The afternoon after....

… the day before the day before the last trip I found time for another immersion and après le déluge I took myself back to upstream for a couple more hours. Starting where I left off, in the absence of rising fish under the bright, hot conditions I flicked a feather-wing around out of curiosity rather than expectation. The trout still came, stopping and stuttering in tango with the darts and deviations of the fly. None took the followers breaking off from the two-step as I ran out of retrieving room or they sensed my looming presence. Continuing the experimentation I changed to a sculpin, a poor man’s waggy tail sculpin (this tie not quite as good as Edwards doing it himself but it gives you an idea) product of Oliver Edwards vice which has not seen the light of day much on the fishing interweb. I like his pattern a lot but it is a painstaking tie and I can’t get the thing to balance right in the water – hence the poor man’s version. Not until I rolled a cast out to the sill of the riffle was there any interest but when I picked up the fly coming back towards me out of the roily water I also spied a fish dogging along behind. And what a strange fish it was too. Not a chub or sucker though it hugged the bottom as if it were, nor did it seem to be a trout though it had something of their lithe, fluid elegance. The fish was large for the stream and as best as I can describe it appeared, with its splayed pectorals and triangular appearance like a miniature monkfish the unknown being a wonderful stimulator of the imagination. Indeed the fish, small in the general scheme of things though it was, exuded a sense of menace and had me taking a half step back as it came near. Closer its colouration was a mottled dark olive yet further removing it from the expected shape and patterning of the fish I was expecting to see. It could have been a trout or sucker which having established its home against the moss covered rocks had taken on their appearance. The plasticity of trout colouration is well documented (melanin concentrating hormone and all that jazz) but I have never seen one quite these shades. It shouldn’t surprise me. Fishing into the origins of highland streams I used to catch light and dark coloured fish depending on the substrate but also a rather special fellow. On many of the streams the pebbles were the usual various shades of slate and sand but there were numbers that were a pinkish orange. There were trout, especially those that held over shallow exposed streamside margins, which mimicked this diversity perfectly having bands of dark, light and the pink-orange. When I first spotted them I took them to be non-trout in my ignorance. So it shouldn’t surprise me though in my mind’s eye I still recall the oddity of the squatiniform shape.

Above the riffle there were trout rising in the puddles of shade cast from overhanging trees. Tricky, but with care accommodating and I brought a sequence of fish to hand on the usual LBJ. At the end of the straight I came to a bend pool on the inside of which a small mud flat allowed me to get out of the water and avoid those irritating wading waves that telegraph ones approach. Even from the back of the bend I could see a good fish holding against the far bank. A finning fish on the lookout for summer titbits awash in the flow. Watching it for awhile the cigarette smoke blueing the air I surmised this was not a fish feeding with regularity on drowned midges but one, seemingly confirmed by the fast splashy rise some way of its holding station, searching the surface for unspecific edibles. I wanted this fish badly. Somehow its hunger, visibility and position made it the acme of a trout to be offered a dry fly. Time for a beetle. I made a ranging cast wanting to feel the almost correct timing and angle necessary before attempting the definitive version on the fish all the while I watching it for signs of disturbance. The cast alighted satisfactorily a little way down but on the right line. I glanced at the fly, a fish came up and took it. I looked back at the one I was trying to target, couldn’t see it. Had it moved so far down at the plop of the beetle. Very belatedly I tightened with the inevitable result of brief contact before the hook pulled. Disgusted with myself I looked back for the fish of my original intent and there it was again seemingly unruffled. It had been a different and until that moment invisible fish that had risen through the column to chomp the beetle, I still had a chance. Sometimes, rarely for me, one gets the approach, cast and presentation exactly as one imagines it would have to be. Such was the case here. The fly landing upstream and a little to the left of the fish, it drifted a couple of feet and the trout calmly came up and ate it. Beautiful.

Throwing a beetle took some courage for me. Much as I like beetle patterns and naturally can see the logic in using them I have never had much success with them. This is likely because I have no confidence in the beetle patterns I tie. They are meant to be simple, a bit of high density foam lashed to the hook folded back to the eye and tied off. Hey presto a beetle. One can elaborate with peacock herl, two folds of foam to give a thorax and abdomen, rubber or hackle legs and more but none of these additions further complicate the fly to any great extent. Despite this I cannot tie the pattern to my satisfaction, the proportions end up wrong, too much or too little foam, the legs look ridiculous and on. The fish have tended to agree and it wasn’t until a couple of seasons ago when Big R started to catch some fish with a beetle I had tied that I looked to make sure I always had some in the box. Even then I have used them only as a last resort and in that frame of mind have been appropriately unsuccessful. This fish represents a little more than a fine sight caught trout. It represents that little tilt of confidence we all need to make a pattern or method a standard in the arsenal.

