On Fishing

It seemed, as I reached it down from its tucked-away niche in the tucked-away little shop, just the kind of thing that would make a present for a friend. Then I noticed that it had a couple of dents on the cover and, on ends of the pages when the book was closed, a couple of faint red stains where water, presumably at some time splashed onto the cover, had run.

I was on the point of rejecting it when the edge of something inside the back cover caught my eye. It was a cracked, yellow-and brown cutting from the Liverpool Daily Post dated Tuesday, August 29, 1933. The headline read ‘Sinking Yacht Rescue’ and then ‘Liverpool Men’s Thrilling Escape’.

Beside the cutting there was an inscription, written in handwriting that was scarcely bigger than the print used in the book itself. I started to decipher it but my eye was drawn relentlessly back to the cutting and I began to read.

It told how Mr A. McKie Reid, clearly a prominent Liverpool medical man, had set off on a sailing holiday with his friend Mr Leo Gradwell, a barrister. They had left Mostyn, in Wales, on the hired ketch Lalage, with two professional deckhands aboard. The plan was to sail up the west coast to Scotland but, in high winds and heavy seas in Caernarvon Bay, they found themselves in trouble. They used the engine for a time, then it broke down. Eventually finding themselves being driven towards the Skerries and with the seas running higher and higher, they made out to open water to run before the wind.

McKie Reid told the Daily Post how, as darkness fell, the boat began to take in water and they had to bail continuously. Finally, after what must have been a terrifying night, a trawler was sighted. Someone on the Lalage managed to flash a lamp briefly and the vessel – itself far off its own intended course – turned towards them.

Once alongside one another, the two boats rearing and plunging on the waves, McKie Reid made what he called ‘the biggest jump of my life. The two deckhands jumped next and Mr Gradwell made fast a towing line before he jumped. By this time the vessels had drifted apart and he nearly fell between them. About an hour after the trawler had taken the yacht in tow, it foundered. But for the trawler’s arrival, we should have been lost.’

Dramatic stuff, all right – but why was the cutting here, in this fishing book? I flicked to the front and looked again at the name and address I had noticed written inside it: ‘A. McKie Reid, 86 Rodney Street, Liverpool.’ I turned back to the inscription alongside the cutting. Deciphered, it read: ‘This book was with me on the Lalage. I threw it inside a rucksack, on board the trawler, before the boats were near enough for me to jump.’ And then the initials ‘A. McKie R.’

What I was holding in that shop – and what will now stay in my own collection instead of being passed on to someone else – was a book of little cash value yet one containing a text that generations of anglers have prized; a volume clearly so loved by its fly-fishing owner that in that dire, life-and-death situation, he took the time to grab it and hurl it to safety before jumping himself, even as the boat beneath his feet was making ready to go down.

I closed the book, went to the counter and handed over the £15 that was being asked for it. It was a bargain to me, if not to anyone else: this collector’s whopper literally in the bag. I’d have been happy to pay twice the price for a book with that kind of history – and for the tell-tale water stains, extra.

A Shattered Dream (#ulink_b40feca6-1740-57a5-8d0f-c18e7a04d647)

THE affection that many of us hold for our rods can border on the irrational. There is something about a rod that, once owned, can make it highly personal whether mass-produced or not. I don’t mean carbon fibre rods, marvellously functional though they are. I mean cane rods. Once cut and tapered, glued and varnished, cane comes to life again in the hand. Or, at least, we fancy it does. We fancy we can feel the throb and pulse of it clean through the corks.

With carbon fibre, all this wonderful subjectivity is lost. Carbon fibre performs better. It can be manufactured to produce any action required of it. We can abuse it constantly without impairing its performance. Carbon fibre has replaced cane for very good reasons. But still it is synthetic stuff, inert and characterless. It cannot tap into the emotions the way split cane used to do.

To lose a cherished split cane rod – worse still, to break one – can be a shattering experience in every sense. I know it only too well.

I HAVE many fishing rods, but I have only ever loved three. All were made of cane. One is a Wallis Wizard, the brilliant wholecane butt, split cane middle-and-top design by F.W.K. Wallis, the legendary Avon barbel specialist. I bought it as a lad by doing a newspaper round. I have it still. It is still in good heart and, more to the point, still in its original number of pieces.

