A Tralfamadorian outing

During my self-enforced blog embargo I managed to get out once on the trout stream for a short afternoon. I had already decided to race down to a stretch of the creek I had never visited before but found too many cars and too many of their bewadered inhabitants spewed out along the river for my peace of mind. I retreated back to a stretch I am coming to know well accompanied by that loss of purpose when a good plan is stymied.

Arriving I found a trickle of small mayflies, possibly blue-winged olives, possibly not, a few caddis and some rising fish. This stretch is rapidly becoming a bit of a proving ground in that it is here I am seeing many of the behaviours I have written about in previous posts. The most striking is the ability of the fish to avoid the hook and that even after they have accepted my artificial as a food item.

But Lo! On casting to the first available fish I caught it. As simple as that. All my maunderings about not being able to get hook-ups went out of the window with this fish. Cast, drift, rise, tighten, fish on. But Lo! Indeed, even as the sun shineth you can be bloody sure that there are clouds drawing nigh. There followed an intriguing, if also a somewhat frustrating couple of hours fishing as I could have wanted. Intriguing in the sense that for a long time, on a very short stretch of water I had plenty of opportunity to cast to feeding fish and attempt to hook them. I didn’t do that well. The first fish was a red herring, lulling me into the false sense that perhaps last summer’s stops and stutters were all a thing of the past. They weren’t.

As I settled in I noticed what was clearly a good fish rising against the far bank, clearly more than just a good fish. Every now and then he was visible as a coalesced shape beneath the surface and when he came to the top he moved water in that heavy, wallowing manner of a fish with considerable proportions. I cast to him and he accepted first time of asking. I missed the hook set of course. Not completely, there was a faint, almost imperceptible jag of hook nicking flesh before he fell away from me. Darn and shucks I thought.

I targeted a few other risers landing one and missing three or more which all came up and took the fly. I marked a couple of them down to try again later and had a look for the big fish. Sure enough he was back into rising rhythm. I cast to him again. It took a number of goes as he was disporting in that annoyingly common sort of far bank lie where the current speed is much less than the mid-stream velocity I had to cast over. I could fib here and say that through combinations of reach, mend, parachute, snake, banana and pineapple casts I put a number of drag free drifts over him. I could lie and claim the world’s greatest repertoire of fruity casts to difficult lies. I could lie. But given that my casting fruit would be a Durian I can’t. So as usual with much huffing and puffing and changes of position I managed to eventually get a number of critically acclaimed (by me) drifts over the fish. On one he glanced idly at the fly as if he was occupied with something else, tying his shoe laces most likely, but the other drifts resulted in nary a glare. The fish I had covered previously were being equally reticent and so I decided on a change of pattern.

I took off the scruffy emerger type thing and put on another scruffy emerger type thing. It was different though I don’t really remember what distinctive aspects the new fly had from the previous. A darker olive body perhaps, grizzle hackle instead of dun I can’t remember. The point is that it was just another generic scruffy mayfly emerger that as patterns go would be characterised in the same bracket as the one I had just taken off. I was following a hunch here you see. And the point is the big fish rose and took on the first good drift. I missed it of course. Didn’t even nick it this time. I went round the rest of the class and landed a fish and missed a further two or three most of whom I had presented the previous fly to already.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses a refrain when something pathetically tragic occurs. He also uses it as a sort of comic touch in amongst the mayhem. It has always struck me as a particularly apt phrase for the inevitability of things, for the circularity in a process that inexorably, despite eager expectations only brings one back to the start again. The refrain is “So it goes”.

I changed flies a further three times and hooked, again for the briefest of tugs, and then cleanly missed again the large fish on two of them. I caught another trout which I had missed before on other flies but once again missed a further six or seven taking fish most of whom I had also already missed previously.

So it goes.

There really should be some improvement I tell myself, some measure of progress. That the return to fly changing with no more reward, no more fish to hand than the previous fly change, has all the hallmarks of a Sisyphean task has not escaped me. However, I did take some things from the experience. One glaring fact was the ease with which it was possible to get a fish that had been missed on one fly to come and have another go on a different fly. A different fly so similar to my eye, at least in concept, that the distinction the fish finds between the two is lost on me.

A number of years ago some friends and I were having a conversation about the trout that either looks at your fly and rejects it or takes and you miss it but is not spooked by the event. It carries on feeding but will not shake a tail-feather at repeated drifts with the same fly. At the time I remember suggesting that like our commonly understood idea of a feeding search image the fish uses a negative image for something that it can, with experience, categorise as “not food”. I was shouted down rather quickly (“how can you have a not food category”) and I rapidly acquiesced to the strength of the guys rejection, never having been mentally nimble enough to pursue a thought out in the open. Other explanations were proposed, tippet glare, micro-drag and the rest of the Usual Suspects. But all these strike me as woolly thinking. It is possible to eliminate tippet glare, micro-drag and all the other things that could affect the presentation and yet still be using the same fly and have it snubbed after initial interest was shown. If this was not the case a fish having rejected a fly but still on the fin for food would come to look at the same fly presented a second, third, fourth time ad infinitum if it did not have some means of categorising the fly’s inedibility after the first offering. What is more intriguing is that the big fish in my little cameo not only came and took the fly but twice felt the hook. Astonishingly this did not put the fish down. I could reject the occurrence as one of those rare, statistically aberrant occasions but it is not the first time it has happened on this heavily fished creek. To my, albeit faltering memory this has only happened once before and that on a particularly large, and hungrily lean fish that I think had become stuck up a spawning tributary by rapidly falling water levels. It would have eaten my grandmother’s wig.

So I took away from this little session the fact that I could probably persist with a feeding fish for considerably longer than I had previously thought as long as I kept clumsiness at bay (always a problem for me). The idea that persistence and a range of well presented flies might meet with an increasing number of opportunities on the same fish is, when written out now in black and white, something of a no-brainer. But the equability of these creek fish in the face huge angling pressure is still something of a learning curve for me.

I also took away the fact that the fish didn’t really seem to care much about pattern. If it looked a bit like the food they were feeding on all well and good, they would be quite likely to take it. Unlike the “bleedin’ obvious” statements above this runs more against the grain. One would expect a level of pickiness to pattern, an epicurean consideration of the plattered offering, from these fish than was apparent during this session and indeed than was apparent last season when similar LBJ emerger type things were all that was needed. Isn’t that the received wisdom, the reason for us carrying around the plethora of similar patterns that we do (though of course one always has to bear in mind that the exponential increase in fly design is also a product of attracting anglers as well as fish)? In fact, now I think about it, it seems these fish care less about pattern than less fished for fish – if you see what I mean. I wonder whether some sort of equilibrium has been struck twixt angler and angled, a tacit, unspoken, unconscious stability between the desire to avoid capture by the fish and the need to see a fish on the bank by the fisher. Hmm, interesting.

So what started out as a trip to flex the muscles, to feel the casting arm at work with the hope of a little finny action turned into an absorbing vignette played out in a stretch not much more than 20 yards long. Not what I had imagined would happen but then imagination and actuality rarely coincide when one allows oneself a few hours on the river.

What I am still struggling with is how to consistently hook the blasted fellows. It is one thing gulling these trout into taking the fly yet it is still another to successfully hook and land the protagonist. I speculated before that this was down to my cackhandedness, that my lack of fishy activity was the problem, a decaying sensibility for the fine tuned hook set. A more recent trip on another creek with fish as little educated as it is possible to get has put the lie to this thought. And so the question remains, how do they do it? How do they take a fly and not get the hook with such aplomb? I still have no idea.

So it goes.