Fishing from the Rock of the Bay E-Book

James Batty

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 633

Beschreibung

I hardly remember life without a rod in my hand, writes James Batty in the opening sentence of his autobiography in fishing. When his American wife moved with him to Cornwall, she saw his family photo album and commented that there was hardly a single picture of him in which he wasn't fishing. This witty, wacky account is James' tale of his obsession with his hobby of fishing, wherever his work took him around the world, seeking out lemon sharks in the Gambia, Striped Bass in New York and salmon in British Columbia. James' genre of writing is a mixture of John Gierach and Bill Bryson: his style is wry, witty and incisive. The end result is an entertaining insight into the mind of a dedicated angler, full of fishing anecdotes, tips and thought-provoking ideas. Extracts from the book - The great thing about anglers – especially when we meet fellow anglers – is that we don't try to hide our nuttiness. Pointless, I'm holding a rod, so are you, game over. We both know we're talking to a person who's a few bananas short of a bunch. - When you reckon you're going to catch something, you make more effort. If you think the session's a lost cause, 'one last cast' translates into, well, one last cast. Unthinkable. If you feel you're in with a chance it reverts to its normal meaning: half a dozen chucks with the diving plug, then a few with the slider just in case, and ten minutes on the sandeel shad because you really never know. - Guiding is not a job I'd do again, not as long as there's alternative employment cleaning out the grease traps at fast food restaurants or hand sorting the output of sewage farms. - They'll take jelly-fry under an inch long when the water's full of plump sandeels, and I don't know why. But it's the mysteries that keep us fishing. - The fish can't see my modest reel or my battered rod until it's too late to say, 'I have my pride, I refuse to be landed on that old shite'. - My financial situation was as tight as a toreador's Y-fronts. - Wave and weather are a mystery, like who's going to win next year's Grand National, where the stock market's going, or why people watch television shows about forgotten minor celebrities eating baboons' foreskins. Long range forecasts are as reliable as horoscopes, just less entertaining. Maybe the Met Office should juice them up, 'The month will be marked by deep Atlantic lows, even deeper discounts at your local supermarket. Don't be too proud to pick up some sausages.' Or they could tell the truth: 'Expect a combination of sunshine, rain, freezing fog, calm days, violent storms, blizzards, and perhaps a plague of frogs. Dress warmly but don't forget to pack a swimsuit.'

Leseprobe

First published in Great Britain by Merlin Unwin Books, 2021

This ebook edition published in 2021

All rights reserved

Copyright © James Batty 2021

The right of James Batty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. All enquiries should be addressed to Merlin Unwin Books (see address below).

Published by:

Merlin Unwin Books

Palmers House

7 Corve Street

Ludlow

Shropshire SY8 1DB

U.K.

www.merlinunwin.co.uk

Designed by Merlin Unwin

ISBN 9781913159399

Dedication

I spent many years moving around the world to find better jobs and interesting fishing. This book is for the millions of people who have to leave their homes because of war, oppression, and poverty.

In retirement I work with a small charity that tries to help one group of such people, Yezidis in northern Iraq whose communities were targeted by the ISIS genocide of 2014.

https://sites.google.com/site/oneandallaid/or https://www.facebook.com/groups/1619802224759642/

Contents

Part OneALL OVER THE WORLD

Fishing Talk

It’s a Family Affair

A Dutch Treat

The Allure of the Exotic

Watching a Float

The Impossible Dream

First and Last Love

Fresh Air and Fun

Big Boots

Unnatural Environments

Little Works of Art

Matching the Hatch

A Professional Career

Explain Yourself

Miraculous Salvage

Student  Foragers

The Jock Told Me

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Sharing the Wealth

A Conversion

Ducks, Geese, & Muddy Underwear

The Stalker

Warthogs, Lizards and Chefs

Corrupting the Youth

Organic Pest Control

One Man and his Dog, One Man and his Rat

Money Can’t Buy you Bites

Jiggery Pokery

Humphry Davy Rules OK

Playing to the Gallery

No Lifeguard on Duty

Forensic Research with a Filleting Knife

The Plural of Anecdote is not Data

Not Cut Out to be a Guide

Stir it Up

Ignorance isn’t Bliss, It’s an Opportunity

Silver Kings in Brown Water

Firearm Safety

Handicraft for the not very Handy

Look Out for the Edge

Poverty, Abstinence, Wildfowl

A Gourmet by the Water

The Tales we Tell

Luck is for Lotteries, Anglers are Astute

The Voice of Authority

Top of the Water Silliness

Wildlife with Missing Biscuits

Tournament Tactics

Lions, Bass Fishers, and Local knowledge

Assume the Fishing Position

Stay Out of Trouble

The Fish Don’t Know When You’re Clueless

Boots and Salmon

An Act of Belief

Vanity of Vanities

Grumpy Middle-aged Men

Frying Tonight

Part TwoTHE UK MOSTLY BASS

Who Needs Indoor Plumbing?

Destiny Calls

Smile for Crying Out Loud

Watch your Step

Some Dogs Don’t Walk

My Old Pal

The International School of Bass

Under your Nose

Who’s Afraid of the Dark?

He Blinded me with Science

Spoilt for Choice

Desperate Weather, Desperate Measures

There’s Nothing to it

Do as I Say, Don’t do as I Do

Positive Thinking

With Thanks to James Joyce

Clever Tricks from the Far East

Unaccompanied Baggage

Searching for Supper

Whenever you Like

A Snapper up of Unconsidered Trifles

Vaulting Ambition

Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

Fortune Favours the Fortunate

Bass-Nutty by Degrees

Shopping for Skinflints

Pollacks to You

Bass, Bait and Belts

Carry-on Luggage

Don’t Play with your Food

Yesterday’s News

Nothing Marks the Spot

The Insomniac’s Reward

Reuse, Recycle, Remarkable

Forage of Discovery

Very Local Knowledge

Low Pressure, High Hopes

It’s Crazy but it Just Might Work

The Ragworms of Human Kindness

A Healthy Diet

Unfair Weather

A Sign

The Colour Purple

Evidence-based Bass

Please Give Your Reasons

Muddling Through

Fluff and Stuff

Right First Time but not Every Time

Cover of Darkness

The Beach for Me

Conspicuous Consumption

A Dark and Stormy Night

Too Soon or Too Late

A Very Present Help in Trouble

A Twenty Pounder

Too Much Weather

The Sizes of Things

I Don’t Know Much

Why am I Here?

You’re Never Alone with a Bass and a Hat

Going the Extra Half Mile

Correlation, Causation and the Need to Fish More

Are we Surprised?

