On Fishing. Brian Clarke
myself beside some huge, intimidating lake, not knowing where to start and relying on shop-bought flies that I knew nothing about.
Naturally, my results reflected this. Most outings ended in disappointment. I would blank, or catch a small one, or miss two offers.
Then, eventually, it dawned. If I wanted better results I could only achieve them on the basis of greater skill, resulting from a better understanding of the business I was about. Only by submitting to that austere, top-hatted and frock-coated taskmaster Effort, I realised, could I hope to capitalise fully on my outings when they came.
And so I decided to stop my mechanistic, chuck-it-out, pull-it-back-and-hope approach. I did not like the drag and dead weight of sinking lines. I did not enjoy stripping lures. I did not know why fancy flies were taken or which to use when, where or how. I did know, though, that to survive a trout had to eat; that it ate flies and bugs; that it could only eat the flies and bugs available to it at a given time of day at a given time of year; and I knew, too, that if I could discover something about these bugs and how they might be imitated, I could improve my chances on the basis of thought and logic rather than on lucky dip and chance. I resolved, from that point on, to concentrate wholly on fishing artificial flies that imitated the real flies that trout regularly consume.
And so, as I recounted fully in The Pursuit of Stillwater Trout, I began to autopsy my own fish and to seek out the results of autopsies conducted by others. Then I constructed a small aquarium and stocked it with the kinds of insects I was finding inside fish: that is, with the kinds of insects that I knew for sure, trout ate.
It was as though the road to Damascus had become floodlit. Now I could see close-up not only what important nymphs and bugs looked like but how they moved, lived and hatched. I saw how pathetic as imitations the shop-bought articles were and what sensible representations would need to look like. I saw, as well, how those representations needed be moved on the end of my line: it was, of course, in the way the naturals themselves moved in my aquarium. In other words I began, for the first time, to understand what imitation and presentation were really about. I saw them not as some horns-locked, competing alternatives as much writing of the time seemed to suggest, but as necessary coconspirators in the deception process.
Before long I was creating my own stillwater patterns and was moving them in the way I had watched the naturals move – sometimes exaggerating this movement to attract attention to the fly or to prompt a predatory reflex from any following fish. My results improved and my confidence improved. The more confident I became, the more fish I caught. In that first year on stillwaters – the only kind of fishing available to me – my catch rate went up 600 per cent.
Then fate stepped in. My work moved out of London and took me to Hampshire. Rivers as well as lakes – many of them glassclear – became accessible for the first time.
New circumstances, new opportunities. I was able to get close to trout and to study them in their natural habitat. I watched how they responded to natural insects in and on the currents and began to imitate these river insects as I had imitated the bugs of stillwater. I watched how fish responded to the artificial flies cast by my friends and I amended my tactics and presentation in light of what I saw. I continued an interest in feeding behaviour and rise-forms because of the clues I realised they could reveal about the insects being taken. Over time, I took thousands of photographs and studied each one to see what it revealed. Gradually, almost unrecognised, a new factor was creeping into my fishing: it was the fascination of study and experiment in its own right.
It was around this time that John Goddard and I began to fish together and before long we decided to collaborate on a book. We decided from the outset to study not only the fish’s behaviour, but the underwater world in which the fish lived.
We constructed large tanks with specially angled sides so that, crouched down beneath them, we could see the world as perceived by the trout: more particularly the fly, the angler and his equipment as perceived by the trout. We set cameras in waterproof housings onto the river bed.
We photographed flies from every angle, from both above water and below. We even, on a few memorable occasions, photographed flies’ feet from under water, at night. (Yes, really. We were trying to understand how trout could go on rising unerringly to flies floating on the surface at night when we, peering down at the surface in the dark, could see no flies at all. Obviously, the fish could see something – but how and what it was we did not know).
With this work, for each of us, the search had moved from dressings that might catch trout or dressings that looked broadly like certain species of fly. Now, the goal had become the creation of dressings – and especially dry fly dressings – that would give a fish everything that we believed it might look for or expect to see. Dry fly dressings, we had realised from the outset, posed a special challenge: because they sit on the water’s surface (i.e.in air) and are seen by the fish from below (i.e.through water), any view of them must be distorted by refraction.
Refraction influences the trout’s view of the world in several ways. One of the things it does is to make it impossible for any trout below the surface to look up and see the world outside the water as clearly as we can see the world below water, when looking down at it from the bank. For reasons too complex to go into here, refraction turns most of the underside of the surface into a mirror that reflects the river or lake bed – or the water’s gloomy depths. So in most places the ceiling of the trout’s world is green or brown or sombrely dark. The exception, again for complex reasons, is a circle of daylight above the fish’s head that acts as a kind of porthole. The trout can see out into the world above water, but only through this porthole – and everything it does see is distorted. The common term for the mirrored area is, unsurprisingly, ‘the mirror’ and the round porthole through which the trout can see above water is ‘the window’. (All of these extraordinary effects, and some of those that follow, are clearly shown in photographs in The Trout and the Fly, the book we eventually published).
John and I were keen to take account of these effects in our fly designs. In particular, we wanted to provide the trout with two visual features which are present in any fly sitting on the surface when it is viewed from below. The first was a tiny prickle of light spots that the feet of a fly transmit through the darkness of the mirror where they touch it. The second was wings that would appear to become separated from the body (rather in the manner of a flame from a gas jet) when the fly drifted from the mirror into the window.
One result of this work was a fly that was aerodynamically designed to land upside down, with the hook point uppermost, when cast. We did not set out to design a fly that landed upside down. Our aim was to design a fly that gave out the signals described above, to a trout looking up at the surface for approaching food: light dimples on the surface and wings that would flare over the edge of the window.
However, as we worked on such a fly, it became clear that the only way we could achieve our goal was by turning the fly upside-down. We were almost surprised – though more sensible men would not have been – when our end-product looked quite like a real fly, even to us.
John and I both knew, of course, that such refinements were not necessary for 99 per cent of the trout we tackled. Indeed, I believe that any effort to turn the hook upside down as an objective in its own right is wasted, offering aesthetic appeal but no observable, practical advantage. However, our upside-down (USD) patterns did bring about the downfall of some of those tantalising, pernickety, wary fish in the 1 per cent category – and that had been our aim.
This whole period was fascinating for us both. We had rummaged through the technicalities of fly design and presentation to an extent which, it is probably fair to say, few others had done. We had photographed much of what we had seen; we had documented it meticulously and we had put our work, through the resulting book, on record.
The period also marked a particular stage in my evolution as an angler: my absorption with the most difficult fish. Soon after the book was completed – and perhaps even as a reaction to such a long period of locked-away, esoteric study – my interest began to turn in the opposite direction. I began to look for simplicity.
The flies I have carried in the years since have become fewer and fewer and ever-more simple. They reflect my belief