Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Opening up a can of worms
Social distinctions in fishing are relatively new and most regrettable, says Tom Fort
Ilike to think of myself as an all-round angler. I acknowledge that my favourite fishing is with a fly for trout and grayling. But having grown up as a coarse fisherman, I retain a soft spot for chub and barbel. I love a pike more than a salmon. I lust after catching a big mullet but haven’t managed it yet.
One of the many beauties of the sport of angling is the diversity of species, methods, philosophies and enthusiasts. The cricket that is played on the playing fields of Eton is exactly the same game as seen on a dusty backyard in Rawalpindi. The golfer hacking his or her way around the municipal nine-hole course is evidently engaged in the same pursuit as Rory Mcilroy when he tees off in the Masters. But angling is split into multiple strands, whose practitioners often know little or nothing of each other.
And this brings attitudes. The salmon angler looks down on the chub fisherman, who regards the
“The dry fly fisherman looks down his nose at the nymph fisher, while the latter regards the mayfly hatch as a vulgar affair”
salmon man as a very different order of being. The man who fishes the wet fly downstream for trout is dismissed as a poor creature by the man who only ever fishes his spider patterns upstream. The dry-fly fisherman looks down his nose at the nymph fisher, while the nymph fisher — who sight-fishes for individual grayling and makes fine calculations of how quickly his tiny Pheasant Tail will sink through the water — regards the mayfly hatch as a rather vulgar affair.
In salmon fishing the orthodoxies have become more rigid. There was a time, not so long ago, when spinning and the use of bait were acceptable on even the snootiest salmon river. Legendary slayers of salmon such as Robert Pashley on the Wye and John Ashley-cooper would not think twice about using a preserved minnow mounted on a flight or a metal Devon spinner if conditions required it. In low water, trundling a worm or twitching a prawn through a pool full of stale salmon were considered legitimate minor tactics.
Higher art
These days the fly rules supreme on most salmon rivers. The worm and the prawn are generally banned even though they require just as much skill as the supposedly higher art of the fly. Many salmon anglers and owners of salmon fishing take a dim view of spinning (to be fair, it is a dull way to fish), though it is allowed in high water.
Roll back a few centuries and the way you fished was dictated by where you fished. Izaak Walton was born in Staffordshire and lived mostly in
London. The waters available to him were the Trent and the Sow in his native county, and the Thames and its tributaries. There were no trout in these rivers so he was a coarse fisherman. He used bait: worms and grubs and maggots and frogs and slugs and little fish, and gave instruction in how to catch chub, perch, roach, carp and the like. It is evident from the early editions of his The Compleat Angler that he knew next to nothing about fly-fishing.
In old age, Walton became friends with a much younger mad keen angler
from a totally different tradition. Charles Cotton was born and lived not much more than a cast away from the River Dove where it flows along the border between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. This was clear, quick water, the home of trout and grayling. These fish fed largely on insects at various stages in their life cycles, and to catch them you had to offer them a version of that food. So you fly-fished for them. That is what Charles Cotton did — he used fibres from feathers and strands of fur and hair that were easily available to him to tie imitations little different in essentials from those used today. Walton watched him but was really too old to learn the technique himself, which is why he commissioned Cotton to write the flyfishing section of The Compleat Angler.
For a long time geography and the difficulty involved in travelling any distance dictated how anglers angled. Where there were salmon and trout, they generally used the fly because that was the most effective way, though bait fishing and spinning were in their repertoire. Where the rivers ran slow and there were reedy, weedy lakes and meres, those who loved to fish plotted the downfall of the so-called coarse fish. They happily killed and ate them and would never have dreamed that anyone would
regard the way they fished or the fish they fished for or themselves as anglers as in any way inferior.
Pleasing show
Social division arose towards the end of the 19th century. A new breed of well-to-do and privileged angler secured possession of the chalkstreams within reach of London — the Test, the Itchen and the Kennet, plus one or two in Hertfordshire. These were specialised habitats for trout (grayling were present but treated as vermin). The fish fed mostly on sub-surface nymphs, as elsewhere. But they also put on a pleasing show by taking the insects on the surface as they hatched and dried their wings. A floating imitation — a dry fly — would take them in a way that was thrilling and aesthetically delightful, and so the cult of the dry fly was born.
These men were led by a wealthy man of leisure, Frederic Halford, who devoted his considerable intelligence and energy towards a systematic study of this aspect of the natural world. He became convinced, and was able to convince his followers, that the dry fly represented the perfect form of angling. And if this was the peak, it followed that other ways were inferior. Thus came into being that most unattractive angling specimen, the dry-fly purist.
Halford was challenged by another chalkstream specialist, cleverer than him. GEM Skues had worked out that trout did most of their feeding below the surface. He caught them on nymphs, and the Halfordians were outraged. A bitter schism opened up, which was fought out at the Flyfishers’ Club in London and ended with Skues being in effect expelled from the Itchen into a lonely retirement.
Decades later, much of that ignorant snootiness has dissipated.
Its legacy persists to a degree on the famous chalkstreams, but even there a more relaxed attitude now prevails. Helped by the expansion of interest in fly-fishing triggered by the opening of reservoirs and stillwaters from the 1970s onwards, some of the barriers between the denominations have been weakened, though some persist.
Coarse methods
Conventional coarse-fishing methods (floats, weights, worms and maggots) will never be countenanced in the game-fishing world. But the same is not true the other way round. Fly-fishing is making inroads into the domain of the coarse fish.
My winter pike fishing is mostly done with an 11wt fly rod, a shootinghead line and a selection of outlandish lures, the size and colouring of which would provoke palpitations among the salmon community on the Spey or Tweed. It is an effective way of tricking the killer lurking on the fringes of weirpools and millpools on the Thames, and there is nothing in fishing to beat the explosion as that toothy jaw whacks into a surface fly.
For the past few years the fishing writer Dominic Garnett has organised a national contest (see flyforcoarse. com) demonstrating how the divisions are being eroded. The most recent featured a 3lb crucian carp caught on a sedge, a 39lb common carp on an Egg Fly (don’t ask me), a huge and horrible catfish taken on a black lure and — most intriguingly — a bullhead that was tempted by a tiny nymph.
We have come a long way since old Izaak lovingly recommended a revolting way of impaling a live frog for bait — “use him as though you loved him… that he may live the longer”. But Walton also loved to dibble a grasshopper through the branches of willow for a chub, his “fearfullest of fish”. He would surely have approved the notion of nymphing for barbel and all the other possibilities now opened up.
Izaak Walton Angling, A Summer’s Day on the Banks of the Colne by Edward Matthew Ward, c1850