WHICHEVER WAY YOU cut it, the mayfly, Ephemera danica, is the iconic chalkstream insect. It defines the most exciting moments in the fishing calendar. It is the proof that the chalkstreams are the most perfect rivers ever created. It is the moment when sometimes you have to step back, shut out the rest of the world and watch in awe to simply accept that nature is utterly and completely amazing.
The mayfly will live for just twenty-four hours at most, perfectly adapted by millions of years of evolution to execute the perpetuation of the species over that single day. There is no time to be wasted. The mayfly does not even have a stomach. It does not live long enough to need to eat. Hatching in their tens of thousands, from a distance the huge clouds of insects look like gunsmoke drifting beside the river. Get up close and an elaborate mating dance is taking place, at the same time both graceful and frenetic as two from the thousands pair up to consummate in a moment what has been two years in the making. But the full story of those two years is not all played out in the bright sunshine, along the verdant banks of the river, but rather in the dark, muddy recesses out of sight of every person and most other creatures, a far cry from those romantic last twenty-four hours.
There is a slight irony to the work we have done on North Stream and the vision of the perfect chalkstream we seek to attain, given that the bright gravel is favoured over silt or mud, when the latter is home to the mayfly for almost all of its life, and without the silt the chalkstream would be devoid of its trademark hatch. However, that said there will always be enough diversity in the different habitats of Gavelwood with the main river, stream, brook and carriers, to preserve the silty bottom the mayfly nymph craves. The only parts of a river that have a problem are the headwaters close to the source of the Evitt where the fast, shallow water strips away any silt build-up, or at worst it dries up in the summer. Unsurprisingly, the higher sections of any chalkstream will have a sparse mayfly hatch at best, the few nymphs that do exist preferring to drift downstream until they find a better and safer home.
Fishermen are often dangerously imprecise about the words they use to describe particular insects or hatch, but the word ‘mayfly’ has a precise meaning on the chalkstreams that exists nowhere else in the world. This causes great confusion with anglers from overseas, and considerable annoyance to entomologists who don’t like to see their taxonomy bastardized. But even though tradition trumps the science of classification on the rivers of southern England the taxonomy still insists that there are over two thousand different types of mayfly worldwide, with around fifty in the British Isles. They are all of the order Ephemeroptera, essentially small up-winged insects that only live for a few days after hatching. However, at Gavelwood when we say ‘mayfly’ we mean only one of the two thousand, Ephemera danica, that hatches for two or three weeks across May and June. Anyone else, anywhere else in the world, could be referring to any of the other one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine or so others of the Ephemeroptera order that hatch in May . . . or so you would think. Fortunately, chalkstream anglers are not alone in abusing the language, as mayflies, up-winged insects, hatch not only in May but in each and every month of the year. In Victorian times they were collectively referred to as ‘dayflies’, which if you think about it, better describes their lifestyle.
But whatever the name the cycle starts with the tiny eggs, something less than a millimetre in diameter, being laid in the surface of the water and then drifting to the riverbed. The sticky casing helps the eggs attach to the bottom, from which they hatch into tiny nymphs that in turn head straight for the safety of the nearest silt bed. Here they burrow, and this will be the mayfly’s home for the next two years. From the angler’s point of view the mayfly nymph now becomes something of a non-person, lurking out of sight. Other mayflies are more obliging: the nymph of the large dark olive that likes to hatch in March and April is a darter, spending his time underwater moving from stone to stone in short bursts that give the trout something to eat and the angler something to imitate. But with two years ahead of him, growing by frequently moulting his outer skin, maybe hiding in the dark recesses of the chalkstream, is the best means of survival for the mayfly nymph.
It sounds a strange thing to say, but the quality of the silt is critical to the survival chances of the nymph. Part of the reason to restore North Stream by flushing it through was that the accumulated mud was, to coin a phrase, the wrong type of silt. Out with the bad and in with the new; between the fast gravel sections, the slower deeper water was the ideal place for new silt beds to accumulate, with fresh material washing downstream. Nymphs have to breathe through their tiny gills, not unlike fish in that respect, and the fetid, compressed mud of pre-restoration North Stream would kill them. What the nymphs need is loose, sandy silt that is easy to tunnel through and is constantly percolated by the oxygen-rich water, combined with masses of vegetable matter like dead leaves, reeds and weed roots for the nymphs to chomp on. Six months on from the day we opened Portland Hatches, the silt beds had begun to establish, but they were too new to hold many mayfly nymphs other than some that might have been washed down in the winter floods. I had plans to change this, but I needed the help of Ephemera danica and some willing volunteers in the weeks to come.
There comes a time in the life of every mayfly nymph when he says goodbye to his dark tunnels, pushing out of the silt and swimming into the open stream in preparation for his or her date with destiny. Not the best of swimmers – he is no agile darter for sure – the mayfly nymph becomes fair game for the trout who switch on to them, consuming them in their thousands once they have started to leave the safety of the silt beds in late April. Common sense tells you that the nymphs should head straight for the surface, hatch and get on with it. Why hang around and risk being eaten? But nature has a plan, insisting that they gather in their legions beneath the surface so that when the trumpet sounds they will hatch as one.
Of course there is always the occasional nymph that does the commonsense thing, hatching as a sad singleton weeks ahead of schedule. In a way it is a good plan to at least escape the jaws of a hungry trout, but as a way of finding a mate it is a hopeless strategy, and scant reward for two years spent in the silt. Whenever I see a solitary one being buffeted hither and thither on a blustery April day part of me feels happy for the affirmation that the cycle of life is turning full circle, but another part feels sad that this is ultimately a life that will end in failure, usually snuffed out by an eager trout. Fortunately for the perpetuation of the species these outriders are few and far between, the hatch-day timing dictated by a force of nature that the mayfly nymphs are conditioned to obey, greeting the world on a date that anglers set their calendar to.
