SPECIAL CONDITIONS AND WET-FLY SOLUTIONS
NERVES.
Years ago, long ere the spirit of revolt was in me, when I followed as
closely as I knew how the maxims of the apostles of the dry fly, and
knew no other method for chalk streams, I suffered many blank days and
much depression from a state of weather and light which must be familiar
to all chalk-stream anglers—the more particularly because the “d——d
good-natured” and sympathetic friend who knows nothing of the subject
picks it out to say knowingly: “What a beautiful day for fishing!” It is
clouded, dull, leaden, overhung, and the reflected light on the water is
a dead milk-and-watery white; while, looking down into its depths, one
sees everything with a deadly and crystalline clearness. There is no
hint of thunder about, but on such days the trout are all nerves. Never
are they so difficult to approach, never are they so ready to dart off
with that torpedo wave. And if one finds a rising fish, and puts a dry
fly over him, even if he bolts not, he rises no more.
But at length there came a day when my first timid experiments in the
fishing of chalk streams with the wet fly had proved encouraging enough
to lead to my having a small stock of wet-fly patterns for chalk-stream
fishing. It was a bad sample of those days when the nerves of trout
seemed all on the jump, and I had fished from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. without
so much as a rise. It was not that the fish were not rising. On the
contrary, they rose very well—not very much, perhaps, but the best days
are often those when the rise is moderate. But this day every fish I
cast to went down at once, and too often I saw that detestable torpedo
wave, sometimes at the approach, and more frequently at the first cast.
Soon after three I tied on a Tup’s Indispensable dressed on gut, and
crawled carefully to within a long cast of a trout which rose at
infrequent intervals in a narrow side-stream under the opposite side. My
line trailed on the water as I approached, and I made the minimum of
effort to dry the fly ere I delivered it, so as to attract as little
attention as possible to my movements. So it came about that the fly,
when it lit a yard or more to the left of and above the trout—it was a
bad cast as regards direction—went immediately under. For the _n_th time
that day I saw that torpedo wave as the fish darted through the shallow
water. I rose with a sigh, but as I did so my rod was a hoop, and the
reel screeched; for the trout’s dart had been _at_ the fly, not from it,
and it had gone a full yard or more to fetch it. He was just short of
one and three-quarter pounds. Before four o’clock I had another brace by
the same method. They were not easy, and I did not get every fish I
tried, or even many; but I got some where with the dry fly I should
assuredly have gone on getting none, and the trout stood to be cast to
in a way they would not that day to the dry fly.
It is true enough that there are days and times when the dry fly will
beat the wet fly hollow, but there are days when the converse is the
case, and from subsequent experience I can recommend the trial of the
wet fly on those dull, nervy days of milk-and-watery glare.
OF THE TROUT OF GLASSY GLIDES.
There are places on most rivers where the water comes swiftly and in
solid volume down a slope too slight in the incline to create a fall,
too short to create a rapid or stickle, and too smooth to cause a broken
surface, yet with a rapid run below. The result is a glassy glide,
gin-clear, with an air of unusual smoothness, and such a pace that there
is an immediate drag upon any floating fly which is laid upon the
current. Often some of the handsomest and best fighting trout in the
river are to be found in such places, where their blood is constantly
refreshed by the highly oxygenated water, their health and energy kept
up to the mark by the need of contending against its swiftness, and the
inducement to so contend is present in the plentiful supply of food
brought down by the current.
Such a glide do I know well, with some excellent fish always showing
there, but never breaking the surface; and for years I found them
impregnable, for the simple reason that, if one pitched a fly over their
noses, it was past them before they could rise to it, and if one pitched
it up enough to give the fish a chance to take it they wouldn’t, because
there was a prompt and streaky drag if the line were, as it could hardly
help being, the least little bit across stream. Even the natural fly
would sail over them unmolested.
