DAWN. IT RISES without a chorus over the river. Typically we don’t have many songbirds and more typically river creatures are late risers. As the sun burns off the mist, the fringes along the riverbanks glisten with dew-laden spiders’ webs. They are everywhere. If you had to count them you would reach a hundred within a few paces. Turn your back to the river and the entire meadow is almost white with webs, from close to the ground to high up on the tall grasses. Even the gaps between the strands of the barbed-wire fences are occupied. And on every one is a spider that crabs across to consume the night-time harvest.
As a fly-fisherman, so by default a sporadic entomologist, I stoop to see the captured. There is a pattern – the further I am from the river the more the webs hold terrestrials like black gnats and flying ants who don’t need the water as part of their life cycle. Sometimes I’ll come across a web that is almost shredded where a big daddy-long-legs has fought a hard but ultimately useless battle to free himself. But I don’t give these webs much time; it is the ones by the river that really concern me.
Fly-fishing is all about reducing the odds. Somewhere out there are over six thousand different artificial flies, and your job, if you want to be successful, is to hone down that number to one single fly to tie on your line for any given moment. Now you could be entirely random with that choice. Or base it on what someone has reported in the fishing book. Or you could use the fly that worked the last time you fished. Or you could just look at that spider’s web, identify what hatched the previous evening and conclude, probably rightly, that if it hatched the chances are a fish ate it. As I examine the webs closest to the river my interest is more than purely entomological; tonight I have every intention of fishing the evening rise, a magical time between dusk and dark when the river can boil as the fish go on a feeding frenzy the like of which we will not have seen since the mayfly.
For all the excitement, it is a time that can be maddeningly frustrating for the angler as the fish rise here, there and everywhere but consistently ignore everything you offer. In the gloaming it is impossible to accurately identify the insects on the water. A torch is no answer as the beam will immediately spook the fish, so you are reduced to scooping up a handful of water and myopically staring at the fly. At best you can hope that the silhouette will give you some clues, but the truth is fly identification is hard enough in broad daylight, so you will likely be none the wiser. But in the cold, unhurried light of dawn with hours in which to contemplate your tactics, the spider’s web is the book of knowledge, and two inert figures tell me enough for the evening to come.
The earliest risers at Gavelwood are always the swans. However early I am, they will be there before me, wreathed in the mist, heads down under the water, picking away at the choicest shoots of crowfoot which are close to the riverbed. For a bird that rarely flies and spends nearly all its day gently paddling they seem to have a prodigious appetite. Maybe there is not much protein in their food of choice, and with that big bulk to fill maybe they have no choice either. The water voles will be out in force as well; this is clearly their favoured time of day, navigating up and down the river, weaving along the edge of the rushes, ready to dive for cover at the slightest sign of danger. The adults are in the prime of their life; their fur shines as if oiled and everywhere they swim it is with great vigour and purpose, be it for finding food or materials for the burrow. By this time in the year the vole population at Gavelwood has pretty well exploded, getting close to its peak for the year as the four or five litters born to each pair since March reach maturity. For such cute little mammals they are fiercely territorial during the summer, spreading out to mark their patch, though in winter when the conditions get tough they will become far more collegiate. But for now the occasional scrabbling spat will be resolved by one swimming the width of the river by way of giving up, whilst the victor mounts a handy section of reed, sits on his haunches and indulges in some nonchalant fur-cleaning.