Nobody entirely knows why the mayfly is able to time its arrival, the second week in May, so precisely. This is no random event – go back through the catch record books of long-established fisheries for a century or more and you will find that clarion cry ‘The mayfly is up!’ inscribed on a date close to 10 May each and every year. It is perplexing when you think about it. Surely an incredibly cold or wet spell or some other weather extreme in the months leading up to May would shift the date? It does for nesting birds, trees, plants and most other creatures, but not the mayfly. The daffodils in your garden can be anything up to a month late. Maybe it is the weather itself in May? But that doesn’t stack up against my days on the river where the hatch has happened in everything from extreme gales where we never even put a rod up, to days when we returned home with sunburn. Maybe it is the water temperature, but the remarkable consistency of a chalkstream in this respect suggests otherwise. In the end the only constant that straddles the records I see is the length of the day and the light intensity that goes with it; somewhere in that little nymph shell it tells him the time is now.
Arrive at a river on hatch-day morning and you will surely be disappointed. Where, you will reasonably ask, are the promised clouds of mayfly? The river will be flat calm. You will probably be tempted to use the word dead. The fish won’t be much bothered, idly holding station, oblivious to all. As a fisherman you compute that the fish will surely have a memory of a juicy mayfly, so you tie one on. Each cast you make is ignored with increasing indifference until a bad one slaps the water; now at last the fish despairs of your cack-handed effort and swims for cover under the weed. Chastened, you engage your fishing intelligence. Maybe a small fly is called for? A snack. A little amuse-bouche before the dish of the day. Out comes a tiny Dark Olive, but the outcome is still angler nil, fish one. You retire if not hurt, then a little miffed. You’d been told this is Duffers Fortnight, the moment in the season when even the most inept angler is guaranteed success. Is it you or is it the fish? In fact it is neither, it is the mayfly.
Whatever anyone tells you, fish do have a memory, and though it certainly does not put them in Mensa territory it is considerably longer than seven seconds. They know deep in their fishy brains that if they wait the hatch will come to them with a feast of plenty, so until then why expend unnecessary energy? And start it will, usually sometime in the late morning, when you’ll catch the first fluttering mayfly of the day out of the corner of your eye. If the day is warm with a little bit of breeze, the delicate insect, about the size and colour of a dandelion seed head, will rise quickly into the sky and before you really realize it was ever there, be gone. Blink and you miss it possibly, but once the hatch starts in earnest you will not miss the mayflies that follow. At first you will be able to nod your head at each individual mayfly as it rises off the surface to take flight, even to the point that you start counting them. But soon the intensity of the hatch will increase so that you hardly know where to look, until the first slashing rise of a greedy trout brings you abruptly back to the river surface.
It takes that first rise to wake the river up. Whether it is that one trout that spurs on the others or whether the conditions are suddenly just right for them all I do not know, but one rise begets another, then another, then another, until you barely know where to look as the river surface churns with fish rising. And the trout are not uniform in their approach to the feast. Some take up position under the food line, the point where the current concentrates the flow of insects on the surface, purposely rising metronomically, carefully selecting from the mayfly parade that drifts above. Sometimes you can almost predict the feeding pattern as they rise for one, submerge to chew it down, and then rise again for the next a minute later. Others abandon their usual haunt, scooting around the river, gulping down any mayfly that catches their eye, ignoring the rule that trout feed facing upstream as they chase mayflies sideways, crossways and downstream. Some throw caution to the wind, leaping into the air to grab the mayfly in flight, crashing down causing a commotion that appears to make absolutely no difference to the other fish who continue to feed oblivious.
That feeding pattern of the trout is often dictated by the weather, as the freshly hatched mayfly drift down the river on the water surface like little sailboats, making ready for that maiden flight. On a damp day it takes a few minutes for the wings to dry; easy pickings, so more of the metronomic trout. On a warm day it can be just a matter of a few seconds, so the trout are more frenetic. But whether the conditions dictate that it is seconds or minutes on the water, the sheer fact that mayfly go so fast from being a nymph in the river to reach the surface, break out of the hard shell and emerge ready to fly is amazing in itself. And fly they do. There is none of the struggling of the inept sedge or wind-borne randomness of the hawthorn. Mayfly, from the moment they first stretch their wings, fly with a purpose. For the male Ephemera danica the flight is short-lived; up in the air, do a few turns and then head for the nearest bush or tree to hang upside down under a leaf. The first hatchers of the day will be the males, who at this point are not much use to anyone, as they are sexually immature, what the entomologists call sub-imago. But not for long (time is always of the essence for the mayfly), as he performs one final moult to emerge ‘imago’: bright, shiny and with those large transparent wings ready for the mating dance later in the day.
Back on the river as the day progresses the hatching will become more intense, to the point where, for maybe no more than half an hour, it will reach a crescendo. The river surface will grow thick with mayfly, dozens covering every square yard, the legions constantly replenished as for every one that takes flight three more pop up from the water beneath. The trout gorge themselves silly as the mayfly keep coming, but even a trout has its limit, and as the hatch dies away the feeding will become desultory, so that by mid-afternoon, with all the mayfly headed for cover in the meadows, the river is quiet again. But this is not the end by any means; for fish and mayfly the best is yet to come.
