Category — Fishing (other stuff)

I finally got around to finishing off my review of the Gear Bag Chest. It’s over in the gear reviews section. Here’s a direct link if you cannae be bothered going there first (though I should point out that there are some other wonderfully insightful reviews there too, which are obviously worth the read). Enjoy!

Time on the river has been extremely limited this season. I’m currently going through the process of writing up a big project for my job (ok, it’s a thesis..) which appears to be more and more like torture every day. The few times I have been out seem to have taken on a new significance, like rare glimpses of sunlight at the end of a big dark cave.

Last weekend I headed over to a favourite river for some serious lone time. Lone time, with added trout. As part of my ongoing musings into the optimum rod to use on rivers, I strung up the shotgun for a bit of a fling. Old stiffy, as she is now also know, turned out to be a whole lot better than I imagined. (For new readers, Old stiffy is a Sage XP, 9′, 5 weight.)

Streamers and dries lie at the opposite ends of the fly fishing spectrum. I already love dries, and fish them wherever possible. But I’ve recently felt an unnerving attraction towards streamers, with their unashamed brashness and ‘use me or screw me’ attitude. This may or may not have something to do with the incredible number of large trout that a certain fishing acquaintance of mine has caught whilst using them over the past couple of seasons. The problem, or perhaps `challenge’ is a better word, lies in combining the two approaches in an outfit that allows both vices to be enjoyed equally.

For the first couple of hours I used an intermediate line with a fast sinking polyleader looped onto the end. Together with a weighted streamer this combination can get reasonably deep quite quickly, so is perfect for searching out deeper runs and seams. This last sentence is yet another wonderful example of the bullshit I spout on occasion (`only on occasion‘ the audience screams!), for I am a total newbie to streamer fishing, and have only ever caught a handful of fish like this. What I should have said was that it feels like a perfect setup for searching out the blah blah blah..

Well I searched and I searched for quite a few hours, and didn’t see, hear, feel or smell any trout. Disgruntled that all my good feelings about streamer fishing weren’t producing, I sat down and mused. There was plenty of evidence of the recent floods our rivers have experienced. The high water line looked like a frightening prospect in comparison to the clear water flowing past my feet. It was funny to see the silt deposited on leaves that normally only shower in the rain. The clear water drew my attention again, and I longed for dry fly simplicity.

Off with the intermediate-sink-tip-polyleader-good-feeling nonsense, and on with a floating fiver. This one hadn’t been used in more than a season, and still had the glued-in leader butt I once eulogised over to anyone who would listen. It really is a nice setup, so smooth and with excellent turnover. As usual I overestimated the required leader length, ending up with something that could be used to measure swimming pools. Something like 20′, which is really a little obscene.

With my lewd leader I thus marched off up to the next run. During the lengthy process of switching over my setup I had noticed a single, solitary rise in a small bit of creased water where a tiny burn flowed into the main river. With no more sign of life forthcoming I began short casts from the back of the run, slowly working up towards the burn. Third or fourth cast in and there was a wonderful, savage take to my fly. It was the kind of take that reminded me of the cutthroat trout in the west of Canada a few seasons back. Eager and willing. The fish now connected to Old stiffy quickly demonstrated that stiffness is a relative term, which is both reassuring and disturbing at the same time. It was the first fish I’ve hooked on the rod that actually made me feel like there was going to be a fight involved. There was.

The trout jumped out the water maniacally, showing the same eagerness to reach for the sky as she’d shown for my floating fly. I had that glorious, stomach churning feeling as I realised that this was probably my fish of the season, and I’d better not cock up. She quickly decided that the fast riffley run downstream looked like a good spot for a picnic, and bolted off. I had foolishly thought that a bit of sneakiness with side pressure and a ready net might forego any complications, and was left with one hand on the rod, one clutching my net and the other… flailing for the fly line. That’s three hands, which is what it felt like.

