keeping the faith

I drove over to the Towy last week to chase sea trout again with an old friend - Steffan Jones. And now I think about it, the last time I fished with him was the last time I fished for sewin in Wales, too long ago at eight or nine years. Neither of us can remember exactly when, though it must have been in that order because the night was made legend by a fly Steff had recently tied called the Millennium Blue.

Back then Steff had peroxide hair and nose studs and was the enfant terrible of the valleys. He was also distraught. At the exact moment we met he had just lost a huge salmon from a dark corner of the Teifi and doubted he'd ever get the chance at such a fish again. He'd hooked it on this pattern the Millennium Blue. "Bloody brilliant fly," he said in that soft Welsh lilt. He gave me one. It caught a good sewin a few hours later and the far bank a few minutes after that and was gone. The following night as I sat and chatted with Richard and Jim Babb waiting for dark to fall, I spotted a fly wrapped around barbed wire. "Hey. It's the Millennium Blue!" Richard was at it like a hare. "My turn!" It caught Richard two fish on an otherwise fishless night and became immortalised by Jim in a story of the same name.

Back then Steff was an obsessive sewin angler, about nineteen years old, full of theories. He was iconoclastic. He enjoyed breaking the rules, defying ancient doctrine. He was - as much anyone could ever be - a punk sewin angler. Nearly a decade on Steff has been through university, come out the other side and put on a veneer of ... what? I dunno exactly, because words like respectability or maturity would still be wrong, implying that neither existed before - which they did in their own way - or that the older Steff is more sedate. The Steff who, about an hour ago, shouted down the phone to me: "Sleep is for losers!" is not sedate. He has softened a little that's all. He's trying to make a living.

Steff arrives at the Abercothi Lodge a short while after I've woken from my derided afternoon nap. I'm sorting kit at the back of my car when he rolls into the courtyard in a battered silver Daihatsu, dents in the wing, a half-flat rear tyre. He must notice me looking too long at his motor because he gets out and says, "Now that's a fishing wagon." He's right. It is. Inside the rear seats are folded flat and are buried under a pile of waders, rods, coats and boxes. Steff probably lives out of this thing in the summer. We convoy to the pub - I'm never going to fit in his car and he's never going to tansfer all his gear into mine - to meet Jamie, the keeper of the Golden Grove beats on the Towy. Jamie is waiting outside with a pint when we arrive. He and Steff are old mates, both of that younger generation of sea trout anglers passionate about this peculiarly Welsh heritage, both rewriting it. Steff as guide, Jamie as keeper, they both might just have their dream jobs too. We eat a too leisurely supper and realise as it ends that it is getting dark quickly. By the time we arrive at The Dragon's Back it is too dark to see the shape of the tree the pool is named after. The water is flat and glassy. An apparently featureless run. Only it isn't. It looks as if there is no flow. Only there is. Steff keenly describes these crypt-black expanses of mirror calm, all buried in night and the shadows of trees, as if he was stroking his hands along the contours of the riverbed. It strikes me then that sewin angling in the black of night is as much about the imagination as anything. Seeing the fly out there swimming through the contours of pool and current, imagining at every cast that the fish is there ready to be teased, provoked, tricked into taking, just as if I could see it, as if I was fishing to a salmon or trout or pike there in front of me. In that sense it is also about belief - about faith in the thought that the fish are "there" - not just in the abstract of "there in the river" but in the particular "there in front of this cast".

As we set up I spend a few minutes messing around with long exposures on my camera. I've missed the dusk, but the moon is up and bright - too bright. Cows are lying on the dew-soaked field. I grab a picture at 15 seconds shutter speed. And it works. The spectral silhouettes of cows ghost under the cold, burning moon. I ask Steff and Jamie to hold still, but a sewin jumps in the last few seconds of the exposure and they both look up in unison and blur the shot. So I take a picture with a flash before remembering myself. "To be honest Charles," says Steff. "It doesn't make a blind bit of difference. The times I've used flash, torches, the works, and caught fish right after. It doesn't make a blind bit of difference." Still iconoclastic then.