Where Have all the Angler’s Gone?

Craftsperson Needed, Bodgers Need Not Apply

Up Against It

Just Desserts

A Proper Job Expert

A Suitable Case for Treatment

Will You Be Quiet?

Production Line Fishing

The Pied Piper of Bass

In Search of Lost Time

A Hypothesis Worth Testing

Pass it On

Bass in Cyberspace

Chaos Theory

Not Quite Molly Malone

A Two Pipe Problem

Intelligence Gathering

Of Course it isn’t Fair

Two Chances, Slim and None

A Crime Scene Investigation

The First Rule of Bass Club

Professional Advice

I’ll Keep my Amateur Standing

Suspend that Disbelief

Strange Ambitions

Healthy Exercise

The Angler on the Clapham Omnibus

PART ONE

ALL OVER THE WORLD

Fishing Talk

‘High voltage man’

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Electricity

I hardly remember life without a rod in my hand. I dimly recall a steamer voyage through Egypt just before the Aswan High Dam was finished. We saw the temple at Luxor where I made my mother buy me an earthenware scarab beetle. But the highlights of the trip were bunk beds with furry ladders and my father asking for a pear from a Greek steward by sketching it with his propelling pencil. That apart, my childhood memories revolve around fishing.

When I met my wife Shelley she flipped through our old family albums. I’m the second of three sons, it was no surprise that the photographic record of my early life was sparse. For the first child parents religiously document the first bowel movement, smile, tooth, tantrum, upright step, haircut, and day at kindergarten; before moving on to primary and secondary school sports teams, driving lessons, boyfriends and girlfriends, graduation ceremonies, jobs, and criminal convictions as relevant. With later arrivals you get birth, marriage, and that’s about it. But what amazed my bride was that nearly all the snapshots were of a boy holding a fish, or just as often of the fish on its own. No birthday parties or posed studio portraits, no family groups, none of those holiday scenes of a small blurry human figure in front of a famous building or landscape. She seemed to think this showed some sort of neglect, perhaps extravagant abuse of thirty-five millimetre film. I disagree. Why would a doting father or mother want a memento of a scowling child who’s blanked or – even worse – not been fishing at all? What’s more every picture was written up with species, size, and location; clear evidence of responsible parenting. If you were picky you might ask why Mother failed to mention bait, water temperature, and time of day, but she made a good start.

My angling career began at the age of four or five when my older brother was shipped off to boarding school, leaving me without a live-in playmate and tormentor. Home was in Khartoum where my father was a manager in the Sudan’s utility company. He was obsessive about tennis, squash, and cricket, none of which are thrilling for a small boy to sit and watch. My mother loved gardening, that’s not much of a spectator sport either. Also she was taking care of my younger brother and he was under a year old. In my sixties I see him as a contemporary but when I was an inquisitive young lad and he was a horizontal blob we didn’t have much in common. I must have been bored.

I’ve no idea how I hit on fishing as a way to amuse myself. I don’t believe the nursery school library had a picture book copy of The Compleat Angler. Mr. Crabtree inspired a lot of young dabblers, but he showed up in the Daily Mirror. My parents read the airmail edition of The Times, usually two weeks out of date so – as with today’s papers – only the obituaries and the crossword puzzle were worth a damn. Maybe I saw people catching things from the Nile as we walked the dog along its banks. Maybe I overheard grown-ups telling the sort of tall tales that have sustained me for the last sixty years. All I know is that I was mad keen to wet a line.

Parental planning’s a mystery to a youngster but after what felt like an age I found out that a junior engineer, Mr. Hansome, had agreed to take me along on his afternoon sessions. My father wasn’t the sort of man to arm-twist a subordinate into a favour so I reckon Mr. Hansome was just a typical angler, eager to corrupt the youth, to turn potentially productive citizens into obsessive nutters who’ll waste thousands of hours by the water’s edge and hundreds of pay cheques on tackle they never use. I have scant memory of Mr. Hansome’s appearance. He was tall to the eye of a five year old, so at least four foot six, and he was never to be seen without a battered felt hat. What I remember clearly are his hands, rough and weather-beaten, dark with tobacco stains, and wonderfully nimble. As he threaded a worm, tied up a new hook, or nipped on lead-shot it was impossible to keep up with the movements of his fingers, fluttering like the tentacles of an octopus on a caffeine binge. I was a keen student so one day he dug out some heavy monofilament and sent me home with guidance on the half-blood knot. Good guidance as well, Mr. Hansome never could have written software manuals or instructions for flat pack furniture, his diagrams made perfect sense; and on our next outing he inspected my homework, grunted cheerfully, and declared me a qualified junior angler.

My tackle came from his store cupboard, an Aladdin’s cave – if Aladdin had never thrown anything away and had managed his inventory by stuffing everything on top of everything else. From this adult toy box Mr Hansome found an old greenheart rod that had snapped off about five feet from the butt. It had been rescued from the scrapheap with the addition of a tip ring at the point of fracture. The action, as a modern catalogue might say, was stiff – it would have splintered before it bent. The rod was teamed up with a small brass centre pin reel with a permanent ratchet. Mr. Hansome himself used a cutting edge fibreglass rod with a fixed spool reel. I was in awe of the way he cast with this lot, his terminal tackle flying like a longhop hoicked over the cow corner boundary, splashing down so far away that we squinted to keep track of his float. My gear flopped like a nervous defensive prod as I pulled a few yards of line from my reel then flicked out into the margin.

We fished for bulti (Tilapia nilotica) – apart from tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus) we used the local names for all the species we ran into – using a float, a couple of split shot, and a size four or six hook baited with worm. Bulti are good to eat, in those days they were as common as fruit flies in a genetics laboratory, and we’d often come home with a decent meal. And although I longed to try a fixed spool reel and hurl my worm half way to Egypt I caught plenty in the reedy gullies a few feet from my Clarks’ sandals.