But one day some years back, on a calm afternoon in July, with not a
trout rising, I was on the Itchen, and I had crawled up some half-mile
of sedgy bank in search of a feeding fish without finding one. But on
the far side, in front of a certain post, the remnant of a one-time
fence, I knew from experience that there was usually a fish—at any rate
at feeding-time. There was nothing to suggest any particular dry fly,
and on the previous afternoon—a Sunday—I had spent a pleasant twenty
minutes watching a fish in front of the stump taking something under
water with a sort of porpoise roll. It therefore occurred to me to put
up one of those little Greenwell’s Glories, dressed by Forrest of Kelso
on pairs of No. 00 hooks to gut, with which the name of Mr. Ewen M. Tod
is associated. I had bought them in the previous spring to experiment
upon bulging trout. These flies are known as “doubles,” and are not
ready floaters. One puts a thumb-nail between the barb, and forces them
apart till the two hooks form an angle of 45 degrees with each other.
The fly dropped a yard above the post and sank. When it should have been
nearing the post, a faint swirl rising to the surface seemed a
sufficient indication of a movement below to justify a raising of the
rod-point, and the fish was fast. In this manner it came about that a
small Greenwell’s Glory on double hooks terminated the cast when the
glassy glide above adverted to was reached. A trout lay out in it in
position to feed, but though he moved a little from side to side, and
may have been intercepting food, he made no rise. Keeping well out of
sight, I dropped the Glory on the far side of and in front of the fish,
and it at once went under. Again came the small disturbance welling
quickly to the surface; up went my hand, and again a good trout was
fast.
That afternoon I killed two and a half brace of good fish with the wet
fly fished into likely places without seeing a single rise. The other
three fish—but that is another story.
Since that day I have killed many a good fish in that hitherto
impossible spot, and one morning in July, 1908, I had two and a half
brace in less than an hour with a wet double Tup’s Indispensable out of
it.
OF THE WET FLY IN POOLS, BAYS, AND EDDIES.
There is probably no problem which has filled the souls of so many
dry-fly anglers with the despair attending defeat as that presented by a
day when a cross-stream wind, whether up and across, down and across, or
straight across, drives every dun under the opposite bank, and into
little pools and eddies between the prominences on that bank, and so out
of the line of the current which would otherwise carry them along. Then
every big trout in the river seems to shift out of the current and into
the sheltered bay or eddy, and there he sets to work collecting with
busy neb the little argosies which have lost their tide, and are
drifting helpless on slack water. It seems so easy to drop the fly in
the right place. So it is, but if, as is many times more than probable,
your cruiser is away a foot or two, or is deliberate in his movements,
and does not take the fly at once, your drag has made itself painfully
evident, and your fish is down for half an hour. No, on those occasions
the only chance with the dry fly is to hit your fish with it on the tip
of the nose at a moment when few naturals are about. Then he may snap
it—but what a number of chances against its so falling!
No, here is a case in which the wet fly is clearly predicated, and it
should be so dressed as to go under without the least hesitation. The
advantage which the wet fly has is not that the trout is taking the
nymph in preference to the floating dun, though he is probably doing
that far more than is apparent, but that, whereas a drag on the surface
is fatal and betrays the gut, an under-water drag is not betraying, and
the movement of the fly caused by the drag may, in its beginning at any
rate, be even attractive to the trout, as imparting motion suggesting
life and volition to an otherwise suspicious object. The drag also
serves to tighten instead of slackening the line, so that a very small
strike fixes the hook.
When the trout takes a wet fly in such a position, the surface
indications are by no means obvious; but if the angler be on the alert
to strike when such indications come, it is wonderful how soon he can
pick up the knack, and what excellent fish this method brings him. A
strike which does not touch the fish, being in the nature of an
under-water drawing of the fly, will often have no scaring effect upon a
feeding fish, where a strike with a floating fly would send him headlong
to cover.
It is difficult to pick among my recollections one instance more
illustrative than another of the value of this method, but I will take
an afternoon in July, 1908. It was a cold day for the time of year, with
a keen north-westerly wind across and a little down. A few little pale
duns were going down, being beaten by the wind into and among the bays
along the opposite bank, where they dodged in and out among the flags.
