Nowt so Queer as Fish

[Chris Plumb]

No not an article about Gay Trout but Brian Clarke's monthly installment from The Times...

 

Enjoy!

 

Chris

 

 

 

 

November 03, 2003

 

When there’s nowt so queer as fish

By Brian Clarke

 

 

 

THE trout season just ended found me fishing an idyllic, spring-fed lake with an experienced, flyfishing pal. The lake was that rarest of waters, the home of a long-established population of large, wild fish.The sun was up. Not a breath of air disturbed the surface. The water was as clear as gin in a glass. Every frond of the lush weed, every stone and piece of marl on the bottom, could be seen as if picked clean with a scalpel. We saw hints and winks of fish, the occasional slow-oiling rise. Conditions were perfect for delicate, long-leader nymph fishing.

We had a quiet morning but, with our host on the oars, an extraordinary afternoon. Quite simply, the fish went barmy: wonderful trout of between 1lb and 5lb snatching the flies, running away with the lines, wrenching down the rod-tops, one after another. We stopped counting, but by the time things went quiet around 6pm we must have netted and released around 30.

 

Yes, I know it wasn’t politically correct. Yes, I know the done thing would have been to stop after half a dozen apiece. Yes, I know the mullahs and ayatollahs will be demanding our heads and wanting to know what kind of angler could want to catch as many as that. Well, that day, I’m afraid, my pal and I did.

 

We both recognised the experience for what it was: a one-off, a day to be set in the scales against all the blanks and the singles and the losses and the break-offs and the soakings and angling’s myriad other frustrations. We exulted in our good fortune and went on enjoying it as long as it lasted, chortling like schoolboys. Later, our host looked back through the books. Our bag was a record for the water, which had been in his family’s hands for generations.

 

Which was all very nice. I mention it, however, for another reason. The next day the owner, tethered to the oars and the landing net during his time with us, returned to the water with another friend, naturally hoping for more of the same. And what did the two of them get? Zilch: a blank, under apparently identical conditions, for two anglers, one of whom knew the water, the lies and the fish better than any other alive.

 

I cannot explain either day. Certainly our catch was not the product of extraordinary skill: on that water, on any given day, I’d put the chances of a competent flyfisher with a lifetime’s experience of the place ahead of anyone dipping in and out. Certainly it was not that we had caught or alarmed all the fish because the lake was large enough for us to have left much of the water untouched. Perhaps there had been some subtle change in conditions. But who knows?

 

A Yorkshireman I knew would have responded in the way he responded to any angling imponderable: “Aye, there’s nowt so queer as fish.” And then, in self-parody: “And they can get a lot more queerer than that, tha knows.”

 

I’d found out just how much “more queerer” early on. The first trout I caught on a fly came off Lough Sheelin, in the Irish Republic, and it weighed 3lb 7oz. It was an extraordinary first fish for anyone to catch, a blind fluke. The next day my companion took his own first trout. A driving wind and torrential rain made casting almost impossible. The boat was pitching and rolling on huge waves. His fish snatched his fly when the wind made spaghetti of his line and blasted it on to the water behind him. It weighed 4lb exactly.

 

Bizarre things have happened many times since. In the early 1980s I was fishing Rutland Water from a boat. It was a baking day. The sun blazed. The fish must have been poaching in their own juices. My companion and I saw nothing, caught nothing and anticipated nothing. Eventually we moored up in a bay for lunch. In desultory mid-conversation, I lobbed the crust from a sandwich overboard. At once a back broke the surface and in a single, porpoising roll a vast brown trout took down the bread, leaving only a series of rings ebbing on the flat-calm surface. It was the only fish we saw all day.

 

There is another boating scenario that crops up time after time when two anglers of equal skill are out together. Trout will take one angler’s fly relentlessly while leaving the other, fished just feet away, untouched. After a while the successful angler will bite off his apparently infallible fly and offer it to his frustrated companion — but go on catching with something different while still his partner catches nothing. They end up swapping places in the boat to see if that makes any difference, but it doesn’t. The next day the situation is repeated — or completely reversed — for no apparent reason.

 

The most extreme variation on this theme happened last month to another pal. He caught trout after trout, his companion, nothing. Eventually, they got to the seat-swapping stage. No sooner was he in the seat his companion had just left than a trout leapt clean out of the water at his end of the boat and landed flapping at his feet.

 

Do I believe it? Yes, I do. Anyone who spends as much time on the water as a keen angler sees lots of unusual things, some of them extraordinary, a few scarcely credible.

 

It all puts the behaviour of the fish on that wild-trout lake into perspective. Thirty giving themselves up to newcomers one day and none succumbing to the local expert the next? A four-pounder snatching a fly when it touches the water on the back cast? A lone sandwich-chomper? Yes, even a fish leaping into the boat at one end to rub in the salt for the chap at the other? Why, of course. There’s nowt so queer as fish, tha knows. And they can get a lot more queerer than that.

 

 

Brian Clarke’s column appears on the first Monday of each month.

[Paul_D]

Very true that Chris, you can laugh, you can cry but it's what the memories are made of. Besides, the successfull angler buys the beers in the pub afterwards. Thanks for the read Chris, only just got around to it.