Bulti

One day bites were slow. Mr. Hansome took off his float and fished a leger in the deepest channels, eking out a catfish or two. He’d given me a few chats about the benefits of sticking at it, so I carried on drifting my worms around the tufty reeds beside the bank. Finally my float budged. It lay on its side for a moment then slid underwater at a heart-stopping rate. I tightened and the rod was almost yanked from my grasp as line began to vanish from the reel. To his credit Mr. Hansome didn’t grab the gear out of my hands, he just offered a stream of breathless advice. ‘Let it go, let it go. Now wind as fast as you can, keep the rod up. It’s turning, let it go again.’ After what felt like a whole cricket match I drew my fish into the shallows. ‘A barada, an electric fish (Malapterus electricus), and a really big one too, at least five pounds. Don’t try to lift it, I’ll get the landing net.’ There followed a torrent of words I didn’t recognise, many of them short and voiced in a yelp. The net’s frame and handle were aluminium. ‘And I’ve spent twenty years as an electrical engineer,’ said Mr. Hansome, rubbing his hands on his shorts, ‘I should know better than to shock myself. But I tell you what, young man, we’ll call her a six pounder. We’ll unhook her with the insulated pliers and we’ll slip her back to fight again another day.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And you know those words I just used, the one with the ‘F’ and the one with the ‘B’?’ I nodded. ‘That’s fishing talk, we only ever say those things when we’re by the river. Not at home, certainly not at school. But I tell you what,’ he grinned, ‘that was a bloody good fish and you’re going to be a proper bloody fisherman.’

Barada

It’s a Family Affair

‘Saint Genevieve can hold back the water’

Son Volt, Tear Stained Eye

See a small group of people taking part in a leisure activity and often you hear one of the adults – sorry to be sexist, but usually it’s the father – offer a dollop of rhubarb, ‘I wanted to find something we could do as a family’. Liar. The honest message is, ‘I’m obsessed with this nonsense, and I realise I’ll be able to indulge my passion only if I drag the kids along as well’. Hence the photos where Dad – in a high tech alpine outfit, shod with the latest carbon fibre skis – smiles smugly; while Mum and the children – in much darned jumpers, with planks of firewood strapped to their feet – bare their teeth as they wonder wistfully how much longer they’ll have to keep landing on their arses in wet snow before they can go back to the chalet and the relative delights of peeling potatoes, hoovering, or trigonometry homework. But when my father took up fishing he joined a gang of equally addicted anglers.

Once in a while we’d head out for a short session at the end of his working day, but the marquee event of the week was on Fridays. That was when we piled in the car and drove across the desert to the dam at Jebel Aulia. At the time this seemed like a major journey but I think it took less than an hour. We kept ourselves busy on the way by eating our breakfast. The gourmet treat was sausage sandwiches. In hindsight I can say that these were pretty vile. Nowadays buying bangers from even a modest butcher’s shop involves a catechism of trick questions: caramelised onion, Cumberland seasoning, chorizo-style, outdoor bred, organic, gluten-free, whatever. Not when I was a nipper. Khartoum was in the Muslim part of the Sudan, hence the Friday holiday, and no pork products were made locally. One of the import houses sometimes sold sausages in a tin. They were almost square in section, they came packed in a lump of lard, and I reckon they contained more rusk – or maybe sawdust – than meat, more fat than lean. And the lean came from cheap cuts like ear, tail, and rectum. But we loved them, especially Father whose day off was blighted when they were out of stock. We ate sandwiches for lunch as well, often with wormy fingers, and any left at the end of the trip were fried for Saturday breakfast. A Marmite butty browned in beef dripping would be the signature dish if I were to open a restaurant.

Jebel Aulia lies on the White Nile upstream from Khartoum. The dam’s a couple of miles long and we’d fish either upstream or downstream. Only one area was off limits, somewhere Father refused to park because his professional predecessor had damaged a company car there. He’d been following a group of camels, leaning on the horn to chivvy them along. I find it annoying when some prat hoots or flashes his headlights at me; camels agree. The laggard of the party stopped dead, waited for the offending vehicle to come close, then kicked in its radiator. Not the cosmetic chrome grille, the whole radiator, clouds of steam and a banjaxed engine. Camels look slow-witted, don’t be fooled. You make your stupid noises up their backsides, they’ll leave you stranded on the roadside.

Our target was bulti. It was possible to spin for tigerfish in the sluice below the dam but, as little people, we weren’t allowed that close to the torrent that came over the spillway. There were stories of people trolling for Nile perch (Lates niloticus) in the reservoir as well but I don’t remember seeing this happen. Our fishing followed a strict pattern, we were like squaddies at a military tattoo. We’d wade in line abreast formation to a sunken wall, on with a worm, then fish it three or four feet under a float. That was what the experts did, we followed suit. The Nile was full of fish and we did well enough. But sixty years later I wonder if we didn’t miss a trick or two. Most of my best bulti came from reed islands, tumps of grass, tangles of roots, but we always set ourselves up in open water. In Botswana I chased tilapia with a Mepps spinner, in the Sudan we always used worms. What might we have caught if we’d tried something different?

A broader idea: anglers tend to be conservative. Not that we vote for the Tories or dress like our parents – mine never wore waders or Goretex. But we choose our baits, flies, lures, and methods based on what’s considered normal. When I was a child visiting Cornwall bass fishers stood on beaches after storms. They used lugworm or ragworm, four or six ounce lead weights. Anything else would have been daft, my handsome. Like businesspeople we find it easier to be wrong in a crowd than to risk branding ourselves as oddities. (I once had a performance review that read, ‘He thinks creatively but otherwise his work is excellent.’ OK it was in an accounting company, but Cornish beach fishers were as stuck in the mud as any financial wonk.) Nobody thought of using plugs on rocky shores, freelining a mackerel on a calm day, or casting streamers and maggoty flies through the shallows. Anglers nearly always copy the locals, we assume they know what they’re doing. Often that’s right, but when I moved to the Gambia, shore fishing meant a beach-caster and a fish bait. The rocky headlands were deserted, spinning gear was rarer than an honest election manifesto. But once I started using lures on the surface my results shot up like a zip fastener on a frosty riverbank.

Nile perch

This herd mentality’s hard to explain, it’s as if we’re afraid someone might ask, ‘Are you crazy?’ Only one thing I could say to that: ‘This thing in my hand, it’s a fishing rod. Of course I’m crazy. What’s your point?’

A Dutch Treat

‘I got your message in Amsterdam’

Van Morrison, Rare Heavy Connection

I must have been eight when we had a family trip to the Netherlands. Father at this stage was general manager at the Sudanese power utility and a Dutch company wanted to flog him some big ticket item: generators, maybe substations. Anyway the vendors were like scruffpot lads at the first meeting with the girlfriend’s family, keen to make a good impression. They put us up in a five star hotel with grounds running down to the Amstel river, paradise for three boys who thought fishing was a biological need running a close second to eating. We’d leave our lines in the water over breakfast, running down between courses to reel in eels.

