16 April 2017 News/Editorial
So….. just as we think things will get better, they get worse.
In the 1960s, April fishing was plagued by non-taking salmon thanks to what we called “the tickles”, red spots all the way down a salmon’s white underside which made them skitter out of the water. Despite huge numbers of fish showing, you would catch almost nothing, until sometime at the end of April/early May, the red spots would heal and the fish would come on the take again.
Nowadays, it is more likely to be white spots on the nose and head, some of which might develop into fungus, with fatal consequences, but for the most, they just will not take for a week or so, until the warmer water heals the sores and the fish begin to feel better.
The lack of catches last week is a combination of these “river fish” not taking, and a lack of fresh fish coming in from the sea.
One can only hope that both will not last.
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The Easter holidays, and those lovely long late spring/early summer evenings, are with us, payback for the gloom and lack of light of the last six interminable months.
I must be one of those SAD people…….. “in more ways than one”, I hear you cry.
There are many of us this far north. Blame Vitamin D deficiency.
PG Wodehouse puts it well, describing people like me, over the winter, variously as:
“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
and
“He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. He had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”
and
“He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommĂ©, and the dinner-gong due any moment.”
My best time is from now until mid July; the sun has heat, it might even burn your skin, the flower beds are bursting into life, the birds are singing and nesting, the swallows, swifts and ospreys, if not already here, are on their way, and the incomparable fresh greens of the new leaves are on the trees as they first emerge.
Or as Robert Browning had it, “God is in his heaven, all’s right with the world”, to which Plum would have added that the lark was on the wing, and the snail on the thorn.
In mid July, quite suddenly, summer becomes ever so slightly samey; the greens of the trees jaded, my roses for the most part over, the grass not growing properly any more, a blessing if you have to mow it, but a herald of the end of the hope that spring always brings.
Golfing last week, some alders were showing green, as were the larch, just a hint of something other than their winter colour. The chestnuts are almost fully out, as is the apple, plum and cherry blossom.
Our banks of primroses are revealed in all their glory. Nicked from underneath our trees, half hidden by rhododendron bushes, from behind hedges, from anywhere that nobody could see them…...and transplanted to where they will give maximum joy…….so much better than those daffodils. Wordsworth has a lot to answer for. Daffs provide aforesaid joy for about 2 weeks, and then annoyance for another 3 months, until it is “safe” to cut them down, when the leaves have died back and gone yellowy/brown.
I used to deliberately annoy my mother by cutting the daffs down too soon, and then tease her the following year when they flowered just fine. We had my eldest boy’s wedding in mid June last year, so I brutally assaulted those pesky daffs in mid May to ensure there was no sign of their decaying selves to mar the beauty of our garden. Sure enough, never have there been more flowers, on those so shamefully brutalised, than there are this year.
If only my mother were here now, the teasing would be gently merciless, with my father tittering quietly in the background.
But best of all, in my perennially spoilt state, I can now potter out of an evening, the 100 yards or so down to the river, to catch one of those large Temple brown trout on an absurdly big dry fly, for what’s the point in fishing dry fly with something you cannot see? Or I might get a salmon or sea trout in the Ledges, long after the tenants have given up going there. I love those evenings, preferably not another soul about, all quiet, the chatter of birds, the turquoise flash of the kingfishers (we have many), and maybe the otters playing in the distance.
I seldom catch anything, but then I don’t want to catch much, for I have been there and done that, just one every now and then is fine…...and, of course, everything goes back, for I cannot kill anything any more. This has nothing to do with favouring 100% catch and release, as some do, just getting more out of seeing a fish swim away than from putting it in the freezer.
“How many salmon have you caught in your life?” I am often asked, to which there is no answer, for it is my business and not yours.
And anyway, numbers are vulgar.
So yesterday.
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