Kitabı oku: «On Fishing», sayfa 2

Which Fly, When

THE flies I use now are very different from the flies I used when I first started out. Indeed, they are unrecognisable from those early patterns. There are also far fewer of them.

I was idly musing on this one day when I realised that my entire fly-fishing career could be plotted through this transition: through my choice of flies as an out-and-out beginner, to those I tied in the middle years, to the sparse collection in which I place all hope, now. Also, I realised, something else could be plotted: not just evolving choices of flies and ways of fishing them, but changes in fishing philosophy and even ultimate goals. Many others will be able to do likewise, for themselves.

In my case, frustration was the catalyst.

ALTHOUGH I had been an angler since childhood, I did not take up fly fishing until I was in my twenties – and did not take it up seriously until I reached my thirties. As a consequence, I found myself in much the same position as others who discover this wonderful activity at the time of life when they are at their busiest.

Life was so hectic that all time for fly fishing (though, naturally, not all time for gardening, washing up, interior decorating, exterior decorating, undertaking minor structural repairs, taking toddlers for walks, helping with the shopping and the school run and earning a living – there seems always time aplenty available for these other delights) had to be squeezed in. Whenever I went fishing, which was infrequently, I found myself beside some huge, intimidating lake, not knowing where to start and relying on shop-bought flies that I knew nothing about.

Naturally, my results reflected this. Most outings ended in disappointment. I would blank, or catch a small one, or miss two offers.

Then, eventually, it dawned. If I wanted better results I could only achieve them on the basis of greater skill, resulting from a better understanding of the business I was about. Only by submitting to that austere, top-hatted and frock-coated taskmaster Effort, I realised, could I hope to capitalise fully on my outings when they came.

And so I decided to stop my mechanistic, chuck-it-out, pull-it-back-and-hope approach. I did not like the drag and dead weight of sinking lines. I did not enjoy stripping lures. I did not know why fancy flies were taken or which to use when, where or how. I did know, though, that to survive a trout had to eat; that it ate flies and bugs; that it could only eat the flies and bugs available to it at a given time of day at a given time of year; and I knew, too, that if I could discover something about these bugs and how they might be imitated, I could improve my chances on the basis of thought and logic rather than on lucky dip and chance. I resolved, from that point on, to concentrate wholly on fishing artificial flies that imitated the real flies that trout regularly consume.

And so, as I recounted fully in The Pursuit of Stillwater Trout, I began to autopsy my own fish and to seek out the results of autopsies conducted by others. Then I constructed a small aquarium and stocked it with the kinds of insects I was finding inside fish: that is, with the kinds of insects that I knew for sure, trout ate.

It was as though the road to Damascus had become floodlit. Now I could see close-up not only what important nymphs and bugs looked like but how they moved, lived and hatched. I saw how pathetic as imitations the shop-bought articles were and what sensible representations would need to look like. I saw, as well, how those representations needed be moved on the end of my line: it was, of course, in the way the naturals themselves moved in my aquarium. In other words I began, for the first time, to understand what imitation and presentation were really about. I saw them not as some horns-locked, competing alternatives as much writing of the time seemed to suggest, but as necessary coconspirators in the deception process.

Before long I was creating my own stillwater patterns and was moving them in the way I had watched the naturals move – sometimes exaggerating this movement to attract attention to the fly or to prompt a predatory reflex from any following fish. My results improved and my confidence improved. The more confident I became, the more fish I caught. In that first year on stillwaters – the only kind of fishing available to me – my catch rate went up 600 per cent.

Then fate stepped in. My work moved out of London and took me to Hampshire. Rivers as well as lakes – many of them glassclear – became accessible for the first time.

New circumstances, new opportunities. I was able to get close to trout and to study them in their natural habitat. I watched how they responded to natural insects in and on the currents and began to imitate these river insects as I had imitated the bugs of stillwater. I watched how fish responded to the artificial flies cast by my friends and I amended my tactics and presentation in light of what I saw. I continued an interest in feeding behaviour and rise-forms because of the clues I realised they could reveal about the insects being taken. Over time, I took thousands of photographs and studied each one to see what it revealed. Gradually, almost unrecognised, a new factor was creeping into my fishing: it was the fascination of study and experiment in its own right.

It was around this time that John Goddard and I began to fish together and before long we decided to collaborate on a book. We decided from the outset to study not only the fish’s behaviour, but the underwater world in which the fish lived.

