On Fishing. Brian Clarke
act as Edwards’ unpaid assistant – and took over the fishing school himself on Edwards’ death in 1968. In 1969 he helped to found the Association of Professional Game Angling Instructors, the body that put until-then unregulated game fishing tuition onto a formal footing. He went on to run fishing courses personally until close to his death, teaching over 3,000 students on the Spey alone. Over the same time he regularly led paying clients on fishing expeditions to Russia, Alaska and Iceland.
By the time he started teaching, Oglesby had already made a name for himself through journalism. He first began to write for angling publications, then additionally for The Field and Shooting Times – at one time producing so much copy that he had to adopt a nom de plume to spread his name more thinly. He became European Editor of the American Field and Stream. He edited the Angler’s Annual for three years. He taught himself to fly and regularly presented field events for Yorkshire Television, from time to time adding glamour for participants and audiences alike by flying in and out on his own aircraft.
Like many successful anglers in their later years, Oglesby found that he needed to fish less and less, but he did not become the outstanding performer he was without being fish-hungry at the outset. This fish hunger – and resulting success – bred some jealousy and led others to spread rumours of how his captures might actually be achieved. In Oglesby’s case it led to some wonderful stories. A family favourite is of the time he arrived at the Yorkshire Esk for a day in the middle of what was proving, for him, a terrific season. Another angler, who did not recognise him, was on the bank when he arrived and saw that he was about to head upstream. ‘I wouldn’t go up there’, the other angler called, inferring by his tone the possibility of nets and maybe a little dynamiting, ‘I hear that bugger Oglesby’s up there’. A pause. ‘Oh, good’, Oglesby replied – ‘I think I’ll go and join him.’
It was in 1966 that Oglesby’s international career took off. Again, through Horsfall Turner, he met Odd Haraldsen, a Norwegian who had a prime beat of the Vosso, at that time the finest big-salmon river in the world and one on which spring fish averaged 28lbs apiece. Oglesby and Haraldsen hit it off and Oglesby came home with an invitation to return every year ‘until you catch a 50-pounder’.
He did not quite make the 50lbs but over the years pictures of Oglesby and his amazing Vosso captures became part of the page furniture of the angling and sometimes of the national press. At the time of his death, among the stag heads and books and other mementoes of a 60-year sporting life that looked down from the walls of his study were four salmon. They weighed 45lbs, 46lbs, 46lbs and 49lbs-plus. The biggest fish was caught on June 17, 1973. The three others were, remarkably, all caught on June 18 of their respective years. In 1981 Oglesby caught a bag of four Vosso fish that weighed 151lbs – an incredible total and one which now seems unlikely to be beaten anywhere.
Oglesby’s fame and wherewithal took him to many exotic places – and as a result he made many famous friends. Hemingway was one. Another was Charles Ritz, the Parisian hotelier and a man who, in private life, was a brilliant designer of fly rods. He fished with the Americans Joe Brooks, Lee and Joan Wulff and Al McClane. In Britain he knew and fished with pretty well every famous angler who wafted a salmon rod, most important among them being Hugh Falkus, with whom he made a number of films. It is a point of interest that it was Oglesby who first taught Falkus to Spey-cast – a fact that Falkus did not publicise widely.
Arthur Oglesby wrote several books, among them Salmon (1971), Fly fishing for Salmon and Sea Trout (1986) and an autobiography, Reeling In (1988). But it will be for his extraordinary captures – and the whirl and the world he lived in – that he will be remembered by most.
FOR most of us, the challenge of the fish alone is enough. Just getting a fish onto the line and then onto the bank takes all the knowledge and wristy skills we can muster. It also takes the tackle to do the job, properly maintained. There is nothing worse than losing a fish through carelessness or through tackle that, in one way or another, has been allowed to deteriorate. Everything is hostage to the weakest link.
A FORLORN friend, relatively new to angling but mad keen, told me how, on one of the first casts of his first outing of the new trout season, he had hooked a substantial fish that came unstuck in seconds. When he wound in, the leader had broken a little above what had been a well-tied knot.
This sad little everyday tale, garnished by the fact that – naturally – not another fish was touched all day, will strike a chord in us all. Every new season brings its crop of challenges. Mostly they are concerned with the intransigence of fishes. For the newcomer or the inexperienced, they can concern tackle as well.
The breaking leader problem is typical. Quite often, when a leader breaks under the circumstances described, the problem is not that the nylon chosen was too fine – though, of course, it can be – or that the breaking strain marked on the spool overstated the breaking strain of the line wound onto it. It is that, in the months since last used – or in the time on display in the tackle shop – the nylon has steadily weakened.
The problem is light. I am not sure what the process is, but the ability of light, and especially sunlight, to weaken spooled nylon is well-established. A few days’ use at the water is one thing; continuous exposure for weeks and months on end is another. The answer is to store leader material in the dark. I keep my spools stacked one on top of another in a long, old sock.
The sock lives in my fishing bag. At the start of each season, every spool in the sock is tested and any suspect nylon is discarded. Then, the spools I will need on my next outing are transferred from the sock in my fishing bag to the pockets of my fishing jacket. If the same spools are needed for the following outing, they stay there. If others are required, the appropriate switches are made. At the end of the season, all spools are socked up and rebagged. It is a simple, if somewhat inelegant ploy that ensures no spool is left open to the light and every spool is available when and where needed. The nods and nudges in the car park, when a loosely jointed leg is noticed hanging out of the boot, add to the ploy’s attractions.
Flylines can present problems, too.
A line that has had some use and that is then left wound on a reel through a close season, tends to acquire ‘memory’: that is, when it is taken out and used again, it does not cast silkily and lie flat on the water. Instead, it casts like wire and spirals across the surface like a loosely wound spring. This is especially true of the inner coils, which have been wound in the smallest, tightest turns around the reel spindle.
The problem this time is not light but lubrication. Modern lines are coated in plastics to which a form of lubricant – a plasticiser – has been added. The job of the plasticiser is to keep the line supple. In preventing the line from becoming stiff the plasticiser assists casting and reduces the risk of cracking. But over time – and especially, it seems, if stored in high temperatures – plasticiser leaches out.
One way of alleviating the effects of stiffness in a line is to stretch it. The permanent answer is periodically to replace the plasticiser that has been lost.
Replasticising agents are available from any good shop that deals in fly-fishing equipment. The line is laid out straight or coiled in wide, loose loops and the plasticiser is smeared along its whole length. After five or six hours the line will have absorbed as much as it needs and the surplus can be wiped off. That is it. The line is ready for use. The effect of this simple operation is magical: it not only abolishes memory and transforms the line’s casting ability but lengthens line life. I treat my lines once a season and they behave perfectly for anything up to five or six.
There is another little wrinkle about lines and leaders. At the waterside they have to be threaded through the rod-rings. Ninety-nine anglers in 100 take the fine tip of the leader and poke that through successive rings, drawing the much-heavier flyline behind it. On most days that works perfectly well. But every angler experiences the other days: those days when, in the eagerness to get started or some moment of distraction, the leader-end is accidentally dropped. Then, pulled by the weight of the flyline behind it, the whole ensemble rattles