On Fishing

One was the ‘Clarke’s Worrif ’, as in – when he was putting forward some proposition or other – ‘Sir, worrif this or worrif that?’ He would sometimes use the other to cut short a classmate, as in ‘Bloggs, this is beginning to sound suspiciously like a Clarke’s Worrabout’.

Both questions were hijacked on a fly-fishing web site I once dipped into. Someone foolishly asked ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ Or, in angling-speak, they asked ‘exactly how do you define a dry fly?’ The hair-splitters and devil’s advocates, the leg-pullers and the ayatollahs were out in force. The Worrifers and Worrabouters had their hands up in a flash.

Frederic Halford is to blame. Up to the late 19th century, the flies anglers used on rivers were motley collections of feathers that were mostly cast out across the current in the hope that a fish would make a grab as they swung around, below the surface.

Then, in the 1880s, Halford and his pal George Selwyn Marryat embarked on an intense study of the kinds of winged flies most often taken by trout. Two books resulted. The first, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (1886), described how these winged, natural flies could be imitated more precisely on hooks. The second, Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889) described how these imitations could best be fished to individual trout that the angler could see.

The advantages of Halford’s new ‘dry fly’ strategy over the old, random, underwater ‘wet’ approach, caused a sensation. Halford found himself at the head of a ‘dry fly cult’ – a position he reinforced by eventually declaring that dry fly fishing was not only more effective than wet fly fishing, but more sporting. Before long, extensive reaches of rivers became restricted to ‘dry fly only’.

Then G.E.M. Skues bobbed up. Whereas Halford and Marryat had studied the adult, winged flies at the surface, Skues studied the underwater nymphs that the adults had hatched from – and developed wonderful imitations of several species. Like Halford, Skues cast his flies only to fish he could see and he, too, attracted a large following. The Halfordians were unmoved. They classed Skues’ underwater nymphs with the old-style wet flies, declared they were just as ‘unsporting’ – and banned them from their waters. Battle was joined between the two camps and raged for decades.

The cordite still hangs on the air. Even today, some fisheries restrict angling to the dry fly in the belief it is more sporting. Hence the short fuses on the web-site when someone asked what is and is not a ‘dry fly’ – a question complicated, of late, by the arrival of new flies designed for fishing not on the surface film or under it but actually in it, part in and part out of the water. Could emergers be fished on dry fly-only waters, as well?

Internet hackles were up in a flash. We had this response, that response, the other response, some of them extraordinarily acrid. They went on and on. The high point for me came when someone decided he could cut through it all. When is a dry fly a dry fly? No problem. You dropped your fly into a glass of water. If 50 percent of it floated above the surface, then it was dry and okay to use on dry fly-only streams. If not, it should be kept for wet-fly waters.

Cyril Pybus would have groaned. He’d have seen it coming a mile off. Worrif, someone said, a fly is 50.1 per cent above the surface in the tumbler test and 49.9 per cent below – or, if it comes to that, vice-versa. Where did these flies stand – or in the latter case, sink? Worrabout eddies and flows, another wanted to know. There were none of these in a glass but they were all over the place on rivers and these could influence the way a fly appeared. Exactly, said someone else – and worrif the glass itself influenced the thickness of the surface tension, and made it different from the surface tension in open water? That could affect a fly, too. And, and, and.

The debate went on for pages and pages, but I eventually fell asleep at my terminal. Many of the contributions – they ran well into three figures – were inordinately long and split every previously splat hair, several times over. Thousands of visitor-hits had been recorded, leaving many readers – no doubt like me – variously fascinated, appalled and amused.

My own view? In my experience, the best fisheries are those that have no rules at all and where the rods can be left to fish as much in the interests of the river and other members, as in their own results on the day. These waters tend, however, to be in the hands of small syndicates whose members are carefully selected and who get to know one another well.

Most other waters do have rules. It is clear that an owner or fishery manager can make any rules he chooses and that if an angler doesn’t like them, he can go elsewhere. There are excellent reasons on some rivers – reasons not connected with prejudice but with conservation – for limiting techniques and catches and the pressures on the water. Restricting fishing to dry fly-only is one of them, but there are others. Finally, where a rule like dry-fly only does exist, it is incumbent on the fishery to make any special refinements crystal clear.