They swept Father off on an endless round of factory tours, meetings with business leaders, and lunches washed down with the finest wines available to humanity. They also assigned us a minder, Henrik, a young chap from head office who was tasked with driving the rest of the family around in a Mercedes, taking us to see whatever sights tickled our fancy. I imagine they picked Henrik for his perfect English and his familiarity with the Rembrandt museum, the tulip market, and the mouse who lived in a windmill. Little did they know. Mother might have fancied a spot of local culture but three outvotes one, and by this stage she was no mean angler herself. We filed into the Mercedes in our wellies, stowed our rods in the boot, and asked to be taken somewhere with bream and rudd, preferably big ones. Nowadays that would be a piece of cake, out with the tablet, a few google searches, on with the satnav, Bob’s your uncle. But poor Henrik spent half an hour and all his pocket money on a payphone, blagged a map from a filling station, and chauffeured us off into the hinterland. And the next day, when I’m sure he was hoping we might fancy a trip to an Edam cheese creamery or a traditional clog-making workshop, he had to do it all again, this time for pike and perch.

On our third and final day he suggested a museum, maybe the zoo. It was tipping rain, forecast to keep it up all day. But fishing nuts are made of sterner and dafter stuff than he reckoned, so on with the plastic macs and where could we fish for carp? At the end of what may have been the longest and soggiest day of Henrik’s professional life he dropped us back at our digs. We pludged across the burgundy lobby carpet. Outside the lounge bar we paused to see if Father might be having a beer with his hosts and Mick slipped out of his mac. He gave it a shake, from the sleeve emerged a large, lively lobworm, landing with a soft plop. An elegant lady going into the lounge squeaked like a mouse in a helium bath, Mother looked mortified, and Mick bent to pick up the escapee. But before he could lay a hand on his spare bait a chap in crimson and gold hotel uniform came down like the wolf on the fold, dustpan in hand, and the worm was gone. Then he offered us a warm smile and a pot of cocoa. And that’s why I’m so sure it was a five star hotel.

The Allure of the Exotic

‘I never knew still waters’

Violent Femmes, Country Death Song

Some anglers want to bag as many different species as they can. My older brother Peter’s one; as I write he’s on a trip to Mongolia and Japan in pursuit of a few of the game fish he’s never caught. A chap I run into on a surf beach marks significant birthdays by jetting off to distant lands that offer interesting sport and some sightseeing to keep his partner entertained – his last holiday was in Mexico for marlin, roosterfish, and a tour of Mazatlán. And the fishing magazines run pieces about ‘species hunting’, running through as many of the UK’s sea creatures as possible, mostly using tiny jigs. I understand the urge to complete a set, whatever its elements, though I resent it when language is used to foster bias: coin lovers are numismatists, stamp junkies are philatelists, how come it’s OK to call someone who writes down railway numbers an anorak? Anyway there are people who collect fish, good for them, whatever waterproof tops they wear. One of Peter’s Japanese targets is the local seabass or suzuki (Lateolabrax japonicus). A lot of the lures we use in Europe are designed for suzuki, which seem to behave like our own bass, feeding best in a stirred up wave. In UK waters I was amazed to find there are five or six different types of goby to be caught. The British Marine Life Study Society reckons they’re hard to identify because more than half the photographs in books attach the wrong name to the wrong tiddler. It’s not just Wikipedia that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Now I have no time for people who claim their branch of our sport’s better than any other. Lure purists and whopper hunters can do as they please. But the one who picks on an angler with a squid bait or a mini-outfit for rock-pools strikes me as a bigoted eejit who needs to shut up, grow up, and get a life. However you fish – as long as it’s legal – is fine, you’re my brother or sister of the rod and line. And I’m not interested in chasing species I’ve never caught before but I’m glad some of my comrades do just that. We may learn new Japanese wrinkles that help us catch bigger UK bass, we may find different types of goby – or at least get better at identifying the ones that are known already. But what I enjoy isn’t the exotic, it’s making the familiar increasingly familiar, becoming more knowledgeable about bass. Maybe that makes me boring, but I’m the same way with birdwatching. I see camouflage coated twitchers with telescopes scurrying about to catch a glimpse of a rare American bagel bunting or hamburger hawk that’s been blown off its migration path by a storm. Fine, but I’d rather sit in the garden with a mug of tea and see how a robin hunts worms through the kale plants, how a thrush chooses the material for its nest – like a really difficult customer in a hardware shop, rejecting twig after twig until it finds the one that looks just like the picture in Ideal Thrush Home. That’s what I enjoy so that’s what I do. Peter travels the world for his sport, I’ll drive no more than twenty miles for mine. Neither of us is right or wrong, we’re just different.

But there was a time when I was desperate to go after something new. I must have been about eight, almost all my fishing had been in the Nile for bulti, and someone gave me A Boy Goes Trouting by G.P.R. Balfour-Kinnear. It was published in 1959 so I had an early copy. The date also explains why the book was aimed only at boys, today I’m sure he’d have written for a gender-neutral youngster. Either way Mr. Balfour-Kinnear quickly replaced Biggles and Fred Trueman as my idol. I’d seen little streams when my parents were on home leave in the UK, the idea of fishing them was thrilling. The Nile in Khartoum’s a massive water, it could be used as a location for a film of Huckleberry Finn or Heart of Darkness. It’s also muddy, Mother said the shade Eau de Nil had been invented by a dye maker who never left the confines of the Coats factory on the Clyde. Casting into crystal pools and shallow riffles, that was a weird and wonderful idea. My only tackle was a spinning rod so I focused most of my attention on Mr. Balfour-Kinnear’s advice about clear water worming. Some day I might have a split cane fly rod, but one step at a time.

Then came the news that we were to spend part of our summer holiday on the Isle of Man, staying in an old coaching inn at Injebreck. It belonged to a branch of my mother’s family and had been converted into a regular house when the motorcar made it possible to travel from end to end of the island, thirty-odd miles, without stopping off for dinner, a few ales, a kip, and a change of horses. And it was within an easy walk of several streams.

When we arrived on the island my mother’s uncle Tom marked our cards. I’m sure there was practical advice about the generator and the oil lamps but I cared only for the fishing stuff. Early mornings were best, ideally after overnight rain to give the water the colour of weak tea. This matched up with what I’d read so I nodded sagely, an eight year old veteran trout man. An eight inch specimen was a keeper, Tom told us, the streams were acidic, good for breeding, poor for feeding, the population needed to be thinned out.

