underwater fatty

I bought a new toy a while back: the camera the kid throws round the garden, and smashes open a tap with on a TV advert. A bulletproof shirt-pocket digital camera, that you can drop in the sea, or on the beach, or even on the floor: and it’ll keep on working. It’s no Leica image-wise and from above water there’s a lot of press and hope involved, because you can’t see the back of the screen. But I’ve been having fun with it, and in amongst a whole load of stuff on the cutting room floor, have grabbed some OK shots – including this one above of a grandaddy trout that was silly enough to eat my fly.

This fish, which was about two feet long, was sitting side by side in a hole in the river bed alongside a second trout - longer still. The river seemed to slide into their lair, a tight seam of current that somehow moved independently of every other bit of water round about. I must have thrown the fly at them a hundred times before somehow I found it, and the nymph dropped into the groove, needling its way down to this docking-bay gob. I think I saw a flash of white, or something. Anyhow, I struck and it was on. And after the initial holy-shit tussle that you’re going to have with a two-foot trout under the impression it was impregnable I dipped the camera into the river and pressed go.

First published 9th June 2008