Reflections on Dace Angling
If you hanker after bigness, in a world hooked on the pursuit of bigness for the sake of bigness, then you would not have read this far. So welcome to you, Brother of the Angle! Dace are wild spirits of sharp flows and untamed waters, though they can often thrive in spite of society’s seeming best intentions to strangle our rivers.
The grayling is said to be the ‘coarse game fish’, a sometimes maligned though elegant salmonid species that is nevertheless covered by coarse fishing seasons due to its springtime spawning. It is then as surely true that the dace is the ‘game coarse fish’ so lithe is it in the flow, eager to take the fly, and sprightly in the fight. A gamer small bar of silver, as keen to take a bait under a blazing sun or a withering frost, is hard or impossible to find.
I don’t know any angler who does not like dace, although I know plenty who have forgotten that these little fish and the places that they inhabit can bring so much pleasure. In fishing for dace, the self-hooking rig has no place. One has instead to find them in the livelier flows that they favour, adapt one’s approach accordingly, be stealthy and subtle, and remain reactive as quicksilver if one wishes with any constancy to capture good dace by design. A fish then to hone the instincts of a true angler!
Though few writers have summed up succinctly what it is to dace fish, many have said wise words about fishing itself. Of simply being there, the oft-quoted Abyssinian inscription of 3,000 BC takes some beating,
“The Gods do not take away from a life the time one spends in fishing.”
Determining who is or who is not such a true angler is a task not for humankind. Rather, it is when the patrolling kingfisher, the strafing sparrowhawk, the bank-top fox, the ever-vigilant dabchick and the hawking dragonfly sense you merely as another facet of the bustling world of which they too are integral parts. Then, and only then, is one of the place and stillness that can be called ‘fisherman’, and perhaps your float top too will nod in quiet acquiescence.
Of the waiting, the wisdom of Richard Walker on the matter of angling patience – specifically the comment during his Desert Island Discs radio appearance that what the angler actually requires is controlled impatience – is recognised by many anglers. However, Arthur Ransome pre-empted this sentiment many years previously, stating nicely in his 1929 book Rod and Line that,
“What other people mistake for patience in anglers is really nothing of the sort but a capacity for prolonged eagerness, an unquenchable gusto in relishing an infinite series of exciting and promising moments, any one of which may yield a sudden crisis with its climax of triumph or disaster.”
Nevertheless, if dace did grow to large sizes, say 10-12lb, just imagine what fantastic sport they – or indeed ‘double figure’ bleak or minnows – would give us? We would have no need to lust after mahseer or comizo barbel in foreign climes, having our own freshwater torpedoes eagerly succumbing to fly, float, ledger or freeline, and probably to lures and live baits as well.
Dace are, however, a small species. We should think no lesser of them for that genetic reality; rather we should admire them all the more for their perfect adaptation of form to lifestyle.
Beauty is so often in the eye of the beholder, and many are the anglers who find beauty in the elegant dace. John Bailey evoked this wonderfully in his 1984 book In Visible Waters when speaking of a particular dace caught during a lingering sunset on a bitterly cold day on Norfolk’s River Nar,
“The birds were already in the barebone wood – everything else had burrowed in for a dire night – when I caught a dace. At that moment, it was the most obliging, beautiful thing I could ever have hoped to see. It was as silver as the stars, it twinkled as bright as the frost, and then as I held it in my hand and the sun’s last rays caught it, the scales turned to rose and flame. It was as beautiful and as worthy a fish as I have ever seen and one that would be impossible to re-create if ever lost.”
Of the Prince of the Stream, the sentiment expressed by Arthur P Bell in his 1930 book Fresh-water Fishing for the Beginner cannot be improved upon,
“A JOLLY little fish if ever there was one.”
This book is written for the jolly little angler that resides still in all of us!
Dace: The Prince of the Stream is published by Mpress and is available from Calm Productions at a price of £20 with signed editions available while stocks last. 25 leather bound editions have been produced. Presented in a slip case, this edition comes complete with a signed certificate of authenticity at £150.00 including p&p.