Three trout, and three only, could I find moving, and they were taking
every dun which went over them. I tried Little Marryat, Medium Olive,
Flight’s Fancy, Ginger Quill, and Red Quill, in vain. In fact I put all
three down. But they meant feeding, and were soon going again. It was
the last day of a seven-day visit. I had so far forty-six trout, and I
wanted to round off the fifty. I put up as an experiment a tiny dotterel
hackle, tied with primrose tying silk in the true Stewart style, not
with the fibres radiating from the head, but palmer-wise for halfway
down the body. The trout had it at the very first offer, and was duly
landed. I went on to the next, and got him almost immediately. The
third, for some reason, had no use for Dotterel duns, but the moment I
covered him with a Tup’s Indispensable he slashed it, and joined the
other two in my creel. I looked in vain for a fourth, and there was no
evening rise, so I had to leave off with but forty-nine of my fifty. But
for the wet fly, I am convinced I should have had to content myself with
the single brace which the morning rise had brought me, and that would
have been a disappointing ending to a good seven days.
OF THE JUDICIOUS USE OF THE MOON.
Though blinder than the proverbial bat in any slanting light, and
therefore not as fortunate as I should like to be in fishing the evening
rise, and though academically of opinion that fishing should cease when
the dusk no longer lets the angler discern his fly, I confess to being
at least as unwilling as any better endowed with sight to leave the
water-side while the trout are still busy sucking down the spinners; but
there are occasions when, if the moon be up enough to cast black shadows
under the banks, and I can find the suitable spot with rising fish, I
envy no man his superior eyesight—mine is good enough. Let me illustrate
my meaning by describing the occasion on which I made my little
discovery.
It was an evening in July. I had not begun fishing before four o’clock,
and the afternoon had only earned me a single trout, and he no great
shakes, either. The evening rise came on, and the trout began to feed
briskly; but my infirmity was against me, and I missed or misjudged
several rises, and it began to look as if I were going to make nothing
of my opportunity, when I came to a bend where the current swung in
pitch-black shadow under the opposite bank, while between the near edge
of the shadow and my bank the stream ran molten moonlight. Round the
bend in the dark I could hear the trout feeding away gaily, and the
rings of their rises surged into the silver of the lighted current.
It seemed a mad thing to do, but I despatched my Tup’s Indispensable to
a spot in the dark as near as I could judge above the ring of a good
fish. My cast lay like a hair on the surface, stretching into the dark,
not too taut. Suddenly I saw my gut draw straight upon the current, the
farther end disappearing under the sheen of the moonlight, and, without
waiting to think, I raised my rod-point, to find myself in battle with a
solid fish. Thrice in the twenty minutes the rise lasted did I repeat
this experience. Each trout was soundly hooked, and a nice level lot
they were, running from one and a quarter to one and a half pounds. Thus
was success at the last moment pulled by a fluke out of almost certain
defeat. It is not always possible to find place and light serving in
this way, but if you do, make use of the moon.
THE WET-FLY OIL TIP.
In my observations upon the judicious use of the moon, I indicated the
advantage to be derived, in cases where the light prevented the rise
from being otherwise detected in due time, from watching the gut cast as
a float signalling the taking of the fly. Indeed, it is not only by
night that the cast may be watched with advantage, but often by day when
casting a fly, wet or dry, but especially wet, into a bad light, while
the cast or part of it may be seen floating on a glassy piece of water.
It is now some years since, in the columns of the _Fishing Gazette_, I
called attention to what I described as the “wet-fly oil tip” in this
connection. I take no credit for this invention. It belongs entirely to
Mr. C. A. M. Skues, the secretary of the Fly-fishers’ Club, and its
discovery came about in this way:
We were fishing opposite banks of a German trout stream, the Erlaubnitz,
and the day rise of fly was over. The trout, which had been hovering
over their pockets in the weeds and in the runs between them, had
dropped out of sight, and it was obvious that it would need something to
attract them more noticeable than the pale watery duns which were the
staple of the season. We agreed upon Soldier Palmers tied with bright
scarlet seal’s fur. Presently the far bank began catching them, though
he was fishing upstream wet in rather fast water. I hailed him, and he
said he had paraffined his gut cast to within the last two links from
the fly and watched his cast. I was not above a hint, and in a minute or
two I was experiencing the benefit of the wet-fly oil tip, and we were
kept busy till six o’clock brought on the usual rise of Little Pale Blue
of Autumn, and a change to floating patterns. It also involved a change
of cast, for a cross-stream cast with oiled gut betrays you with a vile
drag. It is a disadvantage of paraffining your gut that it limits you to
one cast—viz., that directly upstream. But there are times when it is
well to accept the limitation.