The second rod is a Fario Club, one of the great creations of Charles Ritz, the famous hotelier who, in fly-fishing circles, is infinitely more famous as a designer of trout rods. I bought this 8ft 5in piece of honey-coloured delight with the first royalty cheque from my first book, half a lifetime ago.

I did most of my dry fly and nymph fishing with the Fario Club for ten years after that. Eventually, I broke its back – literally – when trying to keep low on a treeless bank while casting to a fish in distant mid-river. Down on one knee, while concentrating hard on the fish and reaching for distance, the line fell too low on the back cast, snagged a meadow buttercup – and did not come forward.

The third rod, a 6ft 9in aftm-4 brook rod built by Constable, was as light and delicate as a fairy’s wand and it cast spells as well as lines. It was as crisp and precise as a rapier – and as deadly. My wife gave it to me on one of my Big Zero birthdays, and I was thrilled to have it.

Cliff Constable was one of the finest builders of split cane this country has produced and his staggered-ferrule brook rod was his finest achievement. I asked my friend Stewart Canham, master fly-tyer and furnisher of cane rods so exquisite that they would not have looked out of place in a Bond Street window, to finish the cane for me.

Now Stewart is an extraordinary man, a big, multi-talented man with hands the size of bin lids. For all that he has an exquisite delicacy of touch and specialises in creating delicate things. One of his one-time interests, for example, was icing cakes and he iced the wedding cake he made for one of my daughters. It was so wonderfully done, so decorated about with sprays of flowers he had made from icing that guests were peering at them this way and that, wondering if they were real. His fly-tying was, a doctor friend of mine said, more delicate than brain surgery. At one time, interested in butterflies, he bred them by the hundred and produced cases of them so delicately spread and pinned that they could have been exhibits in the Natural History Museum. Everything that Stewart Canham decides to do, he does to perfection.

When it came to my rod, he never produced a more personalised thing. All the usual restrained touches were there, from the subtlety of the matt varnish instead of gloss to the near-transparent whippings, tipped with black. But it was the rest, the attention to so much tiny detail, that made the rod truly unique.

When he delivered it, I found that Stewart had got Constable to autograph the cane. A tiny ephermerid nymph, beautifully drawn in Indian ink, was crawling up the butt amid the details of rod length and line weight and the like. The 20-inch stopper that extended the butt section to the length of the top section for carrying purposes was wound about with ivy, drawn in Indian ink, in-filled with white. And so on and so on. He had produced less a rod, more an artwork and it carried a freight of sentiment for me.

Mayfly time in Dorset. A friend invited me down. It was a lovely day, warm and sunny but with – note it – a downstream breeze. The hawthorn blossom was out. The ranunculus was in flower. Swifts curved and sculpted the air. From time to time, wagtails wagged and kingfishers skimmed. In a sidestream, we saw a fish lying awkwardly just downstream of a tree. Mike suggested I give it a go. I slipped under a barbed wire fence and slid into the deep water.

It took several minutes to get into position and feel comfortable. All the time, the fish went on rising and moving steadily upstream towards the tree, narrowing the angle where my fly would have to go. To have any chance, the leader would have to overshoot the fish and be squeezed into the space between the water and the branches. It would take a driven cast, all wrist, to create the tight loop I was going to need. And I would have to take care with the back-cast to avoid the alder that grew over the water behind me. I studied the situation and looked back at my friend. ‘Thanks a lot, Mike,’ I remember saying.

It must have been on the fourth or fifth attempt that the breeze suddenly strengthened. In mid false-cast I took account of it. I tightened the loop still more. I applied yet more wrist. I let the final back cast straighten and then drove it forward.

It did not come. There was an odd sensation, impossible to describe, but something, somehow, somewhere seemed to grate. In the concentration of the moment, I assumed that I had snagged the alder. I have snagged trees a thousand times. Foolishly, I did not bother to turn. I flicked the rod again, expecting either the fly to come free or the branch to give and cushion the movement. I have done that and seen that a thousand times, too.