The mayfly mating dance is one of the defining moments in the chalkstream year; whether you are fishing or just working in the meadow, the moment to stop and gawp. Like so much to do with the life of the mayfly, it is like a magic trick – one minute nothing, the next the reveal to produce a display with few equals. Walk the banks and meadows in late afternoon and you would be forgiven for thinking the mayfly hatch is a mythical event. But stop for a moment, peer under the leaves of any bush, tree, plant and even thick grass, and there they will be. Thousands and thousands, hanging upside down, half a dozen to a big leaf, ready for the first and final dance.
As mid- turns to late afternoon the occasional insect will lift off, fluttering around as if to say, ‘Hey girls, here I am.’ It is the males that are the first on the dance floor at this disco, but being first is not always the wisest decision. The mayfly are soon joined in the air by the swallows and house martins, twisting and turning in the air to snatch every mayfly that takes flight, grabbing them even milliseconds into flight when they have barely had a chance to leave their perch. It is the misfortune of the mayfly that these late spring arrivals from southern Europe and north Africa like the very same places they do: open meadows, a few trees and of course, water. But the mayfly have a way of dealing with the threat – mass flight. Suddenly, as if to protest at the death of the outriders, the mayfly rise up in their tens of thousands. The empty air above the meadows is filled with insects. There are so many that the blue sky on the far horizon looks as if a gauze has been drawn across it. Strangely these huge clouds of mayfly seem to intimidate the birds, which back off, patrolling around the edges to pick off the stragglers.
Make no mistake, the clouds of danica are thick; I guess the birds don’t fly through them because it would be akin to invading a hailstorm, peppered by bodies you could not avoid hitting. But what looks like a chaotic morass from a distance is in fact a closely choreographed mating ritual as the mayflies gather in columns, flying up and then drifting down. It is as if each mayfly rides in its own individual elevator, shooting up to the top floor, then gliding back down to the ground floor, before hitting the up button again. Up and down they go, anything from a few feet above the ground to 30 feet in the air, until one breaks the pattern, darting horizontally to grasp another in midair, where the coupling takes place as they continue to fly up and down.
The mating is necessarily short-lived; flying in unison is hard work, and it is not helped when a female attracts two or three suitors simultaneously. Once done, that is the end of the line for the male mayfly; all that is left is a return to the bushes and death. For the female the final act is egg-laying on the river. If mating has happened very late in the day she’ll wait until the following morning, but for the vast majority they have maybe fifteen minutes of life left to live. They’ll find the river, dip down onto the surface, and after exhausting themselves in the act of squeezing out thousands of eggs, collapse in the film to drown. By dusk the river is quiet again; the last of the mayfly have died on the water and the replete trout lie placid near the riverbed, digesting a huge meal on what is likely to have been one of the heaviest feeding days of their lives. But for us at Gavelwood on this particular day there is one last task; the gathering of the mayfly to repopulate North Stream. Of course we could leave it to nature – I am sure that over a period of years the mayfly would find their way to North Stream when a fierce spring gale whisks them across the meadow to alight on a new home – but I am too impatient to wait on the vagaries of the weather.
I’d heard of this happening more by rumour than fact. On the face of it, it is a fantastic feat to pull off. How do you cope with such a delicate, ephemeral creature, transport it miles from one river to the next? But there are plenty of stories of barren rivers being repopulated after years of no mayfly, or the stock revitalized by the introduction of adults from a different part of the river when years of interbreeding have seen a gradual decline as the lack of diversity reduces the ability of the mayfly population to defend itself against diseases. In my mind I had some fanciful ideas. Sieving the river surface to capture the eggs before they drifted to the riverbed. Elaborate nymph traps. Giant butterfly-style nets to capture the mayflies in the air. Of course none of this is necessary, because the mayfly, by virtue of its leaf-hanging habits, unwittingly simplifies the difficult.
By the end of the day not every female has laid her eggs; impregnated, yes, but spent of ova, no. Some have simply run out of time, others made a start but still have more to do. One way or another they have enough instinct to know that tomorrow’s dawn will open the door to their destiny. So they head to the leaves of the bushes and trees along the bank for the night, sharing the space with males who are likewise waiting their turn tomorrow. To say these insects become inert once dusk creeps up rather understates their torpidness. You can shout at them, waggle the branches or shake the leaves, but will they move or even flicker? Not a chance. If I didn’t know better I would swear they are all dead, but for us mayfly gatherers it makes the task very easy as we gently lift the female mayflies by the tips of their folded wings, ease them off the leaves and lower them into a cardboard box by the dozen. They don’t protest, they don’t flutter. They seem utterly uncaring that they have been rehoused.
I don’t know why, but I feel impelled to include a few males in the harvest, who are easy to spot when side by side with the gravid female who is larger, brighter, and has a butter-yellow body compared with the beige of the male. There is no science as to how many females should be gathered, so we keep at it until the gloom makes it too hard to distinguish the sexes. Peering into the boxes where they cling motionless to the sides, I guess there must be hundreds of mayflies all told, maybe over a thousand. Multiply that by the thousands of eggs that each carries and surely this will be enough for the repopulation to succeed? We have a bit of a debate as to whether to move the boxes to the North Stream that evening or in the morning. The only possible reason not to might be a difference in temperature in the different parts of the river valley – hardly likely to have an effect, but after all this work the risk seems unnecessary, so we leave mayflies in the boxes under the same bushes they were gathered from. The only thing of which I am certain is that I want to make the journey from the mother river to North Stream soon after dawn, whilst the mayflies are still dormant in the chill of early morning.
