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The McNab Challenge

Our October 2002 contribution from Jon Beer

You know those jokes that start off "There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman..."? Well, somehow I seem to have got myself into something similar.

"There was this sea-fisherman, this coarse-fisherman and this game-fisherman....and they were sitting around chatting when this other bloke pops up out of a cloud of smoke in traditional Mephistophelean fashion and sets them a challenge. "Any fool", he said, "can catch any fish on bait and spinner". I knew right away the bloke was a fly fisherman (I also knew that he had never seen me fish with bait of spinner or he wouldn't have been quite so confident). "The challenge", he said, "would be to catch a sea fish, a coarse fish and a game fish on the fly".

So there it was. He called it the McNab Challenge. Doing three of almost anything field-sporty gets called "a McNab" these days. The classic McNab seems to be catching a salmon, a deer and a grouse in one day. Which is strange because the original McNab occurs in a John Buchan novel set after the First World War when three successful but jaded businessmen set themselves the challenge of poaching game from neighbouring estates, having warned the owners of their intention. The eponymous (this is, incidentally, the first time I have ever used that word in anger – opportunities don't occur all that often when writing about fish: I have grabbed my chance) hero is a nom de guerre (another first) invented by the protagonists to hide their collective identity. They set out to shoot a stag, take a salmon on the fly – and then shoot another stag. They give themselves two days for each task. That's enough from the class swot.

It was to be coarse fish first for our McNab.

The River Mole joins the Thames at Hampton Court. A few yards upstream the Mole flows between concrete pilings and under the A309, clogged tight with early morning traffic. This was to be coarse fishing in a very virulent form: a river without a bit of bounce and fuss - sans riffles, sans pools, sans everything. It was a bright morning in late September as we four gathered beside the river. A concrete slip eases its way into the river hereabouts and we clustered around Andy, the coarse fishing man, to receive instruction and demonstration of the construction of a leader that would defy pike teeth.

It begins with around six feet of nylon, tapered if you like but there is little point tapering to something delicate when you see what is going to be fixed on the end. We stuck on level 12lb memory-free nylon. Then a swivel. I don't think a swivel is strictly necessary but coarse and sea-fishermen love them and it is convenient for joining the next bit of kit. This was a foot or so of pike-proof pliable woven wire, which was crimped to the swivel with a loop. The other end was crimped to the fly with another loop, allowing the fly to move freely at the end of this stiffish leader. I made a couple of adjustments to this set-up. I dispensed with the swivel when I lost everything in a hidden net: the wire trace was pliable enough to be knotted. I tied a snap link to the end of the leader, allowing me to change the fly without resorting to tedious metal-work – and if I could find something suitably discrete I would do the same for all my fly fishing. It was a joy to simply slip flies on and off.

I did a lot of fly changing in the first hour while the three of us, the sea-fisherman, the coarse-fisherman and the game-fisherman, flogged up and down the slab-sided channel. It was not as if there were no fish. From the moment we arrived, Nick, the bloke who had thrown us the challenge in the first place, had been lobbing a large jointed plug across the water and landing a prodigious number of pike. We hoped he might leave some for us

There are two small weirs on this bit of the mole. Mike and I had moored our small boat beside the smaller of these. We were casting up towards a raft of weed trapped behind a boom. As the fly drifted below the weed-raft and sunk into the gloom, there was the familiar pluck of a fish and the unmistakable tremor of life as I drew in the line. It was not, in truth, a lot of life. A small perch had grabbed a white marabou streamer fly almost as large as itself. But it was, undeniably, a coarse fish. We held it up for the others to see. I don't think they noticed: they were preoccupied with something huge thrashing the water to foam around their boat.

I slipped the little perch back and we fished on. As we drifted near to the others we learnt that the pike we had seen coming to the boat was a 25-pounder: it had fallen to Nick's jointed spoon. So that tiny perch was still leading the McNab Challenge. We fished on.

We climbed out of the boats for lunch. Mike was casting from the bank – a 10-ft concrete wall - when the fly stopped and he struck into something a little more solid. It was a pike, bending the rod into a fine arc as Mike worked it down the wall to the landing stage where it was netted in triumph.

The day had warmed into afternoon. I was beginning to tire of lobbing a wire leader about the scenery and I noticed some small fish picking at the surface of the calm river. I swapped the large rod and its pike-fly for a light wand with the smallest fly I could find in my box, a sparse nymph on a number 24 hook. In the next fifteen minutes I had half-a-dozen bleak and a couple of dace.

Our coarse fisherman had yet to catch a coarse fish on the fly. Andy took himself back to the weir. Here, as the afternoon drifted into evening, Andy had the catch of the day, a perch of two pounds, a splendid specimen by any method and spectacular on the fly.

We are off to the Welsh Dee for the second part of the McNab. I'll let you know what happens.

Jon Beer contributes regularly to publications including Trout & Salmon and The Telegraph. A collection of these can be found in Jon's book 'Gone Fishing - Adventures in pursuit of wild trout'.

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