I performed that kind of half-shuffle, half-long jump motion required to pursue a fish downstream through thigh-high water, whilst waving my rod about quite a lot and repeatedly muttering “don’t come off, please don’t come off…”. In the quieter water beyond the riffle I started to apply some strong pressure, which caused the fish to jump again. There seems to be no better time for a fish to throw a hook than during a jump, so I eased off a little. By now I’d seen the trout quite clearly through the water (did I mention it was clear?) and she was a beauty. A more controlled application of side pressure brought her to the surface, and with a couple of desperate reaches with the net she was in.

As it happened I had chosen this day to take along my new net, one of those nice Maclean weigh-nets from New Zealand. The idea of a weigh-net is actually quite funny for most of the fishing I do, what with micro-parr and the odd half-pounder signifying a good day at the moment. But I had got a good deal on it, so plumped up the cash in an act not far from self-mockery. The beauty with a weigh net, over the more conventional Salter scales that you manually hook onto the net at the opportune moment, is that the reading you get doesn’t have to be adjusted for the weight of the net. It’s already calibrated. So what you see, for one God-foresaken time, is what you get. In this case that was exactly 2.5lb of golden, gorgeous trout.

A few moments for a photo session and I eased her (I’m pretty sure it was a female; she was certainly very pretty and slightly feminine in a Lara Croft kind of way) into the flow. A couple of moments and she pushed forward and quickly disappeared into the background of the rocky riverbed. Unquestionably my fish of the season, and unquestionably the nicest feeling I can remember for quite a long time.

After all that I had to phone someone, so it was my dad and brother who got the first telling. They were sitting down to a lovely curry at the time, which eased the reception of the fact that I was having amazing fishing and they weren’t. There’s an amazing rush of excitement after a trout like that which is hard to explain to folks who don’t fish. It’s a kind of head spinning rush of joy which seems to far outweigh the material fact of the capture. Even if the trout was quite big, even if it was beautiful, why does it feel so incredibly, soul-burstingly satisfying?

I fished on up the run with nothing to show for it. Nothing except for the whopping great grin on my face from that trout, of course. I slowly started to sink back into something like a regular fishing mode, and began to appreciate the reason that Old stiffy is so highly regarded in the trout world. She really does turn over leaders like the All Blacks against England. Loops unroll quickly, smoothly and with pin-prick accuracy. Even a fairly moderate breeze doesn’t seem to be a great problem. There’s still no question that when fishing dries I feel more at home with my slightly noodly 3 weight, but in all honesty it wasn’t too bad. And it certainly makes fishing the streamers a little less comical. Perhaps I just need to accept that fishing dries and streamers requires quite a lot of compromise on both parts. I think that a stiffish 5 weight like this is probably as close to the useful middle ground as can be had.

After an hour or so of fishless fishing, I crawled out the river and walked up past some moderately interested cows to a long flat. There were fewer trees, but oddly enough a couple of fish rose almost immediately. There had been no sign of any hatch all day, so I wasn’t sure what had brought them up. The rises were gentle though, so I put up a little CDC thing. Eventually I got a solid take, which turned out to be a very feisty grayling (are grayling ever not feisty?). A clean 1lb and a quarter, according to my what-you-see-is-what-you-get-net. He (I think it was a he, the dorsal was pretty long and he looked pissed off) was slipped back with a bit of a splash on my camera, and I decided it was time to trundle back to the car. I don’t know how many more days I’m doing to get on the river this season, but I hope this one will give me a little smile when the going is rough. It will certainly be a long time before I forget the enthusiasm of that take from the beautiful brownie; a bit of cutthroat hope in a big dark cave.

One of the first things I bought when I started fly fishing was a fishing vest. After several hours of careful deliberation over three separate visits to a local tackle shop I settled on a Ron Thomson jobbie at fifteen quid. That last line reveals more about my personality than I’m sometimes willing to admit. It also gives me a wry smile now, a few years down the line. I remember thinking something like “hmm… all the fly fishing heros I’ve seen seem to wear one of these vests, so I’d better get one. With lots of pockets. And a D-ring on the back for my net. Oooh yeah, I’ll need a net too, for all the nettable fish I’m going to be catching down the local trout sewer…Ho hum..”