Gradually as the sun gets higher in the sky and the morning warms, the river starts to wake up. Early on the occasional fish will lazily suck something down off the surface, maybe a spent fly from the evening before, but generally the fish come out from their night-time resting places to take up position in the open current, confident in their own mind that the food will be along all in good time. When the first hatch of the day gets the attention of the trout, it is not so much a hatch but a continuation of the day before, when a few blue-winged olive duns, the fecund females mated and ready to lay, lift off from their night-time perches. A few at a time, they drift off from the sedge grasses or drooping comfrey, or out from under the alder tree leaves, catching the thermal warm air as it transports them 10, 12 feet into the sky before they think better of it and hitch a ride down onto the river surface on a cooler downdraught. In the morning sun, with no breeze as yet, the surface has the texture and colour of blue mercury, and even the infinitesimal weight of the blue-wing creates a little indentation on the water as she settles to deposit her eggs. Every one that lands stands out to me as clear as a ship on the horizon, nodding gently with the motion of the current, and it has to be certain that if I can see them the ever-vigilant trout will not miss out. Doubly worse for the busy egg-layers, olives are some of the trout’s favourite foods. And sure enough, with minimal effort but certain intent, one of the waiting trout tilts his head upwards, computes the position of the insect, adjusts the angle of his side fins and lets the hydrofoil effect of the current carry him upwards towards the surface. With practised ease he drifts downstream at the same pace as the olive until his mouth is precisely below its tiny body, at which point he breaks the surface with his nose, opens his mouth, and as the water rushes in it carries the olive into his gullet. As the trout returns to his original resting spot I can see the slight convulsion in his body as he swallows the mouthful of water and the fly it contains. From start to finish the whole thing took maybe five seconds. To me it seems much longer, and despite many thousand repetitions before my eyes it never fails to put me in awe of just how perfect nature can be sometimes.
But human life intrudes on nature, and I know what I have just seen is the absolute best of news for today’s anglers, so I head to the Drowners House to share my secret. The blue-winged olive has a status in fly-fishing unmatched by any other fly. Iconic pretty well sums it up, so when I drop what I have seen into the conversation thoughts of a lazy start to the day are abandoned by all, and in a flurry of rods, flies and general fishing kit they head off to the river, whilst I take my cue to head in the other direction to see what’s happening on North Stream.
Truly the best thing you can say about any restoration is that it never happened, not in the sense that it didn’t actually happen, but that six months or a year later you would never know the work had been done. By that measure North Stream is almost a complete success. Looking upstream from Bailey Bridge I struggle to recall how dismal it looked the first time I saw it; barely flowing, overgrown, in perpetual shade and impenetrable for most of its length. If you were being kind you would have called it a neglected ditch. But today the scars of our work have healed and it is what we wanted it to be: a clear, fast-flowing offshoot of the main river that makes the Gavelwood meadows a better place to be for the river valley creatures, whether they live on land or in the water. The bankside plants are better for it too. Gone is the scrubland of brambles and nettles, and in its place an apparent hotchpotch of wild flowers that decorate the fringe with a whole palette of colours, growing to different heights, some upright and tall, others tumbling down into the water giving the stream a ragged edge that takes the harshness out of the otherwise straight bank.
The tallest of the plants that proliferate along the banks, about shoulder height to me, is the cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris. It grows like a small tree, topped by a canopy of large white flowerheads, each one the span of your hand, that combine to create a sort of dome. For the fishermen it is something of a nuisance, its height perfectly set to catch a careless back cast; the thin tippet at the end of the fly line always seems to wrap itself around the buds and the hook to embed itself in the woody stem. Add to that the sticky nectar that envelops the whole flowerhead and glues up my fingers so that after five minutes of patient unravelling I sometimes wonder why we tolerate the cow parsley. But somebody loves it, because in June and July the flowerheads will turn almost black, covered by tiny flies which I guess are feeding on that sticky substance I find so annoying. What these flies are, I have no idea. They don’t come onto the fishing radar and look suspiciously similar to the ones that gravitate towards fresh cowpats. But I guess we shouldn’t hold that against them, and somewhere in the balance of nature they have their place, so the cow parsley stays.
The remarkable thing about the plants along the bank of North Stream is the huge diversity that seems to have sprung from nowhere. Our sole effort has been to remove the scrub growth, open it up to the light and keep fast growers like nettles at bay. If I had wanted to create such a beautiful wild collection on purpose it would have been a mighty task, but nature has done it for us in the space of a few months. The purple of the loosestrife, the white of the comfrey, the yellow of the fleabane and the pale pink of the hemp agrimony all cascade this way and that. Even in the wet margins of the stream there is colour where the dainty bright blue flowers of the water forget-me-not provide cover for the nymphs and baby sticklebacks.
