On Nature: Unexpected Ramblings on the British Countryside. Литагент HarperCollins USD

the worse it goes. There doesn’t seem any natural way out of this. Of course I need to TRY HARD TO GET ALL THIS BLOODY LINE OUT THERE. Thing is, with fly casting, you’re not really doing the work: the rod is. Trying harder, swishing it faster, grunting, getting in a fizz . . . it’s all a bit like flapping your arms to get the plane to take off.

      Casting a fly rod is all about timing, not strength or effort, and the harder you try the more you’ll lose the timing. Slow down. Chillax. The rod is a spring and you load it with the inertia of the fly line; it moves forward and stops and uncoils its energy down the line; you pull back and load it again, and so forth. Unless you’re loading and unloading the rod you’re not doing anything. So the best image I can leave you with is this: imagine you’ve got a brick on roller skates, attached to a thin string. You have to move the brick forwards and backwards. If you yank the string it will break, or maybe the brick will fall off the skates. If you go gently and get the timing right it will work just fine.

      Anyway, that was all on the toughened west coast: small brownies, four to the pound and hungry as hell. When I got a job teaching Art to school kids I moved to Dorset and fell inside chalk-stream country. Now the fishing was really tricky. Chalk streams rise from underground, feeding cool, clear and constant flows to lush valleys in which everything grows – fat trout and the fat flies them make them so – to an abundance. Chalk streams are the origin of dry-fly purism, the idea that educated trout develop OCD not only about which fly they’ll eat, but also about exactly which stage of the insects’ eclosion they will fixate on. And sometimes it really does work like this. It can be a fun puzzle to unlock when it does. Most of the time, though, these pampered trout are as catholic in their diet as any other. The fish you thought was taking only blue-winged olives will have beetles, caterpillars and gnats in its belly. What chalk-stream trout do have, though, is an enhanced sense of caution. All trout are cautious, constantly offsetting the need to eat against the desire not to get eaten. But the more there is to eat the higher trout set the barrier against being fooled, the keener their already acute awareness of what looks natural and what doesn’t. In fly fishing that known acuity on the part of the fish translates most often into this: an angler’s obsession with fly pattern. Wrongly. The wrong fly presented naturally will get eaten way, way, way more often than the right fly presented unnaturally. And natural presentation of the fly is all about understanding the currents.

      Back to Castlecove. The worm on the end of a short line has taught you to feel the river.

      But now the fly on the end of a longer line will feel, at first, like playing a guitar in gloves. Though we can impart some control to it, the fly line won’t move like the top of your rod did when you were learning how to fish with the worm. Once cast it lies more or less inert on the water, prey to whatever the flows are doing along its length. And that is unlikely to be the same as what the water is doing around the fly. The river might be moving slowly under the fly line, but quickly under the fly. Or the other way about. You’ve already felt how the river is a marbled conflict of currents. This conflict between the way the water pulls at the fly line and the fly is called drag: the way the fly is pulled, sometimes to an infinitesimal degree, so that it moves unnaturally on, or within, the water.

      Drag is everything in fly fishing. Drag is what stops most fish from taking your fly.

      Though I started to understand this in Castlecove, it’s taken me thirty years to truly get it. Every season scales fall from my eyes and I remember all over again. If you’re casting at a fish that just will not take the damn fly, though it keeps on rising and the pattern looks about right (I’ll get to what that means later), eight times out of ten it’s drag that is screwing you up. Even if you can’t see it . . . that’s what it is.

      It would be impossible to summarise how you deal with drag. It is in itself as infinitely various as the river that imparts it. Drag is one of the beauties of fly fishing. It isn’t an enemy, so much as one of the things that makes the whole business so compelling. Don’t resent it, but do be aware of it and know that no matter what other bullshit you’ll be told about flies needing red eyes, and blue testicles, grey wings and eight tails, or what you’ll feel compelled to believe about how a new fly-rod or line or reel will unlock the door to better fishing, it’s all nonsense in the face of drag. A chasing after the wind. Master drag, my son (or at least start to understand it) and you will truly be an angler. Fish a dragless fly off the end of a garden cane and you’ll catch more trout than King Croesus and all the techno garb that his gold would have bought him.