CHAPTER V

SPECIAL CONDITIONS AND WET-FLY SOLUTIONS

NERVES.

Years ago, long ere the spirit of revolt was in me, when I followed as closely as I knew how the maxims of the apostles of the dry fly, and knew no other method for chalk streams, I suffered many blank days and much depression from a state of weather and light which must be familiar to all chalk-stream anglers—the more particularly because the “d——d good-natured” and sympathetic friend who knows nothing of the subject picks it out to say knowingly: “What a beautiful day for fishing!” It is clouded, dull, leaden, overhung, and the reflected light on the water is a dead milk-and-watery white; while, looking down into its depths, one sees everything with a deadly and crystalline clearness. There is no hint of thunder about, but on such days the trout are all nerves. Never are they so difficult to approach, never are they so ready to dart off with that torpedo wave. And if one finds a rising fish, and puts a dry fly over him, even if he bolts not, he rises no more.

But at length there came a day when my first timid experiments in the fishing of chalk streams with the wet fly had proved encouraging enough to lead to my having a small stock of wet-fly patterns for chalk-stream fishing. It was a bad sample of those days when the nerves of trout seemed all on the jump, and I had fished from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. without so much as a rise. It was not that the fish were not rising. On the contrary, they rose very well—not very much, perhaps, but the best days are often those when the rise is moderate. But this day every fish I cast to went down at once, and too often I saw that detestable torpedo wave, sometimes at the approach, and more frequently at the first cast.

Soon after three I tied on a Tup’s Indispensable dressed on gut, and crawled carefully to within a long cast of a trout which rose at infrequent intervals in a narrow side-stream under the opposite side. My line trailed on the water as I approached, and I made the minimum of effort to dry the fly ere I delivered it, so as to attract as little attention as possible to my movements. So it came about that the fly, when it lit a yard or more to the left of and above the trout—it was a bad cast as regards direction—went immediately under. For the _n_th time that day I saw that torpedo wave as the fish darted through the shallow water. I rose with a sigh, but as I did so my rod was a hoop, and the reel screeched; for the trout’s dart had been _at_ the fly, not from it, and it had gone a full yard or more to fetch it. He was just short of one and three-quarter pounds. Before four o’clock I had another brace by the same method. They were not easy, and I did not get every fish I tried, or even many; but I got some where with the dry fly I should assuredly have gone on getting none, and the trout stood to be cast to in a way they would not that day to the dry fly.

It is true enough that there are days and times when the dry fly will beat the wet fly hollow, but there are days when the converse is the case, and from subsequent experience I can recommend the trial of the wet fly on those dull, nervy days of milk-and-watery glare.

OF THE TROUT OF GLASSY GLIDES.

There are places on most rivers where the water comes swiftly and in solid volume down a slope too slight in the incline to create a fall, too short to create a rapid or stickle, and too smooth to cause a broken surface, yet with a rapid run below. The result is a glassy glide, gin-clear, with an air of unusual smoothness, and such a pace that there is an immediate drag upon any floating fly which is laid upon the current. Often some of the handsomest and best fighting trout in the river are to be found in such places, where their blood is constantly refreshed by the highly oxygenated water, their health and energy kept up to the mark by the need of contending against its swiftness, and the inducement to so contend is present in the plentiful supply of food brought down by the current.

Such a glide do I know well, with some excellent fish always showing there, but never breaking the surface; and for years I found them impregnable, for the simple reason that, if one pitched a fly over their noses, it was past them before they could rise to it, and if one pitched it up enough to give the fish a chance to take it they wouldn’t, because there was a prompt and streaky drag if the line were, as it could hardly help being, the least little bit across stream. Even the natural fly would sail over them unmolested.

But one day some years back, on a calm afternoon in July, with not a trout rising, I was on the Itchen, and I had crawled up some half-mile of sedgy bank in search of a feeding fish without finding one. But on the far side, in front of a certain post, the remnant of a one-time fence, I knew from experience that there was usually a fish—at any rate at feeding-time. There was nothing to suggest any particular dry fly, and on the previous afternoon—a Sunday—I had spent a pleasant twenty minutes watching a fish in front of the stump taking something under water with a sort of porpoise roll. It therefore occurred to me to put up one of those little Greenwell’s Glories, dressed by Forrest of Kelso on pairs of No. 00 hooks to gut, with which the name of Mr. Ewen M. Tod is associated. I had bought them in the previous spring to experiment upon bulging trout. These flies are known as “doubles,” and are not ready floaters. One puts a thumb-nail between the barb, and forces them apart till the two hooks form an angle of 45 degrees with each other. The fly dropped a yard above the post and sank. When it should have been nearing the post, a faint swirl rising to the surface seemed a sufficient indication of a movement below to justify a raising of the rod-point, and the fish was fast. In this manner it came about that a small Greenwell’s Glory on double hooks terminated the cast when the glassy glide above adverted to was reached. A trout lay out in it in position to feed, but though he moved a little from side to side, and may have been intercepting food, he made no rise. Keeping well out of sight, I dropped the Glory on the far side of and in front of the fish, and it at once went under. Again came the small disturbance welling quickly to the surface; up went my hand, and again a good trout was fast.