On our first morning I woke at dawn, grubbed up a few worms, and tramped through the dew-soaked bracken to the water’s edge. Allowing for the way time makes things seem larger, the biggest pool was the size of a generous washbasin, maybe a Belfast sink. The water was clearer than Mr. Balfour-Kinnear and I might have wished, only the stingiest host – or a north American – would serve such anaemic tea. Also his typical small water had pools and rapids, this one had pots and vertical cascades. I adapted his advice, flicking my worm into a waterfall and letting it work around the swirls of the bowl below. After a couple of dibbles I moved upstream and repeated the dose. The sun was lighting the tops of the heather-purple hills when I saw a flash of yellow in the dark water, followed by a tug on the line. You don’t really play a fish in something as small as a jam making pan so I swung my trout onto the grass. Nine inches, a keeper, I wrapped it in ferns and fished on.

That holiday was a revelation. Perhaps not up there with Saul on the road to Damascus, but an eye opener for all that. I discovered the joy that comes from seeing something move to your bait, a thrill that led me into the dry fly, dapping, the skating bob, and surface lures for bass. And I learned how important it is to think about the fish and their chance of finding food, to scan a stretch of water for signs of life before either giving it a go or moving on to a likelier spot.

I’m sure G.P.R. Balfour-Kinnear is no longer with us but I owe him my thanks. He taught me that angling – unlike the football they made us play at school – doesn’t depend on speed, strength, or natural talent. It’s a sport for people who like to scratch their heads and ponder. By the way A Boy Goes Trouting sells on the internet for twenty quid. That seems like a bargain, especially if you have young relatives you’d like to turn into the sort of twits who stand around on riverbanks in the foulest of weather.

Watching a Float

‘No sorrow in sight’

Hank Williams, I Saw The Light

I’ve never been a tackle buff. When a catalogue comes in the post I take a glance in case my regular braid’s on special offer. I flap the new products pages of the odd angling paper to see if anyone’s come up with a way of patching waders so they actually stay patched. And by the way it’s a shame when they wrap magazines in polythene, damaging the environment and denying me a free read as well. I realise the sleeve’s meant to make me put my hand in my pocket and buy the thing. It doesn’t work, I just grumble and I do that anyway, it’s age-related. I’d never look lustfully at reviews of top of the line rods and reels, I’m happy with what I have. In fact I’m not much of a consumer at all. I volunteer in a couple of charity shops, they take care of my clothes, books, and CDs. I buy old cars and run them until the mechanic tells me they wouldn’t pass the MOT even if we found a bent inspector and stuffed the glove box with used tenners. I don’t collect anything expensive, no art, wine cellar, antiques, postage stamps. I’ve always thought of possessions as burdens more than pleasures. When I left the Gambia in my late twenties all my worldly goods were in a carry-on grip and a rod tube. I had to take the shotgun out of the bag and give it to the pilot for safe keeping, but there was plenty of room for it among the shirts and underpants.

In the Sudan I was seven or eight when I outgrew my greenheart rod. I graduated to a pale blue solid glass one with an Intrepid reel. This was a simple bit of engineering, I took it apart with a Meccano screwdriver and oiled it if I was bored, always managing to put it back together without difficulty. It was a very well lubricated machine, I was bored whenever I was supposed to be taking a nap. But the tackle I loved was floats. The standard model locally was a white celluloid cylinder the size of a stumpy pencil with a red tip instead of a rubber. This was a functional bit of kit, not in the least attractive, so I made enough alternative designs to last several lifetimes. Some of my creations involved corks from wine bottles fitted to wooden skewers, shaped with a craft knife and sandpaper, then painted in discreet blues and greens below water level, bright yellows and oranges on top. My favourites were quills. Our house was next door to Khartoum zoo, we fed Mother’s baking failures to the elephants over the garden fence. In the same enclosure were the porcupines, they change their hairstyles as often as catwalk models or New Romantic pop stars, you could pick up quills by the bucket load. I liked them about nine inches long. A loop on the bottom made from fuse wire and whipped on with thread from Mother’s sewing basket, a jaunty striped colour scheme for the bit that sat above the water, a few coats of oil-based varnish, you had a thing of beauty that caught fish as well.

Sixty years on my childhood enthusiasm makes perfect sense. When you fish with a float it’s the link between the world we know with its sunshine, rain, and Marmite sandwiches; and the mysterious realm where the fish might or might not be waiting. It’s a tiny, not fully transparent window into the unknown. Peering at a brightly coloured speck on the surface of the water captures the anticipation of fishing, the curiosity about what’s going on down there, the internal debate about whether to be patient or to up sticks and have a try somewhere else. It grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. Like a zen exercise it banishes anything else you might be worrying about: climate change, religious bigotry, or cabbage whites on the kale. What’s more it’s impossible to be gloomy when you’re watching a float. It’s an emblem of the optimistic fancy that something exciting’s about to happen, a physical symbol of the attitude that makes ‘one last cast’ mean ‘I promise I’ll go home some time this week’.

The Impossible Dream

‘I’ve always been crazy’

Waylon Jennings, I’ve Always Been Crazy

It goes without saying that anglers are optimists. We’ll hit the beach when the websites are rammed with reports of a nightly diet of tiny whiting, persuading ourselves there are bound to be monster cod or bass preying on the plagues of bait-pinching tiddlers. The boat brigade parade on the docks at dawn when skippers are saying sport’s been slow but steady, which means parties of eight rods have been seeing four bites a day spaced at more or less two hour intervals. Chucking a buzzer nymph into a five hundred acre lake or a mackerel into the Atlantic calls for a cheery disposition, I’ve always thought National Hunt jockeys are naturals to follow in Izaak Walton’s footsteps. Ask a rider in the paddock for a forecast and you’ll hear something like, ‘She’s in good heart, she’ll love the ground, no reason we shouldn’t run into a place at least’. This when a glance at the form book suggests, ‘She’s a recalcitrant jade likely to refuse at the first obstacle, but if I fall into a patch of mud I might survive without breaking many bones’.

There’s one area where a rod in the hand pushes us across the line that divides optimism from delusion, and that’s our imagined ability to land extraordinary fish on very ordinary tackle. If we competed in motorsport we’d enter the Monaco Grand Prix with glad hearts in our ten year old Ford Fiestas. Then we’d agonise for years over our failure to manage a podium finish. Job asked, ‘Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?’ The average angler would tell him, ‘No worries, it’s a sharp size sixteen hook, my leader’s made of two pound fluorocarbon, the water’s full of razor-sharp boulders, a three foot pike doesn’t stand a bloody chance.’