I took another few fish on the beetle as I ambled upstream missing a fast rise in choppy water, another unexpected fish alongside a rotting log and putting down countless others before even being able to cover them. Eventually I came out of the trees and could see a large pasture at the end of which I guessed to be where the little footbridge and the start of my experience form the other direction. There are only these two access points. Unlike the hoard ridden stretches downstream there is no bankside path to allow the regular parking of fisherman. To fish this stretch one must wade up or down it and fishermen being either the lazy bastards we know we are or afraid that we may start on a stretch someone has already careened through two bends ahead will take the easy option. In other words just the sort of local stretch I was after.

The accessibility of the stretch might be a factor in a continuing theme on this blog. The tale of the tape of this little foray was eight fish to hand and three missed or lost. All three lost fish were clearly down to operator error – I just got too excited. Of the fish landed one had a precarious hook hold but all the others seemed to have taken confidently, the beetle or LBJ finding firm hold in the scissors or well inside the mouth. What to make of it? The following day with an hour to spare waiting for wife to finish in a meeting I decided to dash to Tralfamadoria where despite it being a very short stretch there are almost always some rising fish. And so it was when I arrived. One intermittent fish against the opposite bank and three rising regularly in the shade of an overhanging tree. I rose three of them to an LBJ and missed them all. So it goes.

I was lucky enough to grab another very brief opportunity the next day and headed to the top of the upstream stretch (and if the downstream reach is allowed a name why shouldn’t upstream. I’ll have to think about it). After mucking around in a few riffles (and catching the most exquisite parr of a trout) I found myself where a feeder creek enters the main stream. At the junction the slower moving tributary backs up to an almost imperceptible creep. I spotted what I hoped to find, a fish in the slack of the junction feeding on the surface. A patrolling fish because as I got in position the second rise came from further away. I cast, the fly landed on the border of the margin weeds and ebbed back towards me. Just as I was wondering whether it was safe to lift off and attempt a more accurate throw the fish came back and ate the beetle. It was a lovely coming together and though I could have carried on for another twenty minutes or so this fish gifted me an overflowing cup. I snipped off the fly and left.

This is all guess work at the moment but more data leads to a functioning hypothesis. The thinking currently goes like this. Within the short distance that separates these two spaces the fish have adapted differently to angling pressure. Downstream in Tralfamadoria they are under incessant angling pressure. Upstream in Erewhon (told you I would, seems appropriate) the suggestion (evidence still seems too strong a word for it) is they are not. Downstream the fish rise to a fly, I cannot say they are more reluctant, more discerning, more “educated” in this sense (they may be and this intriguingly might have something to do with size which I’ll round out another time), but they seem to have devised a way of avoiding being hooked. Upstream they rise to a fly but haven’t. In complicated experiments much of the skill of design comes from controlling for variables that get in the way of a clear, directed question. Outside the laboratory in the real world the variables are many and differ over both space and time. Despite these complications, and with persistence, there comes a point when the weight of accumulated experience is heavy enough that one, or a small set of factors is more likely to explain what is happening than any other despite the plethora of surrounding noise. Given that I have put the lie to the most obvious explanation (my hopeless sense of timing in setting the hook) it is difficult to construct any cogent reasoning that doesn’t incorporate some facet of angling induced learning. One might say that to catch the Tralfamadorian fish my timing needs to be that much keener and this has nothing to do with fish behaving in a knowing (or at least hedge-betting) manner. But this doesn’t wash. To have to alter the timing of the hook-set to account for stocked fish, naive fish and experienced fish implicates a differential response by the trout first to which the angler has to adjust. It is true that fishing small highland streams one has to be quick as a ferret, a speed which results in nothing but a fly whistling into the background bushes when attempted on a more sedate lowland trout. But between Tralfamadoria and Erewhon the water is not different enough, the trout not smaller or larger, the flies the same (exactly so in this case) and the temporal gap too short. As I have said the hard evidence is missing and probably impossible to get but the circumstantial sort is mounting.

These two fish, the one caught in the bend pool and the other at the confluence of feeder and main stem encapsulate much of what I enjoy most about fly fishing. There is something quite visceral in the combination of a visible fish visibly feeding, the necessary quiet and careful approach and deft of a good delivery and ultimately the fish in hand its flank rolled towards you to see the animal as itself before slipping it away. To me it still feels like magic, as if I have picked the pocket of the stream with such care that only the caught trout notices something amiss, the stream still wandering through the crowd, unaware that what it once enveloped is now in my hand. That such an activity can persist for so long with someone like me who has the attention span of a gnat I find deeply fulfilling. That boredom, or worse contemptuous familiarity does not make me abandon the process suggests a pastime both intellectually stimulating and emotionally fulfilling. And that it all begins and ends with, as Ted Leeson wonderfully elaborates on an Emily Dickinson phrase, “the thing with feathers” is a thing to marvel at.