On Fishing

With carbon fibre, all this wonderful subjectivity is lost. Carbon fibre performs better. It can be manufactured to produce any action required of it. We can abuse it constantly without impairing its performance. Carbon fibre has replaced cane for very good reasons. But still it is synthetic stuff, inert and characterless. It cannot tap into the emotions the way split cane used to do.

To lose a cherished split cane rod – worse still, to break one – can be a shattering experience in every sense. I know it only too well.

I HAVE many fishing rods, but I have only ever loved three. All were made of cane. One is a Wallis Wizard, the brilliant wholecane butt, split cane middle-and-top design by F.W.K. Wallis, the legendary Avon barbel specialist. I bought it as a lad by doing a newspaper round. I have it still. It is still in good heart and, more to the point, still in its original number of pieces.

The second rod is a Fario Club, one of the great creations of Charles Ritz, the famous hotelier who, in fly-fishing circles, is infinitely more famous as a designer of trout rods. I bought this 8ft 5in piece of honey-coloured delight with the first royalty cheque from my first book, half a lifetime ago.

I did most of my dry fly and nymph fishing with the Fario Club for ten years after that. Eventually, I broke its back – literally – when trying to keep low on a treeless bank while casting to a fish in distant mid-river. Down on one knee, while concentrating hard on the fish and reaching for distance, the line fell too low on the back cast, snagged a meadow buttercup – and did not come forward.

The third rod, a 6ft 9in aftm-4 brook rod built by Constable, was as light and delicate as a fairy’s wand and it cast spells as well as lines. It was as crisp and precise as a rapier – and as deadly. My wife gave it to me on one of my Big Zero birthdays, and I was thrilled to have it.

Cliff Constable was one of the finest builders of split cane this country has produced and his staggered-ferrule brook rod was his finest achievement. I asked my friend Stewart Canham, master fly-tyer and furnisher of cane rods so exquisite that they would not have looked out of place in a Bond Street window, to finish the cane for me.

Now Stewart is an extraordinary man, a big, multi-talented man with hands the size of bin lids. For all that he has an exquisite delicacy of touch and specialises in creating delicate things. One of his one-time interests, for example, was icing cakes and he iced the wedding cake he made for one of my daughters. It was so wonderfully done, so decorated about with sprays of flowers he had made from icing that guests were peering at them this way and that, wondering if they were real. His fly-tying was, a doctor friend of mine said, more delicate than brain surgery. At one time, interested in butterflies, he bred them by the hundred and produced cases of them so delicately spread and pinned that they could have been exhibits in the Natural History Museum. Everything that Stewart Canham decides to do, he does to perfection.

When it came to my rod, he never produced a more personalised thing. All the usual restrained touches were there, from the subtlety of the matt varnish instead of gloss to the near-transparent whippings, tipped with black. But it was the rest, the attention to so much tiny detail, that made the rod truly unique.

When he delivered it, I found that Stewart had got Constable to autograph the cane. A tiny ephermerid nymph, beautifully drawn in Indian ink, was crawling up the butt amid the details of rod length and line weight and the like. The 20-inch stopper that extended the butt section to the length of the top section for carrying purposes was wound about with ivy, drawn in Indian ink, in-filled with white. And so on and so on. He had produced less a rod, more an artwork and it carried a freight of sentiment for me.

Mayfly time in Dorset. A friend invited me down. It was a lovely day, warm and sunny but with – note it – a downstream breeze. The hawthorn blossom was out. The ranunculus was in flower. Swifts curved and sculpted the air. From time to time, wagtails wagged and kingfishers skimmed. In a sidestream, we saw a fish lying awkwardly just downstream of a tree. Mike suggested I give it a go. I slipped under a barbed wire fence and slid into the deep water.

It took several minutes to get into position and feel comfortable. All the time, the fish went on rising and moving steadily upstream towards the tree, narrowing the angle where my fly would have to go. To have any chance, the leader would have to overshoot the fish and be squeezed into the space between the water and the branches. It would take a driven cast, all wrist, to create the tight loop I was going to need. And I would have to take care with the back-cast to avoid the alder that grew over the water behind me. I studied the situation and looked back at my friend. ‘Thanks a lot, Mike,’ I remember saying.

It must have been on the fourth or fifth attempt that the breeze suddenly strengthened. In mid false-cast I took account of it. I tightened the loop still more. I applied yet more wrist. I let the final back cast straighten and then drove it forward.

It did not come. There was an odd sensation, impossible to describe, but something, somehow, somewhere seemed to grate. In the concentration of the moment, I assumed that I had snagged the alder. I have snagged trees a thousand times. Foolishly, I did not bother to turn. I flicked the rod again, expecting either the fly to come free or the branch to give and cushion the movement. I have done that and seen that a thousand times, too.

