There are more than two acres of water and three places to fish. The
main lake (tough, large); the willow, smaller, oval and deeper than the main
lake, fed at one end by the Eden and, finally, the upper and lower cascades – a
slow moving stream, decorated by giant gunnnera plants (prickly strangers which
look spookily prehistoric) with a waterfall at mid-length.
I’ve fished here a lot. I won’t say I learnt to fish here because I am only a tiny way along the journey. There are other people to talk to about fishing techniques and tactics, which is invaluable, and many times other fishermen and the guys who work here (Neal and Alan especially) have given me impromptu casting lessons.
The fishery is a good size. You can fish in the next peg to another person or you can find somewhere to be pretty much on your own, so that you can make your mistakes in private. Each piece of water has its own mood. On the upper cascade you can imagine that you have stalked through moorland to some wild, shaded upland river where wild brown trout are hiding. Short accurate casting here – lots of bushes to get snagged in.
On the willow, the experts can cast all the way across to the overhanging hawthorn bushes on the other side, which must be about eighty feet. On a good day I can get a little more than halfway. It’s not about casting, I tell myself (often). It’s about catching fish. There’s an underwater current and a run in the far corner, where the Eden invisibly enters the lake, carrying food. This can be the best spot. But it’s a really long cast to land your fly or lure in the optimum place.
On a bright but cold May morning with a slight breeze, it would be good to be there at eight. I almost never manage it. As usual, you drive down pretty, beech-dappled lanes and through a picture book village. The mill is in the middle of Hurst Green but pretty hard to find first time. There’s the usual hand-made sign and you drive down a long straight track. The first sight of the water catches your breath. In the distance, are the neat buildings where the wedding receptions are held.
Alan greets me. I start fishing, at his suggestion, on the main lake. I try my new intermediate (ie slightly sinking) line and a hare’s ear. Probably a poor combination. It doesn’t work. Is this going to be a blank day? I have blanked here a few times. Is the temperature too warm now?
I stroll to the willow, where, propitiously, a rod bent almost double is a sign of good catch being skillfully brought in. This guy has caught six fish, five of them on the last six casts! He’s fishing on a hare’s ear, which is probably, at this time of year, approximating to a May fly nymph.
I’ve noticed much more flies hatching in the last couple of weeks. This will intensify until the summer doldrums when the trout (which prefer cold water) just loll around sluggishly around in the August heat. I love this part of the summer. Nature is taking off like a rocket. Bright days alternate with dull ones. Is this the best time of year to fly fish? I don’t know because it’s my first year of doing it.
The modest, friendly guy is about to leave his peg, the one where he just caught five rainbow trout, in quick succession. No pressure. Fortunately my hare’s ear is on the line – tensioned against the little ring that fly rods have to hold your hook in place when you are walking along the bank. The fly I chose has a little turquoise flash on it, so it’s not exactly pukah. I’m inevitably going to fail, I tell myself. Our brief handover concluded, six-fish walks away. I try not to fumble, as I attempt to get onto the water quickly.
I’m casting about half-way across. There clearly is, or was, a school of fish there. You can’t see them. The water is often quite cloudy at Coltsford Mill, especially after rain. Second or third cast. Bang. A fantastic take on the hare’s ear, which I am retrieving (pulling back through the water) at moderate speed.
This is why fishermen and fisherwomen fish – this addictive, exhilarating moment. A two to three pound trout is a frisky, zipping firecracker that will strain a smallish rod to the point that you think that it will almost snap in half (carbon fibre is an amazing material). The fish darts around, running out of options. I’ve almost got this now. I bring the trout onto the bank without looking like a complete arse. I look at my watch. It's 10.30.
Yes, these are stocked fish – fed with pellets to grow quickly and reared solely to be caught, in an aquatic version of Hunger Games. But matching the right food to the right fish at the right time is not straightforward. Even here. It’s a mixture of science, art and (dare I say) instinct. Even experienced fisherfolk can spend hours and hours flopping their fly lines onto the water with no result.
Times like this when the fish gods are smiling are golden. As usual, I put the dispatched trout into the carrier bag that my lunch was in. Whatever happens, there’s one in the bag. Feeling jubilant, I text a friend the good news. This is not a good idea (see later).
Here we go again. Same fly, same spot, same technique. You just know when your retrieve is good and the line is sitting well in the water. Sometimes, you have a sixth sense that you are going to get a knock. The next take, in almost exactly the same spot, is explosive, like a miniature cruise missile.
Flipping heck. Doesn’t mean it’s a bigger fish. Just frisky. At one point, the hooked fish actually leaps out of the water in a spectacular flash of silver. At that precise moment, my phone bleeps and vibrates, indicating an incoming text. Also at that moment, just at the apex of its improbable leap, the fish drops off the hook! Shit! How did that happen? It seems to defy physics.
I am deflated. I don’t think it happened because the phone went off. That was a coincidence. But incoming message coinciding with the loss of the fish seems like hubris. I feel like a pillock as I reel in the empty line. I can sense, and it happens, that I am going into a dry spell now, especially as news of six-fish’s remarkable achievement has spread across the fishery, as if by jungle telegraph.