That afternoon I killed two and a half brace of good fish with the wet fly fished into likely places without seeing a single rise. The other three fish—but that is another story.

Since that day I have killed many a good fish in that hitherto impossible spot, and one morning in July, 1908, I had two and a half brace in less than an hour with a wet double Tup’s Indispensable out of it.

OF THE WET FLY IN POOLS, BAYS, AND EDDIES.

There is probably no problem which has filled the souls of so many dry-fly anglers with the despair attending defeat as that presented by a day when a cross-stream wind, whether up and across, down and across, or straight across, drives every dun under the opposite bank, and into little pools and eddies between the prominences on that bank, and so out of the line of the current which would otherwise carry them along. Then every big trout in the river seems to shift out of the current and into the sheltered bay or eddy, and there he sets to work collecting with busy neb the little argosies which have lost their tide, and are drifting helpless on slack water. It seems so easy to drop the fly in the right place. So it is, but if, as is many times more than probable, your cruiser is away a foot or two, or is deliberate in his movements, and does not take the fly at once, your drag has made itself painfully evident, and your fish is down for half an hour. No, on those occasions the only chance with the dry fly is to hit your fish with it on the tip of the nose at a moment when few naturals are about. Then he may snap it—but what a number of chances against its so falling!

No, here is a case in which the wet fly is clearly predicated, and it should be so dressed as to go under without the least hesitation. The advantage which the wet fly has is not that the trout is taking the nymph in preference to the floating dun, though he is probably doing that far more than is apparent, but that, whereas a drag on the surface is fatal and betrays the gut, an under-water drag is not betraying, and the movement of the fly caused by the drag may, in its beginning at any rate, be even attractive to the trout, as imparting motion suggesting life and volition to an otherwise suspicious object. The drag also serves to tighten instead of slackening the line, so that a very small strike fixes the hook.

When the trout takes a wet fly in such a position, the surface indications are by no means obvious; but if the angler be on the alert to strike when such indications come, it is wonderful how soon he can pick up the knack, and what excellent fish this method brings him. A strike which does not touch the fish, being in the nature of an under-water drawing of the fly, will often have no scaring effect upon a feeding fish, where a strike with a floating fly would send him headlong to cover.

It is difficult to pick among my recollections one instance more illustrative than another of the value of this method, but I will take an afternoon in July, 1908. It was a cold day for the time of year, with a keen north-westerly wind across and a little down. A few little pale duns were going down, being beaten by the wind into and among the bays along the opposite bank, where they dodged in and out among the flags. Three trout, and three only, could I find moving, and they were taking every dun which went over them. I tried Little Marryat, Medium Olive, Flight’s Fancy, Ginger Quill, and Red Quill, in vain. In fact I put all three down. But they meant feeding, and were soon going again. It was the last day of a seven-day visit. I had so far forty-six trout, and I wanted to round off the fifty. I put up as an experiment a tiny dotterel hackle, tied with primrose tying silk in the true Stewart style, not with the fibres radiating from the head, but palmer-wise for halfway down the body. The trout had it at the very first offer, and was duly landed. I went on to the next, and got him almost immediately. The third, for some reason, had no use for Dotterel duns, but the moment I covered him with a Tup’s Indispensable he slashed it, and joined the other two in my creel. I looked in vain for a fourth, and there was no evening rise, so I had to leave off with but forty-nine of my fifty. But for the wet fly, I am convinced I should have had to content myself with the single brace which the morning rise had brought me, and that would have been a disappointing ending to a good seven days.

OF THE JUDICIOUS USE OF THE MOON.

Though blinder than the proverbial bat in any slanting light, and therefore not as fortunate as I should like to be in fishing the evening rise, and though academically of opinion that fishing should cease when the dusk no longer lets the angler discern his fly, I confess to being at least as unwilling as any better endowed with sight to leave the water-side while the trout are still busy sucking down the spinners; but there are occasions when, if the moon be up enough to cast black shadows under the banks, and I can find the suitable spot with rising fish, I envy no man his superior eyesight—mine is good enough. Let me illustrate my meaning by describing the occasion on which I made my little discovery.