This struck me like the hoof of a camel on a family trip to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. I was nine or ten years old, Father had some business meetings, and we all went along for the jolly. Mother’s enthusiasm for the trip had something to do with birdwatching and she was excited that we’d be fed Hadendowa mutton. The Hadendowa are a desert people and they cook their meat by slicing it thinly and laying it over rocks heated in a bonfire. Personally I’ve never rated food as theatre, I’d rather it were just shoved on a plate. And in the event the low tech cremation didn’t come to pass, something to do with a broken-down car or a donkey with duff suspension.

For my brothers and myself the jaunt was a rare chance to fish in salt water and we latched on like puppies chewing up a sofa. We used our normal gear from the Nile, spinning rods with fixed spool reels and twelve pound line, and mostly we fished scraps of sardine from the piers and breakwaters. I don’t remember what we caught, likely a bunch of reef fish, but I know we produced a lunch to replace the missing mutton. What I do recall is peering into the crystal waters of the Red Sea as half a dozen enormous shapes nosed their way into the harbour. Even allowing for the magnification wrought by the passage of sixty years they were four or five feet long. Father was convinced they were tuna. He may have been right but in retrospect I’d go with giant trevally, they didn’t move quite like tuna. A sensible crew would have scurried off in search of a camera, maybe alerted some of the local professionals – they had harpoons and industrial strength handlines. But no, in typically hare brained fashion we tried to dangle our little bits of sardine in front of the monsters, no thought as to what we’d do if one were to latch on. A hard fighting two hundred pounder on fifty yards of cheap twelve pound line was a possibility I suppose; just like there’s a chance that email saying you’ve inherited an Australian opal mine, send five thousand quid to cover administration costs, is on the up and up.

Over the years I must have tried my luck with dozens of uncatchable whoppers: a shark cruising at the foot of a fifty foot vertical cliff face, a four or five foot ray flapping along the sand when I was using ultralight gear for snappers, a pike as thick as a prop forward’s neck as I flicked size eighteen midges into a Lancashire reservoir. And all that damned fool endeavour hasn’t put out the flame of stupidity, just dimmed it a little. Only two years back I was wandering along a steep Cornish beach around high water. The sea was glassy, the tide small, and a decent bass seemed about as likely as an alien invasion led by the cast of Coronation Street. I was flicking a flying condom into the millpond when I landed a fat mackerel.

Supper for one, I needed another. I scanned the water for signs of whitebait. Thirty or forty yards out there was a ruffled patch. Half a dozen mackerel flew from the surface followed by a disturbance that looked as if a helicopter had dropped a depth charge strapped to a pissed off rhinoceros. A massive tuna broke the ripple, then another, and another. I’ve seen a few tuna in my time and I’m sure some of the shoal ran to a thousand pounds. I’d bet an arm, a leg, and the internal organ of your choice that none was under four hundred. My backpack was unzipped ready to dig out a wedge or a German sprat before common sense took over from adrenaline-induced idiocy. If one of these giants should happen to grab my lure the best I could hope was that it would empty the reel before snapping me off and carrying on munching its way through the all-you-can-eat mackerel buffet. Two hundred yards of almost new braid would be added to the nonbiodegradable shite in our coastal waters and I’d be out twenty pounds for a refill of my spool. I sat on the sand and watched the feeding frenzy.

I’d like to say it was environmental responsibility that kept my lure in its box but I’m afraid the twenty quid may have been the deciding factor.

First and Last Love

‘Feeling good was good enough for me’

Kris Kristofferson, Me And Bobby McGee

My father’s job in Khartoum carried annual leave of three months. Hard to imagine these days, we’ve all been laid low by the American virus that means even long-serving employees are allowed just a few days off. One of my bosses in New York in the 1990s gave me a promotion and told me I now had four weeks of vacation but I should never expect to take it. He also said I must check for voicemails at least twice a day while I was away. In other words I was to keep my nose to the grindstone of organisational bollix even when I wasn’t working. Luckily our house in Cornwall had an old telephone with a dial. I went away and left a recording on the office system: ‘I won’t have any digital access, if it’s urgent please press zero for my assistant.’ Nobody ever did. The content of most business communication has nothing to do with what’s said. It’s just a bleat into the corporate void: ‘I’m still on the payroll here, please don’t forget me at bonus time.’

But back to Father and most years we’d stay a month or so with my mother’s family in west Cornwall. They lived half a mile from the beach and we spent hours on the rocks at either end of the strand. We used sliding floats with worm baits, limpets at a pinch, catching small pollack and wrasse. And when bites were slow we’d dabble in the rock-pools for shrimps. For some reason we were convinced these had to be cooked in sea water, we’d walk up the lane like the Amazing Blondel on an off day, teetering laboriously as we tried not to spill our buckets. I have to wonder why we thought this was such a good idea. Rock-pools are peed in all the time by seagulls, dogs, and children; and a pail of shellfish must build up a fair concentration of prawn poo. But we just did what the old wives told us, ours not to reason why.

Now I’ve always been solitary by nature. Maybe I need peace and quiet to think great thoughts, maybe I’m an antisocial weirdo, take your pick. So one afternoon I left my parents and brothers watching their floats while I headed off in search of new rock-pools. The silky green seaweed was my happiest hunting ground and I found a gully full of the stuff. Dragging my net along the walls of the pool I scooped up at least a dozen decent shrimps. Then I took a look out to sea. Ten yards away was an area dimpled with fishy splashes, definitely worth a cast. But I had no bait, the worms were with the main family party. Limpet was off limits as well, Father had the only penknife. So I tried a shrimp. Typical of my angling career, I used one of the best rock fishing baits there is, but only because it was all I could find, and I didn’t realise what I’d done until much later. As the float settled it bobbed and darted off towards the depths. I tightened into something, played it carefully, then used an ocean wave to slide it into a depression at my feet. It was a bass, it was a little over a pound and a half, and it was a thing of beauty. I don’t believe there were size limits or catch restrictions in the early 1960s, we ate everything except wrasse, but this was a fish that had to go back. It was too pretty to bash on the head and take home. I unhooked it gently and slid it into the wave. It wasn’t love at first sight, the Hollywood film scene where moonlight flashes in the leading man’s eye as the soundtrack swells with violins; but that little bass was a harbinger of an obsession that grips me to this day.