Nothing. No give. Absolutely no give, but again a grating feeling and this time a sound. I turned and instinctively looked for my line and fly. The line was well clear of the alder and to the right. The fly was on the barbed wire fence that I had forgotten about. My eyes followed the line back from the fence to my rod. I saw the oddity of an angle in the silken curve, two rings back from the tip. I saw the cane splintered and light shining through the long, loved fibres.

For a long time, I could not take it in. I suppose the realisation of what I was seeing, the pain of it, was somehow dulled, the way that the shock of an injury sometimes can be. Then, all the things I had loved about the rod – its exquisite beauty, the occasion it commemorated, the scores of magical moments I had experienced with it – rushed through my mind in a torrent.

Mike said it was two minutes before I spoke. I simply stood there uncomprehending, staring at one of the three or four possessions I treasured most in the world, now utterly ruined. I know we all have such moments, but that gives no comfort. It was – it still is – terrible.

Wildlife, the Media and Us (#ulink_f9abb249-a81b-51cb-b0ee-88c873b089ac)

AS SPORTS GO, angling is well-provided with media. Coarse, trout and sea anglers all have several magazines apiece and fishing as a whole has long supported two weekly newspapers. Together, they help us to keep abreast of developments in and around the waterside and to stay on top of new tackle and techniques. By and large, they serve us well.

But not always. Every now and then an editor has a rush of blood to the head. Then, it is as though he loses all sense of proportion. It is as though he sees angling and our small world as the whole world – or else he consciously disregards the wider world completely. Neither is a great idea, but for the most part this matters little. In the main, no-one in the wider world cares much about what anglers think and say – and why should they?

When angling editors go overboard about something which the public holds dear, though, everything changes. Then, real problems can arise – some of them profoundly damaging.

PRETTY well every issue of every publication in Britain is bought by news agencies as a matter of course, angling publications not excluded. Journalists – mostly freelance journalists who live by the column-inches they can generate and the air time they can clock up – read them in the hope of picking up a snippet here, a story there. Insofar as angling is concerned, they know that the British public is besotted with the furred, the feathered and the cuddly and if some angling editor’s rush of blood appears to put him at odds with this, then the telephones ring, news editors get busy and a view that was originally aimed at an angling audience alone hits several million breakfast tables overnight.

This is why, whatever concerns might exist in angling’s media about creatures other than fish – and concerns do arise from time to time – a cautious and measured response is wisest. The temptation to rant to readers for the sake of short-term impact, needs to be tempered with a realisation that outside eyes will be watching and that long-term damage might ensue.

We have seen it over the years with swans and otters– and with cormorants in particular. All three, at one level or another, can have an impact on our sport but the article that begins with pointing this out, that moves on to an indignant ‘something should be done about it’ (always, note, by someone else) and that then demands that populations of whatever it is be controlled, is destined to become ‘Anglers demand cull of swans/otters/cormorants/ babies/old people/the halt and the lame’, or whatever.

It is then that the perceived, short-term editorial satisfactions of ‘making a stand on behalf of our readers’ as fishing editors love to put it, can lead to huge and lasting damage outside angling. Then it is not swans/otters/cormorants or whatever that is most likely to end up in the dock, but angling itself.

Because of one particular incident I want to focus on cormorants, but there are a couple of points on swans and otters to be made, first.

Swans (dealt with at more length elsewhere) can create two problems when, as sometimes happens, they descend in their scores and their hundreds on a short length of water. The first is that they can make fishing, even the simple act of casting, physically impossible. The second is that they can so denude the water of the plants on which they feed that they devastate the cover and bug life on which fish depend.

Given the right of swans to exist, their grace and beauty, the affection in which the public holds them and the power of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, any approach to problem flocks has to be measured and thought out. It may well be possible to get the public to recognise the birds’ impact on fish and fisheries, but that progress will only come through education and negotiation and it will take many years to achieve.

The same principle applies to otters, which have made a dramatic recovery after numbers collapsed in the second half of the 20th century. This recovery has been stimulated by the release into the wild of artificially reared cubs over a period of years. Through natural breeding and because there is so much virgin territory to be reoccupied, numbers have gone up significantly.