OF GENERALSHIP AND THE WET FLY.
There is a bend on Itchen where the water runs deep and black. Over the
best of it hang three large trees, under which, if trout be rising
anywhere on the river, they will be found pegging away, and often when
they are moving nowhere else. The place is near the spot where anglers
foregather for lunch and a pull at pipe or flask; so the fish under
these trees are hammered more than a little, and their knowledge is in
direct proportion to their experience. Here, too, anglers usually take
apart their split canes in the evening, and, ere they do so, have one
last chuck in the dusk with Sedge, Coachman, or large Red Quill at one
or all of these rising trout, but it is the rarest thing for one to be
caught. I have caught six of them in fifteen years. Perhaps it is
because to cover them one must fish straight across from the opposite
bank—no other attack is possible—and they can hardly fail to see rod and
angler.
But it fell about in the year of grace 1909 that my lawful occasions
took me along the right bank, on which the trees grew, past the haunt of
these aggravating risers, and I took the occasion to observe. None of
them were moving at the time, and the water was lower by some inches
than the normal. I looked in the place where the best of the risers was
usually present when attending to business, but he was not there. Four
or five yards farther upstream the bottom, from being shallow, dipped
suddenly to the deep, with a sharp brown earthy edge, and there, lying
in shelter from the current under the earthy ledge at the head of the
hole, lay a trout which I put down at a comforting two pounds. He saw
me, and slithered into his fastness, but I did not forget the hint. Many
times had I cast to that trout when rising, but always under a tree some
yards below. Now I would cast to him when not rising, and I would fish
him in his hide. The lowest of a small cohort of ribbon-weeds craning
their tips gently over the surface indicated the neighbourhood of the
lip of the hole, and, scanning the opposite side carefully, I marked the
exact bunch of yellow flower from behind which I ought to deliver my
cast, and marked on the hither bank a bunch of purple hemlock which
indicated the centre of the hole.
Later in the day from the opposite bank I sent over a wet Tup’s
Indispensable to the weed’s edge several times without avail.
The next time I came down the fish was rising to surface food, and I
left him severely alone. My time was to be when he was not rising, for
no trout seems able to resist a nymph at any time, even if not feeding,
and a nymph of sorts he should have. Coming back later, I found
stillness reigning; so, mounting a Tup’s Indispensable, I soaked it
well, and flicked it over to the edge of the weeds. It lit, and went
under, leaving the gut for the most part along the surface. The gut
drifted down, the fly end slowly slipping under the upper film. The fly
was withdrawn and the cast repeated. Once more the gut lay along the
surface; once more it slipped slowly through to a point; then it seemed
to move under with a certain decision. I raised my rod-point with a
drawing action, and the trout which had defied ten thousand dry flies
was on. He wasn’t quite two pounds, but it doesn’t matter. It was
generalship which got him, which discerned that in his holt he was
possibly accessible to the seductions of the casual nymph-suggesting wet
fly in a way in which he was not accessible to the temptations of the
too well known dry fly in the place of vantage where he daily fed.
A POTTED TROUT, AND ONE OTHER.
When the drowners are out in the water-meadows flushing the ditches till
they flood the tables and drench the grasses with water seeking its way
back through the herbage to the river by way of ditch, drain, and
carrier, the wise old trout who know their business may be found in
narrow ditches and channels down to foot-wide runnels in search of the
earthworm and the miscellaneous pickings of the grasslands. Again, when
July comes round, and the season of minnowing is indicated, the big
trout once more make their way, in search of minnows, into the narrower
irrigation channels of the water-meadows. So ardent are they at times in
pursuit of their quarry that on occasion it is possible to net them out
without their becoming aware of their danger.
