And so, these days, I do not drive to the waterside towing a trailer burdened with copies of every fly and bug known since Genesis, in triplicate. I do not carry representations of Centroptilum pennulatum. Nor of Heptagenia lateralis. Nor of Rhithrogena haarupi. Ecdyonurus torrentis is not in my box. Hydropsyche pellucidula has slung his hook. Leptophlebia vespertina might be in Argentina.
If anyone looks in my box these days – even fly box was an overstatement for years because I actually used those little plastic tubs that rolls of 35mm film come in – they will find only two kinds of general-purpose dry flies: little brown jobs and little black jobs. All the brown patterns are identical to one another and all the black patterns are identical to one another: it is only the hook sizes that differ.
The little black flies have a black seal’s fur body with a short black hackle at the head. Nothing more. I carry these in sizes 14, 16 and 18. I use the largest size when hawthorn flies are about, the middle size to suggest black gnats and the 18s to suggest smuts.
The other flies are all sedge-style dressings. They have a seal’s fur body, the overall hue of which is a warm olive-brown (I do not agonise over the shade of olive brown: each mixture varies and I do not find it matters a jot). The wings are fibres taken from a brown saddle hackle, tied horizontally along the back and clipped off square just beyond the hook bend. A short, brown hackle wound just behind the eye completes the job.
I do not carry a dun pattern at all for the smaller upwinged flies, because I know I do not need to. I know that virtually every surface-feeding trout that is eating small duns will accept the sedge pattern – and the sedge pattern has marginally more bulk (which makes it easier to see), floats longer (all those tiny bubbles trapped in all that seal’s fur) and will last for several fish because it is more robust than a dun.
The only other brown fly I carry is a spinner pattern in sizes 14 and 16 and again, all are identical. They have the same olive-brown seal’s fur body, a few brown hackle fibres for the tail and a strip of very thin plastic tied in the middle, just behind the hook eye, to suggest the spread wings of the egg-laying or dead natural. There is no hackle. If the wings are nicked at the base with scissors, on the rear edge, close to the body, they will not take on a propeller shape and cause the leader to kink. They will also collapse as though hinged when a trout sips the fly in.
Beyond these, the only dry flies I carry are for use on special occasions: mayflies for when the mayflies are up, daddy-long-legs for when the naturals are on the water. And that’s it.
My nymph box is similarly sparse because, again, just a handful of patterns meets most of my needs.
To cover any deep-lying fish or to explore a likely lie on a rainfed river, the fly I most commonly use is an artificial shrimp. I tie these shrimps mostly on size 12s, with a few size 10s. I tie them with different amounts of lead wire under the dressing and distinguish one from another by tying each weight with its own colour of tying silk: in other words, I colour-code them. Unweighted, these dressings are deadly for fish on the fin, high in the water. Weighted, they are also useful for fishing deep down from reservoir banks – and as stalking flies on clear stillwaters.
The shrimp usually has the same seal’s fur mix for the body as my dry flies. I rib the fur with gold wire and tie a thin, clear strip of plastic along the top of the body to suggest the natural shrimp’s shell-like back. Other nymphs I use for general river fishing are size 16 and 18 midge pupa-style dressings, which have a tiny tungsten bead behind the eye. These little flies, attached to ultra-fine leaders, can be very effective when used against difficult fish – and when fishing for coarse fish, which I do quite often. If I need to get down fast in deep, heavy water, a hare’s ear with a large tungsten bead head, often fished on the end of a long leader, does the job.
For fishing on lakes I am never without a range of midge pupa dressings in sizes 16 to eight, variously weighted. I also have a couple of long-hackled spider patterns which can be fished slowly while still suggesting life on a large scale; a damsel nymph; an absolutely deadly, weighted mayfly nymph that I tie with a marabou tail, dyed ivory; and a short, highly mobile black leech dressing that I will try if all else fails.
Add to these flies a few others accumulated over the years – those that have been given, bought or removed from overhanging branches – and you have my entire collection. Honest.
The pleasure I now take in simplicity does not mean that I need not have gone through all those earlier stages. Rather, it is something that I have arrived at, having been through all else. The early frustration, the resolve to learn more, the experiments with tanks and underwater cameras and, yes, those photographs of flies’ feet from underwater at night and the rest have been, for me, essential. They have provided me with hours of fascination and have given me insights that I would not otherwise have achieved. They have, above all, taught me something about trout and have given me, as a consequence, a degree of confidence when I tie on one fly in preference to another and fish it this way instead of that.
But now I am content to follow a sublimely simpler path, dipping in and out of intensity as I please. Sometimes I do get locked-on and involved, but mostly I sit and watch, soak up the wonders of nature and all her works, talk with my friends and relax.
At the end of A River Never Sleeps, Roderick Haig-Brown wrote that ‘perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers.’ Like many others, I suspect, I know exactly what he means. The only difference between us is that I wouldn’t go that far. Not quite that far.
Just yet.
I ONCE met a man who told me he collected fishing books. He had 35,000, he said. Later – and maybe not surprisingly – I learned that he was well-known in collecting circles and that his library was one of the most valuable in the world. He had agents and scouts everywhere looking for rare volumes to buy. He kept some in his house in Washington, DC, but most of them were in vaults in a bank.
Most of us are not like that and could not afford to be like that. Lots of us have a few titles, many of us have dozens, some have hundreds. But we do not collect on an industrial scale. We find our books ourselves, one by one. We find them in jumble sales and charity stores and little local auctions. We find them in tucked-away corners of second-hand book shops and we are tickled pink if we find something exceptional.
That, anyway, is how it is for me. I found an exceptional book, once.
NO SPORT has a finer literature than angling and no sport’s great works are more avidly sought.
The market in second-hand and antiquarian angling books is immense and world-wide. Some dealers handle little or nothing else, their catalogues offering hundreds of titles and thousands of volumes. There are periodic auctions in London, New York, Paris and elsewhere. Prices regularly reach four figures, sometimes five depending, naturally, on an individual book’s significance, rarity and condition.
In a small way, I dabble myself. I am not on the London–New York–Paris circuit. Like lots of others, I am at the ‘tenner, go-on-then, twenty’ end of the market. My haunts are second-hand book shops, ideally tucked away and dimly lit: the kinds of places where time stops and all sound fades; cocooned places where the world resolves to spines and titles, dates and editions; to the whisper of turned pages and the occasional creak from a bare floorboard in the room overhead.
Everyone in such shops is hunting a bargain as he or she defines it, the angling collector’s equivalent of landing a whopper. I have landed one or two – only one or two – myself. One of them was a seemingly ordinary reprint of Sir Edward Grey’s classic Fly-Fishing. It is set to stand as prominently on my shelves