Otters eat fish, but they also have huge territories and so the impact on a given section of a river is likely to be small. It is a different story on lakes, especially if an otter occupies a holt near a commercial stillwater fishery stocked with carp and rears her cubs there. Then, significant numbers of carp – some of them costing thousands of pounds apiece – may be taken, the quality of fishing is likely to decline and the owner’s livelihood may well be threatened. The answer is not for anglers and editors to demand impotently that ‘something be done’ (as some have) but for us all to recognise that the otter, like the swan, is an iconic species much loved by the public and that, if push ever came to shove, the public would unhesitatingly back otters against smelly old fish and those who support them.

The only sensible course of action for anyone concerned for fish and fishing is to accept that the otter is here to stay – I, for one, am delighted about it – and for fishery owners to take whatever steps they can to protect their waters. If fencing and the like cannot be afforded and no public funds are forthcoming to help build them, then the loss of fish will need to be offset through the prices charged: and if the market will not stand that, then the fishery, like any other enterprise caught by changing market conditions, is likely to close. We may think that brutal but the public is likely to see it as simply a fact of life. The only safe and effective solutions to concerns about swans, otters or any other form of wildlife are ones that public opinion will support.

Enter cormorants. If anglers want to see the potential for damage that can be caused by editors getting it wrong, let them consider the impact, many years ago, of a rant against cormorants in a national angling newspaper.

In 1996 a campaign against cormorants was launched by the publication concerned. The report, over several pages, set out the damage that cormorants can do to fisheries, was headlined in huge type on the front page ‘These birds must be killed’ and was accompanied by a picture of a man crouching down with a shotgun at the ready.

The story implied that anglers were shooting cormorants on a large scale and that large numbers more needed to be shot; that organised bands of militants were roaming the countryside blasting at every black bird in sight and that many of their fellows condoned it. The whole episode was a text-book example of how not to handle an emotive issue and, not surprisingly, a national outcry resulted. Many of our fellow-conservationists rightly deplored it. Politicians of varying hues leapt on the bandwagon. Animal rights extremists whipped up the horses. The entire sport, along with its furious and hapless spokesmen, was put on the back foot.

Then the inevitable happened. The media spotlight fell onto something else and the row calmed down. But it left dreadful damage behind. Those images and headlines and that whippedup outcry had gone deep into the public psyche. In the minds of many, the image of angling as a harmless and rather dotty pursuit had been tarnished. We are continuing to live with the consequences. In a climate in which, increasingly, all creatures are seen as fellow passengers on planet earth, angling – given the demise of foxhunting – is now in the sights.

It was all so short-sighted and unnecessary. The issue is not that cormorants do great damage – there is no doubt that, locally, they do – but how best the problem might be tackled. If we are to make real progress on this, as on other sensitive issues, rants must be avoided and loudly condemned when they occur. We need to deal with the world as it exists and not as we would like it to be. We need to deal with facts. Here, in relation to cormorants, are a few.

First, there is no doubt that cormorant numbers are rising rapidly. By the year 2000 it was estimated that there were up to half a million birds in Europe, of which around 15,000 nested in Britain, many of them inland. This indigenous population was even then being steadily supplemented by an influx of birds from the mainland. These incomers boosted the number of birds overwintering here to around 25,000. Around 10,000 of these birds wintered inland and it was recognised that even birds living on the coasts will fly many miles inland to find food. Cormorant numbers have gone on rising ever since. There are single colonies of many hundred of birds close to some of our biggest lakes.

A range of factors is likely to be involved in this population growth. The first is that the free control of cormorants was banned under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, a piece of uk legislation giving effect to the European Union’s Birds Directive. Other factors include the fishing-out by commercial boats of inshore waters where cormorants would normally hunt; the creation of more and more self-stocking reservoirs and lakes as a result of gravel extraction and the like; a growth in the numbers of waters artificially stocked with trout both for food and for sport; a growth in the numbers of heavily stocked commercial coarse fisheries and a reduction in poisons like ddt in the food chain which, in the past, have kept cormorant numbers down.

What has it all meant for anglers? It has given us two problems. The first is the sheer tonnage of fish that cormorants eat. The second is the vast number of fish that the birds injure and kill but do not eat.