On Fishing

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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 back down through the rings into the grass – and the process has to be started again.

A far better method – and one that does not demand the eyesight of a hawk before fine nylon can be guided through tiny rings – is to thread the flyline up the rings and not the leader.

How? The leader, plus a few feet of flyline, are pulled straight off the reel. The end of the flyline is doubled back on itself to form a tight loop and the loop is passed through the rings, in the process pulling more line and leader behind it. Held between forefinger and thumb, the loop can be closed tightly enough to pass through even the tiniest rings on the top-piece.

Done this way, getting a line up a rod is not only far easier for those with less than nimble fingers and good eyesight, it overcomes the falling line problem as well. If the line is inadvertently released, the held loop springs open and jams in the last rod ring to have been threaded. In other words, line and leader are held where they are so that threading can be continued as before.

With the line on the rod and a reliable leader on the end of it, all is ready. Only the challenge of the fish remains: that, and finding a strong, sharp hook.

Always and Never (#ulink_aae85518-a2b3-5ee1-a59e-c23d6348fa36)

IT HAS been said many times that the two least appropriate words in angling are ‘always’ and ‘never’. We can say that this or that usually happens or almost always happens – even that we have never known it not happen – but the moment we become dogmatic and absolute, the exception will pop up to prove us wrong.

Likewise with ‘never’. Fishing is so wide and deep a sport, conditions and circumstances so infinitely variable, fish so varied and unpredictable that, sooner or later, the highly unlikely, even the seemingly impossible, will occur. You can bet on it.

A well-known angling writer and professional biologist, a man whose work I know and admire, wrote in an angling journal that ‘grayling always lie on the bottom. Always! There is no reliable scientific observation published of a grayling resting, like a trout “on the fin”, just below the surface.’

ON THE afternoon of September 16, 1983, I was walking upriver looking for trout when, on a bend I know well, over seven feet or so of water, I saw a big fish on the fin, inches under the surface. I naturally assumed it was a trout – this was a big trout lie – but before I could cast to it the fish saw me, turned and rushed downstream. From high on the bank on that sunlit day, I had a perfect view of it. I saw every detail of the fish as it passed. It was a huge grayling.

The incident was so remarkable and the grayling so big that, for future reference, I marked precisely the position the fish had been, by drawing mental lines across it from features on my own bank to features on the bank opposite. Then I went downstream, waded across the river and came up the other side to find a position I could cast from, while keeping well below the skyline.

A week later, on the afternoon of September 23, I returned to the bend in the hope of finding the fish there again, high in the water, because I knew I would not be able to see it if it were deep. This time, though, I crept unseen up the opposite bank and went straight to the casting position I had marked. I could see nothing of the fish from that place and so cast a small shrimp ‘blind’ a yard or two upstream of the fish’s previous lie. I got it at once. The shrimp could not have sunk six inches before the fish took, indicating that again it had been just under the surface. It weighed 2lbs 14oz and remained my biggest grayling for the next 20 years.

In July, 1987, I was on a camping and fishing trip in the Swedish Arctic with a group of Swedish friends. On a river one evening – there was, of course, still plenty of light in those parts at night – we found a great raft of fish lying just under the surface, again over deep water. The fish were smutting, tilting up to sip down flies with the regularity of metronomes, again just like trout. We could see that they were grayling. We got only one – a monster, 3lbs 4oz – before the wind got up and the fish went down.

One evening in July, 1989, immense numbers of fish were lying just under the surface on a Hampshire carrier. Although it was evening I could, with the light behind me, see them clearly. They were almost all grayling – again, all smutting, simply tilting up, taking a fly, realigning themselves horizontally and then taking again. I caught several. They were grayling in the water and grayling on the bank.

I have seen similar behaviour several times since: two or three times below a particular hatch pool on a river in Dorset where, over very deep water, the fish will range about on the fin, only two or three feet below the surface. I have even taken a photograph of a grayling on the fin, again just below the surface over deep water, in the back-eddy downstream of a hatch-pool on a river in Berkshire.

The writer of the article on grayling also mentioned barbel. I have not seen it myself but I know a wholly reliable barbel fisher, another professional biologist, who has watched these archetypal bottom-hugging fish feeding from the surface when it has been worth their while. Faced with a continuous stream of floating bread, he tells me, some fish will rise right to the top to take it. They deal with the underslung mouth problem by rolling at the last moment, so that the mouth is uppermost.