My Ron Tommie was a lovely dull green colour, and seemed to be made from the kind of cotton left over after some factory in deepest China had finished making Y-fronts for Asda. Flimsy would be polite. The zips looked to be the same as those you find on really cheap purses for sale at Saturday markets all over the country. Great as a last minute mother’s day present, not so great for the brutal treatment of a manic young fisherthing, crawling through thick urban undergrowth to get to hidden bits of river. The first one went after a few weeks, but despite my unkind comments most of the others actually held out for a couple of years.

Upon arriving home with my Tommie-vest I proceeded to enthusiastically fill up as many of the pockets as possible. Plans were made for all eventualities, including famine, nuclear holocaust, rampaging mongeese and long fly-sucking tree branches. The only problem was that once I’d distributed all my flyboxes, floatant, tippet, permits and suchlike, there were still a couple of pockets which didn’t threaten to split open at any moment. Obviously I wasn’t carrying enough flies, so a further trip to the tackle shop was required. A couple of new fly boxes and a few dozen loch-style flies later and things were looking and feeling decidedly heavy (except for my wallet..). Heaviness of tackle is next to manliness of course, so I was all set.

A feature of the Ron-Tom I was particularly proud of was the patch of fluff stuck to one of the pocket flaps close to the left breast. Over the following two or three years this became the very hub of my fishing world, as more and more of my flies seemed to migrate from the neatly arranged boxes and into the party on the patch. Rather than carefully scan rows of carefully organised flies in plush fly boxes, I began to develop a slightly crooked neck from sticking my chin into my chest to examine proceedings on the patch. I really do have good intentions when it comes to fishing organisation, but things just seem to get out of hand.

The vest had a proud life, witnessing all of my fishing exploits up to the end of the 2006 season. She saw me catch a huge river trout, a huge river grayling, fall in (multiple times), blank (multiple times), fall in (some more) and hugged my shivering torso as I watched lovely summer sunsets (after falling in). I’ve thought about it a lot, and I can’t think of anything that would have been gained by spending an extra 50 or 100 quid on a flash-vest. Ok, perhaps a Simms, Orvis or suchlike would have lasted a decade instead of half that, but seriously, fly fishing doesn’t have to be expensive and blingy (some people may disagree).

The green wonder now lies at the bottom of my wardrobe, carefully folded and sucking up the lovely flavour of the surrounding pinewood. One day I will dig her back out again and go fishing. I’m hoping the relationship will still be workable, for I’ve since been unfaithful and moved on to modern rubbish. Perhaps the glory of the woody smell will have done the trick, like a nice bottle of perfume.

Indeed, a day came when it was time to move on. My gear carrying device has since been altered to a chest pack. Note I say altered, and not upgraded. I do now find a chest pack to be a superior all-round system, but I refuse to say that anything is an upgrade of my humble vest. Indeed, while the old vest did lend me a certain ‘elderly’ quality, I occasionally have to refer to the chest pack as a ‘man-bag’, in order to reassure myself of its suitability for a testosterone-packed individual such as me. This has not been helped by occasional unthoughtful comments from people who shall remain nameless.

I suppose any piece of fishing gear can become precious. Fishing for hours on end wearing the vest it becomes part of your fishing mindset, something that is just there. It was a strangely uncomfortable experience making the switch to a new pack, and I didn’t feel comfortable at all for a month or so. Of course all of this talk is pretty much total unadulterated bullshit, because in the end you go fishing for reasons other than pathetic sentimental memories of a fifteen quid piece of Y-front, but that’s what blogging is here for. The only exception to this cutting sentiment is the Hat, but that’s a whole other post.

Believe it or not this post started out as a review of the aforementioned chest pack. That post is now in the pipelines, so watch out over the next few days. It’s one of the older William Joseph chest packs, and it’s a beauty. The review will be in the reviews section soon(ish)…

One of the great things about writing a fishing blog is that it gives you a near-permanent record of the season’s fishing exploits. I often scroll through my old blog posts recalling trips and thoughts. It’s a funny process really, a bit narcissistic, but it’s also very enlightening. It’s possible to ‘chart’ the evolution of one’s fishing life, with all the highs and lows, the glory and the disaster.