It was an evening in July. I had not begun fishing before four o’clock, and the afternoon had only earned me a single trout, and he no great shakes, either. The evening rise came on, and the trout began to feed briskly; but my infirmity was against me, and I missed or misjudged several rises, and it began to look as if I were going to make nothing of my opportunity, when I came to a bend where the current swung in pitch-black shadow under the opposite bank, while between the near edge of the shadow and my bank the stream ran molten moonlight. Round the bend in the dark I could hear the trout feeding away gaily, and the rings of their rises surged into the silver of the lighted current.

It seemed a mad thing to do, but I despatched my Tup’s Indispensable to a spot in the dark as near as I could judge above the ring of a good fish. My cast lay like a hair on the surface, stretching into the dark, not too taut. Suddenly I saw my gut draw straight upon the current, the farther end disappearing under the sheen of the moonlight, and, without waiting to think, I raised my rod-point, to find myself in battle with a solid fish. Thrice in the twenty minutes the rise lasted did I repeat this experience. Each trout was soundly hooked, and a nice level lot they were, running from one and a quarter to one and a half pounds. Thus was success at the last moment pulled by a fluke out of almost certain defeat. It is not always possible to find place and light serving in this way, but if you do, make use of the moon.

THE WET-FLY OIL TIP.

In my observations upon the judicious use of the moon, I indicated the advantage to be derived, in cases where the light prevented the rise from being otherwise detected in due time, from watching the gut cast as a float signalling the taking of the fly. Indeed, it is not only by night that the cast may be watched with advantage, but often by day when casting a fly, wet or dry, but especially wet, into a bad light, while the cast or part of it may be seen floating on a glassy piece of water. It is now some years since, in the columns of the _Fishing Gazette_, I called attention to what I described as the “wet-fly oil tip” in this connection. I take no credit for this invention. It belongs entirely to Mr. C. A. M. Skues, the secretary of the Fly-fishers’ Club, and its discovery came about in this way:

We were fishing opposite banks of a German trout stream, the Erlaubnitz, and the day rise of fly was over. The trout, which had been hovering over their pockets in the weeds and in the runs between them, had dropped out of sight, and it was obvious that it would need something to attract them more noticeable than the pale watery duns which were the staple of the season. We agreed upon Soldier Palmers tied with bright scarlet seal’s fur. Presently the far bank began catching them, though he was fishing upstream wet in rather fast water. I hailed him, and he said he had paraffined his gut cast to within the last two links from the fly and watched his cast. I was not above a hint, and in a minute or two I was experiencing the benefit of the wet-fly oil tip, and we were kept busy till six o’clock brought on the usual rise of Little Pale Blue of Autumn, and a change to floating patterns. It also involved a change of cast, for a cross-stream cast with oiled gut betrays you with a vile drag. It is a disadvantage of paraffining your gut that it limits you to one cast—viz., that directly upstream. But there are times when it is well to accept the limitation.

OF GENERALSHIP AND THE WET FLY.

There is a bend on Itchen where the water runs deep and black. Over the best of it hang three large trees, under which, if trout be rising anywhere on the river, they will be found pegging away, and often when they are moving nowhere else. The place is near the spot where anglers foregather for lunch and a pull at pipe or flask; so the fish under these trees are hammered more than a little, and their knowledge is in direct proportion to their experience. Here, too, anglers usually take apart their split canes in the evening, and, ere they do so, have one last chuck in the dusk with Sedge, Coachman, or large Red Quill at one or all of these rising trout, but it is the rarest thing for one to be caught. I have caught six of them in fifteen years. Perhaps it is because to cover them one must fish straight across from the opposite bank—no other attack is possible—and they can hardly fail to see rod and angler.

But it fell about in the year of grace 1909 that my lawful occasions took me along the right bank, on which the trees grew, past the haunt of these aggravating risers, and I took the occasion to observe. None of them were moving at the time, and the water was lower by some inches than the normal. I looked in the place where the best of the risers was usually present when attending to business, but he was not there. Four or five yards farther upstream the bottom, from being shallow, dipped suddenly to the deep, with a sharp brown earthy edge, and there, lying in shelter from the current under the earthy ledge at the head of the hole, lay a trout which I put down at a comforting two pounds. He saw me, and slithered into his fastness, but I did not forget the hint. Many times had I cast to that trout when rising, but always under a tree some yards below. Now I would cast to him when not rising, and I would fish him in his hide. The lowest of a small cohort of ribbon-weeds craning their tips gently over the surface indicated the neighbourhood of the lip of the hole, and, scanning the opposite side carefully, I marked the exact bunch of yellow flower from behind which I ought to deliver my cast, and marked on the hither bank a bunch of purple hemlock which indicated the centre of the hole.

