On Nature: Unexpected Ramblings on the British Countryside. Литагент HarperCollins USD
Lough Corrib I’ve seen trout with sides like coal dropped in sand; from peaty Scottish lochs trout like slabs of dark chocolate. And there’s a river I know in Dorset where every fish you catch will have an orange adipose fin – like a candle flame alight underwater. These limitless, painterly riffs around the theme of trout are one reason behind my obsession. They are so bloody pretty, and no two trout look exactly the same: this fact is well known to anglers, who’ll recognise fish across the years from the spot patterns on their gill covers. There are ancient brownies in my local stream down the road that I must have caught and photographed two, three times. But in that variety the trout is only responding to its environment, to whether the water is dark or clear, the bed of the stream sandy or rocky. We can see this across these cruder dimensions, though the trout kaleidoscopes well beyond our ability to understand why. In some chimerical way the narrative of the landscape itself is refined and condensed and accreted in trouty hieroglyphics. Limestone, chalk, slate, shale, sandstone, machair, granite, clay: the surface of these islands grades like a thick slab of plywood tilted on a plane, sanded, chopped and buckled and the language of these rocks is printed on the skins of trout. Would that not be reason enough for a lifelong of chasing?
Those Castlecove fish – I sketched many of them before I ate them for breakfast – had butter bellies, green sides, black backs. They looked like the hillside that grew them. I couldn’t imagine how fishing could get much better than it was then, crawling through the snags of gorse and overgrown trees, slipping over boulders, pulling those pretty fish from dark pools that ran like Smithwicks bitter, and cycling home at the end of it all with the best half-dozen in a satchel. In many ways it hasn’t. More than that, though, fishing for trout with a worm in the Castlecove stream taught me some of the big things I needed to learn about catching trout. Most of all, how to get close to them and where they lay. Two intertwined ideas I would have done best never to forget, though forgotten they were and often are once the angler demands space for his fly-casting and derives too much satisfaction from how well it is going. Trout, I found out then and remember again from time to time, are best caught or tried for under your feet, even with a fly rod. And if you go at it slowly enough that’s often where you’ll find them.
You can’t cast far with a free-running lob-worm. All you have, to pull the line off the reel, is the weight of the worm. And you must cast it with a gentle pendulum swing or it will fall off the hook. You’ll struggle to get it more than twelve feet up the river, and an unweighted worm sinks only slowly through the water. If the stream is fast and you hold the worm in the rush of water it will be back past you in seconds, skimming on the surface at the end of a taught line and no trout on earth will take it. So try again, only just to the side of the faster current this time, using the worm and the thin thread that attaches you to it to search for the back eddies and the slips of current between the downstream flow and its upstream counterpart, or the sometimes motionless tongues of water, or the small vortices that will pull the worm down to where the fish are. Only a worm at the mercy of the currents – like a kite in the breeze – can teach you quite so quickly how to feel and read those currents. You must keep the line taut enough that you will see a bite, but not so taut that you’re dragging the worm around unnaturally. Soon enough your rod top is tracing every nuance in the flow, you’re feeling the river as if you’re part of it, and then . . . tap, tap, tap. A trout is knocking on the door. Where was it? You’ll have noticed without noticing. Each time a trout takes, and all the times one doesn’t, you’ll learn a little bit more about where they lie and where they don’t lie. You’ll start to read the water, to see the way a river flows across its crests and hollows, weeds and stones, along the corrugated edges, the riffles and undercuts, and you’ll start to translate what you see into an idea of where the fish are. The river becomes a language, and that language – admittedly with strange local dialects – is the same for every river: for the moorland stream, for a chalk stream, for a lowland brook in a vale of clay; and once you start to look at them as very big pools on a river, the language is not unfamiliar on a loch or a lough too.
