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.
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