.



The end of a perfect day