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John McNab Goes To Sea

Our December 2002 contribution from Jon Beer

The story so far...

Our hero has got himself involved in something – not a bet, exactly, more of a challenge (which feels much the same but doesn’t involve money or the deeds to the family home). The McNab Challenge was to catch a coarse fish, a game fish and a sea fish on the fly. In October I described the first part on the River Mole at Hampton Court where the three challenged fishermen caught pike, perch, chub, dace and bleak. The next part was to be on the Welsh Dee, fly-fishing for grayling.

Now read on....

Well, the Welsh Dee is about the graylingiest river I know of and, to be honest, catching a grayling on the fly on the River Dee was not much of a challenge – huge fun but not much of a challenge. If you want to try it yourself then I suggest you get yourself down to Llangollen and get a ticket on the Llangollen AA’s water from Watkins and Williams (a hardware shop), 4 Berwyn Street, Llangollen. Tel: 01978 860 652. They open at 7.30 so you should get in a full day’s fishing.

We all caught grayling. It was Mike-the-Sea-Fisherman’s first and Andy-the-coarse-Fisherman caught a stunning creature of 2lbs 8ozs and Nick-the-one-who-had-thrown-out-the-challenge-in-the-first-place fell in, so a good time was had by one and all.

And so we moved on to the salty stuff. I was not, in truth, looking forward to fly-fishing in the sea. I have caught sea fish before on the fly but not deliberately. Fishing the sea pool of some tasty little sea trout river I have felt a tantalising pluck that sets the nerves tingling and then found myself back-casting a small pollock into the middle distance, not realising it had clung on. I have caught mackerel on feathers but they don’t count, apparently. The only times I have set out to catch sea fish on the fly – casting over schools of mullet in the lower reaches of the River Otter in Budleigh Salterton – I have been totally unsuccessful.

This time we were going for bass. I had see alarming pictures of bass fishing, blokes standing on storm beaches, surrounded by crashing waves, lit by the hissing light of a Tilley lamp. It all looked a bit manly and rugged for a trout fisherman. And those blokes were bending massive beach-casting rods to hurl six-ounce leads hundreds of yards across the raging surf. It looked like a lot of hard work for a fly rod. I think “daunted” is the word I’m after.

I don’t know if you remember October 27th. It was the day of the storms that cut off half the nation’s electricity, ferries were cancelled and the plane bringing me back from half-term hols had to be diverted to Manchester. Allin all it was “a period of unsettled weather”. So I was expecting some sort of surf when we got to Jersey in the Channel Islands.

I arrived in Jersey a day late on account of diverting to Manchester and not having any electricity when I got home and also not fancying big surf very much. I got a lift from the ferry port to the north coast of the island where Mike and Andy and Nick were already fishing. I had spent an hour the night before screwing studs into the bottom of my felt-soled waders. I was going to be clinging to that beach with everything I could. We arrived atop a headland. There were no towering columns of spume, no anglers clinging like shipwrecked mariners to the rocks. The sun was shining from a cloudless sky: there was a gentle zephyr to take the heat from the afternoon. Perhaps that’s why their tomatoes ripen so early. I made my way down the headland bowed under the weight of a rucksack stuffed with waterproof jacket, neoprene waders, studded boots and a waistcoat-that-inflates-into-a-lifejacket.

They were perched on a rock at the end of the headland. Nick was fishing as I arrived and the others stood above him looking down into the bright turquoise of the sea. Pale shapes flickered in the wavelets and aligned themselves like iron-filings to a magnet as the fly passed over them. One fish followed the fly to the base of the rock, lunging for the fly and then turning away as the fly lifted from the water. They looked like silver eels: they were garfish. I had seen a garfish once before when trolling for mackerel, a strange whip-lash of a fish with long pointed jaws lined with teeth.

Nick cast again and the blokes standing above him called out when the garfish were following the fly. There were dozens of them. Andrew, a local fisherman, was encouraging them with blobs of unpleasant goo scooped from a bucket with a wooden spoon and flung into the sea. Every cast or so the line would straighten as a garfish struck and then go slack as the hook skittered out of the bony jaws. It was some of the most intriguing fishing I have ever seen. I couldn’t wait.

It was my turn. Time after time I could feel the pluck on the line or see a garfish lunge at the fly as it neared the rocks, and each time it fell off. I looked at the hook point: it is easy enough to blunt a hook or lose a point when casting amid rocks. All was well and yet the gar kept falling off. Andy suggested changing the fly. He handed me a fly with a hairy green body and white maribou wing. Two casts later I felt another tug on the line and this time the fish stuck.

A garfish is not designed for a prolonged fight and before long the twisting silver shape was lifted from the water. It is a remarkable fish, as thin as an eel but with all the muscular stiffness of a mackerel. This is a predator. The pointed jaws resembling a waders’ bill give it the local name of “snipe”. The tiny teeth are designed to capture wriggling fish: they are little backward-pointing needles. They may be the clue to successful fly-fishing. I was later to learn that garfish can be caught with no hook at all, just a piece of wool in the place of a fly: those teeth become entangled in the wool and the garfish can be pulled ashore. I thought about the fly that Andy had handed me: perhaps that body of green wool had done much the same job, holding the fly in the fish’s jaw and allowing the hook to get a purchase.

My first taste of fly-fishing in the sea had been a revelation. My neoprenes, boots and jacket had stayed in the rucksack. Garfish fishing had been just plain fun in the sun. Now bring on the bass.

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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