kate moss trout

I saw this trout early one morning on a mountain torrent in the Mackenzie district, South Island, New Zealand ... oh about a fortnight ago now. But I think it saw me first. Like many of the fish in this stream it was lying somewhere pretty obtuse and I was busy looking beyond it to the obvious water. But I saw it in time, feeding just off a fast rip in a run that ought never hold a fish. I ducked down, sat still and watched. It continued shimmying side to side and twice it rose, but to what I couldn't see. Anyway, it was clearly still feeding confidently and so perhaps I hadn't spooked it. I unpeeled the line I'd need to cover it, sent out the false casts over dry rocks beside the river turned the rod twenty degrees left to land my first cast pretty much where I wanted it to go. The trout didn't even wait for the dry hopper to drift over it. It just turned away and fekked off, like I'd insulted it or smelt bad or something. I remembered Mambo's exclamation to me over the phone after his trip here a month or two earlier: "some of those fish have got wing mirrors." Some have indeed. 

I stood up, wound in and got ready to walk upriver. But then I saw the fish pressed hard into a hollow on the far bank, beyond the rip and half hidden under a strand of roots trailing across the water. It seemed sure of itself over there, like it couldn't see me (because of the roots) and so I couldn't see it, like a kid hiding behind a curtain, shoes sticking out at the bottom. I set down my rucksack and pulled out a camera and took a couple of shots looking across the stream: you'll know the shots I mean. Shots where you can see the fish clearly, but then when you look at the picture it's like there's nothing there. 

So I pulled out my little underwater cam and decided to see how close I could get. I pushed it under and just started pulling the trigger, edging closer with every shot. The trout never moved. Not even when I had the camera in its face, moving side to side and up and down, hoping that one or two of the shots I was taking would have the fish in the middle and in focus. And all the while this Kate Moss of the trout world let me snap her again and again. How can a fish be so bonkers spooky as to disappear when a dry fly lands six feet upstream of it and so chilled when disembodied arms and legs advance towards it across the river, waving a silver box that beeps? I was happier to get the pictures than ever I would have been to catch the fish. It is rare indeed to get a trout like that, head on, in the wild and not attached to a fishing line.

Shame indeed then when I discovered later back in the camper that somehow the silly little machine had re-set itself to take diddy images on the lowest mb setting. Drat and double drat.

Fish - a Japanese Obsession!

Our film about Japan's obsessive relationship with fish - the one we filmed last October and November - at last went out on BBC4 last Monday 23rd March. 

It's a relief to have it finished. A relief too that it went down well: "a treasure house of wonders" said the Independent. I suppose Japan was always going to be that. But lots of "picks of the day" and good ratings too, apparently. The film was directed and filmed by Gavin Searle, edited by Mark Atkins and flew under the Keo Films banner.

But the real star, quite obviously, was Shacho, "the boss". Fermented sushi king and Japan's answer to Roger Melly. If you didn't catch the show it's worth the watch for Shacho alone. It is still available to watch in the UK on bbc iplayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00jdw5k/Fish!_A_Japanese_Obsession/

tenkara - a great escape

It is impossible to travel without expectation, Sometimes it is good to have those expectations confounded or exceeded. Other times it is good to have them met. I came to Japan for many reasons, but mostly to find the real place behind the tired cliches. But the moment I caught that amago, on a tenkara rod, in a clear mountain stream down to its autumn bones - that was when I touched Japan, or at least my expectation of its essence. I’m sure we’ll go on to find many other faces of Japanese-ness, but for me that amago moment was special.

Night in Kyoto. Dismal room. Looking out over fifteen air-conditioning units, eyeless balconies, rat chewed pipes. A thin strip of blue sky above bleeds down to night.

Fujioka San picked us up early. Goodbye to air-con-view. It was a long drive, along motorway at first, meeting up with one of Fujioka’s fishing buddies at a motorway toll station. Finally a twisting mountain road, the forested slopes closing in. A sense of countryside, wildness. The developed landscape - any flat ground - is an ugly one. Buildings are functional and grey. There is much concrete and plastic. And everything is compressed, busy. Colours come mostly from plastic signs - which are prolific. There is little open space - in the sense that I am used to - anywhere. Even the flat ground either side of the river is divided up into squashed geometric parcels - rice fields, orchards, vegetable gardens. And in between concreted space everywhere: hard standing yards, car parks. But look up and the mountain side are unbroken forest. Mist rolls over wilderness only yards away from all this compressed utility.

