Losing the plot.

After the Blue Winged Olives have passed through, fishing on the Brook traditionally gets tough. You see very few rising fish, many turn out to be Chub or Dace, which you learn to appreciate this little bit of targeting activity on fruitless evenings as a consolation. But I just needed Trout numbers that year.

The future course of the Willow Brook Fly Fishing Club needed those Trout numbers. The wild Trout in the Brook, perversely as it sounds, needed my Trout numbers also that year. And the memories of those first Chaps who set up this club, to introduce Trout to the stream with the intention of creating a breeding population, also needed these Trout, if their ambition; and dreams;  hard work; and endeavour; was to be realised at last. And it was tangible, Oh-so-close, within touching, and a final solitary hurdle to clear or fall.

I was sticking around longer at the end of the day, and as it got too dark to check knots and change flys, that’s when my thoughts usually, reluctantly conceded it was time to give way to the night shift, those host of unnameable creatures along the banksides and in the air above, with their unnerving cries and occasional clattering’s and disturbing bumps in the night. However, I started noticing the bankside mats of grass sat now on the water surface in mid-summer, moving in the gloom as occasionally the bigger fish started sliding out in to the open water in the failing light, and take up station mid-stream. This took little resistance to twist my arm, to persuade me to stick around awhile, despite feeling like a trespasser in another domain, long, long past my welcome here

I didn’t see the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Nor watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.. I saw instead the starts of caddis hatches that I had no idea about previously, and heard into the deep dark the activities around me as the Brook came alive again, long after normal fishermen were tucked up in bed, dreaming of electric sheep, content that the Brook would be now lifeless and still; the fishing, closed up for the day. The new experiences started with the little speedy “Vee” wakes of the tiny Agapetus caddis fly nymphs, which I’m told is a daytime phenomenon, but not on this Brook.

The adults of Agapetus are tiny, about 5mm or just less than a quarter of an inch, but when they are up in June, July and early August, there’s lots of them on a very calm evening drifting around quite high along the banks, and then the slightest breeze gets them bustling around in the bankside vegetation where they virtually disappear from view… you really have to search for them, if your that way inclined.. and not many of us are, I’ll admit.

But it’s what goes on, in the water that should be really interesting for us. The only thing I personally see is the Vee moving across the surface. When I share this observation, I get told by older, seemingly experienced and “ more knowledgeable” fluff chucker’s, that I’m deluded; and that its actually just the breeze causing that effect and not an insect at all, “You silly boy!”

 Which gives you, Dear Reader, an idea of the look and speed of the little zippy wake.

Usually I just sigh and keep quiet and leave them to it. Marked up in the memory bank and filed away, noted as “Not to be bothered with, and actively avoid engaging in future… a lost cause”. 

One of the times I got dismissed  for my observation about the Vee wake though, I’d had enough of it, thinking to myself, “I’m out there actually observing and questioning this stuff, while you’re sat at home and either getting these ideas you toss around as knowledge from magazines, or just making it up to appear worldly wise”

So I let fly with some made-up idiotic answer that countered that it was not the wind at all. I mean if you’re going to be dismissive and just going to make it up, then why shouldn’t I ?

I replied something like, “ No your wrong, it’s actually the ghosts of caddis flys that met a tragic end and now haunt the surface in ever greater yearly numbers, a myriad of little spectres; and that then when they appear, the ghost Trout come out, and just go increasingly wild for them”. And added “It has to be that, or, its all an hallucination of mine. But you know what…. I am still putting those ghost Trout that I capture in my catch return, just in case it is real”!

I often think out these mildly belligerent responses, but I rarely say them. It’s like a therapy, satisfied that your armed and able to give it back, but not being arsed, or realising that they are so daft they won’t realise I’m taking the piss, and will think I’m being genuine.

No doubt, it will one day back fire on me, and I will be carried away from the Brook in leaking waders and a strait jacket, gibbering those words ….

”I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. The wrestling otters by the Packhorse. Watched caddis flys glitter in the dark near the culvert Bridge. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”. Muttering away as the men in the white coats carry me to the waiting van and away to the loving embrace of Nurse Cratchit and 120 volts across my temples.

.....see Pic of Day!!

It may as well be ghosts causing the Vee wake, they are so small that its really hard to see the little creature stuck under the surface, I’ve only ever caught one in a net, and I can only imagine what’s going on to make them behave this way. As little Trout magnets.