Later in the day from the opposite bank I sent over a wet Tup’s Indispensable to the weed’s edge several times without avail.

The next time I came down the fish was rising to surface food, and I left him severely alone. My time was to be when he was not rising, for no trout seems able to resist a nymph at any time, even if not feeding, and a nymph of sorts he should have. Coming back later, I found stillness reigning; so, mounting a Tup’s Indispensable, I soaked it well, and flicked it over to the edge of the weeds. It lit, and went under, leaving the gut for the most part along the surface. The gut drifted down, the fly end slowly slipping under the upper film. The fly was withdrawn and the cast repeated. Once more the gut lay along the surface; once more it slipped slowly through to a point; then it seemed to move under with a certain decision. I raised my rod-point with a drawing action, and the trout which had defied ten thousand dry flies was on. He wasn’t quite two pounds, but it doesn’t matter. It was generalship which got him, which discerned that in his holt he was possibly accessible to the seductions of the casual nymph-suggesting wet fly in a way in which he was not accessible to the temptations of the too well known dry fly in the place of vantage where he daily fed.

A POTTED TROUT, AND ONE OTHER.

When the drowners are out in the water-meadows flushing the ditches till they flood the tables and drench the grasses with water seeking its way back through the herbage to the river by way of ditch, drain, and carrier, the wise old trout who know their business may be found in narrow ditches and channels down to foot-wide runnels in search of the earthworm and the miscellaneous pickings of the grasslands. Again, when July comes round, and the season of minnowing is indicated, the big trout once more make their way, in search of minnows, into the narrower irrigation channels of the water-meadows. So ardent are they at times in pursuit of their quarry that on occasion it is possible to net them out without their becoming aware of their danger.

On one occasion I got three good trout thus from behind at one scoop of the landing-net, and turned them back into the main.

Often, if they get into a channel with a constant flow and a steady food-supply, trout will not care to drop back to the river, and will take up a position of strength, where, inaccessible to the fly of the angler, they daily increase in size and lustihood. Such potted fish are almost entirely subaqueous feeders, a floating dun rarely crossing their field of vision. They grow dark and copper-coloured, and very unlike the fish of the river from which they hail.

One such fish do I remember, who took up his holt in the eddy just above a hatch-hole, through which ran the whole of a brisk stream some two to two and a half feet wide, turning at right angles to do so, after impinging on his eddy as on a sort of water-buffer. It was not hard to approach the place without being seen, but the moment one looked over the edge his troutship would flash down through the hatch-hole and into the racing stream beneath. Several times I mounted a Sedge, tied on a No. 2 hook attached to a strong cast, and dibbed cautiously over the edge. Once I caught a companion trout of one pound five ounces, but on all other occasions the attempt was fruitless.

Tired at length of these failures, and not pleased that such a trout as our friend of the hatch-hole eddy should give no sport to the fly, one afternoon I approached the hatch-hole from below, slid down my wide and large landing-net into the thrust of the stream, and looked suddenly over into the eddy. There was a brown flash to the hole, and next moment the trout was kicking in the net—black hogback with red copper sides and gleaming white belly, two and a half pounds, and as fat as a pig. Swiftly I conveyed him the needful fifty yards or so to a side-stream some ten or twelve yards wide, and turned him carefully loose. He made no pretence of being scared, but moved leisurely away across and up stream. I watched him cross a patch of weeds and enter a gravelled clearing, where a tidy trout lay, butt him out of it, and establish himself in his place. In a few moments he moved up into the next place, butted out the brace of trout which occupied it, and took the position of vantage. He did not remain long, but moved to the next pool, again ejecting the occupants.

Still dissatisfied, he moved higher up to where the stream was narrowed by camp-sheathing to support a low wooden bridge over which carts pass to carry the meadow hay. Here he ejected the three or four occupants, and established himself finally, with his neb close up under the sill of the bridge—too close for a fly to be got in ahead of him—obviously with the key of the larder in his pocket; and here daily for the next five days of my stay I saw him firmly planted, but, though I plied him with Sedge, and Quill, and Tup’s Indispensable, wet fly and dry fly, I never got an offer or an indication of a desire to offer from him, nor did I ever see him break the surface, and I left him _in situ_ at the end of my visit.