We drove further. The bailiff had not left my permit at the door to the co-op hut like he said he would. We’d have to fish without it.

We pass a dam drawn down to a level that has left a hundred yard deep ring of apocalyptic barrenness all around. A strip of dried, caked earth, dead trees, old walls. And on again until we were on a single-track road through trees, pushing up into a steep gorge-like valley. We stopped by a pull-in just short of a bridge over the river. Down to its autumn bones. Narrow enough to jump over. A cascade through boulders. In winter torrents it would be a different, violent thing. But now the first few fallen leaves of autumn are floating from pool to pool, hanging briefly over the cascades before flowing on.

Tenkara is about simplicity - so Fujioka San explains. it originated with professional fishermen over three centuries ago - an efficient, uncomplicated way of getting fish to sell. I asked if there were any professionals left - perhaps a few. Subsistence small-holders who might use it as part of their living.

The subtleties of the technique differ from prefecture to prefecture and there are different fly patterns too. Fujioka San would take me through all of these back at the inn that evening, a sake fuelled fly nerd-in. By the river he explained that there are three parts to tenkara fishing: giving the fly life; using the wrist to create a snappy cast; and keeping only the tippet on the water. In practice it is much like the way I’d fish any mountain torrent - the Lyn or La Cere, allowing the fly to dance across the surface, animating it, or pausing it over good lies.

I spook a small darting grey shadow at the first pool. The river ought to hold countless fish. But they are either few or they are spooky and difficult to see. The tenkara rod is soft, but it is also pleasantly elemental. Nothing but the pole and the string! Unsurprisingly, the simplicity of the style allows me to concentrate on the fishing itself.

An amago breaches the water after my fly. There is no fight to speak of. It is far too small for that, but even so I have touched Japan at last. The fish flicks across the surface. Fujioka San whoops and laughs with delight - and probably relief. Gavin is filming something else, so the poor fish, Fujioka San and me have to go through our routine one more time. But I keep the fish underwater and send it home quickly. It is the jewell I imagined it might be. Tiny. A bonsai trout. I wouldn’t want it any bigger. The body is barred with finger-width stripes and over this orange spots. There is something oriental about it. The delicate greens and blues like a soft zen watercolour, the orange the same flaming colour as the Japanese maple leaf as it turns in autumn.

What Fujioka San and his mates have let me in on here is their own riff on the pastoral whimsy that fishermen the world over love to swim in - with their cane rods and “things ain’t what they used to be.” It is great to find it here too. It is pastoral, nostalgic. Even though Fujioka San and his mates are reluctant to admit it. They insist that they enjoy tenkara only because it is so simple. But simple is not so simple. Least of all in Japan!. As an idea it resonates with a yearning to look backwards. The sake ceramics, the fly boxes arranged with ancient patterns derived from particular prefectures, the archaic rod (albeit a graphite version) the simple inn whose ancient building was rescued from the flooded reservoir valley, our bathing ceremony, the long evening of dining round an open fire - all this is an escape from the busy, frenetic, complicated Japan just down the road. And a great escape it is too.

First published 3rd December 2008

back from Japan

How I missed toast, porridge, builder’s tea!

We went to Japan on October 4th and I came back November 16th, leaving Gavin, the film producer out there, sunning himself in Okinawa. He may be there still for all I know. But six weeks is a long time. Long enough for me.

We went to Japan to make a film for the BBC, the film an attempt to unlock an apparently impenetrable culture and psyche through the ... metaphor I suppose ... of fish. Japan is a culture obsessed by fish and fishing. In many ways, as we found out, it is a culture defined by fish. There are towns in Japan where one fish dominates, literally dominates the identity of the place. In Niigita drain covers have koi carp on them. There are koi shaped underpasses. Concrete koi in gardens. Koi on taxis, on shop-fronts. Koi everywhere.

First published 25th November 2008

In Taiji it is whales (not a fish obviously).

In Shiminoseki it is fugu.

The fish of Tokyo is, I reckon, the bluefin tuna.

Could we, by exploring, the stories of these iconic fish of Japan get to know the place more fully?

I think we did. We didn’t go there to romanticise the place or airbrush over some of the ways Japan exploits the oceans - we didn’t ignore the plight of bluefin or whales. But we went to get past the cliched pre-conceptions of the place and to understand. To paint an interesting, lively portrait of a nation through its collective mania for all things fishy. Quite how that got me para-gliding in a panda suit I’ll never know, but it did.