Even more improbably – I have written about it elsewhere in this book – I have watched video footage taken by a keeper on the Test, showing a group of eels lying just under the surface like trout, wholly preoccupied with a heavy fall of mayfly spinners. That, it seems to me, is the coup de grace in this debate.

The explanation? I am personally convinced that all fish are opportunistic feeders and that when everything comes together to make ‘abnormal’ behaviour more productive and energy-saving than ‘normal’, they will adopt it. Not always or frequently, but when it pays dividends. Dense hatches of smuts, which might not always repay repeated journeys from bottom to top and back again for each single fly, would clearly be a starting point for such a combination of events. On the other hand the 2lbs 14oz fish, like the fish I photographed in the eddy, was not smutting: it was simply near the surface, over deep water, on the lookout for food exactly like a trout.

Perhaps part of the problem for anglers may be that grayling are so obviously bottom-dwellers, and the received wisdom has so long been that grayling never lie on the fin, that in the main we never expect anything else and so do not look for it. And if we are moved to look for it, either circumstances might not be right to induce grayling to lie high in the water or visibility might be such that, if they are high, the fish cannot be seen.

Either way, in angling, the lesson is the same: ‘always’ and ‘never’ should be given a wide berth.

Barbless Hooks (#ulink_160a5575-286c-5962-8caf-c8ad49f447a6)

WHEN, in the late 1970s, John Goddard and I were working on our book The Trout and the Fly, we conducted all manner of experiments. One was to test the efficiency of barbed hooks versus barbless: did we lose more fish with the latter than the former, we wanted to know.

It was the welfare of the fish we had in mind. Though the barbed hooks we used for our flies were tiny – sizes 12 to 18, mainly – they nevertheless, like all barbed hooks, had to be wriggled and teased out. Fish often had to be lifted from the water during the process and the possibility of stress on the trout was further increased.

If we could use barbless hooks without greatly impacting our results, most fish could be set free without being touched. Once beaten they could be brought to the bankside or the wadered leg and the hook could be slipped out with the merest twist of the fingers. The fish would benefit and so, through the sheer convenience of it, would we.

Appropriate barbless hooks were not available so we started removing existing barbs, ourselves. We hooked fish, then gave them every opportunity to escape. We let the line go slack when the fish was in open water, we let it go slack as usual when they jumped, we allowed them to get into weed beds. It made little or no difference to the numbers of fish we banked. We were happy and the fish were happier. We both wrote about it extensively. But for some, old habits die hard.

A TRAWL of tackle shops has confirmed yet again what a hidebound, tradition-driven and often unthinking animal the average angler is. It was almost impossible to find a suitable hook for fly-tying that had no barb. The reason so few shops stock barbless hooks is because so few anglers demand them. And it makes no sense.

It is now decades since I last fished with a fly tied on a barbed hook. Indeed, even when coarse fishing, I almost always fish barbless because the advantages are so obvious and significant.

A barb on a hook serves only two purposes. The first, in coarse fishing, is that it helps to keep a bait on board. The second, in any fishing, is that it gives some anglers peace of mind. The idea that a bait is less likely to have wriggled or fallen off the hook is, of course, comforting to a coarse or sea angler – though the notion is irrelevant to a fly fisherman, who is not using bait. The thought that a hook with a barb on should in theory not be able to come out, can comfort some in the middle of a fight.

It is worth setting against these ideas, some facts. Chief among them – as anyone who habitually fishes barbless knows – is that no more fish are lost from barbless hooks than from barbed. Many will say that fewer fish come adrift.

Anyone in doubt should consider what happens – and can test the principles involved with a short length of line, a hook and a piece of wood into which the hook point has been clicked.

A fish rises to a fly or takes a bait and the angler responds by striking. In an instant the line tightens, exerts its pull on the hook eye and the hook point begins to go home. Alas, it does not always arrive. A barb sticking out from a hook just behind the point creates a wider part of the wire that slows penetration. Sometimes it stops penetration completely and the hook gains the merest purchase.

All sorts of things can then ensue. One is that the fish, held only by the tip of the hook point, comes off instantly – it has ‘been pricked’. Another common occurrence – especially for dry fly anglers, who need to use fine-wire hooks in the interests of lightness – is that as the point slows penetration and the pull of the line on the eye increases, leverage causes the hook bend to open, again enabling the fish to slip free.