My self-congratulatory musings are broken by a small sound from the edge of the reeds. It is a barely audible slurp that comes and goes in a moment. A minute or so later it happens again. For years this sound confounded me. By every norm it should be made by a fish, but I could never see one, and it was only by luck that I found the source of this mysterious event. Wading upriver one day I heard that selfsame slurp, so I stopped still and stared at the reeds where I thought the sound had emanated. Nothing happened for a while, and then the surface of the water broke, slowly revealing an inch-long damselfly nymph, crawling up a reed that it used as a ladder to get from water to air in preparation to emerge from his or her aquatic body. But for at least this one nymph, being a nymph was the best he was ever going to achieve, because directly behind him, up slid a silvery black, snake-like head that slurped him down in a trice. The stealth hunter was an eel, and by just about any measure the story of where this eel has been and where it will be going trumps even that of the Atlantic salmon, spanning three decades, nearly ten thousand miles and a return journey to the Bermuda triangle.
When it comes to age, eels are the oldest residents of Gavelwood by some considerable margin, though they are almost the most rarely seen. For a furry creature like a vole, two years are a lifetime; otters might make a decade at most. Of the fish, a trout of seven is old, a salmon that makes two or three returns might just get into double figures, and often a pike may live to a ripe age beyond that. Waterfowl that get to three years of age have done well; for more wily residents like the kingfisher five years plus might be normal, and with the swans a dozen to fifteen years is a good age to aim for. So how is it that the eels I spy on a sunlit July morning, in a few inches of water of a tiny stream in an obscure corner of the English countryside, are six thousand miles from their place of birth and have outlived all the other chalkstream creatures by some considerable margin?
To start with the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is not like any of the other chalkstream denizens. It is catadromous, which is to say that it lives most of its life in fresh water but must head for the sea to spawn. There are in fact only a handful of fish (yes, an eel, despite appearances and many other oddities, is a fish) that organize their lives this way. Far more common is the life cycle of that other chalkstream adventurer the Atlantic salmon, who is anadromous, doing everything in reverse to the eel by living at sea for most of the time but needing a return to fresh water for spawning. But of the two it is the eels that outnumber the salmon hundreds to one, and though largely forgotten today, they used to be one of the most sought-after fish in the river.
It is hard to know exactly where to start with the eel, so elongated and complicated is their life. Over two or three decades our eel will take in everything from muddy ditches, treks overland, ocean voyages, numerous hazards and predators, plus a pleasant sojourn in a chalkstream. But maybe this summer moment is as good as any to pick him up as he enters the last two years of his life where the only certainty is a lingering death at the end.
On the Evitt and just about every other chalkstream, eels are a common sight by late summer. After anywhere up to twenty years of living in a muddy pond or ditch they have slithered across meadows, through woods and whatever gets in their way to find the same river they swam up from the ocean all those years before. Though most definitely from the fish family, the eel has two distinct characteristics that set it apart from the other fish and allow it to migrate across land. First, and most obviously, with its asp-like sinuosity it can travel inconspicuously and without much effort over land. That said, the herons at Gavelwood soon latch on to this bounty, leaving the river for a while in high summer to patrol the far reaches of the meadows. However sly an eel might be, the patience and eyes of the heron are better. Second, the eel has the ability to retain water in its gill cavities, keeping the delicate bronchial folds afloat, allowing it to breathe as if still submerged. If you ever see a live eel on a fish counter you can see this for yourself. Look out for the slight bulbous swelling either side of the throat, which is obvious in much the same way that a hamster stores food with puffed-out cheeks. Add to that a myriad blood vessels close to the skin surface that let the eels suck oxygen from the air via the water on their skin, then, just so long as they can stay damp, being out of water holds few perils. Sadly for the eel, this remarkable ability to survive out of water was to make it the ideal candidate for the live eel trade which in its day was big, big business.
At Gavelwood we usually find out that the eels are back by accident, as we clean the fish at the end of a summer evening, lobbing the guts into the river for the scavengers like the crayfish to feast on. It usually takes a few minutes, but eels are like sharks – they can sense blood in the water. In the deep pool outside Drowners the guts tumble on the gentle current or get caught in a back eddy. Eels are hard to see until they are near the surface, but the pale pinky-white guts of the fish are not, so that’s what we watch until they suddenly start to move as if grasped by a hidden hand to quickly disappear from view. If I keep chumming the river with offal, more and more eels will appear, to the point that they grab the guts from the surface the moment they hit the water. Anyone who has never seen this before will always watch with wide-mouthed amazement. It can be a real feeding frenzy; the violence and speed with which the eels take the bait is terrific. If eels were of any great size you might think twice about putting your hand in the water ever again.
