FLY FISHING

Wimbleball Lake in Somerset nestles like an E-shaped ink spill in a green fold marked out on Exmoor. It’s an out of the way spot for trout fisherman and fair weather sailors. On a misty Wednesday morning in mid September the party of anglers arrived to catch trout. The men, eight of them, had motored down from Bristol in three different vehicles and rendezvoused at the water’s edge. The paraphernalia needed to catch fish was unloaded from the cars and put into the four boats that each pair of fishermen would be taking out onto the water. Electric motors and their heavy batteries were vital if they didn’t want to row and none of the men did. Soft seats that clamped onto the hard wooden ones provided more comfort, as several hours would be spent just sitting, waiting. The rods, reels, boxes of flies and spools of line, the priest for whacking the caught fish on the head were all stored in canvass and leather fishing bags. The landing net, a bass and drogue, a cold box with drink, flasks filled with coffee, extra clothes and wet weather gear just in case of rain were all stowed into each boat. It looked as though the team had come prepared for anything that the lake might yield.

“What’s catching do you think?” said Tim.

“I’m going to start with a small stick fly and something with a bit of orange in it. See how I get on.” Ned was tackling up, threading two, the point fly onto the thin leader line and the other on to the dropper. He held up the orange coloured fly unhooked from his fishing waistcoat where he kept his favourites. It didn’t look like a fly you’d find in Somerset but rather an exotic insect from the jungles of South America perhaps. It was a made-up fly of course, the figment of the fly tier’s mind. Ned had killed with ones like it before. It was all guesswork to start with though. They’d have to wait and see what the fish thought, what they were going for. The flamboyance of the fly seemed to match Ned’s mood. He squinted at the job in hand. His big hands and sausage fingers didn’t look as though they could handle the precision of attaching it to the thin leader, but they did.

The team had booked and paid for the four boats and had the whole lake to them selves. It was too early for the sailing fraternity. Competition was going to be fierce but friendly.

“We’ll have caught our limit by lunch.” Tim shouted and laughed at the others as he and Ned pushed off from the floating quay where the boats had been moored. They were the first two out on the water, ready before the others and their electric motor purred into action.

“We’ll head for the far end. The bloke in the hut said they were catching there yesterday.” Tim swung the bow around and pointed it towards a concrete road bridge that crossed the lake at its northern point a quarter of a mile away.

It was grand to be out on the water again. Tim and Ned were good pals. They liked to fish together and although Tim was more experienced, Ned was perfectly competent. He could cast a good line without catching Tim in the back of the head with his hook. He wouldn’t get too many wind knots. Neither man would talk the hind leg off a donkey either. It wasn’t much fun sharing a boat with someone who couldn’t stop talking. With any luck they’d both be into some fish before too long.

The boat slapped its way through the clean dark water. The fishermen were pleased that as the mist cleared, the conditions were overcast and the wind only light. Canada geese loitered on the bank, picked over things in the mud where the water level had dropped, squabbled among them selves in ungainly fashion. Hooted at each other like a traffic jam. Two teal bobbed on the water then shot like skyrockets into the air, their wings working overtime. Cormorants trawled, their long necks like periscopes riding the lakes swell. From the boat they appeared not to have bodies, only necks and their wicked bills. The mew of a buzzard as it circled somewhere over the surrounding woodland made the men realise that they were not alone as the hunters or the hunted.

Ned dropped the anchor over the side and soon the boat took hold. Both men checked their tackle before making the first casts of the day. The reels gave out their line with a high pitched whirr and both men swung into practised action from either end of the boat. It was always satisfying to get the line straight out onto the water, to watch it shoot out, fed by the power of the rod and the human timing. Feather light, the extended line rolled onto the lake. The flies fastened to the invisible leader line plopped then swam for a moment. They slowly submerged and, weighted, gently dragged the line beneath the surface after them. Sinking and waterlogged and beautiful, their dreadful barbs were concealed beneath their man made bodies, tucked up like tails, tails with a deadly sting. They descended slowly, joined the lake, became a part of that watery world, nearly down with the weed, held to the outside by a simple knot, just a twist and turn in the nylon. Inch by inch the lines were pulled back into the boat. The flies were darting through the water, sinking and swimming below the surface, tempting the trout to strike. What arrogance it was to think the fish would take that fly! An absurd creation, a trollop on a hook, a real hooker, done up like a dog’s diner to lure the snappy trout.

The two men sat and cast. Time and time again, the lift and swish, the line peeling off the water, the flies airborne and dripping, the rod just lifted and flicked several times between ten and two on the imaginary clock face where twelve was directly overhead. Ten o’clock, two o’clock, backwards and forwards again throwing its line out, yards away, onto the lake.

“Was that a rise?” Tim thought he’d seen something, a fish breaking the surface perhaps.

“Could be.” Ned cast again, threw out a line with ease.

The take was like any other. The sudden excitement was like an electric shock. It took experience to master the reaction. The line between the catcher and the caught had to be under just the right tension. Too much and the leader would snap, too little and the fish could get off the hook. Ned’s rod bent over so that it nearly dipped into the water. Ned stood up in the boat and let out the line as quickly as he could, his reel shouting at him at the same time as Tim did.

“You’re on boy!”

Ned couldn’t keep control. His line ran out for some yards through the tip of his bent rod. Then everything went slack. The moment had gone.

“Bugger,” said Ned. “I’ve lost it.”

At the end of Ned’s line, the orange fly leapt and lunged. It had broken free without much effort and rapidly rose to the surface. Like the springing teal, it burst into the air shaking the wet droplets off its vile hairy body as it took vigorous flight. Somehow the water had given it life, had turned the finger nail sized nymph into a monster the size of the boat the men were in. The orange beast burst forth. The water boiled and both men became terrified. Their boat rocked violently but it was Ned that caught the full force of the flying insect as it came at him. He would have seen the bright orange as it dived towards him. He might have felt the awful barb as it hit him in the face, splitting his nose like a pat of blood red butter and ripping through the roof of his mouth up into his brain. He was lifted off his feet and swept up screaming into the air over Wimbleball Lake.

Ted’s boat hit the floating quay and he leapt ashore without tying up. He ran up the path to his car, abandoned everything, his face as white as the cloud in the sky behind him, his eyes as dark as the waters he’d just left. He gunned the four by four into life and took off for Bristol.