The cardboard of the boxes, damp from the early morning dew, was easy to slice along each side. Once opened up, the boxes were laid flat in the shade of the bushes alongside North Stream, the serried ranks of the mayflies still comatose, unaware of the overnight activity and their new home. It might have been tempting to shake the boxes out over the water to deposit the mayflies directly on the surface, but over the years I have noticed that this would be a long way from how the females conduct themselves on this all-important day.
Nothing really happens until the morning starts to warm; a bit of rain or wind doesn’t particularly matter. It is the temperature that counts. In human terms it would be that time when you shrug off the extra layer you put on before leaving home. One by one the mayflies start to rise from their cardboard perch, lifting up a few feet before unerringly heading for the water. It is uncanny, but none of them seem to have the slightest doubt in which direction the river lies, and once they reach it there is only a moment of hesitation, or maybe reconnaissance, before they drop onto the surface. There are two styles of egg-laying: the passive drift and the flying dip. The drifters land on the surface, where they remain, pushing out a long string of eggs that is split into shorter sections by the movement of the current. The dippers push out the string in the air whilst flying, dipping briefly onto the water and using the surface tension to break the string. They bounce up and down, two, three, four, five times, until they too come to rest on the water, the supply of eggs exhausted, the end of their lives just minutes away.
On a normal day I would watch this activity with a different eye, willing the trout to rise and snaffle down the egg-laden mayflies. But today I feel very different. I haven’t captured all these females for them to be eaten before they have had a chance to lay their eggs. My hope is that the trout on North Stream, who have mostly never seen a mayfly, will take a while to catch on to the potential feast, but that proves to be a vain hope as the first of the drifters land on the stream only to be consumed within a few yards of touchdown. As the number of mayflies on the water redoubles the safety in numbers equation kicks in, and plenty get the 30 or 40 yards of drift they need to complete egg-laying. Morning turns to a warm afternoon, quickly thinning out the ranks of mayflies on the cardboard as the rise in temperature encourages them onto the stream in ever-greater numbers. The dippers start to outnumber the drifters, much to the annoyance of the more impatient trout who, having to expend more effort than absolutely necessary, start to throw themselves in the air or accelerate up from the deep to snatch a mayfly at the moment of take-off.
Not all the trout are this exuberant; some are wise to the ways of the mayfly. Way down North Stream, almost out of sight of the release point, a group of trout have tucked themselves into the side of the stream under the back eddies. With their dorsal fins out of the water they gently circle like sharks, from time to time lifting their head and mouth to gulp something down. From the distance it is impossible to say what. Nothing shows as sitting up on the surface. But get closer and the water is littered with mayfly corpses, their bodies spreadeagled, held flat by the surface tension. Death comes quickly to the female mayfly. Some simply collapse. Others put up a fight, pulsating in the surface as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. Whether they resist the inevitable or not, the end soon comes to the spent female. But the purpose of their life is fulfilled. The eggs are laid, starting to settle on a riverbed primed for this very purpose. Two years from now, almost to the day, we will know if the repopulation has worked.
To the uninitiated, mayfly sounds a rather innocuous word; an insect that hatches in May – what’s the big deal? An official definition that reads, ‘a slender insect with delicate membranous wings having an aquatic larval stage and terrestrial adult stage usually lasting less than two days’, I don’t find a great deal more help. Yawn. This is more likely to send you to sleep than fishing, but scratch beneath the bland words and you’ll discover an amazing natural phenomenon that excites fish, fishermen and river creatures like no other.
Fly-fishing is all about taking a hook and embellishing it with thread, feather and fine wire to make a passable imitation of a natural insect that you float on the surface to fool the hungry trout looking up from the river below. Believe me, there are many easier and more productive ways to catch fish, but the delight of fly-fishing lies somewhere deep in our psyche. Outwitting a wild creature that lives on its wits is immensely satisfying, though I sometimes wonder why this is when you consider that the IQ of any fish is probably in negative territory.
Fly hatches are everyday events on the chalkstreams, and for that matter most rivers, so why is it that the mayfly excites like no other? Well, everyone likes big, and it is not just big, but truly huge. If you think of the average insect as the size of a cat, Ephemera danica is the size of a cow. And it is this size that always stuns people the first time they see it; more often than not other insects’ hatches are really hard to spot on the river surface as the insects are carried downstream on the current. But not the mayfly – it sits up on the surface like a yacht in full sail. Sometimes when out as a fishing guide I’ll point my client in the direction of a solitary mayfly and they’ll say, ‘What, you mean that leaf?’ Mayflies really do look like that at a distance, and I don’t blame anyone for doubting their own eyes the first time they see one.
Your first mayfly day will be one of those defining moments in your evolution as a fly-fisherman or -woman. Cynical anglers dismiss mayfly-fishing as too easy, but anyone with an ounce of awe for a wonder of nature will be excited each and every year the calendar comes around to May, and that first time will always be hard-wired into your memory.