The film, or maybe even films (we got so much good footage) will be on BBC4 in the New Year. Meanwhile I may fill a few blog entries with my diary notes from six weeks in the land of runny, cold seaweed for breakfast.

wow i caught one ... three actually

Have you ever fished for salmon from high above the pool and seen quite how many times your fly gets a look that at water level you would have no idea of? I was on the Coquet for a few days this August and was lucky enough to be allowed to fish a very special pool, one which holds fish in three or four lies and which you have to fish from behind an ancient wall high above the water. I was on holiday with the kids and so snuck out to fish for only an hour or so each day. And the first time I did I had no expectation at all of actually catching anything. The river was high and falling so I should have been more optimistic ... but come on, this was salmon I was after. I learnt to leave expectation at the door long ago. The cast was a tricky one. I was so high above the water that the fly jet-skated across the pool as the belly of the cast dropped to the surface. So to get a steady swing I had to throw lots of slack into the cast and point the rod downwards. A nice fish turned under my fly after only a few minutes. I would not have seen it if I hadn’t had an osprey’s view: it didn’t break or even disturb the surface. But I knew it was there now and I knew it was lively. I backed up one pace, and changed down to a really small silvery double. Two more casts and nothing. But the third I was sure would swing over the same spot. Up came the salmon. Rising like a trout intercepting a nymph it took the fly and dropped straight back down without turning. I counted to two and hooked it in the top of the jaw. Getting down the wall to water level was not easy. Nor was wrestling the salmon back upriver away from the fall at the pool’s tail.  Not perhaps the silverest of fish but, now that I think about it, my first ever English salmon. Thank you Coquet. For that and two more delivered just the same way a few days later: fish that gave themselves away but only took on the third or fourth change of fly. Fish that I’d never have seen from down on the river bank. If only we knew the rest of the time. If only ...

First published 7th September 2008

urban(e) fatty

... and that’s just the fish.

It’s been a long time since I last blogged on – but that’s OK cos no-one’s reading this anyway - since when, and largely the reason for my silence, I have died of a surfeit of fishing. Either of that or the inguinal hernia (don’t ask) op that pinned me to me bed for a week and made me feel like I had died. The worst part of being cut up and stabbed by doctors is that you can’t laugh afterwards. Everything is painful: for a few days my willy was numb, I couldn’t tell when I needed a piss and I feared greatly needing a dump. But that was all by the by compared with a giggle. Giggling, to say nothing of actual laughter, was like the Spanish Inquisition - a thousand jabbing saw-like blades. So much so that when I wrote to Jim Babb to tell him of my plight and got his typically witty email back, I had to stop reading it lest I tore my insides back open and died in howls of agonised hysterics.

All of which has nothing to do with the fatty pictured above, but this beauty (not the ugly bastard holding it) was one highlight of my trouty season so far, the memory of which took me through the pain. Zim is posing it for a grip and grin, but I caught the fish in a reach of an urban stream more or less exactly between a bus-stop and a haulage contractor’s works depot (though visible from neither). I could of course be more specific and tell you where, but then I’d (as they say) have to kill you. The point isn’t exactly where, so much as generally where – in a very urban stream, and this fish was not the biggest we saw, nor the biggest we caught. How can so many fab fish thrive in an urban setting? Many reasons, I guess, and some of them genuinely encouraging - I like to buck the default fisherman’s lament for time gone by and find, in the words of Ian Drury “reasons to be cheerful”: the biggest must be that urban water is getting cleaner. This stream is heaving with insects as much as it is heaving with tin cans and tyres. (And of course few people wash sheep in pyrethroids near town centres, or plough fields the wrong way in December). The second may be that no-one knows they are there. The most universal response to the sight of us fishing this river (and others like it) is disbelief that there is anything worth catching. Left to their own devices, largely ignored by people and cormorants (too busy for them) and with clean enough water, these fish have found something of a sanctuary in the culverts and race-ways of the town centre.

But our ignorance of their existence is a two-edge sword of course, and on balance it is better to protect through knowledge. it is harder for someone to pollute a stream that is cherished and if they do, the pressure is on: witness the Wandle.

All of which means the Wild Trout Trust’s next big project: “trout in the town” is a great initiative. If we can have wild trout in out town centres we can have them anywhere. The tide is turning methinks (mehopes).