And then as we fish - I have gone in first and I'm working the pool ahead of Jamie and Steff, working in silence, working quietly - the two of them are chatting away like they're either end of a noisy pub, their voices echoing off the trees and carrying easily through the night. Later Steff comes up behind me to shepherd me down the pool and he doesn't stop talking then, or reduce his volume. I whisper replies. Steff is much more concerned about whether my fly is reaching the far bank, whether I'm putting that right mend in the line to bring the fly down under those trees: "So you can imagine it dropping with the mend and then just lifting up off the bottom as you start the retrieve. Cast square in this water, Charles. Yes. That's it. I like the look of that cast. Get ready."

The sewin crash through the night - heavy, fat explosions of stroppy, territorial fish - just so we know they are there. And yet I still have trouble fighting the mechanics of it. In Steff's mind with a fish there under every cast, the mechanics never get a foothold. It's all target and imagination - luring, tempting. For me, within a few casts it is mechanical. I can't keep the imagination or the faith alive. I don't really ever believe I'm going to get one.

And then I do. For three heart-stopping seconds at least. The line pulls sharply tight. The rod jabs down. A flash of white splits the dark. And then as I lift the rod into the tension - gone! "Oh bugger," says Steff. " It took on the dangle. Always a bastard when they do that."

But now I am alive again, alive to the possibility that I might actually catch a fish. Alive to the faith. I fish the rest of the run with more of all of those things that Steff has as a matter of default, that I only have when I can see what is going on. To no avail. Nothing else takes. Jamie leaves as we near the end. It is now one in the morning. I'm desperate for a piss and I'm cold. We climb out and prepare to fish the run again. But already time is running out. Stefan says that dawn is closing down on us. We fish more hurriedly this time, and though I've put on a sweater and a coat, somehow I'm colder. At least the moon is down now. It is much darker.

"I'm in!" Steph hooks one behind me. Somehow it seems as if the atmosphere changed even before had I heard him say it, before the thunderclap of a splash broke the night, before Steff said, "Oh bugger!" Now he had pricked and dropped one. Things were at least hopeful in amongst the minor disasters. Finally, with less time than we'd have liked, we head down to the next pool below us, the best pool on the river according to Steff, to "the Whistle": a huge corner-cauldron, inky black, swathed in a dense mist - a sewin wormhole.

I stepped down the bank into nothing again, faithless again, mechanical again. Steph went upstream. I fished in silence. A silence I realised I'd missed amongst all chatter.

The moon is gone now and with it the spectral blue light that cloaked the river for the first few hours. The sky is running the palest blue in the east. Last night another rod fished on until dawn and caught two fish as the birds began to twitter. They are still quiet now. A deep, foggy quiet broken only by the occasional hollow smash of sea trout breaking the surface. Finally as the dawn lifts a fish jabs my line. It wakes me up. I had drifted thoughtlessly into an achingly slow retrieve, the fly had dropped through the water and was deep on the hang. Now, with renewed faith I wanted to try the run again to be less perfunctory, to give it more belief. I was just asking Steff - he was back on the bank of fixing his line - if this would be worthwhile, when my line jabbed again, and this time the fish held.

"I'm in! .... Shit! It's a small one."

"Hey, it's a fish!"

The little sea trout came bouncing towards me: a fish of about a pound. I reached to unhook it and the fish felt warm-blooded, like it was swimming in tepid soup. It flicked around like a crazy thing in the torchlight and finally, just as I was thinking it might look like the breakfast, it flicked away back to its warm womb. Shit I was cold. The birds were singing now. A crow cried hard from the tree opposite, a crude rebuke or laugh. A little owl tewit-tewood from the heart of the word. I rose out of the river onto the dewy bank, my body feeling weirdly heavy after five hours of moon-walking. I took pictures of Steff fishing in the half light, but he was already talking about "tonight" in the future tense.

"We'll get some tonight," he said.

We did. The forecasters were wrong. The night predicted to bring plunging cold temperatures brought instead a light blanket of cloud, which drew over the end of the fetid, hot day, to lock in all the heat that had vanished into clear space the night before. The moon, tamed by this thin cover, did not burn so fiercely. There were no shadows. And the tail of the Whistle was buried in darkness anyway - that thick wood soaking up the light, emitting black faith. And with it I kept the black faith too. And I caught three fat sewin. Amen.