It’s almost like the tiny little nymph is very much at the mercy of the stream after it leaves its very robust little sleeping bag like case, made up of tiny stones, sand; and grit; where it’s been anchored safely to the stream bed, for what then; must be the really weird and random rise up to the surface at last to become an adult. 

Arriving there. I imagine it realises in a panic, “Oh Shitsky No!!, Im in zee open vater!! Shnelle! I needen ze safely of de edgen!  

And with the tiny high pitched battle cry of, “ Here komme Eich!”. They zip across the expanse like jet propelled, long legged pointed Turds. Rocketing just under the surface, fleeing to sanctuary with all the’ vorsprung durch’ they can muster before re grouping in numbers in the edges! Looking at the slenderness of those two long arms/ legs, they either move them like the clappers or have some inbuilt fart mechanism to achieve that prodigious pace, I really must look into it. My imagination favours the fart propulsion theory , and the legs to be used for saluting each other when they regroup in the verges for the invasion of the skies, greeting each other with a cry of “Javolle mien Capitan”! and “ Fritz? Nien he was taken by ze Trouten Schwienhund”.  

The one thing I do know for absolute certain about Agapetus caddis flies is that they speak broken English. Everything else is a guess for now.

In the narrow bits of the Brook this zipping across the surface rarely gets a reaction, but on the wider more open pools the Fish have time to react I guess, and either smash them as they pass, or plunge after them in pursuit. Any tiny size twenty fly that drags in the surface will get the Trout interested. It’s the time when you really don’t want a drag free drift, any existing rule book is torn up, and its hard to be bad enough to spook a pool with rod and line when they are hatching.

The other activity usually caught in the last glow, or glimpsed in a reflected pool of moonlight, is some rather large caddis that scuttle across the surface and in the new growing silence, get smashed at very noisily and visually.

The orientation of the Brook is such that the moon rise at this time of the year is usually downstream at fishermen’s bedtime. And, I soon realised that drag again was my friend, I seemed to remember it was being a clumsy clot at the time, rather than being innovative and skilful ( which I have never been knowingly  guilty of).

I was conscious that I didn’t want to line the fish, and range finding in the near dark can be tricky for a casting dunce. So I’d feed loose loops of fly line across the stream with the rod tip, to send it down the current in a clean drift. Cheating, well it felt like it at the time, and not something to be proudly admitted to in polite company later on.  

This method did occasionally rise a fish. Somehow though on one occasion I got caught up on my reel, or round my finger, in typical me fashion. The lovely, natural drift, bobbing along the current, a poetry in motion that immediately ceased as the fly rudely jerked to a halt. Then veering to the side came scuttling across the surface towards my near bank and got smashed at by a Trout en route. I tried to replicate my ineptitude precisely and got smashed yet again. The scuttling fly trick seemed to do the job for the fish feeding at this time, but I’ve never admitted to it!.

At this time I was using a semi-automatic French reel and found for upstream casts I could twitch the retrieve and make the sedge skate back to me across the surface, not as successful a ruse as the downstream technique, but it was a good option.( And at least it was upstream… and proper!)

 Apart from  a very long dark old Trout I had caught many years earlier. I had now started connecting with bigger fish in the 2lb and over range, regularly on these night time sessions.

Previously one or two of this size turned up in the catch returns for other members, and the secretary wrote them up ( or wrote them off!) as “obviously over wintered fish”.

I’d always doubted that, along with the silly assertion that the smaller stuff I had been catching was shrunken ‘stockies ‘losing condition’..  And I now think these big fish, like my obvious ‘wilds’ were glimpses of the Brooks own stream bred population, supressed and confused with the stocked fish. They probably got to an age, or had the feeding habit, that kept them safely under the bank in the daytimes, and reached a size that the stock fish couldn’t so easily dislodge anymore. And, as most of the feeding activity on the Brook, after the Mayfly’s, seem to be nocturnal, we fishermen rarely encounter these fish, but they are there; and probably always have been. 

The “Over-wintered stocked fish”, for me, flew in the face of the evidence of the place and advise from fishery managers and game keepers about what we should realistically expect from a stocked fish in a water like ours. These occasional bigger fish were usually caught well away from the stocking area, except one deep fast undercut bank on a bend that tended to always hold a few. But it was a tricky cast and mend, and needed a lot of bead on the fly to get the drift. It needed either skill, dogged persistence, or a stroke of pure luck. Occasionally someone achieved the latter.

