First Memories – Why I Fish

I can’t remember the start. I can’t remember learning. I have always fished and always will.

Early memories are vague, fragmented impressions of fishing the reservoir. In the winter, the water would almost lap against the dry stone wall at the bottom of our garden. In the summer, as the water dropped, a sandy bar would appear backed by banks of horsetail reeds. It was from this island beach, laced with its freshwater mussels, that I would entice small perch or roach to a worm fished under a balsa stick float. My rod was a lime green fibreglass spinning rod with dark scarlet whippings, matched to my dad’s ancient Mitchell reel.

A couple of times a year we would venture out to a stream stuffed with obliging minnows, which would pack themselves into our bread baited jam jar. In no time we’d have thirty or so which we would transport home in a bucket balanced precariously on my knee in the back seat of dad’s car.

Shocking to me now, but for the following week, those unfortunate minnows would be our live bait for the local pike.

The float was an ancient orange topped bung with half a pencil running through the middle – weirdly, I can even remember the blue capped pencil which was silver and strangely triangular with the words “Pressed Felts Ltd.”  printed down the side.

The gear was the same, the rod, the reel, the line, with I think the addition of a wire trace. Our favourite spot was crouching under the Yacht Club at the far end of the reservoir – the clubhouse protruding over the water like a peaked flat cap. We kids would scramble amongst the supporting iron metalwork and sit in the gloom and fish. Despite all the effort, the best we would catch were jack pike, but given the tackle that was probably for the best.

The first decent fish I can remember was when I would guess I was about seven years old. It was an Irish trout from Corrib. Memories can’t be trusted here, but probably a fish of around a pound and a half, caught on a worm whilst my dad cast mayflies from the other end of the drifting boat. Once again I can still vividly see the float, a long swan quill with an orange tip; it lay unused in my tackle box for years. From those early days why do the floats stir the strongest memories?

Then onto the Wharfe at Bolton Abbey catching summer trout and autumn grayling on the northern spiders’ Holy Trinity of Partridge and Orange, Snipe and Purple, and Waterhen Bloa, with the occasional outing for a Partridge and Yellow. These were my first fish on a fly, most of them caught in the Divide, a dark swirling pool just above Cavendish and below the Strid.

Around this time my dad bought me my first proper rod, a second hand 8′ 6” Hardy’s Perfection. Fifty odd years later it sits pinned on my study wall, opposite Dad’s last rod, an equally gorgeous, and to me precious, Pezon Michel.

From there, to summer holidays fishing the lochs of Sutherland – a truly golden time when the course of my fishing life was set. As a 12-year-old my coming of age as a fly fisherman with a 3lb 1oz sea trout caught on a Mallard and Claret from the stunning Badna Bay, nestling in the shadow of Ben Stack. Anything else about the capture of the fish is beyond my memory, apart from taking the wrong route home and stumbling through a forestry plantation.

I’ve often thought about why casting a fly has such a hold over me, I’ve tried rationalising it and I can’t. There have been times when I’ve been uncomfortable with the morality of what I do; however careful I am I must still be inflicting some sort of pain on another sentient being – how can I do that? It’s something even now I’m not fully reconciled with, and I still feel the pangs of guilt from a big trout I caught on Corrib which I kept out of the water too long and which was then beyond revival. I tried to send it “away” but it just slid into the depths beyond help.

But it’s at the core of who I am and what I do. I have a fair few hobbies, some of which I dedicate lots of time to, but none of them begin to give me the same intensity of experience I feel fishing a remote highland loch with just that tantalising chance of rising the fish of my dreams.

I’ve tried to explain to the unfortunate uninitiated how for me there’s none of the gently passing a day feel which they expect of my fishing such a place. Because opportunities to fish in my holy grail places such as these are so rare, I find myself in a race against the day – minutes, seconds are too precious to lose.

I’ve got to get there early, don’t get tangled putting the cast on, should I fish wet or dry, floater or intermediate. The first few drifts it’s mid-morning, nothing, a quarter of the day gone already. A snatched cup of coffee, ten minutes lying in the heather at lunchtime to grab a sandwich. If I’m going to change my flies now would be a good time. And so it goes on. To be fair, once I’ve caught a good fish I do relax, I’m not greedy, and regardless of whether I catch anything I’m in my version of Jordan North’s happy place.

In recent years I’ve become less intense, possibly because now I tend to fish with friends rather than on my own. Also, on a deeper note, I seem to be forever fighting the weather and the remorseless, undeniable advance of a changing climate. However far north or west I go, I can’t seem to escape endless cloudless days, often with only the faintest sighs of wind to ruffle the surface of those treasured highland lochs. Even I ease off my efforts when I know I’m truly wasting my time.

I know I’ve become stuck in my ways, my fishing habits have become a bit like my playlists which my wife constantly reminds me remain forever unchanged; I repeatedly return to my well-trodden favourite fishing haunts. For 70s Buzzcocks and Stranglers I have Loch Leven and the Sutherland of my teenage years, the 90s of Pulp and the Cranberries cover the time I first became obsessed with Corrib and South Uist.

Now that I’m retired I have no excuse, I have the time and the opportunity to break away from my much cherished annual circuit. I’ve shown new resolve by updating my playlist, and just need to match these downloads with the discovery of new angling vistas.

So for my Dea Matrona and Last Dinner Party years there are the possibilities of exploring more of Ireland’s great western loughs, first Mask, and a long awaited return to Sheelin. For something really different, I think I should spend some of my kids’ inheritance on some high quality, doubtless ridiculously expensive, chalk stream dry fly fishing – I’m sure they’ll understand! Perhaps most tempting of all, I have a date planned next autumn with the trout of the Tasmanian wilderness.

I think they should be enough to keep my angling passion burning bright.