Sitting here stressed to the eye-teeth with the realisation that my passport has expired and I’m booked to travel to France in three days’ time when Ian’s most reasonable request for my thoughts and hopes for this season pops into my in-box.
I want to kill him. Or kick the dog. Or kick myself as there’s not really anyone else I can blame…
Last year I moved to Hay on Wye and found myself a little out of my comfort zone. The soft Londoner’s life of easy carp lakes by the dozen, commercials and HITG fisheries everywhere with every species available within an hour’s drive is a thing of the past. This is the Welsh border, an area where stillwaters are thin on the ground, where the river can flood with enough force to bring whole trees downstream, where the sight of a bloated corpse of a dead sheep passing through the swim is a common occurrence.
Well, it wouldn’t be a live sheep, would it?
So targets and aspirations must change. Barbel, chub and pike live here, as do big grayling and plenty of trout. All of which I’ve caught with reasonable success and I’m confident of continuing that. The big hope for me, however, is to catch a salmon on the fly.
Fans of Martin Bowler’s recent writings might assume from the lure-caught multiple catches on the lower river that this is an easy quest, and so it might be down there when everything is right – but I fish where the middle river turns into the upper river and things are much more difficult up here. The relatively few salmon which do manage to make it past the lower river are very well dispersed and a single fish a day from an entire eighty mile stretch of river is by no means a rare event. Some actually herald that catch rate as a major indicator of river recovery which only shows how hard the salmon population has been hit in recent decades.
So statistically this is a massive task but I am determined to crack it and I have had a few lessons on how to handle a two-handed salmon fly rod. This entails learning to Spey Cast, which is a bit of a challenge in itself. All in all, I’m back to being a novice again on an incredibly hard water, fishing for fish which may or may not be there at any given time, on a river which can, and does, rise ten feet overnight. If I can get just one salmon from this stretch this year it will be something to be rather proud of. I’ll need to do some chub and barbel fishing in the interim though, just so I don’t forget how to play a fish!
Now in France on holiday.
I eventually got my passport sorted, albeit at the cost of cancelling a dentist appointment, meaning I now look even more like an extra from the movie ‘Deliverance’ than I usually do. My French is a bit rusty from disuse and the lack of four front teeth makes even my English difficult to understand. People snigger when I speak, even more than usual! Humph…
I’m getting by drinking wine, eating cheese and slinking off to the local river with a fly rod, hammering the recently stocked rainbows and teaching a friend’s son how to do it and how to annoy the local French anglers… It’s great to see a young teenager who has just learned to cast outfishing the locals in full tackle-tart attire. Arf!
Geoff