As with many things angling, the nomenclature is guaranteed to confuse, for the mayfly is far from being uniquely tied to May. On that grandfather of the chalkstreams, the River Test, the hatch runs from mid-May to early June. In a bad year it will last two weeks, in a good year over a month. However, 15 miles to the east, on the River Itchen, an almost identical river, the hatch will start in June and carry on well into July. Try an April walk through the water meadows alongside the River Avon and you will regularly see a hatch that lasts for just a day or so. Confused? I wouldn’t blame you, but nature does not obey the calendar, and our mistake as anglers is to sometimes impose the parameters of human existence on insects that will live for barely twenty-four hours. As a mayfly you spend two years working up to that single day when you will hatch, mate, reproduce and die, so you had better get it right. In your nymphal state you don’t care whether it is April, May or June, all you care about is the optimum conditions to do your bit to preserve your species on hatch day. You certainly don’t have time to expand your horizons by travelling to another river, and therein lies the reason for the local variations. For in the same way that animal species have evolved on the different continents, our mayfly adapts to the tiny variations, such as water temperature or light intensity, within each river catchment. Unable to travel far enough to breed on another river within that single day, each successive generation reinforces the habits of those that have come before, preserving the unique characteristics of a Test, Itchen or Avon Ephemera danica.
But don’t think our ephemeral insect is just a native of the chalkstreams. They occur all over the British Isles, and in Ireland they are the highlight of the famous dapping season of May and June. You will even see mayflies creating havoc in the riverside inns along the River Thames as the after-work drinkers swat them away, fearing them to be some giant mosquito with a bite to match.
It is a racing certainty that your mayfly day will start with disappointment. Like any good angler fired up with enthusiasm for their first day on the river you will have read copious fishing magazines, spent heavily in tackle shops and boasted to anyone who might listen of the fantastic haul you fully expect to take. As the old saying goes, you will have ‘risen early and created a mighty commotion in the household’ and will arrive laden with kit and expectation. In your mind’s eye you will turn the bend in the river to greet a steady stream of mayflies drifting down it, voracious trout greedily swallowing them down. You’ll be thoughtful and measured, taking your time to rig the rod, tie on a new leader – the thin filament of nylon that connects the fly to the fly line – examine the hatch to precisely pick the right pattern from your box, and then with calm deliberation make that first cast of the day, so perfect that it catches your fish of choice the first time.
And the reality? Well, you probably won’t wait until you get to the river before tackling up. In the car park you’ll be all fingers and thumbs in your rush to get ready. New leader? Nah, you’ll use the one left on the reel, though a little voice tells you this oversight will cost you dearly. Considered fly choice? Forget it. You’ll put on the first fly that comes to hand or catches your eye. There is an old saying in the tackle trade that flies are tied to catch fishermen not fish. You have just been the first catch of the day.
The fact is that your ‘mayfly madness’ is already well advanced, but it’s nothing that a couple of contemplative hours will not cure, for in your eagerness to get fishing you will have arrived at the river far, far too early in the morning to start. It is one of those things that coarse fishermen, legendary for pre-dawn starts, never quite understand about fly-fishermen: why we start so late. So late being around ten in the morning, which at the height of summer is a full four or five hours after sunrise, the time when any self-respecting carp basher or pike hunter will be contemplating getting his head down for a few hours’ shut-eye. One of my first clients, Edward Bielby, an old-school city gent, liked to describe them as bankers’ fishing hours: arrive at ten, go for lunch at twelve, be back a bit the worse for wear at two and pack it in at four. Clearly this was pre-Big Bang. Edward held to this theory regardless, which I think said more about his predilection for long lunches than the reality of the fishing conditions on any given visit. In the early days of our fishing forays I tried to persuade him to take a late lunch or hang around for the evening, but he never wavered. On the strike of noon, even in the midst of a purple patch when we were catching every cast, he would wind in, hand the rod to me and head off for lunch. Edward’s view was clear: you set your own rules by which you fish. They might not suit others, but if they suit you, stick to them. The fish you don’t catch will still be there after lunch or tomorrow. And if you are not fishing tomorrow then they will be there for the next lucky fellow. It is a lovely philosophy to live by, and though Edward was wrong to go home so early (evening fishing is often the most exciting of the day), he was certainly spot on for the morning start.
Yet the cadence of the fishing day is not determined by the angler, the fish or the weather, but by the insect life. There is no chicken or egg debate here. The insects start hatching, the fish start feeding and the angler starts catching. Understand this and you are on the path to successful fly-fishing. On a typical mayfly day everyone arrives too early. On this particular overcast, blustery mid-May morning my fishermen for the day, James and Olaf, and I peer down from the bridge to the fish below, who sit there glued to the bottom, gorged from their mayflies the previous day.
Logic tells you that surely a well-presented mayfly pattern, a careful imitation of what was on the river yesterday, will galvanize even the laziest trout to feed.
‘What shall I use on them?’ asks Olaf, who has applied that logic. My heart sinks, for I am certain that for the next half-hour every fly cast by Olaf and James will be ignored, despite numerous variations of fly, angle and presentation. But how can I tell them this? I can’t – I don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm – so I don’t and we get into position.
From the outset Olaf struggles with a downstream wind and cannot make the heavy bulk of the mayfly turn over and land in a position where the fish can see it. A bit frustrated, he gives way to James, who tries his luck.
‘What on earth am I doing wrong?’ Olaf asks.
‘When was the last time you picked up a fly rod?’ I reply.
Olaf thinks about it for a moment. ‘Last summer, I guess.’
‘Tell me,’ I say, ‘do you play golf?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you get on the practice range to hit a few balls before playing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you run?’
‘More or less every day.’
‘Well, I bet you do a few stretches first.’
‘Of course,’ says Olaf, ‘but . . .’ And then it dawns on him: fly-casting is like any other discipline. If you don’t do it for a while you get rusty. You don’t get bad, you just get out of the groove. ‘I get it, you want me to practise!’ I smile at him.