On one occasion I got three good trout thus from behind at one scoop of
the landing-net, and turned them back into the main.
Often, if they get into a channel with a constant flow and a steady
food-supply, trout will not care to drop back to the river, and will
take up a position of strength, where, inaccessible to the fly of the
angler, they daily increase in size and lustihood. Such potted fish are
almost entirely subaqueous feeders, a floating dun rarely crossing their
field of vision. They grow dark and copper-coloured, and very unlike the
fish of the river from which they hail.
One such fish do I remember, who took up his holt in the eddy just above
a hatch-hole, through which ran the whole of a brisk stream some two to
two and a half feet wide, turning at right angles to do so, after
impinging on his eddy as on a sort of water-buffer. It was not hard to
approach the place without being seen, but the moment one looked over
the edge his troutship would flash down through the hatch-hole and into
the racing stream beneath. Several times I mounted a Sedge, tied on a
No. 2 hook attached to a strong cast, and dibbed cautiously over the
edge. Once I caught a companion trout of one pound five ounces, but on
all other occasions the attempt was fruitless.
Tired at length of these failures, and not pleased that such a trout as
our friend of the hatch-hole eddy should give no sport to the fly, one
afternoon I approached the hatch-hole from below, slid down my wide and
large landing-net into the thrust of the stream, and looked suddenly
over into the eddy. There was a brown flash to the hole, and next moment
the trout was kicking in the net—black hogback with red copper sides and
gleaming white belly, two and a half pounds, and as fat as a pig.
Swiftly I conveyed him the needful fifty yards or so to a side-stream
some ten or twelve yards wide, and turned him carefully loose. He made
no pretence of being scared, but moved leisurely away across and up
stream. I watched him cross a patch of weeds and enter a gravelled
clearing, where a tidy trout lay, butt him out of it, and establish
himself in his place. In a few moments he moved up into the next place,
butted out the brace of trout which occupied it, and took the position
of vantage. He did not remain long, but moved to the next pool, again
ejecting the occupants.
Still dissatisfied, he moved higher up to where the stream was narrowed
by camp-sheathing to support a low wooden bridge over which carts pass
to carry the meadow hay. Here he ejected the three or four occupants,
and established himself finally, with his neb close up under the sill of
the bridge—too close for a fly to be got in ahead of him—obviously with
the key of the larder in his pocket; and here daily for the next five
days of my stay I saw him firmly planted, but, though I plied him with
Sedge, and Quill, and Tup’s Indispensable, wet fly and dry fly, I never
got an offer or an indication of a desire to offer from him, nor did I
ever see him break the surface, and I left him _in situ_ at the end of
my visit.
During these five days, however, crossing from the smaller stream to the
main, I saw a trout in a foot-wide runnel hovering with that quivering
of the fins that indicates a willingness to feed. He was not a big
fish—about one pound—but I thought it would be sport to try and cast to
him and catch him in so narrow a channel, and I knelt down to deliver
the fly. He saw me, however, and moved up. It was on my way ’cross
meadow to the main, so I followed him till I came to the place where the
runnel’s water-supply issued from a pipe which entered its head, at
right angles to its course, from the centre of one of the tables. The
flow from the pipe had worried out a corner hole, which was wide and
deep enough to admit my whole landing-net and a bit over, and I dipped
it in. I saw the amber gleam of my trout as he slashed by me and fled
back down the runnel he had ascended, but wriggling in the net which I
lifted was a bouncing fish, black, hogbacked, with copper sides and
white belly, in first-rate fettle, and weighing better, at a guess, than
one and a half pounds, evidently an old inhabitant of that corner. The
main was but a few yards off, and I carefully turned in my captive.
