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DAY OF THE DADDY

Our September 2000 contribution from Jon Beer

I live beside a small stream in Oxfordshire. It has no trout so this is not going to be one of those stories of picking - up - th e-rod - from- beside - the - door - and - strolling - down - t o- the - water's - edge - every - evening that always leave me envious and slightly irritated. It is not all beer and skittles living next to a small stream. On summer nights you can have the window open to any passing breeze or you can have the light on to read in bed: you cannot do both. Leave a light on and a window open and within minutes the ceiling is pebble-dashed with a million midges. Also you are bombarded by fairly hefty items hurling themselves towards the light. I have no idea why large insects do this: when, in the aeons of evolution, did they come across a single light in the darkness? So how did they develop this urge to hurtle towards it, ping off the light bulb and fall, stunned, onto the page I am reading? I have no idea but they do. So I have to keep the windows shut and swelter while large insects scrabble at the window. The spiders know this and build their webs under the eaves and across my windows. It is these webs I am lumbering towards.

A spider's web is a breaker's yard in miniature. The fat, dangerous-looking bloke in the grubby vest sits in the middle surrounded by bits of bodywork and disassembled parts. I can get a fair idea of the current models in the traffic up and down the river by looking at the hulks and casualties that wind up in my spiders' webs.

Now, in September, we have a few large brown sedges, sucked dry and rattling in the breeze. And we have Daddy-long-legs.

The daddy-long-legs is far and away my favourite fly. For a start it is dead easy to imitate. A light, long-shank hook can be wound with anything suitable for the body: look at a spider's web for the colour. I use natural raffia. The legs are what make it fun. Daddy-long-legs legs are made from pheasant-tail herls. Get one of these and tie an overhand knot about 1/3 of the way along. This is fiddly: make a loop and reach through with tweezers. Tie another knot at the middle of the longer end. You will now have a perfect little leg with two knee-joints. Tie in six of these legs near the front of the body you can splay them if you feel like it. I use hackle-point wings from the tattiest, cheapest cape I own so they are short, long-fibred and flecked with brown and useless for anything else. Wind another of these crumby hackles through the wings and you have a raggedy fly that looks uncannily like the real thing.

But the fly itself is only the half the fun. What it does is even better. The daddy-long-legs is a terrestrial fly: it has no business being on the water. The reason so many end up there is because the daddy-long-legs is such a chronically bad flier. In any sort of breeze the daddies are bowled along, bouncing off bits of the scenery, until they come across water. They were never designed for the water. When they touch it bits of them tend to get stuck: they skitter across the surface or struggle to get airborne only to flop back a few yards further downwind. Trout know this. When breezes blow in the shortening days at the end of summer, a trout can expect a large untidy, dinner of gangly legs and wings to flop out of the sky at any moment.

You can cast a daddy-long-legs but it is not easy. Those gangly legs and wings, the very reason the artificial looks so spookily life-like, will set the fly spinning like a small helicopter, twisting the leader into a tight spiral. There is a better way to fish the daddy-long-legs, one that imitates the insect's distinctive behaviour exactly to produce the best imitation in fly-fishing. The secret is to dap the thing .

I have described the art of dapping before (June 1999 - look in the archive). Dapping is the perfect way to deliver the daddy-long-legs. Look: it needs a breeze (it does not need a gale of wind as some imagine) which is exactly when the natural daddies will be stumbling about on the surface. The fly is not cast it wafts, carried downwind on the breeze by the fluffy dapping floss: the fly does not helicopter, the leader does not spiral. By lowering the huge dapping rod the fly can be touched onto the surface. Those cheap, long-fibred hackles do not float well but then nor does the natural. By raising the rod a fraction the bedraggled fly lifts off like a struggling insect, flies or skitters downwind before dropping back onto the surface. Just like the real thing. And, just like the real thing, this commotion excites any red-blooded trout in the vicinity: they will follow a dapped daddy for many yards underwater before grabbing the thing before it makes another getaway. Even better: they will often leap to grab at a fly a foot or so above the water. This spectacular stuff. Dapping the daddy needs strong nerves and a stronger leader. Make it as strong as you like: in dapping the leader never touches the water the imitation really is perfect.

So as soon as I can get hold of some juice for my car I will be off to dap the daddy.

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.