On Fishing

At the most conservative estimate (conservative estimates are best because exaggeration simply undermines our case) the average cormorant eats 1lb of fish a day, which means that in a year six birds will eat one ton, 600 birds will eat 100 tons, 6,000 birds will eat 1,000 tons. While grossing up figures gives staggering totals, the net impact of this predation is not easy to calculate, not least because no-one knows what freshwater fish populations are, overall. What we can assume, however, is that the birds will get their food from the easiest places (most likely small, heavily stocked waters of the kind anglers have created); and what we know is that the damage comes in the particular, not the general – that is, that the damage done to individual fisheries, whatever is happening to fisheries at large, can be dire.

But that is only part of it. While natural mortalities in fish stocks, spawning failures, predation by other creatures and the like all have to go into the negative mix, so do all those fish not eaten but fatally injured by cormorants. When hunting, cormorants often behave like pack animals or sharks: they seem to go into a feeding frenzy. Then, anglers’ concerns become even more clear. Cormorants have large, sharp, hooked bills and will chase most fish that swim, other than the very largest. The injuries they inflict are quite unmistakable – lines across the sides of a fish showing where the bill has taken hold and one or more short, deep slashes, usually in the belly, where the bill hook has gone in. Fish injured in this way but not eaten, are likely to die quickly from their injuries or to die later from disease.

I can speak of it all personally. For some seasons, many of the fish I have been catching from my local river have shown signs of cormorant damage. I have caught many trout weighing around 3lbs that have had cormorant wounds across their flanks, indicating that they had been attacked by birds even though the birds could not cope with their size. One of the biggest grayling I have ever caught – it came from a stream so small and overgrown I cannot imagine how a cormorant got into it – weighed 2lbs 13oz and had cormorant marks across its sides. On another river I found a 6lbs salmon kelt dying in the margins, with cormorant slashes deep in its gut. A fish farmer I know was able to walk right up to one bird because it had so gorged on small trout that it could not take off.

Many a regular angler has similar stories to tell. There is no doubt that cormorants are not just one more big bird. In large numbers they are an obvious menace to waters within flying distance, whatever statistical evidence might currently be lacking.

Politics, however, is the art of the possible. If the birds cannot be fully controlled – and under both British and European law they cannot – then anglers and those who represent them must make the best use of circumstances as they stand. This is what angling’s representative bodies have been doing, with some limited success. Thanks to their efforts, where significant damage to a fishery can be proven, a licence to shoot a small number of birds as a means of scaring away others (albeit only to make them fly to someone else’s water nearby) can now be obtained.

To gain further concessions will take a steady accumulation of credible case histories, wider research (when did researchers ever recommend less?), bridge-building with other conservation groups, reasoned explanation of our concerns to them, to the public and to the politicians who hold the levers of power and, not least, education of the angling community itself.

An important part of this effort must be to win public recognition of the fact that our environment needs to be seen in the round. Specifically, we need acknowledgement of two points. The first is that, of necessity, we have created on our island a landscape that is wholly artificial – and hence everything within it needs to be managed to maintain balances that, for better or worse, we have long since upset in our search for food, shelter and diversion. The second is conscious acknowledgment that, although they may not be as cuddly or as photogenic as their furred and feathered friends, fish are a part in our wildlife heritage and have a place in that wider equation, too.

In the meantime, any relief from cormorants that can be achieved – tweaks to legislation here, alleviations there – are likely to fall short of what anglers would like to see. High bird numbers, and the problems that come with them, are here for years to come.

They will be around longer – and maybe longer than angling itself – if the hotheads have their way.

All You Need to Know (#ulink_b3fd8172-54d7-5c07-a018-bca19c5d799d)

I READ somewhere that more books have been written about angling than about any other subject except mathematics. I have no idea who made the calculation, but it was probably a mathematician – and not a very good one, at that.

Even so, there are many thousands of angling books in print and they have come in all guises: factual books, fishing guides and diaries, reminiscences, anthologies like this. A few, among the very best, break new ground – not an easy thing to do in this ancient sport. Others, also among the best, have a literary quality that makes them timeless. Lots, alas, add only to the word mountain.

I WAS fishing with one of my closest friends, a man who, because of his many excellent books and articles, has become a household name in the fly-fishing world. We fell to talking about the tide of angling literature – the hundreds of books, the thousands – that has been published since Dame Juliana Berners gave us the first work on angling in English, in 1496.

My friend and I were as one. We agreed that while there had been works of technical brilliance over the years, and many sublimely written texts, vast numbers of books had contributed nothing, at great length. ‘In fact’, I said, ‘it would be interesting to go the other way, as an exercise – to see how much information you could squeeze into the fewest possible words.’ A light bulb pinged in my head. ‘Actually, the really essential things about angling can be very simply stated. I think I’ll write a new book, myself. It will be called All you Really Need to Know about Fly-fishing. It will be about seven pages long.’

My friend’s stride faltered and his jaw dropped. ‘Blimey’, he said, somehow conveying that his entire past life – all those books, all those articles – was passing before his eyes, ‘you can’t do that, you’ll put me out of business.’