Fishermen are flocking to the willows from the four corners of Coltsford Mill, like pilgrims converging on a place of worship. Soon, lines are dropping onto the water all around me. Right, the fish say, we’re off. The guy next to me does land a couple of rainbows in the next hour but the feeding frenzy is definitely over. Is that it? It’s almost midday. I can’t go home yet. But a change of spot is called for. It’s hard to leave a place where you have been successful, even when it has gone dry.
I love the cascades. I love them for the gunnera bushes. They were cut
almost to the ground a month ago and now they are back, just as massive and
spiky as ever! I love the fact that the water changes every few feet. There are
spots between trees where trout often shoal, waiting for food to drop onto the
water. You can feel a private, elemental stillness. Often you can detect, with tiny
tentative bites that you feel as much as see, that the fish are
following your hook through the water. They will take the bait just before
you lift the line for the next cast, guaranteed. The daddy (a weird
lure with floppy rubber legs, like a crane fly) can work well here. It doesn’t today. An
unproductive spell seems to have fallen over the fishery. Except that someone,
somewhere, will be doing exactly the right thing and there’ll be a couple of fat
silver fish on the bank beside them.
I chat to a lad who is strolling along from the lower cascades, where
the stream widens to about thirty feet and you can cast further. Has he
caught anything? Yeh, two. What are you using? He shows me his white and green
lure. It’s cat’s whisker. I have some of those in my fly box. The cat’s whisker is a
modern invention. Purists and people who fish Hampshire chalk streams, where
strict protocols must be observed, view them with disdain. The cat’s whisker
(like the woolly bugger or the black and green viva, named, allegedly, after
the Vauxhall Viva) looks like a tiny fish, not a fly, a pupae or a nymph. It does
not even look like a specific fish. Just a fish.
Trout are opportunistic carnivores and, like most wild creatures on God’s earth, they are permanently hungry. Using the cat’s whisker (or the infamous blob, or booby) may not be cricket but non-purist fisherfolk, who do not follow tennis club-style rules, take a pragmatic view – if it works, use it!
I choose another spot where you can cast about twenty feet and retrieve between two trees on either side of the bank. Within a few casts, I’m getting small takes, always near the end of the retrieve. The whisker is working its magic. Obvious really.
I need to make up for the leaping silver specimen that I lost earlier. I flick the line onto patch of troubled water just beyond the trees. I start to pull it back in sharply, attempting to imitate a small fish trying not to be eaten by a bigger fish. This is the bite zone …. Kappow! Game on.
The cascades are an exhilarating place to fish because of the mixture of quietness and kinetic energy. My leader (the short almost invisible line at the end of the floating line) has reduced to about three feet thanks to frequent changes of fly. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Nor does the commotion of a fish being caught. I am on a roll.
The gods are smiling again and I know that I’m probably going to catch another one. I do. It’s the biggest of the day. Now there is a wind knot in my leader, making a weak point where it will easily break. I don’t have any more of the fine but strong line. My arms are aching. Time to stop. I do a selfie with my camera next to a gunnera and I ask the lad who I spoke to earlier to take a picture of me with three fish on the bank.
The picture is cheesy, possibly a bit gory. I have never done a bank shot before. I don’t want to appear like some sadistic trophy hunter or the pale, flaccid guy on the cover of Carp Weekly, who looks like the thing that he has just caught! Is it ghoulish? Well, they are fish, I tell myself, like you see in Waitrose, eviscerated and neatly wrapped in Cellophane. But I caught them.
Do my friends think that I am a freak? I have no idea why, at my time of life (50s) I have been siezed by a almost compulsive urge to do this – to learn a complicated set of skills so that I can catch fish.
I’ve started to think about fly fishing a lot. Probably too much.
On my way home, I buy a trout smoker from a handy little shop in Beckenham. It works with sawdust and a methylated spirits burner. It’s expensive but a really nice piece of kit. The instructions are peculiar and incomprehensible. So I turn to YouTube for elucidation, like you do. There is always a nerd with a streak of narcissism who has been on the same journey as you and who now wants to share his success. It’s always a man, never a woman.
I’ve become quite good a gutting fish. I can now slice the inedible bits off a trout, without my kitchen looking like a scene from the Silence of the Lambs. Soon, an evocative aroma of woodsmoke is drifting across my back yard. After a few false starts, the smoker works a treat. The fish are improbably seasoned with salt and soft brown sugar (thanks YouTube). I enjoy a pleasurable, reflective moment in my suburban garden as the sun goes down. I went out. I caught something. I lit a fire. I ate it. Sorted.
On my first trip to Coltsford Mill when catching a trout seemed like a really big deal (it still is) I wrote a poem about it. It's a sonnet.
The battle of the mill pond
Armour-plated, living in shadow
you were the monarch of Coltsford Mill
cruising with your shoal of minnows
you were friend to the mayfly and swallow.
Made of cartilage and muscle
you guided your tiny retinue
through their lonely kingdom of mud –
the true lord of hazel and willow.
Testing your royal blood and sinew
you flashed to air like a silver lance
in the last battle that you fought.
The wedding guests glimpsed you.
They admired your aqueous existence
until the day that you were caught.
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