Nothing. No give. Absolutely no give, but again a grating feeling and this time a sound. I turned and instinctively looked for my line and fly. The line was well clear of the alder and to the right. The fly was on the barbed wire fence that I had forgotten about. My eyes followed the line back from the fence to my rod. I saw the oddity of an angle in the silken curve, two rings back from the tip. I saw the cane splintered and light shining through the long, loved fibres.

For a long time, I could not take it in. I suppose the realisation of what I was seeing, the pain of it, was somehow dulled, the way that the shock of an injury sometimes can be. Then, all the things I had loved about the rod – its exquisite beauty, the occasion it commemorated, the scores of magical moments I had experienced with it – rushed through my mind in a torrent.

Mike said it was two minutes before I spoke. I simply stood there uncomprehending, staring at one of the three or four possessions I treasured most in the world, now utterly ruined. I know we all have such moments, but that gives no comfort. It was – it still is – terrible.

Wildlife, the Media and Us

AS SPORTS GO, angling is well-provided with media. Coarse, trout and sea anglers all have several magazines apiece and fishing as a whole has long supported two weekly newspapers. Together, they help us to keep abreast of developments in and around the waterside and to stay on top of new tackle and techniques. By and large, they serve us well.

But not always. Every now and then an editor has a rush of blood to the head. Then, it is as though he loses all sense of proportion. It is as though he sees angling and our small world as the whole world – or else he consciously disregards the wider world completely. Neither is a great idea, but for the most part this matters little. In the main, no-one in the wider world cares much about what anglers think and say – and why should they?

When angling editors go overboard about something which the public holds dear, though, everything changes. Then, real problems can arise – some of them profoundly damaging.

PRETTY well every issue of every publication in Britain is bought by news agencies as a matter of course, angling publications not excluded. Journalists – mostly freelance journalists who live by the column-inches they can generate and the air time they can clock up – read them in the hope of picking up a snippet here, a story there. Insofar as angling is concerned, they know that the British public is besotted with the furred, the feathered and the cuddly and if some angling editor’s rush of blood appears to put him at odds with this, then the telephones ring, news editors get busy and a view that was originally aimed at an angling audience alone hits several million breakfast tables overnight.

This is why, whatever concerns might exist in angling’s media about creatures other than fish – and concerns do arise from time to time – a cautious and measured response is wisest. The temptation to rant to readers for the sake of short-term impact, needs to be tempered with a realisation that outside eyes will be watching and that long-term damage might ensue.

We have seen it over the years with swans and otters– and with cormorants in particular. All three, at one level or another, can have an impact on our sport but the article that begins with pointing this out, that moves on to an indignant ‘something should be done about it’ (always, note, by someone else) and that then demands that populations of whatever it is be controlled, is destined to become ‘Anglers demand cull of swans/otters/cormorants/ babies/old people/the halt and the lame’, or whatever.

It is then that the perceived, short-term editorial satisfactions of ‘making a stand on behalf of our readers’ as fishing editors love to put it, can lead to huge and lasting damage outside angling. Then it is not swans/otters/cormorants or whatever that is most likely to end up in the dock, but angling itself.

Because of one particular incident I want to focus on cormorants, but there are a couple of points on swans and otters to be made, first.

Swans (dealt with at more length elsewhere) can create two problems when, as sometimes happens, they descend in their scores and their hundreds on a short length of water. The first is that they can make fishing, even the simple act of casting, physically impossible. The second is that they can so denude the water of the plants on which they feed that they devastate the cover and bug life on which fish depend.

Given the right of swans to exist, their grace and beauty, the affection in which the public holds them and the power of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, any approach to problem flocks has to be measured and thought out. It may well be possible to get the public to recognise the birds’ impact on fish and fisheries, but that progress will only come through education and negotiation and it will take many years to achieve.

The same principle applies to otters, which have made a dramatic recovery after numbers collapsed in the second half of the 20th century. This recovery has been stimulated by the release into the wild of artificially reared cubs over a period of years. Through natural breeding and because there is so much virgin territory to be reoccupied, numbers have gone up significantly.

Otters eat fish, but they also have huge territories and so the impact on a given section of a river is likely to be small. It is a different story on lakes, especially if an otter occupies a holt near a commercial stillwater fishery stocked with carp and rears her cubs there. Then, significant numbers of carp – some of them costing thousands of pounds apiece – may be taken, the quality of fishing is likely to decline and the owner’s livelihood may well be threatened. The answer is not for anglers and editors to demand impotently that ‘something be done’ (as some have) but for us all to recognise that the otter, like the swan, is an iconic species much loved by the public and that, if push ever came to shove, the public would unhesitatingly back otters against smelly old fish and those who support them.