And these alleged fish that survived the winter, miraculously had doubled in size.  The stocked fish, lacking the social graces required for a prolonged life in a population whose feeding zones are held by displays of size, not aggression or contact. Planted here with a size, swelled by rich feeding ,now searching where food is no longer delivered daily by a bombardment of pellets rattling down upon the water surface from above.

Why we we’re not fly tying fish pellet imitations on a size 12 in those dark days is puzzling now.

I used to get a lot of success with a beetle pattern plopped down behind the Trout , it would turn and almost be committed to snapping at the aerial intruder. I thought I was imitating the plop of an accidental tumble off an overhanging branch, and was, in my own sweet way, matching the hatch. What I was probably doing was matching the sound of a hatchery pellet plopping into the surface , and the Trout’s committed aggression was the relief of getting some real food at last, in this strange environment that it had found itself in. Had I gone down with pockets full of fine grit or gravel to rattle the surface first, I’d have probably had even more success.

And that’s how that season petered out,  I had done what I could, and when I could. I saw a good variety of other members giving it a go too, and seeing if it would fish as well with no stocked fish, and really, I heard no grumbles.

I had my wonderful encounter with old Bernard who seemed instantly converted. The Chairman was at last wandering down from his ‘Des Res’ and catching “Wild Trout” from ‘his’ stream. The old secretary was now letting it be known he was catching a good number of Trout that same size as the ones we used to stock, and was even converting to a small stream rod  and light line dry fly setup.

I knew Barry and The Docs son had “Put in a shift or two” to get the numbers up too. There was nothing more I could do, and I really didn’t feel there was any more that I could present to them this year to persuade them. I’d given them a glimpse of what it could be. Now, it really was just up to them as a club to make a choice.

So I took up a friends offer to share their Thanksgiving dinner and avoid the AGM, and hopefully let the evidence of the year do my talking.

Ultimately, I didn’t want to be the singular responsibility of making that next step.. if it’s one persons will bending and bullying the others to change, it’s not as strong a foundation as a collective decision.

What I gathered afterwards, was for once, only two people from the whole club did not submit a catch return, and nearly every member tried to fish it that year, which was unheard of previously. The catch return, despite the weather, and that now it was just a return of the numbers actually caught, and no fudging; was up on the previous year’s total of wild fish ,and suspected hatchery fish, and stocked fish, all combined. The average of fish caught per session rose also.

A few of the more informed doubters the year before, complained that they would expect a close thing on the numbers on the catch return, but they predicted that it would be dominated by very small Trout and ruin the ‘sport’. They warned that we would end up with a stream full of 6-9 inch fish and “Who wants to spend the night catching tiddlers ?!”

However, I’d been aware of that early on with the habitat work and been mindful of population bottle necks. Luckily for us our problems were not adult habitat or juvenile, it was the Redds and hatchlings where we had a bottle neck in the early development, and that’s where I had aimed many efforts, while creating more pockets of adult habitat in the long beats of juvenile riffle and shallow pools, to add variety to the beat.

And yes, there was a lot of small fish caught, but there was a good number of 1lb to 1½ lb fish caught by many fishermen, and in numbers comparable with the stocking days. A few lucky fishermen hitting the next age up, and with my clumsy clot behaviour in the gloaming, a number of 3lb+ four year olds, showing we had a full range available. There was no real difference, people were happy to catch the very beautiful and feisty smaller fish when they got them, the quiet periods were due to bad weather and water levels, not just the inevitable disappearance of the “stockies” after July, and then a dour two months of nothing but Chub to chase.

Incidentally a note from the fish farm read out at the AGM informing up that our Stock fish next year would be going up to £4.25 per fish was another nail in the coffin. We could put that £4000 into habitat work or equipment instead.  

It was voted to cease stocking the Brook  and to make fishing catch and release with Barbless hooks.

Three people left in protest. The three I have mentioned before that I encounter still, and tell me how the fishing club ruined the fishing, as if I’m no part of it and a third person. I think because I made the decision to avoid that AGM meeting, they don’t associate me directly with the ‘coup de grâce!’

What I wasn’t there to hear that , of the members stepping down, new members from the waiting list were being invited to join… One was called MAX!!