The only problem is that it’s actually quite a bit of effort to keep a blog updated (eh…), and so inevitably one doesn’t record all a season’s trips. The real nitty-gritty detail of a trip is also lost on a blog: stuff like the atmospheric pressure, the temperature and the colour of my socks. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately: there are bound to be some hidden jewels of fishy information in those lost and under-reported trips.

I think the solution is the Diary of Future Past. A concise, all-encompassing record of every fishing trip I make. We’re talking hardware here folks, the real stuff, not just 1’s and 0’s and digital trickery. It’s the kind of record the real folks of old used to keep, the kind you can carry around and flick over whilst on the bus. I’ve been meaning to do so myself for the past couple of seasons, but it’s only now that I’ve discovered the secret to making good such ambitious intentions. Preparation, preparation, preparation.

In my old folly I thought a simple notebook would suffice. A few ruled lines, a ballpoint pen and a little determination. But the time folks, oh the time. I am really just as lazy as the next man, and it just takes too much time to start a fishing report with a totally blank sheet of paper. I need a little prodding, and the Diary of Future Past prods nicely.

There are lots of commercial fishing diaries out there, but the ones I’ve seen are rather expensive, not very good and full of advertising. So I decided to make one myself, using the glory of JFig, my printer at work and the lovely folks in the graphics and photocopying wizardry department of the University of Edinburgh. The lovely thing about making your own diary is that you can include precisely the empty spaces you want. There are also no adverts, dodgy photographs or deeply inspiring quotes from Robert Redford. It’s a diary without the fat and cholesterol, streamlined to sharply prod me into faithful adherence.

I think I’ve included the most important stuff: empty spaces for the date, details about the weather, the general hatch and trout activity, notes about the flies I used and plenty of space for meanderous wanderings. The Diary is A5 size, so it’s nice and portable, with a stiff cardboard backing and clear plastic covers. Each report has two pages: one with the writing, and a second on the back available to stick in wee photos if desired. Book one has space for 83 diary entries, which should see me through a season or two. I reckon it should be possible to file a report in about ten minutes, which fits nicely into my morning turd regime. No more excuses.

I recently started reading `How To Fish‘ by Chris Yates. It’s actually not about ‘how to fish’, and it’s not even about fly fishing, well at least not principally. It’s main subject is coarse fishing, particularly for perch, but the essence of this seems to be utterly identical to fly fishing.

I’m up to chapter 6, and it’s already quite clear that it is a really beauty of a book. Chris has a wonderful style of writing. It is deceptively simple, but also extremely elegant and insightful. The best thing I can say is that he seems to be able to communicate a feeling which gets somewhere close to one’s soul. I’ll try and write a proper review when I’ve finished, so for the moment I’ll leave you with a wonderful paragraph.

“…fishing offers a dimension where, even if you don’t cast very far into it, you can be free of the wired-up world and suddenly in touch with an equally complex, less concise but deeper-rooted reality. The simpler your approach the more intimately you’re involved; uncluttered by a barrow-load of equipment, untroubled by the passage of time, hopefully undisturbed and often unambitious, you rediscover the art of improvisation that you mastered as a child, and as you become more absorbed in the watery surroundings you begin to notice details - the bending of a reed, the forming of a ripple, an abrupt stillness - that gradually join up to create an event that you may be part of. “

It’s nice to see the Clyde River Foundation and others getting school kids to understand something about rivers. The BBC have an article about one such project in Clackmannanshire. Check it out.

A while back I was musing about the great fly tying problem of `waste stuff’. Every time I tie a deer hair emerger a great plume of trimmed deer hair finds its way down onto my bedroom floor. This is not exactly a universe-ending disaster. However, with my new-fangled portable fly tying system, I know I’m going to be doing a lot more tying on the road. That means my tying bench will be B&Bs, campsites and my car steering wheel. With all that waste, I could end up causing a kind of world war with the neighbors, and that’s definitely not cricket. What was needed was a catcher. A Catcher in the Hookeye, in fact.

Take one coat hanger, one old teeshirt, a little inventiveness and a friend with a sewing machine. Boil together in a large pan with garam masala, tomatoes and a Saturday afternoon. Add a chunk of metal, sprinkle with a little Disney magic and out pops this wee gem.