The only sensible course of action for anyone concerned for fish and fishing is to accept that the otter is here to stay – I, for one, am delighted about it – and for fishery owners to take whatever steps they can to protect their waters. If fencing and the like cannot be afforded and no public funds are forthcoming to help build them, then the loss of fish will need to be offset through the prices charged: and if the market will not stand that, then the fishery, like any other enterprise caught by changing market conditions, is likely to close. We may think that brutal but the public is likely to see it as simply a fact of life. The only safe and effective solutions to concerns about swans, otters or any other form of wildlife are ones that public opinion will support.

Enter cormorants. If anglers want to see the potential for damage that can be caused by editors getting it wrong, let them consider the impact, many years ago, of a rant against cormorants in a national angling newspaper.

In 1996 a campaign against cormorants was launched by the publication concerned. The report, over several pages, set out the damage that cormorants can do to fisheries, was headlined in huge type on the front page ‘These birds must be killed’ and was accompanied by a picture of a man crouching down with a shotgun at the ready.

The story implied that anglers were shooting cormorants on a large scale and that large numbers more needed to be shot; that organised bands of militants were roaming the countryside blasting at every black bird in sight and that many of their fellows condoned it. The whole episode was a text-book example of how not to handle an emotive issue and, not surprisingly, a national outcry resulted. Many of our fellow-conservationists rightly deplored it. Politicians of varying hues leapt on the bandwagon. Animal rights extremists whipped up the horses. The entire sport, along with its furious and hapless spokesmen, was put on the back foot.

Then the inevitable happened. The media spotlight fell onto something else and the row calmed down. But it left dreadful damage behind. Those images and headlines and that whippedup outcry had gone deep into the public psyche. In the minds of many, the image of angling as a harmless and rather dotty pursuit had been tarnished. We are continuing to live with the consequences. In a climate in which, increasingly, all creatures are seen as fellow passengers on planet earth, angling – given the demise of foxhunting – is now in the sights.

It was all so short-sighted and unnecessary. The issue is not that cormorants do great damage – there is no doubt that, locally, they do – but how best the problem might be tackled. If we are to make real progress on this, as on other sensitive issues, rants must be avoided and loudly condemned when they occur. We need to deal with the world as it exists and not as we would like it to be. We need to deal with facts. Here, in relation to cormorants, are a few.

First, there is no doubt that cormorant numbers are rising rapidly. By the year 2000 it was estimated that there were up to half a million birds in Europe, of which around 15,000 nested in Britain, many of them inland. This indigenous population was even then being steadily supplemented by an influx of birds from the mainland. These incomers boosted the number of birds overwintering here to around 25,000. Around 10,000 of these birds wintered inland and it was recognised that even birds living on the coasts will fly many miles inland to find food. Cormorant numbers have gone on rising ever since. There are single colonies of many hundred of birds close to some of our biggest lakes.

A range of factors is likely to be involved in this population growth. The first is that the free control of cormorants was banned under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, a piece of uk legislation giving effect to the European Union’s Birds Directive. Other factors include the fishing-out by commercial boats of inshore waters where cormorants would normally hunt; the creation of more and more self-stocking reservoirs and lakes as a result of gravel extraction and the like; a growth in the numbers of waters artificially stocked with trout both for food and for sport; a growth in the numbers of heavily stocked commercial coarse fisheries and a reduction in poisons like ddt in the food chain which, in the past, have kept cormorant numbers down.

What has it all meant for anglers? It has given us two problems. The first is the sheer tonnage of fish that cormorants eat. The second is the vast number of fish that the birds injure and kill but do not eat.

At the most conservative estimate (conservative estimates are best because exaggeration simply undermines our case) the average cormorant eats 1lb of fish a day, which means that in a year six birds will eat one ton, 600 birds will eat 100 tons, 6,000 birds will eat 1,000 tons. While grossing up figures gives staggering totals, the net impact of this predation is not easy to calculate, not least because no-one knows what freshwater fish populations are, overall. What we can assume, however, is that the birds will get their food from the easiest places (most likely small, heavily stocked waters of the kind anglers have created); and what we know is that the damage comes in the particular, not the general – that is, that the damage done to individual fisheries, whatever is happening to fisheries at large, can be dire.

But that is only part of it. While natural mortalities in fish stocks, spawning failures, predation by other creatures and the like all have to go into the negative mix, so do all those fish not eaten but fatally injured by cormorants. When hunting, cormorants often behave like pack animals or sharks: they seem to go into a feeding frenzy. Then, anglers’ concerns become even more clear. Cormorants have large, sharp, hooked bills and will chase most fish that swim, other than the very largest. The injuries they inflict are quite unmistakable – lines across the sides of a fish showing where the bill has taken hold and one or more short, deep slashes, usually in the belly, where the bill hook has gone in. Fish injured in this way but not eaten, are likely to die quickly from their injuries or to die later from disease.