Speaking personally, I carry no tumblers of water and no measuring devices. Where an unelaborated dry fly rule exists, anything I can see on the surface is a dry fly and anything I can’t is a wet. That’s it.

And as to angels on a pin head, who said they can dance, anyway? I mean, sir – worrif they’ve all got two left feet?

Fun in the Grass

FISH will, on their day, take pretty well anything. There is scarcely a comestible you can think of that has not, at some time or another, caught them. Undeniably, though, some baits are more consistently successful than others and we all have our favourites.

Many of the best baits can be bought from tackle shops and lots of others come free from the wide outdoors. Acquiring the former is straightforward. Getting our hands on the latter can lead to excitements and delights, not all of them obvious or expected. I once risked the censors to write about them – and in a family newspaper, at that.

ONE of angling’s weeklies marked the opening of a new coarse season on rivers with a supplement devoted to the ‘Top 50 Baits’.

The supplement was structured rather in the manner of the dance-of-seven-veils. The revelations came little by little. They were made from the outside in. It was only at the very end that the Top Two – the tit-bits, so to speak – were revealed. Before them came as extraordinary a smorgasbord of fishy temptations as can have been served up in one place at one time.

Squid was Bait No 50. Marshmallows, the ‘Floating Kings of Confectionery’ as the weekly described them, came in at 49, elderberries at 46, beef steak and mince at 45. Potatoes came to the boil at 35, artificial spinners and spoons wobbled into view at 34 and cheese got a sniff in at 19. As might be expected whole fish, fillets of fish, bits of fish littered the list of delights for the carnivores and plenty of cereals, fruits and cooked pulses were there for the veggies.

When the last veils were whipped aside, we found ourselves ogling The Big Two. Top Bait No 1 was maggots, Top Bait No 2 was bread. It was the lack of detail on Top Bait No 3 that was surprising. Top Bait No 3 was that anaconda of the lawn and vegetable patch, the lobworm. What was missing was an appreciation of the sporting opportunities the lobworm offers in its own wriggly right. It is an omission I want to make good, now.

Only a masochist digs for worms. Every angler knows that lobworms aplenty will be found lying right out in the open, on top of the lawn at night. All that is required to catch them is a torch, a tin, the stalking skills of a Kalahari bushman and the fastest forefinger and thumb in the west.

I don’t know why lobworms come up at night, but I can guess. Some say it’s because they are attracted by the cool night air. Others say they want to drink the dew from the grass. More likely, I suspect, is the prospect of getting up to what nature expects all of us to get up to on the grass under the cover of darkness at some time or other – only faster and more cheaply.

When it comes to courtship, remember, lobworms have little use for chat. When pursuing their wriggly ends, they have no need to splash out on drinks and dinner, quite possibly wasted. There are no clothes to be fumbled off. All they have to do is lie out there in the buff, waiting for a touch from another pointy nose and they’re away. So lobworms are on the top because they’re on the pull.

Which appears to leave them vulnerable. To the uninitiated, it looks the simplest thing in the world to bend down and pick them up. But the lobworm has lots of tiny little hooks in the sides of its tail and while its body is in the open, it usually leaves its tail in its tunnel. The challenge is to spot the worm, grab it and whip it into the can before it can set the hooks into the earth and pull itself down to safety – which it can do at reflex-defying speed. Obviously, easier said than done.

Also, because lobworms are light-sensitive, the torch beam cannot be shone directly onto one for more than a moment or it will be gone. One solution is to point the beam into the grass and to look for your quarry in the periphery of the light it throws. The other is to soften the beam’s glare.

A friend told me about his preferred way of doing the latter, long ago. He recommended – you can see why no-one digs for lobworms any more – covering the torch end with several layers cut from a woman’s silk or sheer nylon stocking, ideally still warm (‘they’re more stretchy, then’) and taken from the thigh end, which for some reason was ‘better’. Tights, I remember him saying fervently, ‘just aren’t the same’.

