28 May 2017 News/Editorial
I am never quite sure if I have been to Brockhoperig up the Ettrick, but when viewing the radar picture from my Hampshire weekend lair on Saturday, it looked bad. The Met Office observation map had pink and white echoes over upper Ettrick and Teviot, at the extreme end of things, white being over 32mm/hour.
And so it was that between 5pm and 5.30 pm the Brockhoperig gauge went up 5 ft, yes 5ft, in half an hour. Not only am I not sure where it is, but whoever lives there must have had a biblical deluge. There was also a smaller rise at the very top of Teviot.
Is this the answer to Tweed’s drought problem? No, for 5ft at Brockhoperig might translate to less than a foot below Kelso, and quite possibly very dirty as well.
More is desperately needed, and not just in one place, we need a heavy day’s rain, catchment-wide.
And a 5ft flood at Kelso, not Brockhoperig……. wherever Brockhoperig is!
Sadly, there is nothing in next week’s forecast which will produce a 5ft flood at Kelso, or anywhere else.
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The Test in mayfly time is a joy. Quite unlike the persistent flogging that can be salmon fishing, the successful trouter bides his time, observes, and then pounces when the time is right….usually at a regular riser within range.
I am not much cop at it, but even duffers like yours truly can score and convince themselves they are some good, when the mayfly hatch is in its pomp.
The joy of the Test is its clear water, so that you can often see your quarry and in particular its white mouth opening and shutting as it sucks down another scrumptious meal. A steady hand and nerve are needed to land the fly, like the gentlest falling bit of fluff, about 3ft upstream of that white mouth, avoiding the terminal “drag” at all costs, all the while ready to strike, not too quickly, but fast enough to stop the fly being ejected.
The Test’s underwater lakes, the aquifers, are seriously depleted after a dry winter, so the Test itself and its carriers are low, very low, making the challenge of deceiving those trout just that bit more difficult.
I spend a lot of time sitting on the bank, listening to the cuckoos, hoping to see a water vole scuttling along the margins (why does the Tweed have none of either?), among the impossible beauty of the Hampshire countryside, all within a 1 hour drive of SW1.
How many trout did I catch and how big?
Well now, in a funny way, you see, that, the actual catch……..
………... is the least important bit about it all.
Whereas the camaraderie, the company of friends, the merciless banter, the glorious surroundings, even the occasional glass of something cool and just a tiny bit “refreshing”.
All of that.
What more could one possibly want?
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