I can speak of it all personally. For some seasons, many of the fish I have been catching from my local river have shown signs of cormorant damage. I have caught many trout weighing around 3lbs that have had cormorant wounds across their flanks, indicating that they had been attacked by birds even though the birds could not cope with their size. One of the biggest grayling I have ever caught – it came from a stream so small and overgrown I cannot imagine how a cormorant got into it – weighed 2lbs 13oz and had cormorant marks across its sides. On another river I found a 6lbs salmon kelt dying in the margins, with cormorant slashes deep in its gut. A fish farmer I know was able to walk right up to one bird because it had so gorged on small trout that it could not take off.

Many a regular angler has similar stories to tell. There is no doubt that cormorants are not just one more big bird. In large numbers they are an obvious menace to waters within flying distance, whatever statistical evidence might currently be lacking.

Politics, however, is the art of the possible. If the birds cannot be fully controlled – and under both British and European law they cannot – then anglers and those who represent them must make the best use of circumstances as they stand. This is what angling’s representative bodies have been doing, with some limited success. Thanks to their efforts, where significant damage to a fishery can be proven, a licence to shoot a small number of birds as a means of scaring away others (albeit only to make them fly to someone else’s water nearby) can now be obtained.

To gain further concessions will take a steady accumulation of credible case histories, wider research (when did researchers ever recommend less?), bridge-building with other conservation groups, reasoned explanation of our concerns to them, to the public and to the politicians who hold the levers of power and, not least, education of the angling community itself.

An important part of this effort must be to win public recognition of the fact that our environment needs to be seen in the round. Specifically, we need acknowledgement of two points. The first is that, of necessity, we have created on our island a landscape that is wholly artificial – and hence everything within it needs to be managed to maintain balances that, for better or worse, we have long since upset in our search for food, shelter and diversion. The second is conscious acknowledgment that, although they may not be as cuddly or as photogenic as their furred and feathered friends, fish are a part in our wildlife heritage and have a place in that wider equation, too.

In the meantime, any relief from cormorants that can be achieved – tweaks to legislation here, alleviations there – are likely to fall short of what anglers would like to see. High bird numbers, and the problems that come with them, are here for years to come.

They will be around longer – and maybe longer than angling itself – if the hotheads have their way.

All You Need to Know

I READ somewhere that more books have been written about angling than about any other subject except mathematics. I have no idea who made the calculation, but it was probably a mathematician – and not a very good one, at that.

Even so, there are many thousands of angling books in print and they have come in all guises: factual books, fishing guides and diaries, reminiscences, anthologies like this. A few, among the very best, break new ground – not an easy thing to do in this ancient sport. Others, also among the best, have a literary quality that makes them timeless. Lots, alas, add only to the word mountain.

I WAS fishing with one of my closest friends, a man who, because of his many excellent books and articles, has become a household name in the fly-fishing world. We fell to talking about the tide of angling literature – the hundreds of books, the thousands – that has been published since Dame Juliana Berners gave us the first work on angling in English, in 1496.

My friend and I were as one. We agreed that while there had been works of technical brilliance over the years, and many sublimely written texts, vast numbers of books had contributed nothing, at great length. ‘In fact’, I said, ‘it would be interesting to go the other way, as an exercise – to see how much information you could squeeze into the fewest possible words.’ A light bulb pinged in my head. ‘Actually, the really essential things about angling can be very simply stated. I think I’ll write a new book, myself. It will be called All you Really Need to Know about Fly-fishing. It will be about seven pages long.’

My friend’s stride faltered and his jaw dropped. ‘Blimey’, he said, somehow conveying that his entire past life – all those books, all those articles – was passing before his eyes, ‘you can’t do that, you’ll put me out of business.’

It was a joke, of course, but for all that, the essentials of fly fishing would consume very few trees. I once tried to squeeze quite a few of them into a reply to the youngest reader of The Times to have written to me up to that point. Peter was 13. He enjoyed coarse fishing but, on a holiday in Wales, had seen someone catch a grayling on a dry fly and had been fascinated. His father had suggested he write to me. What exactly was dry fly fishing and how could he get started?

Here, more or less, is what I told him.

Dry fly fishing is a way of catching fish – mostly trout or grayling, but plenty of other species as well – on imitations of the kinds of natural flies they are accustomed to taking from the surface.

To do it, I told Peter, he would be best off with a fly-rod about 9ft long, rated what is called aftm-6. He would need an aftm-6, double-tapered, floating flyline to use with it and a reel to put the line on. This outfit would do the job he wanted and be versatile enough for lots of other fishing as well. He should persuade his father to buy him a couple of lessons with a professional fly-casting instructor. The instructor would teach him how to cast correctly and practice would take care of distance and accuracy. He would also be shown how to do fiddly things like joining a nylon ‘leader’ to the line and a fly to the leader. He would be using only one fly at a time and it would be treated to float. At the water, the aim would be to get that fly to the surface in front of a targeted, rising fish, in a natural and unalarming way.