First published July 29th 2008

the bass are in

We’re having the pointing on our chimney done by Paul. Or we were. He came round this morning and found not a lot holding it together. So now we’re having our chimney rebuilt by Paul. Oh well. There was good news too. Paul’s into sea-fishing and we usually compare notes when he’s over. In the winter there had been little good news – he was struggling to catch and even then only codling. But Paul said things had been good lately, so I pressed him for details. He said he’d had a load of smoothhound – over a dozen in one session round at Salthouse – though they had moved off recently. Now he was catching bass. My ears pricked up. Where? Off the beach a few miles from my back door, pretty much where I walk the dog every day. I’d been busy waiting for birds and seen nothing. But the bass were there, Paul assured me. Not far off. A flick of a cast he said. In the channels. The beach he was talking about shelves slowly, but there are a few ridges in the sand, enough to create channels and a line of breakers twenty or thirty yards out on the high tide, with flatter water close in. I wasn’t going to wait. With high tide at six and my email down yet again, I took the dog out for the walk she’d waited patiently all day for – only I had rod and waders this time. Paul wasn’t there, though I thought I might bump into him. I had the beach to myself. I messed around with my camera, taking self-timer shots resting it on my tackle bag. I threw a hundred plus casts at the line of breakers, walking slowly up and back down as I did so. And on about the 99th I had a take. A bass (not big, but a bass) jagged the line all the way in, only to fall off at my feet, tumbled end over end in a large wave. But the bass are in. And – as the man said – I’ll be back.

First published 16th June 2008

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

did i blink and miss it?

This could just be the fisherman’s arrow of time, the conviction that things must change from better to worse, but I reckon that I’ve asked this question every June for the last few years: “did I blink and miss it?” Mayfly I mean. Maybe the condensation of memory has stuffed all my yesterday mayfly days into one compressed folder and the uncompressed reality of now is always going to be a stretched out version of how I think things ought to be. Now is full of wet days and windy days, with the odd perfect one between. Yesterday is all perfect. But then again ... I just can’t think of too many of those yesterdays lately: lately seems to have been not quite there for one reason or another. And those steamy, still afternoons, plagued by river locusts and punctuated by the gorging snouts of fat trout – a long way off . I don’t know. It’s not as though I haven’t caught anything. It’s not even as though it hasn’t been as much fun as ever. And I’ve generally thought that I’d shut my todger in a fridge door sooner than start on the things aren’t as good as they used to be road to oblivion and flat caps. But ...”did I blink and miss it? Or what?”

First published 9th June 2008

usk-ulicious

Last week I went over to Wales, invited by the National Parks Authority to help launch some new fishing guidebooks they’ve had published. I hadn’t fished on the Usk for years, and fancied the excuse to return. I arranged a few hours pre-launch on the Gliffaes hotel top beat – one of my favourite bits of water anywhere. The beat may only be a few hundred yards long, but the river here is a trick-of-the-eye staircase of water – several rivers in one – and in spring it can keep you absorbed for a day. I particularly like fishing on the Usk in spring. There’s no need to hurry. Nothing happens before eleven. And it’s all over by four. The means you can down a monster breakfast – on this morning it was the finest of all, a white-bread bacon sarnie and a mug of tea from a roadside van in a parking bay somewhere on the A40 – skip lunch, and be off the river by tea-time, which at Gliffaes means a Bacchanalian feast of cake. The beat was mine for the day, so I felt in even less of a hurry, knowing that the river would be “coming on” just as I got to it. The sun was shining. A little warmth was pushing into the air as I strolled across the riverside meadow that slopes down to the edge of the Usk. But as I did so I noticed a hat popping up and down over the edge of the bank half way up my beat, as though someone was kneeling down there and performing unnatural acts with sheep. The hat – it turned out – belonged to some old gaffer in enormous Ocean waders, with a piece of string round his neck who was in fact trying and failing to biff a tiny trout on the head. The trout flicked feebly around the bank, while the blows rained down inaccurately around it. I let him carry on for a bit, then asked: “So you’re fishing this beat today?” He looked up, startled and said, “Ah, well, yes. Me and my fwend are fishing beats two and three.” “And this is beat one isn’t it?.” “Ah, yes. Well ... Er... I was just fishing it till you got here.” Fantastic. I’m going to have to remember that one. What a justification for just about any nefarious activity, from poaching upwards .... “I was just ... driving your Porsche / shagging your wife / using your money ... till you got here.” Brilliant.

As was the fishing, by the way.