But catching eels one at a time with bait is no way to make a fortune; industrial-scale eel traps were the answer, which exploited the need for the eel to migrate downstream en masse on particular nights of the year prompted by the phases of the moon. We don’t have them at Gavelwood, but relics of the eel traps remain on the Evitt. Essentially a bridge was built across the river, preferably on a section that was no more than 3 or 4 feet deep, with stout posts to support it every 9 feet. Then between the posts was lowered into the water a frame that held three fyke nets, which once in the current billowed out below the bridge like windsocks. So as the eels swam downstream they were directed into the mouth of the fyke net, which narrowed towards the end where it was tied off; pressed by the current, the eels were trapped in a squirming ball of their fellows.
Today, with refrigeration and fast transport, it is hard to imagine just how sought-after fresh fish was in rural communities far from the sea, but the hundreds of tons caught in the Evitt every year had a ready and eager market. At the height of the summer when the eels were most plentiful (and most other fish and meat perished in a day), the fact that they could be transported and sold live put them at a premium. And when the steam railways connected the country to the industrialized towns the scale of the eel harvest ratcheted up further, peaking at the end of the nineteenth century.
A hundred or so years on the eel has fewer hazards to negotiate, yet even so the population has collapsed by 80 per cent in three decades. If fishing alone was to blame the solution would be easy, but with each passing year I see and hear fewer eels on summer evenings. Pollution, a particularly harmful parasite from Southern hemisphere eels, changes in the oceanic currents, and closer to home the loss of water meadows, are all contributing to the decline. Despite that there are still commercial eel nets left working in the Dorset and Hampshire estuaries, laying out fyke nets overnight eking out a living for the eels they need for smoking, but on the whole the yellow eel, as it is known at this stage in his life, heads downriver unmolested, feeding as he goes. They are, as the fish guts demonstrate, utterly omnivorous; dead fish, live fish, invertebrates, snails – you name it, they will eat it. They are driven by the imperative of this last opportunity to build up their body reserves, because in a few weeks’ time they will enter the sea, never to feed again. But though they cannot feed they still have nearly two years to survive, which they will do by eating themselves from the inside out.
What fascinates me about the eel that slides past me under the Bailey Bridge on a route that will take him past all the same waymarks from years earlier, and through one of the relief hatches at Middle Mill and on to the sea, is how very little we still know about the life and habits of Anguilla anguilla. All sorts of theories abound and assumptions are made, but in total we perhaps know a quarter, or maybe a half at best, about how the eel lives its life. But this much we do know, that by high summer all the eels that sense their time has come are vacating the muddy ponds and ditches that they have called home for twenty years or more and, guided by the smell of the chalkstream water, thread their way through the grassland of the damp channels of the meadows and into the Evitt. The river journey to the sea of 30 miles or so is a trifle compared with what lies ahead, so they dawdle, feeding where they can whilst keeping a wary eye out for their few predators like otters or scrabbling down into the gravel for cover.
As the fresh water gives way to salt the body of our eel starts to change again while he runs the length of the estuary before turning west, hugging the southern English coastline for a while. The yellow skin starts to turn bright silver and the eyes grow huge and black. It was assumed for years that the eyes enlarged for better night-time vision, a safer time for the eels to swim close to the surface, but maybe this is not the case. As the English Channel merges into the Atlantic Ocean our eel should by all accounts slightly alter his course for a straight shot towards the Sargasso Sea that lies about 1,000 miles off the Florida coast, southwest of Bermuda. But he doesn’t. He turns south through the Bay of Biscay and heads down the African coast until he picks up the North Equatorial Current, on which he will drift pretty well due west for the next year to eighteen months until he reaches the huge morass of drifting sargassum weed that is the Sargasso Sea.
