THE ANGLING WORLD is full of contradictions; not least the fact that May 1st is regarded by many as the traditional opening day of the chalkstream season, despite the obvious truth that the proper and legal start is April 3rd. A bit of me rails against the inconsistency of it all, but on the other hand the quirkiness is part of the charm, so if people want to let me have the run of the river for a month, who am I to complain? Actually, though I hate to say it, there is a certain logic to a May start. Not everyone is prepared to freeze their fingers to the bone or wait for days on the off chance for thirty minutes of grannom action. May is the month when the river wakes up as the days get longer and warmer, when you can almost taste the difference between April 1st and May 1st – you can certainly see and hear it. Pretty well everyone is up and about. Every bird is sitting on eggs close to hatching or shepherding a brood along the river. The otter, water vole and field mouse work all hours, day and night gathering food to take back to the mewling infants. The trout are on their game and a river apparently devoid of fish a month ago now has them in every spot.
For the people it is the Drowners House that has become the hub of Gavelwood each morning, the place where the anglers and helpers gather before the serious business of the day, be it fishing or river work. ‘I’ll meet you at Drowners’ has become one of those stock phrases instead of ‘I’ll see you later.’ In my mind I had hatched a plan to build a new fishing cabin, but over the winter as Drowners became our default location when the weather was bad or we needed a point to meet at, I turned my mind to restoring it.
The first time I saw Drowners back in the summer it was a mess. It sits directly over Katherine’s Brook, straddling the stream that races under the building, which was open inside the house – the wooden floor that covered it had rotted away years ago. Three stout cross-beams remained, and it was clear from the fresh spraints that the most recent inhabitants were the otters, who clearly found it the ideal spot to rest and gorge on a trout or two. In places the thatched roof had collapsed to let blue sky show through, but otherwise the building was as sound as the day it was built.
Drowners is old; at least four centuries, with thick red-brick walls and rain-worn Portland stone cornerstones. It is more or less 15 feet square, with a thatched roof supported by oak rafters that rise to an apex from which hangs a storm lantern on a chain that is just about low enough for the unwary to hit their heads on. It had survived because it was built to survive; floodplain buildings are designed that way. The foundations are huge lumps of stone that prevent the stream washing away the ground. The walls are deep, four bricks thick, tapering ever so slightly from base to head height. The mortar is lime, which flexes as the building moves on ground that expands when sodden in winter and shrinks when drying in summer. Outside the house there is a leat, or man-made stream. This was dug to divert the heavy flows coming down the Brook in times of flood away from the house. All in all, Drowners was built to last, but sadly not always for comfort.
Besides the obvious, a river running through it, there are two things that will strike you at once as you enter a drowners house for the first time. First, the lack of windows. They simply don’t have any. Second, the damp. The wooden floor (when there is one), the walls and the air are all damp. Winter, spring, summer, it is always the same, as is the temperature. A warm 51°F when the frost is on the ground, a cool 51°F when the sun blazes down. The latter was of no interest to the original occupants of the house, the drowners, who only ever occupied it from January to March, when the flooding of the water meadows required them to be there around the clock. Today is another story, and the restoration posed a question: do we restore it to what it was even though its original purpose is defunct, or do we change it to something useful for today? The restoration was going to involve three things: a new oak floor, two new oak doors and a major overhaul of the thatch, which is unusually sedge reed, as all the thatched houses in the village are either Norfolk reed or straw. But since the sedge grows prolifically around Gavelwood it was at the same time local and, even better, free. The real problem was the windows, or rather the lack of them. Should we knock holes in the walls to create them? In the end the decision made itself.
The roof seemed the natural place to start, and with the roofing material all around us we got to work. Sedge is one of those unspoken staples of the water meadows; until you have a purpose for it and start looking you don’t realize that it is absolutely everywhere: in the margins, on the banks and across the meadows. It grows in clumps; it grows in swathes and most impressively tussocks with thin, sage-green, razor-sharp blades sprouting from the head. These grass-like blades are truly razor-sharp – pull at a handful and your palm will be shredded by incisions as painful as any paper cut.
The tussocks look like something out of a sci-fi movie, growing in clusters, huddled along the bank where they like their roots in water year round. Each is the size of an upended wine barrel; apparently brown and dead all the way up from the ground to the head, where the grass sprouts up before tumbling down to create an all-round fringe that almost reaches the ground. These tussocks can outlive trees; in places I have fished since childhood the same ones still grow, the only difference today being that I am now tall enough to perch my bum on them as a comfortable resting spot whilst waiting for a fish to show. The tussocks, for all their freakish appearance, have something of a reputation as a refuge habitat, creating a microclimate, if you want to call it that, where the insects and tiny mammals can survive the extremes of flood and drought. It is said that if you shake out a tussock over sixty different species of invertebrate will fall out. I can’t swear it is true but I can confirm, having sat on quite a few, that some of the inhabitants, probably ants, have a nasty bite.
