Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Country Diary
A sullen grey sky and little chance of a salmon, but who cares? It’s a day on a pristine chalk river being entertained by dazzling dragonflies
Though I managed to coax several greedy jack pike from their lairs earlier this season, those magnificent doublefigure Atlantic salmon that cruise up the Hampshire Avon each spring and early summer have eluded me. But I have had terrific fun trying to catch one. I have a Saturday rod in a fishing syndicate on the Lower Avon, which is refreshingly unmanicured and unstocked with trout unlike other chalk rivers in the south.
The Lower Avon is salmon and coarse fish country and our syndicate water covers four contrasting beats that run for several miles through one of the richest wildlife habitats in Europe. One of the great charms of our water is that it is perfectly fishable without being over-gardened. As with all proper fisheries, each beat has its own fishing hut and it would be fair to say that ours range in character from one-star dilapidated to five-star palatial.
The “palace” must rate as one of the plushest fishing huts — or should I say lodges — in the land. Inside, it would be roomy enough to swing half-a-dozen cats tied end to end. There is a wood burner to stave off early-season chills and an adjoining decked veranda that overlooks a floristically rich hay meadow and a beguiling stretch of crystal-clear water. It has a braided channel, an awkward-tofish eddy that swirls around the tail of a line of rusting groynes, and a deep, narrow run that rushes beneath a sleeper bridge, where pied wagtails loiter to ambush mayflies.
Seasonal treats
On the first Saturday in June, I stood on the veranda, taking it all in. It is a view I will never grow tired of and because each beat is fished on a four-week rotation there is always some new seasonal treat in store. The water was low, very low; we hadn’t had any serious rain for weeks and in the logbook there was no record of a salmon having been caught on this particular beat since April. Fishing-wise, I knew it would be tough going but so what? I wasn’t there only to catch a salmon; I was there to spend time on the riverbank and to soak up the serenity of a pristine chalk river valley in June.
On this particular day, fluffy white cumulus clouds raced across the bright blue before a sullen grey sky eventually took hold. Rain was on its way but it would come too late to put fresh water and fresh fish into the system, at least for this Saturday rod. The low water made choice of fly and line tricky, but I found that I could make a sparkling Posh Tosh tied on a slowsinking polyleader swim quite nicely.
It drifted downstream and across without catching on the swan-stripped fronds of water crowfoot that billowed in the shallower, gravelly midstream sections, before slowly sinking into the deeper cuts beneath the margins where I hoped a resting salmon might lie.
Dashing hobbies entertained me, hunting above the insect-rich crown of a lone English oak tree. A cock lapwing checked me out several times before returning to his hen, who almost certainly had chicks afoot, and a reed bunting repeatedly sprang from the lower limbs of an alder, trying to be a flycatcher. But it was the dazzling array of dragonflies and damselflies that accompanied me along the overgrown riverbanks that really stole the show.
They gleamed and shone and sparkled as brightly as any of the garish salmon-flies in my fly box, and I felt embarrassed at not being able to name them all — the hawkers, darters, chasers, skimmers and emeralds got me in a muddle. On several occasions I lay down “the Avon salmon tamer” — so named by the kindly friend who built it for me — and whipped out my phone to take pictures of the flies I couldn’t identify. Taking half-decent photographs of dragonflies is far harder than I imagined.
Of the dragonflies, it was scarce chasers that I saw most of that day. There was hardly a time when a beautiful battleshipgrey male wasn’t cruising along the margins beside me, patrolling his own beat. Scarce chasers are red-listed as a nationally scarce species, but clearly they are not that scarce on our water.
“The huts on our beats range from one-star dilapidated to five-star palatial”
Mike Short is an ecologist at the GWCT. He is a keen angler, deerstalker and forager and helps to run a wild bird rough shoot in Wiltshire.