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Fish, by all means

Our February 2001 contribution from Jon Beer

Paul taught me to fish with a fly. I had met Paul at school where he was a prefect of a particularly high-tone and moral persuasion (and I wasn’t). He is now some sort of judge (and I am not) - which just goes to show where That Sort of Thing Can Lead.

He showed me the thing on the waters of the Derwent in Derbyshire. After a bit of that back-to-twelve-o’clock-pause-now-forward-to-two-o’clock sort of stuff, we stood by a tumbling run and he flicked a little dry fly, a Tup’s Indispensable, into the head of the run and we followed it down the bouncing water – which just goes to show how long ago it was: I could see that sort of stuff with ease in those days. And the fly disappeared. And then Paul was playing a fish out of the run and into the calm water beside the shingle bank. It was a grayling, the first I had ever seen. The whole thing looked fairly straightforward. You lobbed something that looked like a fly and the fish grabbed it: you could watch the thing happen in front of you. I was enchanted.

That evening I went back home to the Lincolnshire fens where there are no grayling or trout or tumbling runs so I practised with little black flies on the rudd that infested certain ponds. And that worked as well. And so it was that I began my fly fishing as a dry-fly specialist because I had no idea how to do anything else. For some time this yawning ignorance kept me casting my little dry-flies in conditions when more sensible fishermen around me had long switched to other methods and were catching fish.

You might think this would lead to a reputation for stupidity. Not a bit of it. I acquired a completely spurious reputation as a purist. Credulous fishermen who were catching trout hand over fist with wet fly, worm and spinner would meet me, flogging fruitlessly away with my little dry flies, and regard me in awe as a sort of angling ascetic, starving in the desert in order to attain spiritual purity - loopy, but somehow noble.

There is something in the character of Englishmen that admires this sort of pointless perseverance. One of my father’s most stinging rebukes was to look at me, shake his head in a weary sort of way and sigh, “you always want to take the easy way out, don’t you?”

It made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now. Of course I wanted to take the easy way out. Who wouldn’t?

Look: there is no intrinsic virtue in doing things the difficult way. My dry-fly purity was not remotely noble. It was just stupid and as soon as discovered the joys of wet fly and nymph and dapping I started to catch a lot more fish. I am not saying that restricting yourself to dry-fly fishing is stupid if that is what you want to do. But such self-discipline is no more meritorious than that of the maggot-only man.

I am beginning to rant.

I mention all this because there have been rumblings in the world of fly fishing of late. They are the usual sort of fly-fishing rumblings. Bloke A devises a novel way to catch fish and Bloke B wants it banned because it is not pukka, because it is not really fly-fishing. Czech nymphs are copping it at the moment.

Czech nymphing – or more descriptively, short nymphing – is a technique used to fish deep flies close to the bottom in fast water - typical grayling lies. Two or three heavily weighted nymphs on close droppers drag the leader down quickly. The leader is short, little more than the depth of water. The line is fished as near vertical as possible with the flies under the rod tip so that any touch on the flies is felt instantly or, if the nymph is lifted by the fish, the line moves to one side. To fish deep, the flies must swim dead drift and hence within little more than the rod length of the angler.

All this is similar to the fishing of a “San Juan Worm” but the worm (a hook with a wrap if red thread) is carried into the depths by a substantial lead weight and held above the bottom by an “indicator” which is quite obviously a float. You can probably hear the slight sneer in those last eight words. Force of habit: I apologise. Why shouldn’t fly-fishermen use a float if the thing works? – it certainly makes the takes easier to see and stops fisherman littering the bottom with snagged flies. There it is, you see? - that English-fly-fishing disapproval of the things that make fishing easier or more effective. It is also certain that casting either of these unwieldy rigs is something of a swine. It would be much better to use a long rod and a fixed-spool reel. It would then be almost indistinguishable from the French technique of fishing “au toc” which is done with a natural bait fished below the rod tip, the angler feeling the “toc” of the take through the straight line. But somehow this just ain’t fly-fishing - but I am not at all sure of the point where it stopped being fly-fishing.

So here are a few little points to ponder: is fly-fishing something to do with the fly? If the pole angler replaces his maggot with a fly – a killer bug, say – has he become a fly fisherman? In northern Spain most fishermen work a team of flies with a bubble float and a spinning rod. Is that fly-fishing? The French distinguish between that and “Mouche Fouettée” – literally “cast” in the action of a fly rod. So is it the fly-line that makes it fly fishing? You don’t need a fly-line to fish the San Juan Worm – or Czech nymphs, for that matter: they have quite enough weight to be cast from a fixed-spool reel. So is it the reel. How can that be important? And what about dapping. No need for a fly-line there and no “fouettée” if it comes to that - so is this fly-fishing?

The definition of what is and isn’t fly-fishing is not at all clear. And it does not matter a jot to the fish. It should not matter to the fisherman – provided the way that I fish does not interfere with your enjoyment of the way you fish.

And - far more importantly - the other way round.

Jon Beer contributes regularly to publications including Trout & Salmon and The Telegraph. If you have any comments, do not hesitate to get in touch or use the message board.