Fresh Air and Fun

‘I love that dirty water’

The Standells, Dirty Water

My aunt lived outside Liverpool and my brothers and I stayed with her over short breaks from boarding school. And of course we always were on the lookout for the chance to fish. There were canals in the area where stolid types cowered under their giant green umbrellas watching tiny floats and catching even tinier roach and sticklebacks, but we didn’t own any coarse gear and it seemed you needed an enormously long rod to be in with a chance – or at least to avoid being laughed at by the experts. The Mersey in the 1960s was a toxic cesspit where the likeliest catches were bicycle wheels, oily rags, dead rats, and cholera. North Wales was rumoured to have good rivers and beaches but you could get to them by public transport only if you had a couple of days to spare and an aptitude for route-planning that would have put Scott of the Antarctic to shame. So we went to Blackpool, a direct bus ride that took only an hour.

Our favourite mark was the end of the North Pier. For all I know this might have been the only spot where fishing was allowed, it had a platform at the end reserved for anglers. So the ladies and gentlemen who sunbathed in deckchairs – often swathed in thick blankets like tartan mummies – were spared the risk of being impaled by a flying rig or put off their chips by the pong of stale bait. The walk to the end of the structure was under half a mile but it took you past a bingo hall and a ghetto of tumbledown kiosks peddling candy floss, fizzy drinks, and ices. There’s something in the British psyche that says sitting in a damp gale of icy wind watching whitecaps scud across dirt brown water calls for summery refreshments. Also sun hats, usually worn with woolly jumpers, greatcoats, and knitted mittens. Halfway along the pier was a giant greenhouse where delicate sun seekers could enjoy their ultraviolet rays under cover in a fug of steam from mugs of soup and smoke from Woodbines.

There was a tackle shop as well. No idea why but the standard rig was a wire paternoster with three size eight offset hooks, a four ounce disc-shaped weight, and one inch portions of dried black lugworm. Grown-ups used this contraption on beach-casting rods, slinging their baits away to the horizon. Youngsters with centre pin reels lowered their kit into the khaki waves, looking for the scours around the pilings. Once your gear was in the water you leaned your rod against the railing, clipped a bell to the tip, and stood back to await nibbles. Bites were slow but almost everyone caught small dabs and flounders, the odd silver eel to provide half an hour of fun as you untangled a macramé bollix made of three brass booms, three monofilament snoods, and a dollop of slime. There were rumours of cod but I never saw one, they always seemed to have been landed by the uncle of the brother-in-law of the girlfriend of the mate of the person you were talking to. It’s that kind of hearsay evidence that keeps the Loch Ness monster in the news from time to time.

In wild weather the anglers’ jetty was closed, grubby waves washing over the planks. We’d fish from a tea shop, sitting in its relative warmth and watching our rods through the spray-spattered windows. The café owner was an understanding sort; as long as you bought something, you could use his gaff as a bivouac for as long as you fancied. But he drew the line at baiting up or unhooking catches on his tables. A pleasant fellow but obviously no fisherman.

Big Boots

‘By the cool crystal waters’

Francis McPeake, Wild Mountain Thyme

We lived in Dar es Salaam for the second half of the 1960s. My brothers and I were away at boarding school or university but we spent a lot of our holidays with our parents, and when Peter passed his driving test new fishing horizons opened up. Father’s company car was off limits but Mother had a Ford Anglia we could borrow for trips into the Tanzanian interior. It wasn’t comfortable. In those days UK manufacturers produced special models for export to Africa. All they did was add one or two leaves to make the suspension bone-shakingly firm and remove the heater. Someone in Dagenham must have seen a few pictures and decided the whole continent was criss-crossed by dirt roads and bathed in sweltering sunshine. They were right about the lack of asphalt but the upland regions of East Africa have frost in winter and there are places where the snow never melts.

One chilly expedition was to Mufindi in the Southern Highlands. The area was dotted with tea plantations and some of its waters had been stocked with trout, from Loch Leven I think. Tanganyika became a British colony only after the Great War so the fingerlings must have been shipped off around the twenties. They were well established, bred successfully, and some grew to five pounds.

Settlers from Blighty often worked hard to recreate the rural UK in their new homes. As well as the fish they’d brought a garden centre full of roses, every tea planter’s house had them climbing around the door. Apart from the orange tile roofs they might have been living in one of those Cotswold villages jammed with tour buses and shops peddling rustic pine furniture made in Thailand. If I were in self-imposed exile I dare say I’d miss the land of my fathers but brown trout and roses wouldn’t top my list of home comforts to be imported. Maybe a supply of Marmite or a flat pack brewery from Burton-on-Trent. In any event we were glad they’d decided a fly fishery was an essential feature of civilised life in the wilds of East Africa.

There was a guesthouse on the bank of the lake we fished. It had a fireplace to take the nip off the evenings and a leather bound journal for catch reports. The first page of this volume described the fish as ‘not free rising’. Given anglers’ wild optimism I’d say this meant a trout had been spotted near the surface in about 1949 but it was sunbathing not feeding. The fellow with the most catch reports in the book was a Mr. Niblett and the water-watcher regaled us with tales of his skills. Folk in that part of the world struggle with the sound of the letter ‘L’ and can’t pronounce anything that ends in a consonant, so Niblett morphed into Nibiriti. Nibiriti, we were told, could cast so far that his fly was invisible. He also owned a pair of very big boots – waders – and he could cover the whole water. His rod was long and strong, his line was heavy and it sank to the bottom where he pulled it along at heroic speed. In modern reservoir parlance he was a lure stripper.

I’m not sure where my fly rod came from but it was an old split cane job with an action somewhere between soft and abject. With the benefit of experience I’d say the fibres had started to break down, I imagine it was somebody’s hand-me-down. Or maybe it was designed to be rubbish from the get-go, like fast fashion clothes, fast food hamburgers, and customer service from banks. Either way even a champion caster would have struggled to cover more than a dozen yards with it, and I was a clumsy novice. My line had started life as a floater but sections had lost their coating, turning it into a sink-tip, not to mention a sink-middle. But you use what’s around. The fishing log said the best flies were Matuka, Peter Ross, and Alexandra. I had an Alexandra, that’s what I tried.

If I were to fish that water again I’d use something to suggest a tadpole or a damsel nymph. They can be retrieved more slowly than a lure, my arm wouldn’t have been so knackered so quickly. But I kept flogging way with my Alexandra, wishing I had a pair of Nibiriti’s big boots so I could reach more water. As my elbow stiffened I tried along the reed beds that lined the bank. By now I was managing just six or seven yards so I could see when a golden flank turned behind my sinking fly. I recovered half a yard of line and hit resistance. It was a slim fish with a kype, a pound and three quarters, and I was smitten. Of the enthusiasms of my early teenage years – they included Vimto, tinned ravioli, Vespa motor scooters, and Françoise Hardy – only fly fishing has stood the test of time. And big boots.

