Category — Books

How to Fish by Chris Yates is possibly the best fishing book I’ve ever read. It contains no trout fishing, flies, waders or mention of the word ‘tippet’. He even proclaims himself as devoid of the trout fishing bug, preferring the Perch found in the sedate rivers of the south of England to the trout of the tumbling tirades up here in Scotland, or anywhere else for that matter. All of this is totally inconsequential.

As a writer Chris Yates has achieved something close to perfection with How to Fish. He captures the beauty, obsession, madness and gladness of fishing with the most fantastically simple, yet hypnotically engaging style I’ve ever come across. It sometimes seems amazing to me that a writer can have such a thing as their own ’style’. After all, they’re only words, and how many ways can there really be of arranging ‘fishing’, ‘wonderful’ and ‘fell in’? Reading Yate’s offering I feel I’ve understood just as much about writing as about the glory of fishing. The pace of words, the construction of the chapters, it’s all brilliant and just draws you into a different world, populated by stripy fish and gently wafting weed.

The first time I picked the book up I had a slightly tentative feeling towards coarse fishing, born of several years of exclusively fishing flies. That feeling lasted about two seconds once I started reading, and it wasn’t long before my own memories of catching perch and tench as a child crept back. I now find myself in the position of feeling close to finally understanding something about the universality of fishing. It really is about a mindset, and the species and methods are almost meaningless beyond personal preference. Funnily enough I was reading John Gierach’s essay on ‘The Purist‘ just last night, which was rather timely.

If you want to read How to Fish for yourself, you can get a copy from here if you like. Mine is currently doing the rounds of all my family and fishing pals. For a sneak preview, I found the first chapter here in full. As a final aside, I recall downloading a podcast some time back featuring Chris Yates interviewed by Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5 Live as part of the promotion for the book. It was very interesting to see how the pace of Chris’ voice seems nicely tied in to his writing style. I have a copy of it but have been unable to locate one online. If there’s any interest I’ll try and find a way to distribute it, if doing so isn’t illegal.

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. “

I worked a little bit on the blog this morning, and you can now find a burgeoning list of my favourite books under the page “Books“, which is a permanent link over on the left under the main navigation menu. Needless to say, more will be added as I find time.

Happy reading…

I love reading fishing books. Even during the trout season I find a good fishing book can relax and excite me like no other written words. Somehow the process of fishing seems to lend itself very well to the art of the written word. There’s always a beginning, quite often a middle, and always some kind of end. Perhaps the most important thing though is that fishing can always be a journey. And there’s nothing like a good journey to strike imagination and hope into the mind of a reader.

One of the great things about internet fishing diaries and websites is the potential for discovering books, both new upstarts and old time gems. I’ve bought several books following recommendations from my pal Alistair over at the Urban Fly Fisher blog. One of my recent favourites is “Trout Madness” by Robert Traver.
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Last night I finished reading a book. I’m not a particularly fast reader, so this was a relatively rare event and worthy of mention. Rather more worthy of mention however was the book itself. Isolation Shepherd by Iain R. Thomson is now among my favourite books. It’s a wonderfully simple premise: the life and times of a shepherding family who lived in one of the most remote and beautiful glens in all of Scotland. From Strathfarrar in the east, up the great expanse of Loch Monar and into the upper reaches at Strathmore, this is a book set in the finest of Scottish landscapes. Great mountains lie all around. The fantastically remote Sgurr na Lapaich and An Riabhachan to the south, Sgurr a’Chaorachain to the north and the Bowman’s Pass to the west are just a few of the many fine hills and valleys. There are rivers and lochs as well. Monar itself, the Gead lochs to the south west and the myriad streams and burns running off the peaks. A little piece of isolated perfection nestled into the far north west of this island.

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My fly fishing ‘history’ can be roughly split into two periods: BB and AB. These stand for ‘Before Bob’ and ‘After Bob’. Anyone sniggering at this point, well, I’ve never met the man so let’s not go there.. The Bob I’m referring to is of course Bob Wyatt of Trout Hunting fame. This book had a really strong influence on the way I fish and the way I think about fishing. In fact it is what made me sit up and start to think a little about my fishing in the first place. It’s helped me to be able to ponder, with at least slight objectivity, about what might be going on when I tie that shaggy size 14 sedge onto my tippet.

One of the things I most enjoy about Bob’s writing is his wonderful ability to present simple, logical ideas that suggest how trout live and feed. His writing style is very relaxed and readable, and you never feel you are receiving a lecture. Sometimes when I’m out on a river and things are not going well I’ll share a wry chuckle with myself (or anyone willing to listen) that goes somewhere along the lines of “what would Bob say?” More often than not the answer I find bubbling into my brain tells me to sit down, have a cup of tea and smell the flowers!

I particularly like the emphasis Bob puts on fishing pals and how important it is to have in mind that fishing should be about the experience. One of the last and best chapters is in fact called “The Experience is the Thing” and I think he just about sums up all that is great about the shared joy to be found in angling. I feel like I’m there bobbing down the windward shore of a highland loch in June, a good pal near by, sharing some banter and catching bright wild brown trout.