First published 22nd April 2008

green turtle cay

Just home from what has become the sun-baked plateau on my idea of heaven – the town flats at Green Turtle Cay. These are the flats – swum over by the bonefish – that reconfigured my hard-drive when I first fished them back in ... well a few years ago. Then, sandwiched as my few days were between two hurricanes, and shone down upon at midnight by a full moon, I put the extra-terrestrial spookiness of the gigantic bonefish I saw, and my all-round skunking, down to lunar cycles and unwinding barometers. I liked to think that if I went back and got my timing right I’d slay them. Went back I did. Last year. At the tail end of my attempts to make my own film – the subject of which was a quest for a giant bonefish – you know, double figure – I refugeed my way to Green Turtle Cay, having lost my camera buddy Matt to real work back in London. I fished it for a few days and on the third hooked into the one bonefish of my time there. It took me thirty minutes to land and its snout crept over my ten-pound duck-tape mark by an inch or two: it was in fact, bloody huge. It wasn’t however any bigger than a dozen or more other fish I’d seen on each tide. The bones there are just pigs. Great big, very smart pigs. You can walk to the flats so they get fished over a lot. There’s never a tide without someone there teaching the bones the difference between right and wrong. Consequently those fish spook at the full menu of things that spook a bonefish, only with a sensitivity factor of maximum. The shadow of the line, a heavy set down, the plink of the fly – and most off all at the fly itself. It works like this. You see an enormous bone swimming right at you. You’re on the line between turtle grass and white sand, so the bonefish is dark and as it meanders from black grass over to white sand it sticks out like a dog’s willy. You have plenty of time to get wired and nervy. You measure out your cast, watching the fish all the while, trying to plot a course. You lay the line down softly. The fly hits the deck. The bonefish keeps on coming. Everything is in place. When the pig is four feet away you scud that fly a few inches, enough to make most bones spring all kitten-like onto the back of it. This one though just turns round and swims the other way. Or worse, it skirts the fly, swims closer to check out who cast it and then swims away. This happens time after time. Once in low light I saw the spectral shape of a ridiculously big fish, mid-teleport between one dimension and the next ... mid “beam me up” in its vaporous not quite thereness. I lengthened my cast to throw a fly a yard or two ahead of it into skinny water, and that the fish simply unzipped the ocean. I hadn’t even landed the line.

So you’ll get why I’m chuffed as a dog with two bones to have landed about ten for my week this last trip, including three off the last tide. I took smaller flies: size eights, tied with small, black bead-chain eyes and sandy rabbit-fur. I took lighter line, a lighter rod. And I got the hang of a strip that kept the bonefish coming, at least as much as it turned them away – which was an improvement. And I took a day out with Rickie Sawyer, who is one of the best guides you could ever fish with – a top bloke, patient and entertaining. With Rickie I landed a fish of 11lbs.

Not bad for a family hol in which I’d promised to – and in fact did – spend most of my time with the kids.

First published 13th April 2008

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

pikey

Until the last few weeks it hadn’t been a good pike season. The Fenland streams I like to haunt through winter months - in places I consider absolute bankers - gave up nothing. They seemed further away each time I went to them. Stolen afternoons began to lose their appeal. I blamed my lack of success on the usual angler's menu of excuses: the drainage board ruining everything with pointless dredgings; too many cormorants; too many other people fishing the same spots.

Until the last few weeks it hadn’t been a good pike season. The Fenland streams I like to haunt through winter months - in places I consider absolute bankers - gave up nothing. They seemed further away each time I went to them. Stolen afternoons began to lose their appeal. I blamed my lack of success on the usual angler's menu of excuses: the drainage board ruining everything with pointless dredgings; too many cormorants; too many other people fishing the same spots.

But we learn things and forget them, don’t we? I'd forgotten how I struggled in previous years, how my salao period was nothing unusual. And I'd forgotten about the most fundamental thing of all: temperature. The simple law of piking – now I’ve remembered it, is this: if it’s cold and getting colder – stay in bed; if it's already cold and staying cold, get up if you must, you might catch something; but if it’s been cold, and it’s warming up, go now! With pike surely it’s all about metabolism, how it slows down, adjusts and then speeds up again. You want to pick those speeding-up days if you can.

Last Sunday was a speeding-up day. I knew when I woke up, heard birds chirrupping, listened to worried radio headlines about an even earlier spring and felt the unseasonable warmth. I knew because I’d enjoyed a few other days like this in the last few weeks and caught pike a plenty from stretches of river that had been “empty” a month earlier. I'd caught enough, frankly, but I suggested to Vicky a picnic by the river: “It would be great for Iona to catch a pike.” My nine-year old daughter shows a glimmering spark of her dad’s obsession and I reckoned a toothy croc from the Fens would transfix her. There’s something about pike that kids just love – the latent, but actually harmless (unless you’re a little fish) menace of the things, like monsters under the bed and wicked witches.