We constructed large tanks with specially angled sides so that, crouched down beneath them, we could see the world as perceived by the trout: more particularly the fly, the angler and his equipment as perceived by the trout. We set cameras in waterproof housings onto the river bed.

We photographed flies from every angle, from both above water and below. We even, on a few memorable occasions, photographed flies’ feet from under water, at night. (Yes, really. We were trying to understand how trout could go on rising unerringly to flies floating on the surface at night when we, peering down at the surface in the dark, could see no flies at all. Obviously, the fish could see something – but how and what it was we did not know).

With this work, for each of us, the search had moved from dressings that might catch trout or dressings that looked broadly like certain species of fly. Now, the goal had become the creation of dressings – and especially dry fly dressings – that would give a fish everything that we believed it might look for or expect to see. Dry fly dressings, we had realised from the outset, posed a special challenge: because they sit on the water’s surface (i.e.in air) and are seen by the fish from below (i.e.through water), any view of them must be distorted by refraction.

Refraction influences the trout’s view of the world in several ways. One of the things it does is to make it impossible for any trout below the surface to look up and see the world outside the water as clearly as we can see the world below water, when looking down at it from the bank. For reasons too complex to go into here, refraction turns most of the underside of the surface into a mirror that reflects the river or lake bed – or the water’s gloomy depths. So in most places the ceiling of the trout’s world is green or brown or sombrely dark. The exception, again for complex reasons, is a circle of daylight above the fish’s head that acts as a kind of porthole. The trout can see out into the world above water, but only through this porthole – and everything it does see is distorted. The common term for the mirrored area is, unsurprisingly, ‘the mirror’ and the round porthole through which the trout can see above water is ‘the window’. (All of these extraordinary effects, and some of those that follow, are clearly shown in photographs in The Trout and the Fly, the book we eventually published).

John and I were keen to take account of these effects in our fly designs. In particular, we wanted to provide the trout with two visual features which are present in any fly sitting on the surface when it is viewed from below. The first was a tiny prickle of light spots that the feet of a fly transmit through the darkness of the mirror where they touch it. The second was wings that would appear to become separated from the body (rather in the manner of a flame from a gas jet) when the fly drifted from the mirror into the window.

One result of this work was a fly that was aerodynamically designed to land upside down, with the hook point uppermost, when cast. We did not set out to design a fly that landed upside down. Our aim was to design a fly that gave out the signals described above, to a trout looking up at the surface for approaching food: light dimples on the surface and wings that would flare over the edge of the window.

However, as we worked on such a fly, it became clear that the only way we could achieve our goal was by turning the fly upside-down. We were almost surprised – though more sensible men would not have been – when our end-product looked quite like a real fly, even to us.

John and I both knew, of course, that such refinements were not necessary for 99 per cent of the trout we tackled. Indeed, I believe that any effort to turn the hook upside down as an objective in its own right is wasted, offering aesthetic appeal but no observable, practical advantage. However, our upside-down (USD) patterns did bring about the downfall of some of those tantalising, pernickety, wary fish in the 1 per cent category – and that had been our aim.

This whole period was fascinating for us both. We had rummaged through the technicalities of fly design and presentation to an extent which, it is probably fair to say, few others had done. We had photographed much of what we had seen; we had documented it meticulously and we had put our work, through the resulting book, on record.

The period also marked a particular stage in my evolution as an angler: my absorption with the most difficult fish. Soon after the book was completed – and perhaps even as a reaction to such a long period of locked-away, esoteric study – my interest began to turn in the opposite direction. I began to look for simplicity.

The flies I have carried in the years since have become fewer and fewer and ever-more simple. They reflect my belief that appearance (i.e.pattern) in a dry fly is vastly less important than most writers would have us believe – and that the only really important requirement of a dry fly is that it be of correct size. Colour comes a distant second. I fish these few flies in the knowledge that most feeding trout are catchable if they do not know they are being fished for and are presented with flies that look as though they might be food, in a natural and unalarming way, when and where the trout expects to see them.

And so, these days, I do not drive to the waterside towing a trailer burdened with copies of every fly and bug known since Genesis, in triplicate. I do not carry representations of Centroptilum pennulatum. Nor of Heptagenia lateralis. Nor of Rhithrogena haarupi. Ecdyonurus torrentis is not in my box. Hydropsyche pellucidula has slung his hook. Leptophlebia vespertina might be in Argentina.