There is no doubt that the thicker, thigh end of a sheer nylon stocking doubled and redoubled over the end of a torch, diffuses the beam nicely. The problem is that the time taken to negotiate one from the wearer’s legs can sometimes leave little time for fishing itself. Which, my friend said, was okay by him.

But let us say that these preliminary challenges have been risen to. Let us say you have your stocking-tops, that your worm has been sighted, that it does not bolt and that you have managed, with a lightning stab down of forefinger and thumb, to grab it. Now what?

Usually, not much. The worm will have its hooks firmly set into the sides of its tunnel. You will be pulling with the aim of extracting it. But you cannot pull too hard in case the worm snaps – and you want the whole worm. So you find yourself in a protracted battle of finely judged strength and wills.

What is required is a steady pull that does not slacken for an instant. If the pull does slacken, the worm will sense weakness and take heart. If the pull can be sustained, the worm will over time begin to give up hope and little by little its grip will ease. Eventually, if you judge things aright, the lobworm will release its grip all of a sudden and the prize will be yours.

So yes, though the Top 50 Baits supplement did not mention it, there is more challenge in getting your hands on a lobworm than in acquiring the 49 other baits put together. It can take ages. That is the down-side. The upside is that in getting the requisite gear together – the stocking-tops especially – you can end up with more than one kind of result. Which, as my old friend would say, has always been okay by me.

Arthur Oglesby

ANYONE who reads the angling press regularly sees the same writers featured, time after time. If they go on long enough and have enough to say, such writers can acquire a kind of fame – though it is fame only within the closed world of fishing. Then, sooner or later, they disappear: either they lose interest, or they are displaced by younger, fresher writers or else, naturally, the man with the scythe intervenes. And that is that.

Every now and then, though, a fishing writer reaches a wider audience and is remembered by the national press when he dies. Arthur Oglesby was one of them. Oglesby was not a mover of mountains in angling, like a Falkus or a Walker, but he was a skilled writer and teacher who featured in the game fishing magazines for over three decades. He also lived in an exotic way. Oglesby had Brylcreemed good looks, money and social connections. Together with his fishing and writing skills, they took him to places, and into company, of which most anglers could only read. And he caught fish. Boy, did he catch fish. It was because of all this that I obituarised him in The Times.

WHEN Arthur Oglesby died on December 2, 2000 – the same day as his long-time friend Jack Hemingway (son of Ernest) – British angling lost a legendary salmon fisher: a man who repaid the privilege of a private income and the ability to fish pretty well when and where he pleased, by passing his encyclopaedic knowledge on to thousands of others through four decades of teaching and writing.

Oglesby was able to enjoy the cream of Atlantic salmon fishing on the international circuit in the days before disease, loss of habitat and pollution took its toll of this heroic fish, reducing it in many places to the point of extinction. He amassed a tally – it was over 2,000 fish in Britain alone – sufficient to take an ordinary mortal’s breath clean away. He counted among his friends many glittering names inside and outside the sport.

Indeed, Oglesby had been due to fish with Hemingway in Alaska earlier that year, but looming heart surgery prevented him from going. Then Hemingway himself underwent heart surgery and it was complications following their operations that claimed both men’s lives.

Arthur Victor Oglesby was born into comfortable family circumstances in December, 1923 and lived the early part of his life in York, close to the family business of Harvey Scruton Ltd., a firm of manufacturing chemists. He started to train as an industrial chemist immediately on leaving school, enlisted with the Black Watch at the age of 18, led his men into battle in the D-Day landings as a young officer – and was wounded in both chest and leg.

Oglesby left the Army as a captain and went into the family firm, which had been built on a widely known product of the time, Nurse Harvey’s Gripe Water, the first gripe water to come onto the market. In 1955 his father came into the younger Oglesby’s office – and collapsed and died in his arms. Arthur was catapulted into the managing director’s chair, struggled to overcome the burden of heavy death duties – and built the business up. By the mid-1960s he was able to hand over the reins to his brother David so that he could do what he had always wanted to do: devote his life to angling. Soon after he moved to Harrogate, where he settled.