It was a joke, of course, but for all that, the essentials of fly fishing would consume very few trees. I once tried to squeeze quite a few of them into a reply to the youngest reader of The Times to have written to me up to that point. Peter was 13. He enjoyed coarse fishing but, on a holiday in Wales, had seen someone catch a grayling on a dry fly and had been fascinated. His father had suggested he write to me. What exactly was dry fly fishing and how could he get started?

Here, more or less, is what I told him.

Dry fly fishing is a way of catching fish – mostly trout or grayling, but plenty of other species as well – on imitations of the kinds of natural flies they are accustomed to taking from the surface.

To do it, I told Peter, he would be best off with a fly-rod about 9ft long, rated what is called aftm-6. He would need an aftm-6, double-tapered, floating flyline to use with it and a reel to put the line on. This outfit would do the job he wanted and be versatile enough for lots of other fishing as well. He should persuade his father to buy him a couple of lessons with a professional fly-casting instructor. The instructor would teach him how to cast correctly and practice would take care of distance and accuracy. He would also be shown how to do fiddly things like joining a nylon ‘leader’ to the line and a fly to the leader. He would be using only one fly at a time and it would be treated to float. At the water, the aim would be to get that fly to the surface in front of a targeted, rising fish, in a natural and unalarming way.

When Peter approached a river, I said, it should be in the knowledge that a fish is a wild and wary thing, easily ‘put down’. What is more, he should know that in a river fish have to face the flow and so, when they are hungry, they look upstream for the flies and bugs the current brings downstream towards them.

What did all of this mean? It meant that he should avoid alerting the fish to his presence either by the way he dressed or the way he moved and that the best approach to a fish looking upstream was from downstream – from its blind side.

On the flies to be cast, I explained that most of the natural flies fish eat are not much more than a centimetre long and that if Peter wanted to maximise his chances, his artificial flies should be tiny as well. This question of size, I wrote, was the single most important factor where artificial flies were concerned. The only other important factor was colour and because most natural flies are drab as well as small, his flies needed to be drab also: browns and blacks would cover most situations.

With all of these matters taken care of, the need was to ensure that the cast fly floated towards the fish as daintily and unhindered as the naturals all around it. That meant avoiding drag. Drag is what Peter would often see, after casting out: the current would push on the line and leader floating on the water and would create a downstream curve in them. Sooner or later and sometimes instantly, this push on the line and leader would pull on the fly and cause it to skate across the surface in an unnatural way. Minute amounts of such drag, quite invisible from the banks, could be enough to kill all chances.

Drag can best be avoided, I wrote, by having the minimum amount of line lying on the surface in the first place and by careful choice of the position from which the cast is made. Most often, the best place will be from just behind the fish and a little to one side of it; but often, paradoxically, it will be from directly opposite the quarry, as well.

When he had got everything right and his fish had tilted up, opened its mouth and taken his fly, I told Peter he should give it a moment to close its mouth and tilt down again before lifting – not yanking – the rod end upwards and setting the hook. A few words about landing the fish, fishing barbless, the value of joining a local club and – well, all right, then, recommendations for a couple of books, my own astonishingly among them – rounded the letter off.

I knew that success would not take long if Peter followed these simple suggestions – and so it proved. I also know that in my letter I have the makings of Chapter 1 – All you Really Need to Know About Dry Fly Fishing in that seven-page book I had talked about. Chapter 2 – All You Really Need to Know About Wet Fly and Nymph Fishing – surely cannot be far behind.

Naturally, I told my famous writer-friend. He was gratifyingly appalled.

Arthur Ransome (#ulink_96d6a20b-903e-514b-9779-9805b0a7ceef)

IT MUST be fascinating to have someone we thought we knew well, cast in a new light by a sudden turn of events. The mere possibility that long-held assumptions could be wrong would have us sitting bolt upright and curious.

Even news about someone remote can, we all know, have this effect: for example, when damaging allegations surface about a national figure. The charges do not have to be based on fact to set the weevils at work – all they need to do is to appear. Ideally, for the media, they should surface about a revered figure who is long since dead and so cannot lodge a defence. Tarnished Idol Syndrome always makes news.

IT’S NOT EVERY day that I get to think kindly about Lenin or Trotsky or even, come to think of it, about certain personages in mi5 and mi6. I mean it wouldn’t be, would it? We angling correspondents have plenty to do without getting mixed up in politics and revolutions and counter-intelligence, thank you very much.

Still, credit where credit is due. Had it not been for the foregoing folk, Arthur Ransome would not have been making the news the way he has in recent years, at first identified and then exonerated as a possible Bolshevik spy – and then I would have had no peg on which to hang my own information about him.

Of course, it had long been known that the famous foreign correspondent and children’s author got close to the revolutionary leaders while reporting from Russia around 1917. And we can assume that he got a lot closer still to Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, because he had an affair with her before the two eventually married.

