prawnography

Edward Barder – yes the respected rod-maker – and I have been sending each-other prawnographic emails. There’s feathers and all sorts involved and Edward seems a bit embarrassed, though that hasn’t stopped him so far. Recently I posted him a plain brown envelope with something pretty illicit inside. Edward was both delighted and shocked. Somehow we found out we were both into the same idea. A bit of a fantasy really and with only the slenderest chance of ever making it happen, but we both want to catch a really enormous trout. Not just a big trout. We were talking something that threatens shipping – a true whopper. A hooter of note. A behemoth.

And we both knew how to do it or at least how to get ourselves within a shouting chance. We needed to tie a fly that looks like something big trout eat. So, big trout eat little trout, mice, even birds – a pal once caught a trout with a whole sparrow inside it. But these things cannot be easily imitated with a fly that comes under the ruling “dry fly and nymph” only: a sort of self-imposed angler’s sporting code to stop the likes of me and Edward dragging clockwork mice through darkened pools, this means that the allowable artificial “flies” should imitate the aquatic and airborne stages of insects only. But big trout also eat crayfish. And crayfish are just big shrimps really – in a way. If you squint and look at them through the wrong end of a telescope. And imitations of freshwater shrimp also happen to count as “nymphs” in the rule-book, even though they are crustaceans. The famous Wilthsire river-keeper Frank Sawyer invented his Killer Bug to mimic a shrimp.

So we reckoned there was a loophole here, a chink in the ethical curtains of fly-fishing. Edward and I were going to invent a Killer-Big-Bug, or a Cray-Twin - or something like that.

I started to mess around with pheasant feathers and came up with something pretty groovy. And easy to tie too. Imitations of architecturally complex things like crayfish can get fantastically involved if you’re not careful and I’m for impressionism not realism in fly-tying. I took two identical wing feathers off a cock pheasant (a dead one), stripped the fluff away, nipped off the tip with scissors and was left with two neat, copper-coloured “claws”. These I tied down onto the hook-shank, and then I wrapped a body of dyed-red hare’s fur back to the eye of the hook, where I also tied a tiny lead dumbell for eyes and for weight. Some of the same feather stuck out over the eye of the hook and looked for all the world like a little crayfish paddle. It was a work of genius, obviously.

Edward was aghast. “Have you ever been to sea?” he wrote. “It looks like it judging by your cheeky crayfish pattern. I had something else in mind, a shy little thing. But you’ve clearly taken the whole thing to heart and come up with something that needs a wire tippet and a two handed rod. Good man. Always knew you’d come round to Norfolk ways.” I’ll let you know how we get on.

First published 18th March 2008