‘It’s not going to be a boot camp,’ I promise, ‘but let’s give James some space and move a few yards downriver.’ That’s exactly what we did, and for fifteen minutes I took Olaf back to basics, casting with a bit of wool until he could land on a spot the size of a dinner plate at 15 yards. Then we tied the mayfly back on. A couple of casts later Olaf looked at me woefully as the old problem came back with the fly landing in the crumpled heap of tangled leader.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, taking the leader. I nipped off the fly, cut off a yard of leader and retied the fly. ‘Try again.’ This time all was perfect. The rod went up, the line stretched out behind Olaf, and when fully extended he brought it forward, and as the line and leader unfurled in a straight line the mayfly drifted onto the water.
‘How did that happen?’ asked a delighted Olaf, who repeated the same perfect cast to two or three different points on the river. The fact is, different days, different flies and different weather conditions demand different leader length. But when you’ve paid three or four pounds for a nine-foot factory-made leader it takes quite an act of faith to lop 2 or 3 feet off it the moment you take it out of the packet. Fortunately I hadn’t paid for Olaf’s leader, so I had no such scruples.
Back with James we guessed that the absence of any whoops of joy or splashing meant that he had had no success, but we abided by the angler’s code that allows for admission of failure with a suitable excuse attached.
‘Any luck?’ asked Olaf.
‘Nothing,’ said James. ‘They won’t look at anything. I’ve tried at least half a dozen flies but . . . [the excuse is on its way] . . . they are clearly not feeding.’ He reels in and asks me, ‘What shall I try?’ I am tempted to say coffee then launch into the explanation about why we need to wait until later in the morning, but they are so enthusiastic and fired up I don’t have the heart.
‘Well, it’s clear the trout are not impressed by our mayflies and are waiting for the hatch later on as the day warms up,’ I said, getting an explanation of sorts in, then pausing, hoping one or other might take the hint and suggest coffee, but they both just look dejected. ‘So,’ I continue, ‘there is a little trick that sometimes gets them going.’ This brings looks of hope and I produce a fly box.
Peering into the box I pick out a tiny little black midge, which looks exactly as you would imagine – one of those buzzy, bitey things you associate with the summer; they generally leave you with red spots. Actually midges are one of the few insect groups that hatch all year round so are a constant feature of the trout diet. Our trout know that the big meal of mayflies will be along later in the day, so for now they are just chilling out ahead of the feast. Yet like any diner offered peanuts at the bar or bread on the table the temptation to snack is irresistible.
James gives way to Olaf, who gets into position and after a few false casts easily covers the fish nearest to our bank. Not a twitch. My snack theory looks on shaky ground. Olaf looks at me by way of a question.
‘Good cast, but leave him alone. Let’s cover each of the fish in turn, from left to right.’ (There were four spread across the river.) The second is equally dismissive, but the third twitches just a fraction. It is the tiniest of moves as the fish lifts a few degrees from the parallel as if to acknowledge the presence of the fly, but nothing more. If it wasn’t for the gin-clear water and our absolute focus on that single fish it would be easy to miss, but we all three see it and let out a collective gasp.
Olaf casts again, this time the black midge landing a little further upstream, on the peripheral vision of the trout, which quick as lightning lifts off from the bottom. He drifts up on the current, letting the flow take him downstream, tracking the progress of the fly, getting ever closer beneath it. None of us breathe for we know that in the next moment the trout should open his mouth, suck in the fly and be on the line, but when his nose is almost touching the fly he has an abrupt change of heart and in an instant heads directly back to his spot on the riverbed.
‘Faen, faen, faen . . .’ exclaimed Olaf (‘Damn, damn damn’), reverting to his native Norwegian, and then laid half a dozen increasingly frenetic casts over our fish. The trout was having none of it, resolutely refusing to budge until Olaf crashed down his line in a truly appalling cast, which sent all four fish fleeing for cover. But it didn’t really matter, for just that one show of interest, even though the fish didn’t actually take the fly, was a victory in itself and we were all content to take a break.
In the clear, alkaline waters of a chalkstream there is a hive of activity buzzing beneath the surface as a mayfly morning progresses. The thousands of little nymphs, which started life as eggs almost exactly two years ago to the day, are getting ready to emerge. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, a mayfly nymph stops feeding and prepares to head for the surface of the river. For our nymph this is the most dangerous moment in his life; as he struggles to shed his larval shell in the surface film, not only is he easy pickings for hungry trout, but get the timing wrong and there will be no other mayflies with which to mate – disaster at every level.
It must be said that part of mayfly madness is fuelled by just how obliging the nymphs are about their timing. For us anglers the delight of fly-fishing lies in the uncertainties, but just once a year to know exactly what will be hatching on any given day (with ravenous fish to match) is a special treat. Would we want it every day? No. Do we like it once a year? Most certainly. So, how on earth do the nymphs arrive bang on time every year?
You’ll hear all sorts of theories why – light intensity, UV rays and water temperature – and I guess there is an element of fact in them all, but more realistically do we care that much? The important fact is that from around the middle of May is the time to head for a river with a box of mayflies and great expectations.
By now it was well past eleven o’clock and whatever expectations Olaf and James may have had were morphing into disappointment as the high of the fish-we-didn’t-quite-catch faded. Sometimes as a fishing guide this is a worrying moment, and if you are not careful you can lose your clients to surly indifference for the rest of the trip. On any other day I might have been worried and have tried to convince them to get back on the river, but not today. Today I’d have staked my life on the certainty that within the next hour or two an armada of mayflies would be floating down the river to give Olaf and James the fishing day of their life. So I fuss around, fill them with coffee, and we compare fly boxes to fritter away the time while I constantly scan the river with one eye.
