I’ve been caught – hook, line and klinker

The brown trout fishing and bank strimming – essential bank maintenance – was curtailed rather when the weather took a turn for the worse: howling north winds and sleet. Added to which I was warned off the river by the chairman of the board, whatever my excuses.

To add insult to injury, it turned out I was breaking the brown trout guideline anyway. For reasons that defeat me we are allowed to keep only two brownies a week. Two a day might be sensible, as no one seems to fish the river for brownies hereabout and the place is hoaching with them.

Which is not the same as saying they simply hook themselves by the shoal. They don’t. The one thing you hope for is to be on the river during a “rise”, when, if you believe all the stories, the surface boils with feeding trout.

This is the moment when the experienced hand identifies the flies bobbing down stream on which the trout are feeding and selects something similar from his well stocked fly box (ahem). And then the fun begins.

Largely because I tended to be rather late getting down to the river this only happened once. At the time I was fishing, as recommended, a very small Partridge and Orange (turns out it looks like a caddis fly) with a Greenwells Glory on the dropper, a short spur of line spliced half way up the cast. Two flies, double the chance. So the water started boiling and I couldn’t for the life of me see what it was they were feeding on but followed my expert’s recommendation and replaced the Partridge and Orange with a March Brown. Not a thing.

There followed a scene rather like those old Thelwell cartoons of grinning fish leaping over the line of a despondent looking fisherman. The expert, when consulted, produced the usual litany of likely problems; wrong fly, wrong size, rubbish casting, wrong colour water, wind in the north. And so on. Have you tried klink and dink, he asked which, for all I knew, was a well known comedy act. Ah well, you tie on a big hairy dry fly (ideally the eponymous Klinkhammer named after a Mr Von Klinken) which floats and below that a nymph (why dink I know not) which is meant to look like an emerging fly.

And instead of casting down stream (wet fly method ) you cast upstream (dry fly). It’s like fishing with a sophisticated float. When the klink goes under you’ve got one on the dink.

If all goes well you get one on both. Well it hasn’t happened yet. I’m still awaiting delivery of a klink, a change in the weather, and the re-opening of the river. ■