If anyone looks in my box these days – even fly box was an overstatement for years because I actually used those little plastic tubs that rolls of 35mm film come in – they will find only two kinds of general-purpose dry flies: little brown jobs and little black jobs. All the brown patterns are identical to one another and all the black patterns are identical to one another: it is only the hook sizes that differ.

The little black flies have a black seal’s fur body with a short black hackle at the head. Nothing more. I carry these in sizes 14, 16 and 18. I use the largest size when hawthorn flies are about, the middle size to suggest black gnats and the 18s to suggest smuts.

The other flies are all sedge-style dressings. They have a seal’s fur body, the overall hue of which is a warm olive-brown (I do not agonise over the shade of olive brown: each mixture varies and I do not find it matters a jot). The wings are fibres taken from a brown saddle hackle, tied horizontally along the back and clipped off square just beyond the hook bend. A short, brown hackle wound just behind the eye completes the job.

I do not carry a dun pattern at all for the smaller upwinged flies, because I know I do not need to. I know that virtually every surface-feeding trout that is eating small duns will accept the sedge pattern – and the sedge pattern has marginally more bulk (which makes it easier to see), floats longer (all those tiny bubbles trapped in all that seal’s fur) and will last for several fish because it is more robust than a dun.

The only other brown fly I carry is a spinner pattern in sizes 14 and 16 and again, all are identical. They have the same olive-brown seal’s fur body, a few brown hackle fibres for the tail and a strip of very thin plastic tied in the middle, just behind the hook eye, to suggest the spread wings of the egg-laying or dead natural. There is no hackle. If the wings are nicked at the base with scissors, on the rear edge, close to the body, they will not take on a propeller shape and cause the leader to kink. They will also collapse as though hinged when a trout sips the fly in.

Beyond these, the only dry flies I carry are for use on special occasions: mayflies for when the mayflies are up, daddy-long-legs for when the naturals are on the water. And that’s it.

My nymph box is similarly sparse because, again, just a handful of patterns meets most of my needs.

To cover any deep-lying fish or to explore a likely lie on a rainfed river, the fly I most commonly use is an artificial shrimp. I tie these shrimps mostly on size 12s, with a few size 10s. I tie them with different amounts of lead wire under the dressing and distinguish one from another by tying each weight with its own colour of tying silk: in other words, I colour-code them. Unweighted, these dressings are deadly for fish on the fin, high in the water. Weighted, they are also useful for fishing deep down from reservoir banks – and as stalking flies on clear stillwaters.

The shrimp usually has the same seal’s fur mix for the body as my dry flies. I rib the fur with gold wire and tie a thin, clear strip of plastic along the top of the body to suggest the natural shrimp’s shell-like back. Other nymphs I use for general river fishing are size 16 and 18 midge pupa-style dressings, which have a tiny tungsten bead behind the eye. These little flies, attached to ultra-fine leaders, can be very effective when used against difficult fish – and when fishing for coarse fish, which I do quite often. If I need to get down fast in deep, heavy water, a hare’s ear with a large tungsten bead head, often fished on the end of a long leader, does the job.

For fishing on lakes I am never without a range of midge pupa dressings in sizes 16 to eight, variously weighted. I also have a couple of long-hackled spider patterns which can be fished slowly while still suggesting life on a large scale; a damsel nymph; an absolutely deadly, weighted mayfly nymph that I tie with a marabou tail, dyed ivory; and a short, highly mobile black leech dressing that I will try if all else fails.

Add to these flies a few others accumulated over the years – those that have been given, bought or removed from overhanging branches – and you have my entire collection. Honest.

The pleasure I now take in simplicity does not mean that I need not have gone through all those earlier stages. Rather, it is something that I have arrived at, having been through all else. The early frustration, the resolve to learn more, the experiments with tanks and underwater cameras and, yes, those photographs of flies’ feet from underwater at night and the rest have been, for me, essential. They have provided me with hours of fascination and have given me insights that I would not otherwise have achieved. They have, above all, taught me something about trout and have given me, as a consequence, a degree of confidence when I tie on one fly in preference to another and fish it this way instead of that.

But now I am content to follow a sublimely simpler path, dipping in and out of intensity as I please. Sometimes I do get locked-on and involved, but mostly I sit and watch, soak up the wonders of nature and all her works, talk with my friends and relax.

At the end of A River Never Sleeps, Roderick Haig-Brown wrote that ‘perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers.’ Like many others, I suspect, I know exactly what he means. The only difference between us is that I wouldn’t go that far. Not quite that far.

Just yet.