Unnatural Environments

‘I don’t wanna work in a building downtown’

Arcade Fire, Television Antichrist Blues

A lot of anglers tell each other they really don’t care whether they catch anything, it’s just such a pleasure to be surrounded by nature. Generally this means they haven’t had a bite since God was a boy but they want to keep heading out because blanking beats helping the kids with their algebra or fixing the window that’s been loose since they moved in. And the oddest bit’s that a lot of popular marks are very unnatural, wrecked by hideous human tinkering.

Reservoir trout fans are attracted to ugly dam walls the way politicians are drawn to lobbyists with platinum credit cards. Some waters prohibit access to their dams, anglers see these bans as a challenge and an indication the walls must be fish magnets. I’ve watched many a fat stockie escape when some fly rod wielding outlaw realises even a telescopic landing net won’t reach down fifty feet of concrete blockwork. And fair enough, reservoirs are manmade to begin with, but the bit that looks least like a proper lake is that stonking great structure with the sluice gates in the middle.

Rivers are butchered as well. When I was a teenager my brother Peter had a yen to catch a barbel. He did his research and found the closest hotspot was in Yorkshire. So off we went through the rugged loveliness of the Pennines with hope in our hearts and sandwiches in the boot. The magic mark turned out to be just below a massive weir that had been built fifty-odd years back, lots of steel and rust-stained cement. I don’t think we had our barbel, perhaps because of the bait we used. We were told by the locals that a cube of luncheon meat was the best bet, we took them at their word. Looking back I wonder why fish would be hunting lumps of greasy pink pork waste in a clear north country river. Had there been a teashop nearby serving nostalgic snacks from the war years I’d be open to persuasion. ‘I’ll try the Spam fritter. By gum, it’s just as filthy as I remembered, I’m going to chuck it in the river for the fishes.’ Groundbait never does any harm.

Sewage outfalls were popular spots in Cornwall when I was a youngster. Mullet, bass, and pollack for the rod fishers, while boatmen surrounded the smelliest coves with their lobster pots. I’ve never thought much of lobster. Piers and jetties attract attention as well and I’ve had decent bass from the mouths of harbours as the tide carries their prey in and out through a narrow funnel. And often that’s what makes construction projects so fishy: they produce larders where food piles up along with the predators that fancy it. Dam walls trap dead and dying flies and fry, weirs scour out potholes that fill with edible debris, sewage pipes attract crustacea that feed predators and scavengers.

The clearest example of fish adapting to technology was something I saw in Dar es Salaam in the 1960s. The city’s harbour was a natural bay with a dozen or so wharves scattered around its margins. Most of the shoreline was muddy, stony, and gently shelving. Someone told me there were red snappers (Lutjanus gibbus) in the area and I had a bash. The bottom was too rough to ledger so I freelined a prawn bait. There was easy access by the ferry terminal, I was dropped there and I went for a wander, casting whenever I saw broken coral, structure for prawns to hang out. But it was deadly dour, one missed bite in two hours. Heading back I tried a last cast right beside the terminal, a concrete ramp that ran out into the channel. No sooner had my bait splashed down than the ferry came into view. Dar es Salaam drivers were a spirited gang – they all thought they were competing in the East African Safari Rally – and the ferryboat captain was cut from the same cloth, rushing at the shore as if hell bent on doing as much damage as possible, a maelstrom of swirls from the propellers. Rats, I thought, bound to put the fish off the feed. As I started to reel in I felt a solid yank from a three pound snapper. I fished on, sitting on the edge of the slip. Whenever a ferry arrived or set sail there’d be a few minutes of non-stop bites. When both craft were out in the middle of the passage there was not a nibble. The wash from the screws created whirlpools and eddies that dislodged prawns and crabs from their hidey holes, providing the snappers with an all-you-can-eat-but-you’d-better-be-quick-about-it buffet. When the water was still, the crustaceans tucked themselves safely away and the predators loafed around waiting for the next eruption of treats. Snapper behave a lot like bass, it seems, they’re canny opportunists.

Little Works of Art

‘Hey good lookin’’

Hank Williams, Hey Good Lookin’

For the first twenty-five years of my fishing life I was broke. I went from being a schoolboy whose pocket money barely covered essentials like gobstoppers and yoyos to being a teacher living on the faintest whiff of oil on an undersized rag. I’m not sorry. From an early age I learned that you don’t need the latest spiffy tackle to make good catches, you just need to spend time by the water. The professionals I met in Khartoum and Dar es Salaam often owned no more than a spool of stout mono, some hooks, and a few knackered sparkplugs for sinkers. They made a living anyway because they knew what they were doing. Their marks were like old friends, one glance and they could feel what was going on in the water, where the fish would be holding, what they’d be chasing. Today I run into anglers, especially youngsters, who tell me they can’t afford the kit for bass. Often they’ve read puffs in magazines, articles about the wonders of a six hundred pound lure fishing reel or a Japanese plug finished by hand and priced like a Savile Row suit. It’s my pleasure to show them my gear, none of it’s expensive, all of it works just fine.

In my teens and early twenties I made a lot of my equipment. There was a company called McHardys that sold blanks and fittings. The name’s interesting. Maybe there was a family called the McHardys, more likely it was a handle invented to send a message: if you can’t stump up for Hardy’s gear here’s the next best thing, brought to you by a frugal Scot with a cheeky sense of humour. Certainly I wound up with a very decent trout rod, salmon spinner, and beach-caster. My efforts never quite looked the business, I hadn’t the patience to make two coloured whippings for the rings, I wanted everything put together and down by the drink in double quick time. But the fish can’t see what’s in your hand until it’s too late. I bought something called mill end fly lines as well, usually for between a fifth and a tenth of the top drawer prices. They worked fine, any differences between the full whack efforts and my bargain basement cheapies were lost on me.

Strangely I didn’t start tying my own flies till a bit later in life when I was no longer dirt poor, just grubby. I think I was struck by the beauty of the ready-made articles, the precise way they were put together. I must have driven shopkeepers insane, I’d pore for hours over their display boxes eying up the ribs, the tags, the whip finishes. Then I’d buy one Grouse and Claret and one Dunkeld. It was only when I learned about scooping trout, from a weather-beaten Yorkshireman by a stream near Preston, that I began to understand what these tiny sculptures were all about. Peering at the stomach contents of my fish helped me see how many nymphs or emergers it takes to sustain a healthy trout. And I realised a finny eating machine doesn’t have time to whip out its loupe and check the evenness of your dubbing or the jaunty angle of your wing. If your offering looks reasonably like the prey species, down it goes.