Sure enough, within half an hour the first mayfly of the day appears; it is strange, but they do just ‘appear’ like a magic trick of nature. One moment you have a flat, dull river surface and the next the iconic vision of what fly-fishing is all about. The morning sun bounces off the dappled white wings, making it easy to track the progress of the mayflies floating downstream.
‘Is that a mayfly?’ asks Olaf. ‘I can’t believe how huge it is.’ James picks out a mayfly from the box and holds it up at arm’s length to compare the silhouette with that of the real mayfly.
‘I thought these flies were a joke, but they really do look like the real thing,’ he says, and wastes no time tying it onto the end of his line.
The three of us stand watching the stately progress of the solitary mayfly as it drifts further downriver. It seems inconceivable that such a tasty morsel will be left unmolested for long, and sure enough after 15 yards, with a gulp and a splash, the best meal of the day disappears into the stomach of a trout.
‘That’s it, no more coffee and sitting around,’ I announce, so we gather up our stuff at speed and head down the back path of the woods that will bring us out to the bottom of the beat. By the time we are in position the hatch is beginning to build, with a good ten or a dozen mayflies on the surface within casting range of James. Rather than cast blind we wait for the first to be taken by one of the fish we can see holding in the current. Sure enough we see a brown shape loom up from below, open its mouth, suck in the fly, turn its head down and with a slash of his tail drive back down into the depths, using the force of the water to push the mayfly down its throat. It is all over in two seconds, with the same trout back on station and ready to take the next fly that comes along. But this time it will be James’s fly.
The first few casts are all over the place, too far left, too far right or not far enough ahead of the target fish. I think James is being overcautious; a mayfly is a big offering for any trout and it needs to eye it up before committing, so it pays to land the mayfly a good couple of yards ahead of the fish. With a little encouragement this is exactly what he does, and we see an action replay as the trout locks on to James’s fly. But this time as he turns his head down to swallow the fly Olaf and I in chorus scream ‘strike’. James’s rod comes up and the fish is on.
The fight is short and James soon has the fish in the net. He holds him up for a quick photo; after all your first fish on a mayfly is a must for every family album. Back in the water we watch the trout shudder as he coughs up three or four mayflies in various stages of digestion before heading for a clump of weed. He will no doubt sulk there for a few hours before getting back on the hatch.
Next up is Olaf, and while James emails the fish photo to anyone who might be remotely interested, and probably plenty who aren’t, we wait for the next rise. Sure enough we don’t wait long, and Olaf needs no invitation. Learning from James, his first cast is bang on and a few minutes later we are releasing his first fish.
At this point in the day my job is done, for a while at least, so I sit down on a fallen tree to watch the action. The boys fish turn and turn about, each giving way to the other once a fish is caught. Not every cast catches a fish and not every fish wants to rise, but that’s part of the fun. Find a fish that won’t react to your fly? Well, tear it off and try a different variation. Have a fish that comes up and looks but will not take? Next time give it a twitch. A fish that simply won’t play ball? Move on to another; there are plenty more fish in the sea (well, there are!). The fact is that part of mayfly madness is that you have more choices for more fish than at just about any other time in the fishing year, so it’s a chance to be a bit blasé or to try some new tricks.
Of the two, it is James who tires of catching first. Tired of catching fish? Yes, it really can happen, and he joins me on the tree to watch Olaf, who is soon into another fish. As we watch it splash around, James asks, ‘Simon, why is it that despite the thrashing around and all the fish we have taken out of this one spot the others don’t seem to care?’
It is a bizarre thing and he’s absolutely right. If I lobbed a tiny stone into the river all the fish would flee in an instant, but to have one of their fellows tear up and down on the end of a line and then disappear doesn’t seem to bother them one jot. There is clearly no empathy between fish, and long may it continue from an angling perspective, but as for an explanation, I don’t have one.
As is often the case on a mayfly day, after the big surge the hatch eases off to the point where the flow of mayflies becomes a trickle and the trout lose interest. But it is simply a lull in the action; there is much more to come in the afternoon, so we head back for lunch. James and Olaf chatter away ahead of me, comparing notes from their successful morning. I know for sure it is a couple of hours they will remember for ever. I’m happy for them and feel just a little surge of pride at being able to lift the curtain on something most people never get to see or be a part of.
‘Tell me something,’ James asks, ‘we’ve seen hundreds, no probably thousands of mayflies this morning, only a tiny proportion of which have been eaten by the trout and ducks [yes, even ducks love to eat mayflies], so where have they all gone? As far as I can tell they have vanished.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ I say, stopping beside an alder bush and lifting a branch. ‘Look here.’ And there, as I expected, hanging upside down on the underside of the leaves are two or three mayflies on each leaf. They are completely unfussed by our intrusion and make no attempt to fly away. I gently pick one up by the tips of its wings and place it in the outstretched palm of my hand so that James and Olaf can examine it. The mayfly sits up on my hand, crouched on olive-coloured legs that resemble the hindquarters of a cheetah about to spring. Its three grey-black tails are double the length of its body and its sail-like cream wings, translucent with heavy venation, sit on a creamy yellow body that is long, thin and maggot-like. Look directly at the head and huge bulbous eyes stare back at you above a jaw that would easily crush anything unfortunate enough to get in its way.
‘Creepy,’ says Olaf. ‘Any idea what they taste like? Trout clearly like them.’