During these five days, however, crossing from the smaller stream to the main, I saw a trout in a foot-wide runnel hovering with that quivering of the fins that indicates a willingness to feed. He was not a big fish—about one pound—but I thought it would be sport to try and cast to him and catch him in so narrow a channel, and I knelt down to deliver the fly. He saw me, however, and moved up. It was on my way ’cross meadow to the main, so I followed him till I came to the place where the runnel’s water-supply issued from a pipe which entered its head, at right angles to its course, from the centre of one of the tables. The flow from the pipe had worried out a corner hole, which was wide and deep enough to admit my whole landing-net and a bit over, and I dipped it in. I saw the amber gleam of my trout as he slashed by me and fled back down the runnel he had ascended, but wriggling in the net which I lifted was a bouncing fish, black, hogbacked, with copper sides and white belly, in first-rate fettle, and weighing better, at a guess, than one and a half pounds, evidently an old inhabitant of that corner. The main was but a few yards off, and I carefully turned in my captive.

Two days later I was fishing up the bank of the main in blazing sunshine, searching for a rising fish, but finding none, when my attention was attracted by a movement in the water close under my bank some ten or fifteen yards above the spot where I turned the trout in. I dropped my wet Greenwell’s Glory a foot or so from the spot, and, answering the draw of the floating gut signalling some under-water adhesion, I tightened on a nice fish, and after the usual preliminary exhibition of coyness, emphasized by sundry jumpings, I persuaded him to come ashore. The spring-balance said one pound ten ounces. Colour, size, and shape, were identical with the trout I had turned back two days before, and though, of course, I cannot prove it, I have no doubt he was the same.

Now, why did one of these potted trout take the fly, and the other refuse? This is my theory: Both had got the exclusive habit of subaqueous feeding, but the big one had his nose in a position where it was impossible to get a wet fly to him so as to pitch above him, or even alongside of his head, and the water was too fast for it to be worth the while of a fish of his calibre to turn and follow a mere nymph. The smaller fish was in a position to be covered, and the moment the nymph came to him under water he had it as a matter of course. Possibly, in the same position the larger trout might have done the same.

OF TWO SATURDAY AFTERNOONS.

They were consecutive. Both were in August, 1909, and the reason why they are recorded is not because of any remarkable success, but because they illustrate varying conditions on the same river, proving amenable to varying treatment.

The first found me by the water-side soon after two o’clock. The morning rise was completely over. Not even a grayling was rising. The water was deadly still. A full stream was running, because the hay-makers were in the meadows, and no water that could be kept out was being let into ditches and carriers; so it was no good exploring them for stray risers, as at other times I might have done. For some time I explored likely places under the sedges with floating flies—No. 1 Red Sedge with hare’s-ear body, Red Ant, and Tup’s Indispensable—but without eliciting the faintest response. Then about five o’clock I put up a wet Greenwell’s Glory, and cast it upstream, wet, into every little likely pool between the bank and the weed-bed which grew intermittently a yard or two out from the bank. The change was immediate. By six o’clock I had three and a half brace of average fish (biggest one pound ten ounces), all on the same fly. Fish would surge a yard or more to meet it, would even turn downstream and take it, though the floating fly had not moved a single one to offer. There was no evening rise.

The following Saturday I was down at the same time. There was the same faint westerly breeze, and much the same light. A few—very few—grayling were taking black gnats for a short time after my arrival, but they soon stopped entirely, and I had only one in my basket. Not a rise dimpled the surface. I continued, however, casting a Black Gnat under my own bank—the right—for some forty or fifty yards, without an offer. I had the mortification of seeing three handsome trout move out from position, and I was just about to change to a Hare’s Ear Sedge when I saw a grass-moth flutter out of the sedges and across the water. As luck would have it, I had four floating Grannom in my cap, and it didn’t take long to knot one on.

In a few minutes I was into a trout, which took as the fly lit. I landed him, and then another, and yet a further brace, every one of which took the Grannom without the least hesitation. Then I found myself trenching on the beat of another angler, and I bethought me that the three fish I had disturbed might be back in position; so I turned down, and, getting below them, cast carefully to where they ought to be. I whipped one fly off; then with the new fly I rose the first of them—quite a nice fish—hooked him, and lost him after a short tussle. Examining the hook, I found it pulled out nearly straight owing to a soft wire. Whether that rattled me or not I don’t know, but I left my two remaining Grannom in the other two fish successively. Having no more, I fell back on the Sedge in vain. Equally vain were Red Ant (dry) and Greenwell’s Glory and Tup’s Indispensable (wet), and, as there was no evening rise, I finished up with a basket of two and a half brace, which with better handling should have been four brace.

On each of these afternoons there was no rise of fish or fly; and on one nothing but a floating pattern did any good, on the other nothing but a sunk pattern.

The inference that I might have gone back blank on the first occasion but for the supplemental aid of the wet-fly method does not seem far-fetched.