But travelling on an ocean current over which he has no control creates problems for the eel, as with every day that passes he is getting closer to sexual maturity. Somehow he has to time his arrival at the Sargasso Sea to coincide with his sexual peak, because with a body that is slowly rotting from within there is no margin for error. It seems those big eyes have nothing to do with night-sight but everything to do with swimming at great depths, as the eel goes as deep as 3,000 feet in search of the best currents to help him on the journey to the Sargasso Sea. Maturing too quickly? Get down to those lower temperatures and slow down your metabolism. Arrested development? Move up to the warmer water closer to the surface for a while. One way or another, the eel arrives ready to mate.
I would love to tell you that the eels have a seagoing version of the redds and a ritual as poetic as the trout and salmon, but sadly no. The truth is nobody is exactly sure how eels breed. The Sargasso Sea, at 700 miles wide and 2,000 miles long, is still one of the great unexplored areas on the planet. To the best that anyone can tell the female lays her eggs in the water, into which the male releases his sperm, the tiny fertilized ova attaching themselves to the weed during incubation whilst the parents simply die. With anywhere between 2 and 10 million eggs being laid by each female, it has to be a fairly random process, but how long the incubation lasts we can only guess at. What is known is that they hatch as leptocephali, leaflike larvae, and countless millions of these tiny, transparent, immature eels hitch a ride back towards Europe on the Gulf Stream, taking the direct northerly route that their parents avoided.
It is a fairly aimless journey that can take anything from a few months to a year but once the eels, now about 2–3 inches long and known as glass eels, scent the smell of a river they are galvanized into action. Prodigious numbers converge on the river estuaries, and nature’s tactic of providing millions so that a few may survive is amply demonstrated, whilst the birds and fish gorge themselves on this annual feast that comes their way in May and June. Man, of course, learnt not to let this windfall pass by without harvest. In Victorian times the coastal fishermen of Devon and Cornwall netted such vast numbers that they were sold by the cartload, to be fried into so-called ‘elver-cakes’. Heaven knows what they tasted like, but the description at the time as ‘having a peculiar appearance from the number of little black eyes that bespangle them’ does not make me want to grab for the frying pan.
But assuming that our elver, now starting to get darker in colour and lose his translucence, makes it past these dangers, he finds himself compelled by millions of years of evolution to migrate inshore using the Evitt as his highway, hauling himself out to wriggle across the fields to make his home in a muddy ditch or stagnant pond. An eel can pretty well eke out survival in any habitation, growing according to the season and availability of food. Even extremes of weather don’t faze them. In dry spells he will burrow deep, and in freezes will get frozen with no apparent ill effects. This was famously discovered by the nineteenth-century French zoologist Eugene Desmarest, who kept a pet eel for thirty-seven years. However, during one particularly harsh Parisian winter Desmarest arrived at his laboratory to find the eel frozen in the pottery pan in which it lived, so brought it back to life by thawing it with tepid water. In fact there are plenty of folk tales of frozen eels mistakenly gathered in firewood and ‘miraculously’ springing to life when piled up by the hearth.
But for all its ability to survive, our eel is no fast grower. The usual span in the muddy lair is somewhere around twenty years, which by most measures is a long time, though up to eighty-five years has been recorded, putting the apparently mundane eel right up there in the animal kingdom longevity stakes. Fortunately the years of life are no guide to size, as the eel will rarely grow to weigh much more than three pounds or be longer than 3 feet, otherwise he would be of anaconda proportions, devouring everything in his wake. That equates to an annual growth rate of just over an inch a year and four ounces of weight. In truth an annualized average is probably deceptive, as our eel grows in spurts, putting on plenty of weight in the good years and just surviving in the bad.
In the early evening as the sun dropped in the sky and the smoke from the barbecue drew me across the meadows towards the Drowners House I pondered on where to rank eels in the chalkstream hierarchy. On the one hand they are omnipresent, somewhere out there in their thousands, biding their time for that moment, years or even decades ahead, when they will start migrating. Until that moment comes we hardly see them, let alone have any interactions with them, so they hardly feature on the chalkstream radar. Two centuries ago, when they represented big money, I know I would have felt very differently, marking out these summer nights for a profitable eel harvest. Back then the brown trout that are everything to us today were held in very little regard, so I guess every creature will, in the end, have its day.