Yet the fact that Ransome might, just might, have been a spy or a double agent was not aired until some of his private papers came to light in 2002. In 2005, the National Archive released mi5 files relating to the time Ransome was a journalist in Russia, between 1913 and 1925 – and raised similar questions.

The mi5 files made it clear that Ransome had been watched by the security services because they feared he had become a propagandist for the Bolsheviks while working in Petrograd, then the Russian capital. One informant claimed that Ransome was expected to move into the Kremlin to live. Another report said that Ransome had been considered such a potential risk to British interests that a top-secret paper on him was circulated to the ‘King and the War Cabinet’.

As late as 1927, by which time he was back in England and domestically ensconced, a ‘confidential source’ was reporting that ‘Arthur Ransome is a traitor, married to a Bolshevik woman, he is an undoubted Communist and in the pay of the Russian Secret Service’.

While all of this was being filed away by mi5, other material was giving rise in the agency to the contrary view: that Ransome was not only not a traitor but actually a spy for mi6, working against the new Russian leadership. (How, it must have seemed as reasonable to ask then as now, could mi5 not have known for certain, one way or the other? What does it tell us of communication between the two in those tumultuous times?).

Whatever the truth, such exotic possibilities in Ransome’s background will have surprised many a reader of Swallows and Amazons. More prosaically, perhaps, some others may be surprised to learn of Ransome’s background as an angler. Ransome was not only a passionate angler but wrote extensively about his sport. He became one of the finest angling correspondents to write for a national newspaper in the 20th century.

Though many aspects of Ransome’s life have been extensively chronicled, Ransome’s work as an angling correspondent has been as submerged from view of late as split-shot beneath a float.

Fishing and fishermen stimulated some of Ransome’s best writing and led to one of the best collections of essays in a sporting literature that goes back to 1496. It led to a second collection of angling pieces and to a fine exploration of Ransome as both writer and angler by Jeremy Swift – Arthur Ransome on Fishing – published in 1994.

Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884, the son of an angling professor of history who was himself the son of an angling father. Early family holidays were spent near Coniston, in the Lake District, walking, boating and learning to fish – experiences that were later to be deeply mined for his children’s books and which, between his travels, constantly drew him back.

A somewhat chequered education that took in an unhappy spell at Rugby, eventually led to a place at Yorkshire College – later Leeds University – where Ransome surprisingly began to read science before dropping out. He headed for the bright lights of Chelsea, having determined to become a writer and threw himself into it with huge energy. By the time he had reached his mid-20s he had a string of books behind him – including a critical study of Edgar Allan Poe – and had married for the first time.

This marriage, to Ivy Walker, of Bournemouth, was a disaster and Ransome was soon looking for an escape. From 1913 on, Ransome spent much of his time in Russia, writing the kinds of insider reports for the Daily News and the Observer that caused the security services to take an interest, dallying with Evgenia – and fishing wherever and whenever he could. He returned to England with Evgenia in 1925 and settled in the Lake District. The same year he began an angling column for the then Manchester Guardian.

Between August that year and September 1929, Ransome produced 150 pieces, most of them as polished as gemstones. He wrote on people and places, tackle and trout, wet flies and the weather. He wrote on ‘Bulls and Kindred Phenomena’, on ‘Talking to the Fish’, on ‘Failing to Catch Tench’ and on scores of other subjects besides. He wrote about them all with knowledge and insight and warmth and wry humour. He crafted every piece in a style that engaged the non-angling reader as well as the smitten.

Fifty of the best pieces, plus a translation of angling passages from Sergei Aksakov, the great chronicler of Russian life, appeared in Rod and Line (1929) – a book which Sir Michael Hordern, another keen angler, brought memorably to life for television.

The opening sentence of the first piece in Rod and Line, is a corker: ‘The pleasures of fishing are chiefly to be found in rivers, lakes and tackle shops and, of the three, the last are least affected by the weather.’

Among several later penetrating essays is one on the theme that angling is ‘a frank resumption of Palaeolithic life without the spur of Palaeolithic hunger’. In that piece, as often elsewhere, Ransome goes to the heart of it: ‘Escaping to the Stone Age by the morning train from Manchester, the fisherman engages in an activity that allows him to shed the centuries as a dog shakes off water and to recapture not his own youth merely, but the youth of the world’.

Ransome’s second collection, which included the scripts of some of his radio broadcasts, was published as Mainly About Fishing (1959). A portrait of Ransome tying one of the flies shown on the cover of this book, his favourite Elver Fly, still hangs in his old club, the Garrick, in London.

Ransome finally gave up his angling column when he decided that the pressure of producing it weekly was beginning to take the edge off his own fishing. He gave his editor three months’ notice of his intention to quit in March, 1929. By May he was well into Swallows and Amazons.

Ransome fished – and on and off wrote about fishing – late into a life that was increasingly plagued by ill-health. He caught his last fish, a salmon, in 1960. By 1963 he was confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1967, aged 83. Among the papers he left were parts of a new novel. It had, like so much else in this public man’s private world, an underlying angling theme.