In recent years there has been something of a dust-up between ecologists and river keepers on how to manage these tussocks. You may have seen evidence of the traditional practice while driving through the Highlands or the west coast of Ireland, where they proliferate and are managed by an annual burning. And burn they do. The air-dried blades catch easily, popping as the flames jump from tussock head to tussock head leaving a smoking landscape of bald, blackened sedge heads. It is certainly an effective way to clear the debris and there is no doubt that the tussocks grow with renewed vigour each subsequent year. However, it is something of a scorched-earth fate for the poor insects that mostly perish in the flames. So in deference to them, we trim the tussocks with a hedge cutter, leaving the debris on the ground for a few weeks before finally raking it away.
The tussock trimmings are not what we are after for the roof; it is the sedge that grows in swathes in the wet sections of the meadows. During the summer and autumn the cattle leave it alone; the ground is too wet for them to easily forage, and they don’t eat it for the same reasons you should not pull at it. So by December, entirely by an accident of nature, a crop is there to harvest. Cutting is simple. The same scythes we use for the river weed are given an extra fierce edge to the blade and we bend our backs into the base of the sedge reed beds. It is a bit like cutting a wheat field, as three abreast we scythe the pale green blades to the ground. Amongst the harvest is plenty of dead matter, what a thatcher would call ‘litter’, which we leave behind as we gather and bind the sedge into bundles that we stack crossways like a squat Jenga tower to dry out.
By March they were dry, ready for patching the holes in the roof. In truth Drowners needs stripping back for a complete rethatch, but for now make-do will do. I am no thatcher, and if we were starting from scratch I’d be lost. But I have seen it done enough to know the principles, and by following the pattern of what remained the bundles were tamped into place, compressed by hand and finally held in place by split hazel pegs bent into an inverted U shape. Onto the floor went freshly sawn oak boards, still wet with sap, so recent was the felling of the tree. Dried boards were no use to us; the damp interior would soon have them expanding and twisting. The doors were made of the same, the hinges rescued from the skeletal remains of the old doors.
While trying to admire our handiwork we found out why windows were a must. With the holes in the roof repaired and the doors closed, the interior was pitch-black and not a little spooky as the rush of the water beneath filled the darkness. The drowners must have been a hardy lot, but we were not, so two windows were promptly knocked into the south and east walls to complete the restoration. With the addition of a table, some benches and the storm lantern, Drowners was complete with the exception of one item – a catch record book.
Record books come in all shapes and sizes. Big leather-bound ledgers embossed with the name of the fishery. Card indexes. Cloth-wrapped diaries. Bespoke books, each page laid out to record the date, weather, number and size of fish caught, flies used, and an ‘other comments’ column for embellishments and observations. Scrappy school exercise books doctored to do the same at a fraction of the cost. One famous River Test beat has the records inked on the oak walls, including a 1944 D-Day catch return with the comment, ‘A. Hitler be damned!’ However, make no mistake, whatever the vellum, whatever the binding, these are important tomes. On a salmon river it is all about red-toothed capitalism, on a chalkstream rather more about sedate entomology.
The value of a salmon river resides entirely in the number of fish caught; a productive beat by a busy road will always sell for more than an idyllic but less productive beat. The different weeks of the season are priced according to the historic catches. Rent a prime week and it will be twenty times more expensive than a low-season week. Estate agents assessing a beat for sale or probate will use the average catch over the past ten years to arrive at their valuation, and with some changing hands for millions the value of each fish suddenly becomes a critical multiplier. Salmon river owners recognize this, and when the chips are down they don’t suffer fools, or more pertinently bad anglers, gladly. If you think your money alone is enough to secure the best week on the best beat of the best river, you’d be wrong. You need to deliver a good catch return, and if you don’t, well, suddenly that week will become ‘unavailable’. On the other hand if you are a good salmon angler who can magic fish apparently out of thin air, your inbox will be thick with invitations for the most amazing fishing for absolutely nothing. All round it is a fair exchange.
Chalkstreams are very different; the numbers matter less and the tone more. The mark of a successful river is rising fish. It is great to see fish, it is even exciting to catch them on a sunken nymph, but the money shot is the fish that takes the insect from the surface. If you think of most angling as monochrome, dry fly-fishing is the full colour, HD/3D model. That moment when a dimple radiates across the river surface just ahead of you as a trout sucks down a fly is truly every bit as good as eyes meeting across a crowded room. Fish that don’t rise are as pointless as pheasants that don’t fly when dry fly-fishing is the game, so the most depressing remark in the comments column of the book is always, ‘Didn’t see a rise all day’. On the other hand a comment along the lines of, ‘Fish rising all day but could not work out what they were taking’ brings out the alpha male in fly-fishermen who, even though they would never admit it, secretly expect to succeed in spades where the author of the comment has failed.
So watch any angler arrive at a fishery and you will observe a pattern. After the usual pleasantries – the journey, the weather past, present and future and an update from the river keeper of his latest travails – the angler will peel away into the cabin intent on examining the catch record book, scouring the latest entries for clues to what flies to use or which parts of the river are fishing best. It is a ritual that is hard to avoid, though what it does for your state of mind is open to debate. If the diary reports a cracking few days you are pitched into both envy, which feels mean, and mindless optimism that the winning streak will continue. If the reports are dire you get no clues as to what flies are working and are pitched the other way into a slough of despair that you have chosen a bad day to fish.