There is a third possibility. A barb is not added to a hook, but is cut into it and the spot at which the cut is made naturally represents a weak-point. Too often the result – especially with cheap, fine-wire hooks – is that the great leverage exerted on the point by the pull on the hook’s eye, causes the point to snap clean off. Another lost fish.

With a barbless hook, none of this happens. Without a barb, a hook has no weak point and no wider point to slow penetration. If a barbless hook gains a purchase, the odds are that it will go home, first time.

Once home, it is much less likely to come out than might be imagined. Any angler playing a fish needs to keep a tight line to stay in control – which helps to keep the hook in place. But even if the line is allowed to fall slack it is extremely unusual for a hook to come free. The mere action of a fish swimming means that it tows the line, which exerts enough drag on the hook to keep it secure. In a river, even if a fish stops swimming and the line is allowed to fall slack, the hook stays in place. The reason is that in a river the fish is obliged to face upstream, into the current and the current carries the line downstream behind the fish – again exerting drag on the hook.

There is another, overriding consideration why I not only always fish barbless with a fly but almost always fish barbless when using bait. It is because even the tiniest barb can make a hook difficult to remove and the fish often has to be taken from the water to get the hook out. Any time a fish spends out of the water adds stress for it and, in inexpert hands, there is an added risk in the process of the fish being damaged.

In contrast, a fish taken on a barbless hook can be set free with ease, the hook simply sliding out. Indeed, there is rarely a need for a fish taken on a barbless hook to leave the water at all – a reason why, when trout fishing on most rivers, I not only do not use barbed hooks but do not carry a landing net, either.

It is in spite of all of this that anglers keep on demanding hooks with barbs and why the trade, not unnaturally, keeps on supplying them to the exclusion of pretty well all else.

There are fixes: a barb on a hook can be pressed flat in the vice before fly-tying begins or – caught at the waterside with a shop-bought article – the barb can be pressed down with a pair of small, flat-nosed pliers, a tool that has many other uses besides.

Both actions are the work of a moment, but still that weak spot remains and the odd point snaps off. If only more anglers would recognise the benefits of barbless hooks and would ask for them, the problem – and not the fish – would go away.

Bernard Venables (#ulink_ae8489e1-b7f2-5518-88ad-2bd56617b021)

ASK A NON-ANGILER to name the best-selling angling book of all time and the most likely answer will be Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Ask a fisherman – one over 40, anyway – and the one-word response will be ‘Crabtree’.

It is hard to find a middle-aged angler who does not have Bernard Venables’ marvellous book. In the 20 years to 1970 Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing was almost a compulsory buy. My own copy – yellowing, frayed and dated ‘Christmas, 1952’ in a childish hand – is beside me as I write.

No-one knows how many copies Izaak Walton’s pastoral hymn has sold, though in the 350 years since it appeared it has run to more than 400 editions, printed in dozens of languages. Anglers know that Venables’ paperback story of father showing son how to fish through the angling year – largely through wonderfully executed, cartoon-style strips with informative bubbles – sold hugely. Few know what the true figure was. All knew its impact on them. Its importance, the way it enthralled two generations of young angling minds, was so great that, in later life, Venables became positively revered, the first Izaak Walton since Izaak Walton.

I got to know Bernard quite well. I first met him in the early 1990s when I interviewed him for one of my columns for The Times. Subsequently we found ourselves, quite independently, guests at a fishing dinner in Wales and we jiggled the place-names about so that we could sit together and talk. The next meeting was at a small lunch party, held in a mutual friend’s home, to mark Bernard’s 90th birthday. I met him several times more before he died on April 21, 2001 – and subsequently was invited by Eileen, his wife, to speak at the memorial gathering held to celebrate his life. It was one of the greatest gatherings of anglers – eminent anglers – that can have ever been brought together in one place. I did not write about that, but I did write about his extraordinary burial.

ON MAY DAY, under a cherry tree just breaking into blossom and not a fly-cast from one of the rivers he lived much of his life for, the most-widely known and best-loved angler since Izaak Walton, was laid to rest.

Bernard Venables, creator of Mr Crabtree and author of the extraordinary Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, a work that sold over two million copies and that lit the torch in two generations of young angling minds, was not a religious man and there was not a trace of formal religion in the two events of the day.