Oglesby had been a passionate angler since childhood. In the 1950s he took to fishing the Yorkshire Esk, in those days an excellent salmon and sea trout river – and it was there that he met the man who was to prove, he was later to write, the greatest single influence on his fishing life: Eric Horsfall Turner.

Horsfall Turner, then Town Clerk of Scarborough, made an international name for himself in the late 1940s and early 1950s as captor of a string of giant blue-fin tunny – fish weighing 500lbs and 600lbs apiece – that put in a brief appearance along the north-east coast: but he was also a brilliant salmon angler, knew everyone in the business – and introduced Oglesby around.

In 1957 Oglesby went to Scotland with Horsfall Turner and there found himself introduced to Captain Tommy Edwards. Edwards was, by common consent, the finest fly-casting instructor of his day and had a fishing school on the Spey. Oglesby went back several years to act as Edwards’ unpaid assistant – and took over the fishing school himself on Edwards’ death in 1968. In 1969 he helped to found the Association of Professional Game Angling Instructors, the body that put until-then unregulated game fishing tuition onto a formal footing. He went on to run fishing courses personally until close to his death, teaching over 3,000 students on the Spey alone. Over the same time he regularly led paying clients on fishing expeditions to Russia, Alaska and Iceland.

By the time he started teaching, Oglesby had already made a name for himself through journalism. He first began to write for angling publications, then additionally for The Field and Shooting Times – at one time producing so much copy that he had to adopt a nom de plume to spread his name more thinly. He became European Editor of the American Field and Stream. He edited the Angler’s Annual for three years. He taught himself to fly and regularly presented field events for Yorkshire Television, from time to time adding glamour for participants and audiences alike by flying in and out on his own aircraft.

Like many successful anglers in their later years, Oglesby found that he needed to fish less and less, but he did not become the outstanding performer he was without being fish-hungry at the outset. This fish hunger – and resulting success – bred some jealousy and led others to spread rumours of how his captures might actually be achieved. In Oglesby’s case it led to some wonderful stories. A family favourite is of the time he arrived at the Yorkshire Esk for a day in the middle of what was proving, for him, a terrific season. Another angler, who did not recognise him, was on the bank when he arrived and saw that he was about to head upstream. ‘I wouldn’t go up there’, the other angler called, inferring by his tone the possibility of nets and maybe a little dynamiting, ‘I hear that bugger Oglesby’s up there’. A pause. ‘Oh, good’, Oglesby replied – ‘I think I’ll go and join him.’

It was in 1966 that Oglesby’s international career took off. Again, through Horsfall Turner, he met Odd Haraldsen, a Norwegian who had a prime beat of the Vosso, at that time the finest big-salmon river in the world and one on which spring fish averaged 28lbs apiece. Oglesby and Haraldsen hit it off and Oglesby came home with an invitation to return every year ‘until you catch a 50-pounder’.

He did not quite make the 50lbs but over the years pictures of Oglesby and his amazing Vosso captures became part of the page furniture of the angling and sometimes of the national press. At the time of his death, among the stag heads and books and other mementoes of a 60-year sporting life that looked down from the walls of his study were four salmon. They weighed 45lbs, 46lbs, 46lbs and 49lbs-plus. The biggest fish was caught on June 17, 1973. The three others were, remarkably, all caught on June 18 of their respective years. In 1981 Oglesby caught a bag of four Vosso fish that weighed 151lbs – an incredible total and one which now seems unlikely to be beaten anywhere.

Oglesby’s fame and wherewithal took him to many exotic places – and as a result he made many famous friends. Hemingway was one. Another was Charles Ritz, the Parisian hotelier and a man who, in private life, was a brilliant designer of fly rods. He fished with the Americans Joe Brooks, Lee and Joan Wulff and Al McClane. In Britain he knew and fished with pretty well every famous angler who wafted a salmon rod, most important among them being Hugh Falkus, with whom he made a number of films. It is a point of interest that it was Oglesby who first taught Falkus to Spey-cast – a fact that Falkus did not publicise widely.