The Catcher in the Hookeye is my version of the waste material bin. It fits snuggly onto most vice shafts with that wee chunk of metal I mentioned, which I found lying around my lab at work. I’m not sure what it’s called, but I call it `the wee chunk of metal’. The frame is made of a bent coat hanger. Of course, coat hangers are normally bent when you buy them, so the idea of bending one is almost ironic. Bending the bent. It’s like asking a duck to quack with a Swedish accent. It’s a bent idea that.

The catching bit is the back of one of my oldest teeshirts. My mother tried for about five years to get me to chuck it, but my line was always “Ma, there will be some use for it eventually, I’m just not sure what it is yet.” Well Ma, here it is. The catcher of the Catcher in the Hookeye.

I like the fact that all my waste gets trapped now. I’ve always found that waste fly tying material is a bit like a dream: if you don’t grab it whilst it’s fresh, it’s lost forever. And that, my friends, is a little sad. Now there’s a right and proper place for waste, and it’s in the Catcher. Every now and then I’ll delve into the bowls of this humble servant, and it’s amazing the bits and bobs of old material that can be used for other flies. As I am an ethnic mix of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Scotland, I’m about as tight as they come. So don’t blame me, it’s genetic.

The Catcher falls nicely in line with my increasingly obsessive policy of home-made fly tying paraphernalia. It functions perfectly well, and cost -£2.50 (that’s the money I saved by not wasting time and petrol on taking my old teeshirt and coat hanger to the recycling joint). I tried for about three months to find something similarly decent in the fishing tackle shops, and the cheapest thing I found was almost a tenner. Ridiculous. Get yourselves a flaming coat hanger and a good old fashioned chunk of metal. Take half an hour on a Saturday afternoon (other days are less reliable) and churn one out for yourself. Then get down to the local newsagent and spend your saved cash on 250 penny sweets. Glorious.

Long hours of quiet meditation. Days of ingesting inordinate quantities of super-curry. With-holding toilet use for three days. There are many things we can do to try to change ourselves. I tried to change, I tried to be a Tuesday-night-tier. I tried to set targets and to stick to them. Ten muddler heads a week, how hard can it really be? Sadly, it just doesn’t work.

I’ve since come to accept that my erratic fly tying behaviour is probably a reflection of something rather unchangeable and hard-wired into my brain. I’ve heard it referred to as ‘personality’, and it ain’t half an arse at times. My newfound zen-like self acceptance means that some kind of permanent solution has had to be found for the issue of fly tying gear transportation. The Stand of Majesty just wasn’t going to cut it on the road, not with all those bobbin antennae. What was needed was a way to transport everything I could possibly need for any possible situation. Fluff, feathers, bobbins, the whole shebang. The system needed to be hardwearing, reliable, small and most importantly, easily transportable. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you… the Far-reaching And Ridiculously Tenacious fly tying System (FARTS to you and I).
[Read more →]

Whilst studiously working to write up some recent work I came across a really nice set of video clips. They are of the famous Gary Borger, and as far as I can tell they date from a few decades ago. A particular classic is the nymphing video series, which starts here. You can find the rest of the clips here. They are well worth a look.

I have a strange relationship with fly tying. On the one hand it has helped me to get more out of my fishing. I love seeing a trout sup down a little sherry spinner tied by my own two hands. It’s a special kind of satisfaction that just doesn’t exist with shop bought fluff. I have also found, however, that it sometimes has a tendency to drive me into a kind of unhealthy obsession. The most bizarre thing of all is that the obsession isn’t actually about tying flies.

Organisation. Where would we be without the simple joy found in sorting stuff out, finding a proper place for every last widget? Fly tying is an absolute class A activity for those of us with a ’sorting out’ fetish. The endless packets of dubbing, the myriad feathers and capes, the insane variety of hooks. Oh what joy! I am certain that I have a problem. I’m becoming the kind of fly tier that spends more time, a lot more time, sorting out fly tying paraphernalia than actually tying flies. Perhaps the worst thing of all though, the real bottom clencher, is that I rather suspect that I spend even more time just thinking about sorting out fly tying gear than even sorting the damn stuff out.

[Read more →]