CHAPTER I

OF THE BEGINNING OF THINGS

OF THE INQUIRING MIND.

I read recently in that fine novel, “A Superfluous Woman,” a sentence enunciating a principle of wide application, to which anglers might with advantage give heed: “We ought not so much to name mistakes disaster as the common practice of servile imitation and faint-hearted acquiescence.” In no art are its practitioners more slavishly content “jurare in verba magistri” than in angling. Tradition and authority are so much, and individual observation and experiment so little.

There is, indeed, this excuse for the novice, that, going back to the authorities of the past after much experiment, he will find that they know in substance all, or practically all, that, apart from the advance of mechanical conveniences and entomological science, is known in the present day. The difficulty is to dissociate the dead knowledge, which is reading or imitation, from the live knowledge, which is experience. And if these pages have any purpose more than another, it is not to lay down the law or to dogmatize, but to urge brother anglers to keep an open and observant mind, to experiment, and to bring to their angling, not book knowledge, but the result of their own observation, trials, and experiments—failures as well as successes.

In all humility is this written, for I look back upon many years when it was my sole ambition to follow in the steps of the masters of chalk-stream angling, and to do what was laid down for me—that, and no other; and I look back with some shame at the slowness to take a hint from experience which has marked my angling career. It was in the year 1892, after some patient years of dry-fly practice, that I had my first experience of the efficacy of the wet fly on the Itchen. It was a September day, at once blazing and muggy. Black gnats were thick upon the water, and from 9.30 a.m. or so the trout were smutting freely.

In those days, with “Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice” at my fingers’ ends, I began with the prescription, “Pink Wickham on 00 hook,” followed it with “Silver Sedge on 00 hook, Red Quill on 00 hook, orange bumble, and furnace.” I also tried two or three varieties of smut, and I rang the changes more than once. My gut was gossamer, and, honestly, I don’t think I made more mistakes than usual; but three o’clock arrived, and my creel was still “clean,” when I came to a bend from which ran, through a hatch, a small current of water which fed a carrier. Against the grating which protected the hatch-hole was generally a large pile of weed, and to-day was no exception. Against it lay collected a film of scum, alive with black gnats, and among them I saw a single dark olive dun lying spent. I had seen no others of his kind during the day, but I knotted on a Dark Olive Quill on a single cipher hook, and laid siege to a trout which was smutting steadily in the next little bay. The fly was a shop-tied one, beautiful to look at when new, but as a floater it was no success. The hackle was a hen’s, and the dye only accentuated its natural inclination to sop up water. The oil tip had not yet arrived, and so it came about that, after the wetting it got in the first recovery, it no sooner lit on the water on the second cast than it went under. A moment later I became aware of a sort of crinkling little swirl in the water, ascending from the place where I conceived my fly might be. I was somewhat too quick in putting matters to the proof, and when my line came back to me there was no fly. I mounted another, and assailed the next fish, and to my delight exactly the same thing occurred, except that this time I did not strike too hard.

The trout’s belly contained a solid ball of black gnats, and not a dun of any sort. The same was the case with all the four brace more which I secured in the next hour or so by precisely the same methods. Yet each took the Dark Olive at once when offered under water, while all day the trout had been steadily refusing the recognized floating lures recommended by the highest authority. It was a lesson which ought to have set me thinking and experimenting, but it didn’t. I put by the experience for use on the next September smutting day, and I have never had quite such another, so close, so sweltering, with such store of smuts, and the trout taking them so steadily and so freely.

It was a September day two or three years later when I had another hint as pointed and definite as one could get from the hind-leg of a mule, but I didn’t take it. There was a cross-stream wind from the west, with a favour of north in it, and all the duns—and there were droves of them—drifted in little fleets close hugging the east bank, where the trout were lined up in force to deal with them, and feeding steadily. Fishing from the west bank, I stuck to four fish which I satisfied myself were good ones, and in over two hours’ fishing I never put them down. I tried over them all my repertoire. I battered them with Dark Olive Quill, Medium Olive Quill, Gold-ribbed Hare’s Ear, Red Quill (two varieties), Grey Quill and Blue Quill, Ogden’s Fancy, and Wickham, and I left them rising at the end with undiminished energy, and went and sat down and had my lunch. Then I sought another fish, and began again, when suddenly it occurred to me that I had not tried the old-fashioned mole’s-fur-bodied, snipe-winged Blue Dun. I had only a solitary specimen, and that was tied with a hen’s hackle; but such as it was, and greatly distrusting its floating powers, I tied it on. I did not err in my distrust, for after a cast or two it was hopelessly water-logged. I dried it as well as I could in my handkerchief, and despatched it once more on its mission. It went under almost as it lit, just above a capital trout, but for all that it was taken immediately. The next trout, and the next, and the next, took it with equal promptitude; one was small, and had to go back, but the others were quite nice average fish.

Then, in my eagerness, I was too hard on my gossamer gut when the next trout took my fly, and he kept it. I had no more of these Blue Duns, and I did not get another fish till the evening.

Still I did not realize that I was on the edge of an adventure, nor yet did I realize whither I was tending when Mr. F. M. Halford told me how a well known Yorkshire angler had been fishing with him on the Test, and, by means of a wet fly admirably fished without the slightest drag, had contrived to basket some trout on a difficult water.

Indeed, it was several years later that, after fluking upon a successful experience of the wet fly on a German river which in general was a distinctively dry-fly stream, I began to speculate seriously upon the possibility of a systematic use of the wet fly in aid of the dry fly upon chalk streams. In conversation with the late Mr. Godwin (held in affectionate remembrance by many members of the Fly-fishers’ Club, and, indeed, by all who knew him), who had seen the very beginnings of the dry fly on the Itchen, and remembered well and had practised the methods which preceded it, I learned how, fishing downstream with long and flexible rods (thirteen or fourteen feet long), and keeping the light hair reel-line off the water as much as possible, these early fathers of the craft had drifted their wet flies over the tails of weeds, where the trout lay in open gravel patches, and caught baskets of which the modern dry-fly man might well be proud.

I gathered, however, that a downstream ruffle of wind was a practical necessity; and as I could not pick my days, and such as I could take were few and far between, I realized that, even if they appealed to me—which they did not—these methods would not do for me, as I might, and often did, find the river glassy smooth, but that, if I were to succeed, it must be by a wet-fly modification of the dry-fly method of upstream casting to individual fish.

I could not believe that the habits of the trout were so changed as to make this impossible, and I began to look for opportunities to experiment. The bulging trout presented the most obvious case, yet it was rather by a chain of circumstance than by the straightforward reasoning which now seems so simple and obvious that I was led into experiments along this line.

How I effected some sort of solution of the problem with a variant of Green well’s Glory, and later on with Tup’s Indispensable, is detailed elsewhere, as also are my experiments with the trout of glassy glides (who seldom break the surface to take a winged insect, presumably because of the drag), together with other fumblings in the search of truth; but from that time forth I have seldom neglected an opportunity to test the wet fly on chalk-stream trout. It may be that on many occasions I have used the wet fly when the dry would have been more lucrative. On the other hand, I have found it furnish me with sport on occasions and in places when and where the dry fly offered no encouragement, nor any prospect of aught but casual and fluky success, and I have provided myself with a method which forms an admirable supplement to the dry fly, and has frequently given me a good basket in apparently hopeless conditions, and in the smoothest of water and the brightest of weather.