Two days later I was fishing up the bank of the main in blazing
sunshine, searching for a rising fish, but finding none, when my
attention was attracted by a movement in the water close under my bank
some ten or fifteen yards above the spot where I turned the trout in. I
dropped my wet Greenwell’s Glory a foot or so from the spot, and,
answering the draw of the floating gut signalling some under-water
adhesion, I tightened on a nice fish, and after the usual preliminary
exhibition of coyness, emphasized by sundry jumpings, I persuaded him to
come ashore. The spring-balance said one pound ten ounces. Colour, size,
and shape, were identical with the trout I had turned back two days
before, and though, of course, I cannot prove it, I have no doubt he was
the same.
Now, why did one of these potted trout take the fly, and the other
refuse? This is my theory: Both had got the exclusive habit of
subaqueous feeding, but the big one had his nose in a position where it
was impossible to get a wet fly to him so as to pitch above him, or even
alongside of his head, and the water was too fast for it to be worth the
while of a fish of his calibre to turn and follow a mere nymph. The
smaller fish was in a position to be covered, and the moment the nymph
came to him under water he had it as a matter of course. Possibly, in
the same position the larger trout might have done the same.
OF TWO SATURDAY AFTERNOONS.
They were consecutive. Both were in August, 1909, and the reason why
they are recorded is not because of any remarkable success, but because
they illustrate varying conditions on the same river, proving amenable
to varying treatment.
The first found me by the water-side soon after two o’clock. The morning
rise was completely over. Not even a grayling was rising. The water was
deadly still. A full stream was running, because the hay-makers were in
the meadows, and no water that could be kept out was being let into
ditches and carriers; so it was no good exploring them for stray risers,
as at other times I might have done. For some time I explored likely
places under the sedges with floating flies—No. 1 Red Sedge with
hare’s-ear body, Red Ant, and Tup’s Indispensable—but without eliciting
the faintest response. Then about five o’clock I put up a wet
Greenwell’s Glory, and cast it upstream, wet, into every little likely
pool between the bank and the weed-bed which grew intermittently a yard
or two out from the bank. The change was immediate. By six o’clock I had
three and a half brace of average fish (biggest one pound ten ounces),
all on the same fly. Fish would surge a yard or more to meet it, would
even turn downstream and take it, though the floating fly had not moved
a single one to offer. There was no evening rise.
The following Saturday I was down at the same time. There was the same
faint westerly breeze, and much the same light. A few—very few—grayling
were taking black gnats for a short time after my arrival, but they soon
stopped entirely, and I had only one in my basket. Not a rise dimpled
the surface. I continued, however, casting a Black Gnat under my own
bank—the right—for some forty or fifty yards, without an offer. I had
the mortification of seeing three handsome trout move out from position,
and I was just about to change to a Hare’s Ear Sedge when I saw a
grass-moth flutter out of the sedges and across the water. As luck would
have it, I had four floating Grannom in my cap, and it didn’t take long
to knot one on.
In a few minutes I was into a trout, which took as the fly lit. I landed
him, and then another, and yet a further brace, every one of which took
the Grannom without the least hesitation. Then I found myself trenching
on the beat of another angler, and I bethought me that the three fish I
had disturbed might be back in position; so I turned down, and, getting
below them, cast carefully to where they ought to be. I whipped one fly
off; then with the new fly I rose the first of them—quite a nice
fish—hooked him, and lost him after a short tussle. Examining the hook,
I found it pulled out nearly straight owing to a soft wire. Whether that
rattled me or not I don’t know, but I left my two remaining Grannom in
the other two fish successively. Having no more, I fell back on the
Sedge in vain. Equally vain were Red Ant (dry) and Greenwell’s Glory and
Tup’s Indispensable (wet), and, as there was no evening rise, I finished
up with a basket of two and a half brace, which with better handling
should have been four brace.
On each of these afternoons there was no rise of fish or fly; and on one
nothing but a floating pattern did any good, on the other nothing but a
sunk pattern.
The inference that I might have gone back blank on the first occasion
but for the supplemental aid of the wet-fly method does not seem
far-fetched.