‘I have heard it said they taste like butter, but I’ve never quite had the balls to give it a try. How about you?’ I push my hand towards Olaf’s face, who backs away laughing. ‘I would of course, but I’m a vegetarian.’ I don’t think he is really, so we carefully return our mayfly to under the leaf, where he will remain for an hour or two before shedding his skin and emerging looking much the same but ready for the all-important mating ritual and the famous mayfly dance.
The odd thing about the mating dance is that it starts all of a sudden. One moment you are looking in a particular direction, maybe at the treeline or over the water meadows; turn away then look back a few seconds later and the air will be alive with thousands, possibly millions of dancing mayflies. The air can get so thick with them that it is like gunsmoke drifting across a battlefield. But this is no random dance; its beauty lies in the precision of nature’s pageant.
This is the cue for James, Olaf and I to get ready for the really serious fishing of the day. As the late afternoon sets in, the mating is complete and the males slink off to die in the bushes. The females will soon return to the water to lay their eggs, where the trout will be ready for the most almighty feast as the mayflies spend the last few minutes of their lives laying down the seed for the next generation.
I make sure that both James and Olaf have two particular types of mayfly for this final hour or two; the first looks a lot like the morning flies, to imitate the female sitting on the surface, albeit this time she is laying eggs rather than having just hatched. The other fly is a very plain affair, looking like one that has been pressed in a book. It represents the dead mayfly lying in the surface film, all stretched out like a corpse floating in a Hollywood ‘B’ movie swimming pool.
I am pretty sure that my guiding role is over for the day; my anglers have cracked the mayfly code and the fish will be certain to oblige. It now comes down to waiting for the fish to feed, banging the right type of fly down in the right place, then changing between the two patterns as the fish switch from the live to the dead insect as their fancy takes them. So I position the two on different parts of the beat and wait at the mid-point for the action to begin.
We don’t have to wait long for the first egg-layers to head for the river. But stuffed full of over 8,000 eggs, they are no longer the nimble fliers we saw at the dance. They adopt one of two strategies to deposit the eggs in the river; one keeping them alive a good deal longer than the other. The suicide strategy is to sit on the surface to lay their eggs, but the temptation to the trout is too great and there will be no chance of escape as the eager trout hoover them up or the mallards line up across the width of the river to do the same. The competition is sometimes so frenetic that a trout will snatch a mayfly from beneath the beak of the duck, who will cock his head with a mystified air as if to say, ‘Who stole my mayfly?’
The savvier mayfly descends to the surface of the water to release her eggs in groups by dipping the tip of her abdomen onto the surface at intervals, using the surface tension of the water to draw the eggs from her body. But even this is no guarantee of survival, for the trout will leap from the water to grab the mayflies in mid-air. Whichever path our female chooses, her lifespan is now measured in minutes rather than hours, and as the evening draws in the river surface becomes thick with mayfly corpses.
While James seems to have struck a purple patch, catching a fish with almost every cast I can see, Olaf is getting more frustrated as the fish continue to rise in front of him but ignore his every offering. This spills over into his casting, which gets wilder with each cast, his line swishing like the tail of an angry cat. So when his back cast gets caught in the bushes behind him for the third time, this seems the moment to go to his aid.
Using the excuse of stripping down his leader and putting on a new tippet is my way to calm things down, so while I clip and knot on a new fly we stand on the bank examining the water surface picking out the egg-laying, dying or dead females in turn.
‘What’s that?’ asks Olaf, pointing to a perfect circle of pulsating ripples, about the diameter of a coffee cup.
‘That’s a dying mayfly – in its final convulsions as it drowns,’ I say. ‘Watch it.’
The violent shudders last a couple of seconds, the mayfly enduring them two or three times – as if absorbing a giant electric shock – until it lies still; dead on the surface. As if on cue, a trout rises from below in the most nonchalant manner, knowing that the mayfly is a spent force with no chance of escape, and opens his mouth to let the flow of water draw the meal into his jaws.
‘Let’s try this,’ I say to Olaf, holding up a spent mayfly pattern. ‘Pick any fish you like!’
There is indeed a lot of choice: half a dozen fish rising at regular intervals within 15 yards’ casting distance. Some were feeding on the egg-layers, others waiting for the pulsating mayflies, while the rest lazily sucked down the dead. Trying his luck with one of the middle group, Olaf casts twice over a feeding fish that ignores the fly.
‘Next cast, when your fly gets into the view of the trout, give it a twitch.’ Olaf looks at me as if not quite understanding. Maybe it’s just a language thing, but not knowing the Norwegian for twitch I try a different tack. ‘Waggle the tip of the rod to make the fly move as it drifts.’ It takes Olaf a couple of goes to get it right, but boom, the moment it happens the trout comes straight up without hesitation and takes the bait.
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ screams Olaf with delight. ‘Amazing, so simple and so damn effective.’ And for the next half-hour we have some fun picking out a particular fish feeding in a particular way and changing our strategy to match, but the twitch has become Olaf’s secret weapon of choice.
James walks back down the river to join us with a huge smirk on his face, holding out a bedraggled fly.
‘What’s that?’ asks Olaf.
‘Well it was a Thomas’s Mayfly, but after ten casts and six fish it is now my favourite fly ever!’
Not wishing to be outdone, Olaf says, ‘Watch this’, and goes on to demonstrate his now perfected ‘twitch’ to deadly effect. As he gently slips his umpteenth fish of the day back into the river, he turns to James. ‘Want to have a go?’
‘No, I think I’m done. And this fly,’ he says, snipping it off and sticking it in his cap, ‘is going to be my lucky charm.’ And like gamblers who have been on a hot streak, walking away from the table with pockets bulging with chips, the pair decide to call it a day.