What we did on our holidays

(see also Fairport Convention's second album released 1969 on A&M Records)

April 2008, and the five of us head to Lagrasse in S. France for our first family holiday abroad together. Leaving home at 04:00 to catch a bus from Belfast to Dublin, we stop via Newry and stare at the Newry Canal. In recent years, this waterway has attracted a new breed of fly fishers - those after pike on the fly. Traditional streamers and lures are known pike catchers, increasingly they are taken on the dry fly. Whatever the method, this sounds like thrilling sport. Lean, predatory and athletic, I can only try to imagine the buzz of taking a pike on the fly.

The main objective of the holiday is to relax, eat and drink well and get out and about a bit together. But also to fish a little.

I had the opportunity, well the pleasure to meet up with Marc "La Mouche"Fauvet, a local fly fisher, fly tyer and casting guru. He'll blush when he reads this, but hey, I was impressed.

The day started with some coffee at the house, well, we were in France. There was croissants too... We then headed out of town towards the mountains, parking up and heading to the waterside. This was a welcome sight, small water and brushy. I was keen to pass Marc my 7' 2wt rod to see what it could do in experienced hands. I had always assumed such ultra-light gear was limited in terms of casting. Marc was in the water, behind him a narrow slither between branches and brush as he expertly aerialised 30' of line with fast and tight loops. No snagging going on here, just total line control and the ability to alight a dry fly on to the water's surface with complete finesse.

Dude on the stream...

Yeah, I was real impressed....

No wonder then that Marc completed and passed the FFFCCI exam in Germany a couple of weeks later.

We saw a few trout, I spooked them and didn't catch any. Strangely, the day was more about fishing, the landscape and the company than fish, if you get my drift. The conversation was amusing and intelligent, the company warm and thoroughly enjoyable.


Next time, we'll get serious about the fish. Marc knows this water well and would make a first class guide if you find yourself in the Aude/Lagrasse/Carcassonne area in need of some fly fishing or casting tuition. Untill then, I'll keep playing my Fairport Convention album and remember what we did on our holidays...


Marc's details are:

Marc Fauvet

Federation of Fly Fishers-Certified Casting Instructor
Comision National de Lanzado (Spain) -Master de Lanzado

Based in the French Pyrenees, south of Carcassonne, I offer casting courses for beginners, intermediate and advanced fly fishers in English or French.
Guiding services on local waters are possible as well.

Contact:
marcfauvet at yahoo dot com
phone- (33) 468 69 62 83

Back In Ireland

from "The Longest Silence - a life in fishing"
Thomas McGuane

'The fish I caught were all around two pounds apiece. I don't remember ever catching stronger, wilder, more violent or wanton fighters than these fish. They were vividly leopard-marked with short, hard bodies. They wore me out with their valour.'

Scale down

Waters remain low. Unless there is rain in the next week or so, levels will be very low and the nature of the fishing will change dramatically. Fish will retreat to wherever there is sufficient depth, gloomy pools and undercut banks. Such habitat is usually patrolled by larger trout, but more fish are likely to take refuge as conditions change.

I welcome whatever conditions I find. Things are getting more challenging though, and the bumper month of May is now over, so the season moves in to a different phase; time to get technical.

This is what ultra-light fishing is all about. Where a couple of weeks ago, trout were lining up to strike at modest size, flashy flies, now a more technical approach is required. And by technical, I mean smaller flies, presented on lighter tippet with greater finesse.

Sunday evening and a couple of hours on the water. It had been a hot day, with occasional, gusty breezes. As evening approached, temperatures dropped a couple of degrees and there is cloud cover. There is limited insect life on the water, and the flows are weaker with low, clear water. For almost an hour, searching pockets, runs and riffles with the flies that had brought so much sport the week before, there is little action. Half a dozen strikes, and these are not as determined or committed as before. And yet there are trout in the usual places.

I understand hard conditions. Learning to fish the canals of the English Midlands in the early eighties has served me well. These waters had suffered industry for decades, and fish populations, mainly roach, gudgeon, dace and the odd skimmer, were small. Matches were won and lost by the dram and total catches were often measured in ounces rather than pounds. Such conditions demand a light approach to tackle, feeding and presentation. This has always been my comfort zone, and also my sweet spot - where my fishing is executed most naturally and intuitively.

I'd promised to be home "in less than a couple of hours", and so it was time to tune in to the conditions and fish properly. After an hour of flogging the water, a rethink would also rest the stream. It was time to scale down.