The first was a simple, private gathering of family and friends – if it had been public, there would have been thousands there – in a village hall deep in Hampshire. Friends recalled their memories of the man they knew and one read a marvellously crafted, humorous piece that Venables wrote in 1953 about the dangers of leaving groundbait in the vicinity of horses. Later there was the simple interment ceremony conducted on the side of the sloping downland hill in the wind and the rain.

For all that there was no religion in the day, it was a spiritual occasion. Venables had lived his 94-plus years in tune with nature, close to the earth, marvelling at its wonders, secure in his mortality. When he died on April 21, after a mercifully short illness, he was ready and content.

Venables was devoid of pretension. He genuinely wanted to be buried in a cardboard box – he saw his own return to the earth as the landing of just another dust-speck on the turning wheel of time and felt that to use anything else would be pointless. But it was not to be. When he was lowered into the pure, white chalk it was in a more startlingly appropriate way: in a wicker basket made to take his own tiny frame, as light and natural a coffin as one of Old Izaak’s creels.

At the precise moment of his burial the heavens opened and a wind-driven rain riveted down. Someone said ‘typical fishing weather’ and we smiled and nodded before drifting away. A few held back. Someone dropped an old cork float onto Bernard’s creel. Someone else dropped down an artificial mayfly. Yet a third old friend dropped down another artificial fly and a fourth a small slip of wood which, he later said, had long-ago been harvested from the garden of Izaak Walton’s Staffordshire cottage.

A couple of minutes later a blackbird, gripping its swaying cherry branch tightly, burst into full-throated song. It was as if the clouds had parted and the sun had come out.

It is impossible to overstate the impact that Bernard Venables had on angling – and on young minds especially – with Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing. Crabtree was not Venables’ first book or his only book – Venables wrote a shelf-full of books, including one on tanks, one on a journey down the Zambesi and one about the open-boat whalers of the Azores. But Crabtree was his masterpiece.

Crabtree the angler hatched from a highly popular strip cartoon that Venables drew for the Daily Mirror in the years immediately after the war. In 1949 the Mirror decided the strips should be turned into a book. Venables pulled several of the strips together, added some new bits, a few watercolours and some linking text. The resulting marriage – of images so vibrantly crafted to words marvellously honed – proved a soft-backed, 96-page publishing wonder. All it seemed to do was follow a father and son fishing through the year – for pike in winter, for trout in spring, for bream, tench and carp in summer, for perch, roach and rudd in autumn. But it sold in its hundreds, its thousands, its millions, earning its author not an extra penny in the process because the Mirror took the view that he was an employee when he did the work and so all rights were the paper’s own.

There is no doubt that, in his later years, Venables came to view Crabtree with ambivalence. In a real sense he lived his later life struggling to get out of Crabtree’s shadow but whatever he did, the shadow lengthened and followed. Venables had much to feel frustrated about: not least the fact that his high artistic talents – ‘I live and breath for my art’, he once told me, ‘I am hell-driven by it’ – did not receive the recognition that was their due. Venables was a painter of a high order in oils and watercolours, a wonderful carver of wood and sculptor of stone. His work was hung several times in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition. His cottage near Salisbury was crammed with the artillery of these inner conflicts: paintings, busts, easels, paints, brushes and inks jostled for space with rods, reels, bags, boxes, books and wellies.

The overriding question Venables leaves behind is as much – he would not like this – about Crabtree as it is about himself. Why did that tiny book with its both timeless and dated, working-class yet oddly classless team of father and son fishing and talking, become the publishing wonder that it was?

Acumen on the part of the Mirror Group obviously played its part. The timing was perfect. After the war, in drab days, long before television or videos or computers, most people were thrown back on their own resources for diversion and the reach and promotional clout of the paper made sure that anyone who might remotely be interested in the book, saw it. Venables’ great skill with brush and pen also played a key role.

But there has to be more, something that accounts for the book’s success with, above all, young boys.

A key feature, I believe, is that for the first time Venables took young minds which to that point had been physically marooned on the bank, down into the water and into the world of their quarry. He showed Crabtree and Peter at one end of the rod, fishing to the barrier of the reflecting surface. He showed the fish at the other end reacting to what the pair did and did not do. So Venables, for the first time, completed the circle: he made fishing come alive in the reader’s own mind, in the process giving each action at one end of the rod a visible consequence at the other. Naturally, also, his fish were great fish – and we knew that if we did what Crabtree and Peter did, whoppers would end up in our nets, too.