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GRAYLING

Our October 2000 contribution from Jon Beer

Trouting is over for another year. The King is dead Long live the Queen. It is time to talk of grayling.

I do not mean how to catch the things. There are splendid books that do that great meaty tomes they tend to be which is curious because you catch grayling in much the same way as you catch trout - only less so. There is a little less to say because grayling are not found in quite the variety of waters that trout inhabit. You will not find them up the thin, bouncy end of rivers and only rarely in the big, still bits at the other end. But in between these extremes grayling and trout can be found in much the same waters, eat much the same sort of food and so can be caught in much the same sort of way. Differences between trout and grayling fishing have little to do with the differences between trout and grayling and lots to do with the differences between how fishermen regard the trout and the grayling.

Many years ago I went fishing in Germany on the River Kyll, a beautiful stream running south from the Eiffel hills to the Mosel. They have sensible system on some parts of the Kyll. To fish the waters of the local club you must be resident in the village for two days. Guesthouses, shops, bars the whole community benefits from the river and its fishing. I had to apply to the village Fischmeister for my permit. He told me about the sort of trout and grayling I could expect in the Kyll the grayling seemed huge and I asked him what flies I should use. I was pretty confident because I had tied up several tasty grayling flies I had discovered in a highly-respected book. They were pretty fancy numbers. Most of them had red tags: grayling, apparently wouldn't look at a fly that didn't have a red tag. One highly recommended item, Bradshaw's Fancy from the 1880s, had two of the things, one at either end. You got the impression that grayling needed waking up. The Fischmeister looked at my grayling flies: he fetched in his mate from the shop next door and showed him. They chuckled. He picked out the smallest grayling fly. It was a size 14. He said that a trout might just take that. He made trout sound like a gullible hick you might sell Tower Bridge to. A grayling, he said, would not go near it. He pointed to some tiny little dry flies I reserved only for the most fastidious of trout. He though they might take a Kyll grayling in a poor light, if the grayling were none too bright. I got the impression that the grayling sat around the River Kyll discussing the finer points of entomology while the oafish trout grinned inanely and grabbed at anything shiny the bigger the better.

There is a clue in the size of the flies the smaller the fly, the more highly esteemed the species. In England the grayling flies were not only fancier than trout flies: they were bigger. In most of Europe you will hear that grayling flies must be smaller. On stretches of the Moselle in the Vosges mountains the fishery by-laws insist that only large flies can be used until the grayling season begins in May. This is to prevent the fastidious grayling grabbing flies intended for trout. A frenchman and I once tested this supposition. We were fishing the Kaitum River in Swedish Lapland. There are plenty of grayling to be caught in the Kaitum. Out of curiosity Luc put up a spinning rod and launched a tiny Mepps out into the current. A grayling duly attached itself on the first cast. Luc went up a size in spinner. Two casts later he had another grayling and he changed to a larger spoon. And so it went on. We stopped at a three-inch pike plug but only because it was the largest lure he had on him. The grayling were lining up for the thing. You do not need smallflies for grayling it is just they hold them in higher esteem on the continent. Charles Ritz regarded the grayling as the finest of all salmonids at a time when anyone catching one on an English chalkstream was encouraged to throw it out onto the bank. A French friend once asked Frank Sawyer for some of the magnificent grayling he was hauling out of the Avon because they competed with his beloved trout. The Frenchman wanted to stock them into a French stream. Sawyer refused to provide them. He could not bear the thought of grayling sullying the chalkstreams of Normandy.

One of Sawyer's creations provides a fascinating example of the way in which a fisherman's opinion of a fish is revealed in the flies he is prepared to chuck at it.

Frank Sawyer regarded the grayling as vermin: "Sometimes I net them, at others I use traps, but often....I take a fly rod, and with a lure of my own construction I fish to kill." Hence the name of that lure - the Killer Bug . The Killer Bug is easy to tie. Turns of silver-coloured fuse-wire for weight are covered with an even winding of darning wool: "The best I have found is a wool with a fawn background that has a definite pink tinge ." And it works. It should do - it is the spitting image of a maggot. Grayling like maggots. This is hard to accept for lovers of the queenly grayling. Ronald Broughton is one such and president of the Grayling Society. In "The Complete Book of the Grayling " to be published at the end of this month, Dr.Broughton writes of the Killer Bug:

"I am reasonably sure that in the light-bedded chalk-streams it looks to the fish like a crustacean attempting to copy local colour."

And you can believe that if it makes you good.


The Complete Book of the Grayling by Ronald Broughton, Published by Robert Hale, £35.00. This is a revised and expanded edition of "Grayling: The Fourth Game Fish"(1989). Read the Fish & Fly review...

Flyfishing for Grayling by John Roberts is a splendid, thorough study of the fish and its fishing. Read the Fish & Fly review...

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.