A far better method – and one that does not demand the eyesight of a hawk before fine nylon can be guided through tiny rings – is to thread the flyline up the rings and not the leader.
How? The leader, plus a few feet of flyline, are pulled straight off the reel. The end of the flyline is doubled back on itself to form a tight loop and the loop is passed through the rings, in the process pulling more line and leader behind it. Held between forefinger and thumb, the loop can be closed tightly enough to pass through even the tiniest rings on the top-piece.
Done this way, getting a line up a rod is not only far easier for those with less than nimble fingers and good eyesight, it overcomes the falling line problem as well. If the line is inadvertently released, the held loop springs open and jams in the last rod ring to have been threaded. In other words, line and leader are held where they are so that threading can be continued as before.
With the line on the rod and a reliable leader on the end of it, all is ready. Only the challenge of the fish remains: that, and finding a strong, sharp hook.
IT HAS been said many times that the two least appropriate words in angling are ‘always’ and ‘never’. We can say that this or that usually happens or almost always happens – even that we have never known it not happen – but the moment we become dogmatic and absolute, the exception will pop up to prove us wrong.
Likewise with ‘never’. Fishing is so wide and deep a sport, conditions and circumstances so infinitely variable, fish so varied and unpredictable that, sooner or later, the highly unlikely, even the seemingly impossible, will occur. You can bet on it.
A well-known angling writer and professional biologist, a man whose work I know and admire, wrote in an angling journal that ‘grayling always lie on the bottom. Always! There is no reliable scientific observation published of a grayling resting, like a trout “on the fin”, just below the surface.’
ON THE afternoon of September 16, 1983, I was walking upriver looking for trout when, on a bend I know well, over seven feet or so of water, I saw a big fish on the fin, inches under the surface. I naturally assumed it was a trout – this was a big trout lie – but before I could cast to it the fish saw me, turned and rushed downstream. From high on the bank on that sunlit day, I had a perfect view of it. I saw every detail of the fish as it passed. It was a huge grayling.
The incident was so remarkable and the grayling so big that, for future reference, I marked precisely the position the fish had been, by drawing mental lines across it from features on my own bank to features on the bank opposite. Then I went downstream, waded across the river and came up the other side to find a position I could cast from, while keeping well below the skyline.
A week later, on the afternoon of September 23, I returned to the bend in the hope of finding the fish there again, high in the water, because I knew I would not be able to see it if it were deep. This time, though, I crept unseen up the opposite bank and went straight to the casting position I had marked. I could see nothing of the fish from that place and so cast a small shrimp ‘blind’ a yard or two upstream of the fish’s previous lie. I got it at once. The shrimp could not have sunk six inches before the fish took, indicating that again it had been just under the surface. It weighed 2lbs 14oz and remained my biggest grayling for the next 20 years.
In July, 1987, I was on a camping and fishing trip in the Swedish Arctic with a group of Swedish friends. On a river one evening – there was, of course, still plenty of light in those parts at night – we found a great raft of fish lying just under the surface, again over deep water. The fish were smutting, tilting up to sip down flies with the regularity of metronomes, again just like trout. We could see that they were grayling. We got only one – a monster, 3lbs 4oz – before the wind got up and the fish went down.
One evening in July, 1989, immense numbers of fish were lying just under the surface on a Hampshire carrier. Although it was evening I could, with the light behind me, see them clearly. They were almost all grayling – again, all smutting, simply tilting up, taking a fly, realigning themselves horizontally and then taking again. I caught several. They were grayling in the water and grayling on the bank.
I have seen similar behaviour several times since: two or three times below a particular hatch pool on a river in Dorset where, over very deep water, the fish will range about on the fin, only two or three feet below the surface. I have even taken a photograph of a grayling on the fin, again just below the surface over deep water, in the back-eddy downstream of a hatch-pool on a river in Berkshire.
The writer of the article on grayling also mentioned barbel. I have not seen it myself but I know a wholly reliable barbel fisher, another professional biologist, who has watched these archetypal bottom-hugging fish feeding from the surface when it has been worth their while. Faced with a continuous stream of floating bread, he tells me, some fish will rise right to the top to take it. They deal with the underslung mouth problem by rolling at the last moment, so that the mouth is uppermost.
Even more improbably – I have written about it elsewhere in this book – I have watched video footage taken by a keeper on the Test, showing a group of eels lying just under the surface like trout, wholly preoccupied with a heavy fall of mayfly spinners. That, it seems to me, is the coup de grace in this debate.
The explanation? I am personally convinced that all fish are opportunistic feeders and that when everything comes together to make ‘abnormal’ behaviour more productive and energy-saving than ‘normal’, they will adopt it. Not always or frequently, but when it pays dividends. Dense hatches of smuts, which might not always repay repeated journeys from bottom to top and back again for each single fly, would clearly be a starting point for such a combination of events. On the other hand the 2lbs 14oz fish, like the fish I photographed in the eddy, was not smutting: it was simply near the surface, over deep water, on the lookout for food exactly like a trout.
Perhaps part of the problem for anglers may be that grayling are so obviously bottom-dwellers, and the received wisdom has so long been that grayling never lie on the fin, that in the main we never expect anything else and so do not look for it. And if we are moved to look for it, either circumstances might not be right to induce grayling to lie high in the water or visibility might be such that, if they are high, the fish cannot be seen.
Either way, in angling, the lesson is the same: ‘always’ and ‘never’ should be given a wide berth.
WHEN, in the late 1970s, John Goddard and I were working on our book The Trout and the Fly, we conducted all manner of experiments. One was to test the efficiency of barbed hooks versus barbless: did we lose more fish with the latter than the former, we wanted to know.
It was the welfare of the fish we had in mind. Though the barbed hooks we used for our flies were tiny – sizes 12 to 18, mainly – they nevertheless, like all barbed hooks, had to be wriggled and teased out. Fish often had to be lifted from the water during the process and the possibility of stress on the trout was further increased.
If we could use barbless hooks without greatly impacting our results, most fish could be set free without being touched. Once beaten they could be brought to the bankside or the wadered leg and the hook could be slipped out with the merest twist of the fingers. The fish would benefit and so, through the sheer convenience of it, would we.
Appropriate barbless hooks were not available so we started removing existing barbs, ourselves. We hooked fish, then gave them every opportunity to escape. We let the line go slack when the fish was in open water, we let it go slack as usual when they jumped, we allowed them to get into weed beds. It made little or no difference to the numbers of fish we banked. We were happy and the fish were happier. We both wrote about it extensively. But for some, old habits die hard.
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