Matching the Hatch

'Well, I'm back'. The closing words of Sam, having returned to the Shire at the end of Tolkien's epic. Simple words, and yet carrying so much weight with them, as the reader has journeyed 1300 emotional pages to hell and back again is his company. Unremarkable such words might be, were it not for this journey that we've been on. And with a similar feeling can it be said, 'well, we're back'.

I've laid low, not saying too much too publicly, only close confidence with those who might understand. Maybe that's an unfair slur, maybe folks are more sympathetic than I give credit for, yet fear of proof to the opposite perhaps being true holds me back. We've come a long way in the past few months and I'm sure that we've still a long way to go. It feels a mockery when grief is still all too real. Lost people, lost security, lost plans and insufficient experience of the like to process it all. It's less than two months till I was due to be married, the happiest day of your life so I hear. And yet now we can't quite be certain of where we will be in two weeks time. And yet, as I wrote about in the last post, angling and its wild places offer just the refuge, the escape to process, that I'm sure so many people need right now. And with that I bring this rambling introduction to a close: The return to fishing is a sweet thing and all the sweeter for the bitterness of late.

I've missed country lanes. Scooting along, half asleep, woken periodically by a patch of loose gravel or blind corner, driven through the gloaming half light of dawn by the thought of fish. Maybe they're already on the feed, maybe we've missed the tide? This early in the season such concerns are largely without merit, the fishing is rarely as dramatic as activity towards late summer. But such sessions early in the season prove a valuable learning experience, finding the marks that might prove fruitful later in the year without wasting that precious window. On this particular morning, Stuart and I planned to check out a headland new to both of us. Without any reliable information online, we were left to spend the first 45 minutes or so simply working out access routes to a rocky platform below. We're beaten back on many of our first attempts, the schist proving too snappy and steep, or small blobs of windswept grass crumbling away from their poor foundation of thin soil upon rock. Happily, an access route is eventually beaten, though requiring some slab traversing on thin pockets above deep water - less easy with a rod in hand.

'I think we have grown soft', Stuart concedes to my suggestion as, to my surprise, he's the first to buckle to sitting a little while out of the bite of the penetrating east wind. As suspected the fishing isn't easy, with just a couple of small pollock to myself and a foul hooked sandeel for Stuart (quite a remarkable catch really) but it's nice to catch up and be back on the exposed SW coastline. We traverse back as the tide rises, mindful not to lose our barnacle encrusted route to the lapping waves, giving a shallow bay a try for a wrasse. Happily, one such fellow obliges and gives my natural black minnow a smash as it was drawn perpendicular to a kelpy shelf. The donkey-like teeth of ballan wrasse generally make short work of such a soft bodied (and expensive!) lure, but this always seems to outperform other soft plastics in locating wrasse at a new mark. After a short scout around coast path for any more likely looking spots to check out next time, we call it a day and part ways. Or at least Stuart calls it a day, I've still got the whole afternoon on my hands...

Give us a kiss... incredible blue and green rubbery lips give way to crab crunching molars.

It's quite amazing how quickly litter can accumulate in my car: empty engine oil bottles, CD cases, half chopped leaders, custard cream packets. After a brief rummage, an OS map is located. Crunching down yet more custard cremes, I trace the blue veins of the rivers of South Devon, stretching upwards into the depths of Dartmoor. The lower reaches of these waters are prized, lorded over by gluttonous clubs asking ticket prices in excess of my budget to feed myself, let alone cast a line. One particular square of this map is located however where no such barrier is to be found, where the river is so narrow that it can be jumped in many spots and tangled branches reach across the whole way. I follow a hunch and make my way up there, it's kind of on the way back anyway I justify.

Little to my knowledge, it seems that everyone else has had the same idea. Pulling up towards the car park, I notice a lady sneer from her Range Rover at the occupied parking bays before skulking away. I manage to back my wearied campercar up onto a grass verge, making sure to keep the front wheels clear of loose gravel so as to allow my escape later. I soon realise that perhaps not everyone has had the same idea and start to get the distinct feeling of being a zoo animal, as families passing with picnic mats and tugging cries of children suggest a very different purpose for their being here, young children staring at my uncouth waders to their parents embarrassment. No matter, I'll keep off the busy highway of the footpath through my own path of the riverbed.