If one of my own pals, the pal Al, is reading this I suspect a small smile may have crept across his lips by this point. This is to be expected however, because he ‘knows‘ Bob. Even if you don’t have this privilege, I cannot recommend a better book to tuck into this closed season.

Now for part two of a few noodles on nymph fishing. I spent some more time reading Ollie Kite’s book and reckon I’m closer to crystalizing my thoughts a bit. The last post on this basically consisted of reasons why indicator fishing is dodgy. There are some genuine reasons that are pointed out in that web article I linked to, chief of which is that you actually miss quite a lot of takes because you’re so focused on only one bit of the line. To be a good nymph fisher I reckon one of the most important things is to be able to look everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The sign of the take could be so many things it seems a shame to limit yourself to robotic oogling of a float.
So, what makes proper nymph fishing different, and how is it done really well?

It’s a nymph party and you’re all invited..!

The absolute key to this is what Ollie describes as “informed anticipation”. If you cannot see the fish you are fishing to, as is almost always the case where I fish in the riffles of spate rivers, you must do the next best thing and that is to imagine the fish. Again this may sound pretentious/stupid or whatever, but having done this a bit I can honestly say it is absolutely central to becoming good at this. He puts it much better than I could:

“Try to anticipate the movement for striking by picturing in your mind not only what is going on beneath the water, whether you can see it or not, but by what you intend to cause to happen beneath the water.”

A really simple way of putting this into practice is suggested in that article where the author describes how he teaches people nymphing:

‘When I’m teaching short-line nymphing, I often tell the students, “Find a reason to set the hook sometime during this drift.” This helps them to intensify their concentration and to expect a strike instead of being surprised by a strike.’

Angry stonefly nymphs face each other off!

What I like so much about this way of fishing is that you are truly hunting the fish. Generally you don’t get away with the kind of lucky hookups that can come with swinging/winging wet flies, or even prospecting with dry flies. These are obviously great methods in their own right, but there’s just no way they require the same levels of skill and anticipation that come with good nymph fishing.

When you are really fishing a nymph properly I’ve never found anything else that so completely absorbs your concentration and tunes your senses. If you then actually catch a fish it’s a thrilling mix of “strewth I actually hooked one” and “how the hell did that happen” and “hmm I think I’m becomming a bit Buddhist”. A good couple of hours of fishing like this and I need a drink..!
I should point out that I realise it’s probably not kosher for a Buddhist to fish (afterlives etc etc), but hopefully it makes my point. Actually I bet a Tibetan monk could make a flipping brilliant nymph fisherman.

Even crappy nymphs like these work well. The Kitester would have been proud of that one on the top right

So what all of this is trying to say is that good nymphing comes from serious concentration, anticipation and quick reactions. Shedloads of practice helps as well.

“Maybe I should have fished a nymph…”

Since this is really a kind of personal fishing diary I intend to ocasionally use it to voice any fishy thoughts I happen to be mulling over. That’s what this post is going to be like, so sorry if this is boring.

I had a really good chat with a pal of mine a few weeks ago. We talked nymphing. Of the dead drifted upstream shabang. Truth be told I quite often talk about this with the guy because he’s kind of a guru I reckon and I need to learn. I’ve been spending a bit of time this year practising this dark art and I feel I’ve just about done enough of it to have some ‘proper’ thoughts. This doesn’t mean I’m any good, actually it means I know I’m not. It’s just a case of trying to learn by listening closely to oneself’s own bullshit.

There are nymphs in there!

It’s a funny old business nymphing upstream you know. Unquestionably the most difficult of all river fly fishing skills, you basically just fish a dry fly with your eyes closed. Ok so that’s slightly exagerating the point, but not by much. What makes it truly testing and what is at the heart of the matter is that stuff also happens in 3D.

This guy is 3D, and he lives in 3D

Why is this important? Because to my mind almost everyone who fishes a nymph tries to find ways to avoid this fact, and to make life 2D. If you fish a great big indicator, it is a hell of a lot easier to start catching a few fish on the nymph. However, there is no way that you are becomming a really good nymph fisher this way. There’s essentially not much difference between this and fishing a dry: in fact that’s what it is, a way for dry fly people to fish a nymph without learn how to properly.

Look, no indicators!!

Does this matter? Not at all. Fish as one wills, the fish dinnae care. But to me, there just seems something a little cheap and half arsed about skipping out on properly learning this obviously fascinating branch of fly fishing. And by properly I mean to *know* the take without a globug on your leader. This is the great bit, the bit that makes me excited and mad in one go. Ollie Kite was aparently amazing at this, and reading his book has been really good fun and just a bit inspiring. How is it possible? Well another good place to start is here, followed by a good while on a river. Why am I obsessed by this stuff? I reckon it’s because to be good at this kind of fishing takes a serious pinch of zen. I’m not really there yet, but I’ve tasted the jam and it’s good. Rasberry…mmm.. There’s just something amazing about fishing up through a nice riffle and suddenly there’s a nice trout on your line and you don’t know quite how it got attactched. But you do really. You’ve reached the zen plain.