We took our sandwiches to Pentney – the ruined portico of a once-grand abbey, alongside a farm-house and a barn built with the same stones. It’s a wild and open place of rooks, barn-owls and hares and it is as quiet there, when the wind sweeps away the sound of the quarrying, as anywhere on the Fens. I once followed a mother otter and two cubs for hundreds of yards upstream to this spot and at times I was within ten feet of them. The river swings through two right-angled turns here, and swallows itself under an ancient bridge. The pike lie in a reed-fringed canal upstream. Iona asked if she could use the trout rod I gave her last year, and when I explained that the fish we were after would chew that rod up for breakfast her eyes widened. “Will they pull me in?” she asked. “They will if I let go of you.”

A wet pike fly is difficult to cast – so I did the casting. We moved downstream, me aiming as close to the reeds on the far bank as I could and then handing the rod to Iona, who pulled the fly back in, making it twitch like an injured fish. We hop-scotched our way down the bank, heading for lunch at the fence-post on the far corner. Half-way there a pike hit the fly. Gaping jaws appeared out of the gloomy water and the sparkling fairy vanished. “Oh my God. It’s huge. It’s massive!” Iona shouted as the fish turned a green, reptilean back across the surface and lunged away. I held her round the waist, waited till she was steady, then told her she was on her own and let go. The pike pulled one way, Iona the other. Teeth gnashed, water foamed, the pike playing its part just perfectly. The wicked witch of the Fens had cast its spell!

First published 25th February 2008

feeling a bit duckflyish

I first met Tom Doc six, maybe seven years ago. I was standing on the end of a concrete jetty in a bay at the nothern end of Lough Corrib, on Ireland’s west coast. It was late March. The trout season hadn’t even started back home in East Anglia where trees were still bare and easterlies straffed the flatlands. Tom was wearing a light sweater with more than a few flies hooked through the wool. It might have been his fly box. “They’re taking this thin one at the mo,” he said. “And last week they were on this here, a Connemara Black.” He pulled the fly out of the sweater snagging a loop of grey wool behind it. “I had sixteen in a day a week ago last Wednesday, when I had the lough to myself, though it’s toughened up a bit since then.”

The Connemara is just a skinny black thing, with a black cockerel-feather wound round the head and a touch of blue jay at the throat. It’s a popular fly all over Ireland and will catch trout, salmon and sea trout. But tied small it looks exactly like a hatching duckfly. And the duckfly was why I was there. It’s a black midge – just one of a massive family of flies, the Chironomidae or buzzers as fishermen call them. The type that don’t bite. Every pond and puddle will have its buzzers. But the duckfly – because they populate those balmy west-coast Irish loughs, hatch early in the year, long before anything else really gets going. On a still, warm day they’ll come off in such numbers that the columns they form as they gather to mate in the evening look like plumes of smoke rising over every headland and island on the lough, like so many hundreds of bonfires. Smoke signals to a just-out-of-hibernation fly fisher with a bad case of the shack nasties.

Fishing the duckfly hatch into the fading light of a March evening can be surreal. The light turns blue and the air and water become seemless at the edge of sight. The temperature drops and soon you can see your breath. But out there in that orb of blue the trout just keep on rising. Sometimes one-off concentric rings, when you’ll throw your fly in a hurry to the same spot hoping the fish is still there. Or sometimes the trout will come swimming up on a line of duckfly along the edge of a ripple, the dark nose of the fish slapping down again and again, each rise finished off with a flourishing wiggle of the tail. Then, with more deliberation you’ll lay the cast out ahead of the fish and wait. As often as not they’ll take a natural within inches of your fly and move on. But when they do take – God, it’s addictive. A fat Corrib trout will spin and fire-cracker through that blue universe.

Tom Doc is a fishing guide and he also owns – and farms – an island at that northern end of the lough. An island round which trout rise to duckfly every March. When he’s not fighting a losing battle with the bracken on the island Tom’s on the lough after those fish, with or without clients. He doesn’t need the excuse of a paid day to go fishing. He’s as mad for it as the rest of us. I haven’t seen Tom for a year or two now, but I feel due another appointment with him and the duckfly of March.

First published 14th February 2008