First up, the existing 6x tippet was clipped at 6" and 30" of 7x tippet added to give an overall leader length of nearly 10', longer than practical on most of the brushy streams and burns I fish, but in low water, things have opened up and I can back-cast maybe 25-30 feet.

Next I added a #22 quill bodied klinkhammer. The key here is the hook, a TMC 200R, which is closer to a standard size 22 hook, unlike the greatly oversized Patridge Klinkhammer Extreme range of hooks.


Conventional Klinkhammer theory relies on this oversized fly to shock trout in to opportunistic feeding, providing an obvious differential to natural food prey. The TMC hooks enable the all-important scale-down, even with emergent, parachute style dressings. Similarly, the flash of mylar ribbed, tri-banded dubbing is replaced with a quill bodied dressing to convincingly represent a natural, segmented body. It's not that these fish are particularly spooky, more they are feeding less voraciously and with added caution in low water. The 7x tippet is degreased, the new fly ginked, scale-down complete...


Success in fishing relies as much on one's confidence in approach as any other variable, and making the first cast post scale-down just feels so right.

The first cast in to a jostling riffle, between rocks and weed brings a trout up. He misses, as the fly accelerates away in the current. Next cast, slightly further upstream and a positive strike leads to a hook-up and a 9" wild brown trout.


And I stop fishing right there, as if to make a point.

Trout bum

"A friend once asked, 'How come a guy who dresses in rags and drives a smoky old pick-up can afford such snazzy tackle?'

"... It should be obvious."

John Gierach

Hei kona ra

I work for a London based firm, from a satelite office in NI. During my round of office goodbye's, at the end of a trip earlier this year, a colleague announced that she was leaving the firm to return to NZ. In passing, I mentioned that NZ was one of the top trout destinations on my wish-list, unaware of our shared passion for FF and trout.

We have kept in touch on this issue, and I hope one day to take advantage of the kind offer of NZ hospitality. The following extract is Lynne's take on fishing her home waters:

So trout fishing in New Zealand. I can rave about it...no doubt the fishing magazines do. The landscape is gorgeous. There is lots of good water and, generally, not many fishers. The fish are large! The browns are as wily as ever.

I live in Wellington (bottom of the North Island), where there is some nice trout fishing on the Hutt River and its tributaries. I've not fished that water though.

I have fished around Lake Taupo (middle of the North Island) simply because that is where I used to go for holidays. My favourite rivers there are:

-the Tongariro; big water and big trout (rainbows) also lots of fishers.
Zane Grey country.
-the Tauranga Taupo; lovely quiet water, nice fish with a splendid sense of being by yourself. In the upper reaches (read hiking access only) lively native forest and beautiful pools.
I'm certain the other smaller rivers that flow into Lake Taupo would be as equally delightful; I've never fished them.

If you're after browns you'll need to look further than Taupo. I'm told the Mataura River in Southland (bottom of the South Island) is the place for big browns. Having done some hiking around that part of the South Island, I think you'd be spoilt for choice: there are so many beautiful rivers and streams there.

If you're short of time, I think that it might be worth investigating using a guide to start with simply to get access to local knowledge and to learn about the rivers. I suspect many of the good fishing spots might need a 4 wheel drive and the blessing of the local landowner to get access.

Bigger fish

I've said elsewhere, that the '08 - '09 season has had a slow start. Heavy rain through March and much of April left waters high and coloured. High water's not a problem, there's good high-sticking sport to be had, but coloured water pretty much kills the game.

So I have taken full advantage of the warm spell and low, clear waters on local streams and burns. But things are different this season.

I spent a lot of time studying over the Winter months; Ed Engle and Vincent Marinaro texts especially, and tying small flies. Ed Engle talks at length about keeping things simple, putting as little as possible between you and the trout. Marinaro is the mad scientist of fly fishing; theory and observation intertwined with oracle-like truth. I've taken this stuff to heart. Fishing has become a more intuitive pursuit.

I spent a couple of hours on Saturday, refining the #20 klinkhammers, that have proved so effective this month. The body is a little leaner, the wing post finer but a little taller and the ribbing more uniform. The trout don't give a damn; the more each fly catches, so the scruffier the fly becomes and the more appealing to fish (this is evidenced by the increasing strike-rate over time I've observed on every session this year). And yet each refinement, tweak and subtle modification translates in to sharper focus on the water, a stronger sense of there being less between the trout and me.