Most universally? The trout are in the seams: not in the rip, nor in the dead water to the side of it. The trout lie between the two. This seam between the tongue of flow into a pool and the dead water to the side of it is the most obvious of all. But think about the margins between fast water and slow across the full three dimensions of the channel: along the bed, along the edges, at the tails of pools, in the whorls off fallen timber or boulders. These seams are the pockets of shelter from which a trout can easily dart into the flow to feed and back again. Think seams, pockets and margins and you won’t be far from the fish.
I learnt how to cast a fly eventually and graduated from bicycle to ancient VW Polo and drove over to Kerry every summer for years, camping or hiring caravans near Water-ville to haunt the little mountain loughs and streams above Lough Currane. No trees, see? Unlike Castlecove, a bit of space to wield a fly rod. I have pinned to the wall above my desk the Suirbheireacht Ordonais No.20 Dingle Bay bought on one of those hols in Co. Kerry and it’s there to remind me of these places: the stream full of engine blocks and one other spot in particular: a necklace of loughs that curls back into the mountains above it – into the foothills of Macgillycuddy’s Reeks. We’d park at the end of the road, turn our back on Lough Derriana and follow a little stream up into the valley above. Flat ground at first, a peaty bog crossed by fences hanging with sheep’s wool and plastic, then a moraine of mossy, hollow land strewn with boulders, the stream coming and going, above ground, below it, the lough forever over the next brow – until finally we reached it. Tooreenbog was in most lights an almost melancholic body of water. Though it was full of fish, had we not walked beyond it the first time we might never have gone back. But at its head was a waterfall that seemed to invite an exploration of what lay beyond. The valley curled away, its end beyond sight, but with some sort of siren call about the place. We heard it and followed and found over every ridge a new lough, smaller than the last, each one pocked with rising trout and dripping with silence, until we reached the end, a sheer wall of rock 500 feet high, split by a waterfall dropping off the plateau above to vaporise against fern-covered rocks below. The final lough, which doesn’t have a name, was pressed up hard against this slope and its windless surface reflected the place like glass. It is a cliché of rose-tinted memory, but here it was true: with a team of three flies I could bet on three to the cast in those loughs, and especially below the waterfall in Tooreenbog.
A good place to practise, then. Because though you can learn to cast a fly rod on a lawn it is much more fun if keen and hungry trout are there to reward your efforts. A lough is good for other reasons: you can find a shore to put the wind at your back; the hungry fish won’t mind a muffed cast; the still water gives you time to think. Like everything in fishing, casting a fly rod can get as complicated as you want it to. It can certainly become an end in itself. And above all a brown trout lough will teach you this: like on the stream at Castlecove, if you’re quiet and slow you don’t have to cast very far. The trout in a small mountain lough are most often feeding right along the edge: if you stand high on a rock and cast at the horizon (which, when you get good at casting, you will definitely spend several years doing) they’ll move just beyond reach. If you sneak low and quiet and fish along the shore-line you’ll catch a hat-full. So, if we stick with the idea that casting is about catching, it is best kept short and accurate and best kept simple. The casting stroke is this: nine o’clock on the forward stroke, half-twelve on the back. Pull out three yards of line and swish the rod back and forth between these two points. You will have already done it wrong. I said twelve-thirty: that’s just past your ear. The rod must never go further back than this! You think it didn’t? It did. And again, just now when you tried to prove it didn’t. Okay. Do this for an hour, imagining that I am there to tell you ALL THE TIME that you brought the rod too far back. After a while, if you believe me, you might begin to get it right. You’ll know when you have because the line will straighten along the ground in front of you, instead of falling in a heap. By the way, you’ll be taking it too far back for two reasons: first, you are flopping the wrist; second, you’ll be waving your elbow around. Tuck the elbow in at the hip. Don’t break the wrist.
When you’ve finally got that right try the same again with a longer line: it’ll probably go wrong again. You’ll compensate for the added length by making those same mistakes you started with and you’ll add to the mix the idea that if you swish really quickly it will help. In fact you need to slow down. Stop the rod