For myself I’m a less than enthusiastic reader of record books, for all of the above reasons when it comes to the fish caught; fishermen are not liars but they are mostly natural optimists who prefer, like gamblers, to celebrate their successes above mourning their failures. Likewise since catch and release has become a common practice, the number and size of the fish caught has inexplicably risen now that the return is estimated rather than weighed . . . But when it comes to the comments section and brief remarks like, ‘Good hatch of BWOs [blue-winged olives]’, my own little antennae start to twitch. For a successful chalkstream day is all about the hatches, and around Mayday the hawthorn hatch is the one we hanker after.
There are certain insects that don’t really belong on a chalkstream, but are intrinsic to the hatch calendar. They are collectively known as terrestrials – as the name indicates, bugs that live on the land rather than the water. Daddy-long-legs, or crane flies, are the most easily recognizable members of this group, which includes flying ants, beetles and the hawthorn fly. It is the misfortune of these insects to be blown onto the river where, ever the opportunists, the trout will go mad for them at particular times of year. Now why trout have such a predilection for things that have no place on the river, which only appear for a few days each year, is as much a mystery as why cats like fish. But anglers, like the trout they seek, are opportunists in equal measure, and the emergence of the hawthorn fly is the clarion call to head for the river.
There is some debate as to why the hawthorn fly is so called. Some say it is because it lays its eggs in the roots of the hawthorn bush, others that the hatch coincides with the flowering of the bush of the same name in late April, early May. I have no idea which is definitively true (for the record I err on the side of the bush theory), but whichever is accurate they are a freaky, fun way to celebrate Mayday. They are freaky because, well, they look like freaks. There is no other fly in the entire year that looks remotely like a hawthorn. To start with it is jet, jet-black with a pair of long, hairy legs that hang down like a lanky undercarriage. Secondly it is instantly recognizable, as it looks a bit like the common housefly; the two are distantly related, coming from the Diptera order of true flies. However the hawthorn appears to have been on an intensive course of steroids that gives it a bulky appearance, making it more than twice the size of its domestic counterpart. And like most over-muscled creatures it lacks nimbleness. Hawthorn are easy to pluck from the air with your hand as they fly past, their direction of travel dictated by the wind rather than any purpose on their part. Their life on the wing is short, just a week during which they hatch, mate and then lay their eggs in the soil from which the fly will emerge from the larval state fifty-one weeks later.
Hawthorn are fun because they are something of a circus act: the show that hits town for a few days creating entertainment and mayhem before it moves on for another year, leaving a void in its place. They are easy to spot as they swarm together as part of the mating ritual, keeping close to bushes and undergrowth in the warmth of the day. Clearly hawthorn are aware of their aeronautic shortcomings. Unlike the mayfly that will rise to 20 or 30 feet in the mating dance, hawthorn rarely go over human head height. But there are always a few that peel away or get caught by a sudden gust, and the observant angler will track the progress of any that come in the direction of the river.
Once you see them coming your way there is a strange inevitability to their fate, like the hapless canoeist inexorably being carried towards the waterfall. I open my fly box and tie on one of the hawthorn imitations, which have spent as much time in a closed compartment as the larva has in the ground. At this point I have two choices: cast to where I know a fish will be in the confident knowledge that the hawthorn is the dish of the day, or wait a few minutes for the first of the clowns to tumble onto the water, bringing the fish to the surface.
Now here is a strange thing about fish and fly-fishing in general. If I do the former, nine times out of ten the fish will ignore my imitation. OK, you might say, fair enough. After all it is a full twelve months since the fish last saw a hawthorn (or never in the case of the yearlings and stocked fish), so he’ll need to see a few to wise up to them. I like this theory. It makes sense. Until, of course, the very first hawthorn plops onto the surface and wham!, up comes a trout. Follow up with your imitation and wham!, you’ll have a fish on. Confounding, but such is the endless fascination of fishing.
It is this wham, bam, thank you ma’am approach that reignites the flames in the heart of every angler at the start of the new season. Sure it is good to tie on tiny flies to imitate obscure hatches, but that is more for the balmy days of summer. Early season, when it is still a little chilly with gusty days, the casting action is a bit rusty and the fish hard to spot, this circus act is the best entertainment ever, or so we think at the time. We all know in our hearts it is really a bit too easy, but who can resist? And then as suddenly as they arrived the hawthorn are gone. They don’t taper off, they stop dead. One day they are there, the next gone for another year. Suddenly the river seems empty. Disconsolate anglers stare at the flat calm or peer hopefully across the meadows in the vain hope of more hawthorn blowing their way. But no such thing. Even the fish take a break. The circus has left town. We are sad to see it go, but the emptiness will be short-lived. In a few days the first mayfly will appear.