Arthur Oglesby wrote several books, among them Salmon (1971), Fly fishing for Salmon and Sea Trout (1986) and an autobiography, Reeling In (1988). But it will be for his extraordinary captures – and the whirl and the world he lived in – that he will be remembered by most.

The Weakest Link

FOR most of us, the challenge of the fish alone is enough. Just getting a fish onto the line and then onto the bank takes all the knowledge and wristy skills we can muster. It also takes the tackle to do the job, properly maintained. There is nothing worse than losing a fish through carelessness or through tackle that, in one way or another, has been allowed to deteriorate. Everything is hostage to the weakest link.

A FORLORN friend, relatively new to angling but mad keen, told me how, on one of the first casts of his first outing of the new trout season, he had hooked a substantial fish that came unstuck in seconds. When he wound in, the leader had broken a little above what had been a well-tied knot.

This sad little everyday tale, garnished by the fact that – naturally – not another fish was touched all day, will strike a chord in us all. Every new season brings its crop of challenges. Mostly they are concerned with the intransigence of fishes. For the newcomer or the inexperienced, they can concern tackle as well.

The breaking leader problem is typical. Quite often, when a leader breaks under the circumstances described, the problem is not that the nylon chosen was too fine – though, of course, it can be – or that the breaking strain marked on the spool overstated the breaking strain of the line wound onto it. It is that, in the months since last used – or in the time on display in the tackle shop – the nylon has steadily weakened.

The problem is light. I am not sure what the process is, but the ability of light, and especially sunlight, to weaken spooled nylon is well-established. A few days’ use at the water is one thing; continuous exposure for weeks and months on end is another. The answer is to store leader material in the dark. I keep my spools stacked one on top of another in a long, old sock.

The sock lives in my fishing bag. At the start of each season, every spool in the sock is tested and any suspect nylon is discarded. Then, the spools I will need on my next outing are transferred from the sock in my fishing bag to the pockets of my fishing jacket. If the same spools are needed for the following outing, they stay there. If others are required, the appropriate switches are made. At the end of the season, all spools are socked up and rebagged. It is a simple, if somewhat inelegant ploy that ensures no spool is left open to the light and every spool is available when and where needed. The nods and nudges in the car park, when a loosely jointed leg is noticed hanging out of the boot, add to the ploy’s attractions.

Flylines can present problems, too.

A line that has had some use and that is then left wound on a reel through a close season, tends to acquire ‘memory’: that is, when it is taken out and used again, it does not cast silkily and lie flat on the water. Instead, it casts like wire and spirals across the surface like a loosely wound spring. This is especially true of the inner coils, which have been wound in the smallest, tightest turns around the reel spindle.

The problem this time is not light but lubrication. Modern lines are coated in plastics to which a form of lubricant – a plasticiser – has been added. The job of the plasticiser is to keep the line supple. In preventing the line from becoming stiff the plasticiser assists casting and reduces the risk of cracking. But over time – and especially, it seems, if stored in high temperatures – plasticiser leaches out.

One way of alleviating the effects of stiffness in a line is to stretch it. The permanent answer is periodically to replace the plasticiser that has been lost.

Replasticising agents are available from any good shop that deals in fly-fishing equipment. The line is laid out straight or coiled in wide, loose loops and the plasticiser is smeared along its whole length. After five or six hours the line will have absorbed as much as it needs and the surplus can be wiped off. That is it. The line is ready for use. The effect of this simple operation is magical: it not only abolishes memory and transforms the line’s casting ability but lengthens line life. I treat my lines once a season and they behave perfectly for anything up to five or six.

There is another little wrinkle about lines and leaders. At the waterside they have to be threaded through the rod-rings. Ninety-nine anglers in 100 take the fine tip of the leader and poke that through successive rings, drawing the much-heavier flyline behind it. On most days that works perfectly well. But every angler experiences the other days: those days when, in the eagerness to get started or some moment of distraction, the leader-end is accidentally dropped. Then, pulled by the weight of the flyline behind it, the whole ensemble rattles back down through the rings into the grass – and the process has to be started again.