Nobody at Drowners is in a big rush to go fishing; tonight is as near perfect as it will get. That sort of evening when the air is still and humid. The type of night when you throw off your sheets and blankets, open every bedroom window and lie on top of the bed wishing that you had air conditioning. Nobody rushes because fishing the evening rise is as much about anticipating it as doing it. It could happen any time from when the sun dips below the horizon to when a cold mist rolls over the meadows. Or it could not happen at all. From Drowners we have a pretty good view up and down the river, so everyone is content to loll about with bottles of beer and desultory conversation waiting for the first sign, be it a splash of a messy rise, a tiny dimple, or the ‘gloop’ as a sizeable fish sucks down a spent fly. Our ears grow more attuned as our eyes grow less useful.
It is part of the mystique of the evening rise, that brief moment of time after dusk but before darkness when the fish go on a feeding frenzy, gorging themselves on the insects as they die or lay eggs in the surface of the river, that it does not happen every evening. The allure is not so much the catching, but the manner of the catching. In truth, for all the effort and dud evenings it is one of the least efficient manners of catching a trout. But we persist because one good evening, even one good fish, makes all the failures worthwhile.
Tonight the omens look good – bright sunshine all day and now as dusk advances, a hint of humidity. We are banking on the fact that the trout are hungry after a day in which they hardly fed, not by reason of the heat but simply because trout don’t have eyelids, so looking up hurts. However, the feeding habit is well ingrained at this time of year, so really we are waiting them out, knowing or perhaps more realistically hoping, that temptation will get the better of them once the sun has set and the insects, dead or alive, get stuck in the water film in the close, humid air of dusk. So wait we do, as the heat goes out of the day and the light fades.
‘Upstream or downstream?’ I ask, uncurling from a bench and picking up my rod at the sound of the first plop. ‘Upstream I think,’ replies one of the others joining me as we creep along the bank ready to make the first cast of the evening. More or less in position, we wait for the fish to show again, and sure enough 10 yards upstream and across, below the opposite bank, the silver rings of ripples show where the trout has taken a fly in the surface film. ‘What fly?’ asks my companion, as if anyone can really tell in this sort of light. ‘Sherry Spinner,’ I say with absolute certainty. He looks at me with mock incredulity so I say, handing him the rod, ‘Here, you have first cast.’ My choice of fly has nothing to do with what we have just seen but everything to do with the cobwebs from the morning that were thick with blue-winged olive duns. Logic tells me that the duns, even though ready to mate, will have hated the hot day as much as the trout (and us for that matter), so will have waited it out for the cool of the evening to make that final transformation into mating spinners and egg-layers.
Kneeling behind the bank fringe for cover, my companion makes short little flicks of my rod to pay out the line, dropping it to the surface to check the fly is floating OK. Satisfied, he picks up the line, gauges the distance to the fish, and after two deft trial casts in the air then lands the line on the water with the third, the fly alighting gently on the surface about 2 yards ahead of where we estimate the fish is holding. In the gathering dark it is surprisingly easy to see the line and the fly, which show silver against the inky dark of the river surface. It is made easier still when suddenly the water erupts around the fly and with a whoop of joy he swiftly raises the rod tip to hook the trout. But this trout obviously knows a thing or two about being hooked, for it heads to a weed bed that in the dark the angler cannot see and promptly throws the hook. One nil to the fish.
Leaving him to curse, but silently congratulating myself on fly choice, I move on upstream as the river starts to come alive with fish rising here, there and everywhere. This is a true evening rise and I know that it won’t last long. The temptation is to cast like mad and fish like a man possessed, haring up and down the river to cover every fish. However, the usual rule of fly-fishing applies: pick your fish, cast once and make your one cast your best cast. I observe this rule at least in part and soon have three fish to my name, one fly lost in a bush, and both hands red and itching, having managed to sting them in a clump of nettles when releasing one of the flies.
Holding up the fly to the sky and squinting to check it, I realize that in my concentration on the fishing we have gone from dusk to dark and the fish have stopped feeding. As the minutes pass I will a fish to rise, but with no new rises and the mist rolling in over the river I know in my heart of hearts it is over for tonight. For a while I hang on, hoping for just one more chance at one more fish, but when the heat of the day ebbs out of my body and a little shiver goes through me I take the hint. The rise is over, it is time to go, but the evening had lived up to its promise.