I stop for a moment to photograph a mayfly upon my wing mirror. The first I've seen this year and a sure sign of the season and with it the good things to come. Getting to the river, the clutter of buggie wheels are drowned out over the soft rumble of this clear, low river. A canopy of oak and sycamore filter the heat and brightness of the mid-afternoon sun, encapsulating a damp, dappled-green tunnel. Large mossy boulders offer cover from which to cast in the thin water, whilst long fallen trees bridge the stream and offer vantage points. Black gnats buzz and in thick clouds over the fast water at the heads of pockets, and a small black klinkhammer is tied on to try to best match. It might seem an absurdity to an onlooker to try to get inside the mind of a fish, the brain being perhaps the size of a pea at best and yet such is the central dogma of much of fly fishing. In fairness, behavioural ecology models do suggest that it can be energetically beneficial to an organism to lock on selectively to a small food item and ignore rare more calorific food items when such small items are encountered frequently enough, so forgoing a large (and less agonising to see!) mayfly in favour of a pathetic tiny black imitation does have some sense. The trout however disagree, as pool after pool is fished through without the usual suicidal approach of Dartmoor's diminutive brownies.

They're not always big in size but wild Dartmoor browns certainly lack nothing in character. 

Having fished through one particularly deep slot in the gorge, with only a half-hearted inspection by one unimpressed fish, I looked ahead to the next pool. A cursed golden retriever came bounding through into the shallows, followed by owners. Disappointment is hidden best as possible beneath beard, cap and polarised glasses, as the couple hold a phone aloft to take a picture of this real-life, wild, free-range adolescent fishing dirtbag, spooked trout skittering behind unbeknownst to them. I take a moment to sit and think, or more realistically sulk, this is quite a pleasant river but the fish really aren't having it. As I do so, a young child walks along the path above chattering happily to their mother about looking for tadpoles, bucket in hand. I crack-up into a smile, remembering being that very kid except I, unlike most, never seemed to grown up from seeking out the wild squishy beasties of the outdoors. Who knows, maybe this kid will grow up into an unwashed obsessive angler too.

But it sparked a moment of thought too. If you were to read much into the fly selection of lots of aesthetic traditional fly fishermen you might think that the humble brown trout has the weightwatcher's own slimming club diet, only picking at the dainty little insects that float. But if you look into the real diet of brown trout, particularly in nutrient-poor acidic rivers, bigger individuals need to be stomaching much more substantial items in order to hold any weight up, the biggest fish often even becoming cannibalistic. Here comes the potentially controversial bit: matching the hatch, a phrase often tied up in the aesthetic world of select dry flies, should then often lead you to try to imitate the fatter more nutritious items than just little midges or even (dare I say it) fishing mayfly patterns for the sake of tradition (I recently made an appearance of Fly Culture's podcast with Pete Tyjas, touching during that time on that very matter. It was an absolute blast and honour, and you can listen to it here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/402997).

Looking down into a shallow eddy, I spied those little black squirming figures that made up many a childhood escapade. Surely a tadpole must make a pretty nutritious and welcome meal for the desperate trout of Dartmoor? It certainly doesn't come with the awkward chitinous packaging that most arthropods that they're used to do. Nipping off my klinkhammer, I delve into my fly box for a likely imitation. Perhaps were it not for so many hours in the flat, sinking deeper into madness late at night and into the peeping hours of the new day, I might not have tied up some of the less orthodox patterns in there. I thank my moments of madness on this occasion, as I pick out a heavy tungsten weighted jig hook, dressed with black dubbing and a short black marabou tail. Perfect, as tadpole as tadpoles come. The pool here looks as though it reaches depths of perhaps 4-6 feet, though hard to tell in the crashing white water. Clambering above, it's possible to flick the fly into the churning undercurrent and hold it deep on merely the leader and a foot of fly line outside the tip of the rod.

Tadpoles and my little tadpole imitation.

The drift stops, flicking the tip upwards to free the fly of some snag, only to find the snag pulsating and throbbing in the strong current. It worked! In such a manner, a handful of otherwise elusive brownies are brought to hand, including a very nice fish for these parts of 10.5". Slipping the barbless hook from the upper lip, my fingers graze some sharp teeth. Such teeth surely can't be for sipping little insects and, save sexual selection, nature is rarely superfluous. Here's the noodle bending bit, was this capture an excellent exercise in matching the targeted food item, or merely exploiting the aggressive tendencies of trout towards an easy meal. Might it not equally be said though that to fish a dry over the water, even a mayfly, when the trout are not feeding on such is not matching the hatch but instead just inducing the aggression of trout towards surface food items?

That's like a real sized trout! Quite a specimen compared to Dartmoor's usual standard. 

I catch plenty more trout as the afternoon wears on, just shy of 30 and the majority on elk hair and CDC caddis in shallower glides. No caddis hatch was seen, but such a fly is buoyant and visible and thereby easy to fish when the trout aren't being too selective. Despite the usual esteem for dry fly fishing as being the 'proper, right and respectable' way of catching trout, those fish which came to my tadpole imitation were those which felt most rewarding. It sets the mind wandering, where there's a bunch of thumbnail sized froglets about in a few weeks, will the trout lock onto those too? What possible Frankenstein frog fly could imitate them? You can keep the mayfly, it's all about the tadpole hatch for me now...

Okay, I guess mayfly fishing is kinda cool too...