I got an hour on the water yesterday. After half a dozen smaller fish, a stunning wild brown trout was taken in 10" of water, at the head of a narrow channel. It's dorsal fin was visible as it snatched surface flies from the accelerating current, lost a little ground in the flow and then resumed position. Only a couple of feet downstream, in calmer water, there were numerous smaller trout ranging between 8" - 10", easier to pick off from a wider feeding area. To reach the head of the channel required a cast directly between two banks of weed, among rocks and boulders, before the current caught the fly and carried it overhead. I didn't attempt this immediately, preferring to get in to the swing of things with a few fish.

It took three casts to induce a strike, the first two just edging up the channel towards the largest fish in the pod. The strike was sensed before it came, more intuition.


This is a large trout for the waters I fish, maybe not the largest out there, but this is a GOOD fish at just short of 14".
(If you have a 17" screen, click on the image to see an actual size image. This is a beautiful, wild fish...)

It was also the first wild brown trout our youngest son had ever seen, and he hasn't stopped talking about it.

The opportunist

How to spend your lunch-break...?

It's widely recognised that wild trout are opportunist feeders. Where food is plentiful (and water quality good, the two are intrinsically linked), they flourish in numbers, so increasing competitive pressure for food resources. Where food is scarce, numbers are more limited. In either case, trout exhibit an opportunist approach to feeding - a basic survival mechanism. Fly fishing for trout is all the more productive for this fishy instinct, more so on lightly fished waters.

I spend significantly more time thinking and dreaming about fishing, reading about fishing and tying flies than actually fishing. That's life. Maybe once or twice in a season, I will spend a whole day on the water; setting off at sunrise and walking, fishing, lunching and absorbing the landscape all day, returning home at dusk to relax with a large, often very large malt.

The norm is to catch a couple of hours here and there, maybe 3 or 4 on a good day. In order to max out my time on the water, I too have become an opportunist. Last Thursday, it was a very warm, late Spring morning as I worked at the home office, getting on with business. It has been a couple of weeks since the last heavy rainfall, local waters are ideal, a little low and clear. It was easy to become distracted, imagining medium olives, swarms of gnats and the odd hawthorn fly bringing fish up.

I'd been working since before 08:00, eating fruit and some nuts as I went and could skip lunch, go fishing for an hour (or so) and fill-up on more fruit mid-afternoon. This was highly measured opportunism, it was one of those days when you know the fishing will be memorable, if short-lived. It became impossible to concentrate on business...

There is amazing, lightly fished water within a couple of miles of home. On arrival, I sat below the bridge pictured to tackle-up. All around, upstream and downstream were trout rising, sipping at the occasional medium olive and vast swarms of gnats. At times there were multiple rises at once, the entire surface of water disturbed by feeding trout.

The road sign has been submerged since last Christmas, during roadworks in the village. I think it lasted about two nights before being tossed in the river. There are also wheelbarrows, shopping trolleys (predictably...), cable drums and a few bike frames.

I've often considered clearing the river of this debris, maybe even getting some of the local kids engaged in caring for the river. Age has made me cynical, any demonstration of care for the river would likely increase it's abuse, so I keep a low profile and only fish when the kids are at school or zoned out on PS2 at home in the evening. And so I never fish the river on a Friday night, when the adjacent park fills up with teenagers and cheap lager.

The fishing was simply fantastic. In such still conditions, it was possible to place the DT2F line with pin-point accuracy over individual fish, just upstream of the rise and watch as the fly was snatched from the surface.

Sure, I missed a few, always do but fish after fish was brought to hand, most unhooked in the water and released within seconds. I even stopped fishing for some 10-15 minutes and observed as the water around me filled with trout, ranging from 4" to, I estimate nearly 14". Standing motionless, they would swim between my legs, oblivious to my living presence. As I moved to fish one last run, the water exploded in to chaos, trout darting in all directions.


The last 20 minutes was thrilling fishing. Dropping a fly in to the head of the central run pictured above, produced a strike to every second cast, resulting in 6 fish, each one 10 - 12". They must have been lined up in numbers, picking off insect life as the current hustled through the submerged gravel channel. Keeping the rod low and applying side pressure swiftly drew hooked fish away from the feeding shoal and kept the strikes coming.

I think I was away for about 90 minutes, it was easy to get back to business.