Though we may sometimes bemoan our luck, as a breed, fly-fishers are blessed with more than their fair share, claimed Brian Belshaw, who in the May 1990 edition of Trout & Salmon recalled some amazing examples of good fortune
The Falls of Shin, where the writer’s luck finally ran out
DEAREST Izaac D Walton (1593-1683) declared that “No man is born an angler”. But I would like to argue that anglers who, by their ultimate performances, are both ‘born’ and ‘made’ have one thing firmly in common. They all are born lucky!
If this is the wrong moment to say so, perhaps because some awful disaster of the fishing or other kind has struck our reader, let him/her take a deep breath and think. Fisherpersons’ (oh dear) luck can be either good or bad, but the mere fact of being a fisher, and especially a fly-fisher, is a glorious condition which will last a lifetime. It will ever (well, almost ever) soothe the savage breast just as surely as music, and perhaps gold, does for other, less fortunate mortals.
Fishers are basically lucky, for better or worse, because they have, or acquire, an approach to life and a special state of mind which is unique. All of which reminds me of a cavalcade of events that enlivened, or depressed, the joys of flexing a rod and catching (or not catching) fish.
I have a friend who realised he had lost his car keys in deep Scottish heather. Wandering hopelessly, he found them again against immeasurable odds. He parted exactly the right tuft in a wilderness of millions, and may never be so lucky again. Fishermen, of course, should possess dozens of spare car keys, to be secured freely about their person.
I was once deeply engrossed in an approach to a fine trout rising in a Cumbrian stream — creeping, stooping with huge care — when a young boy appeared behind me waving an outstretched arm. Fearful for his effect on my trout, I scowled and gesticulated in an attempt to shoo the lad away. Then, as he faltered, I noticed something in his outstretched hand. My apologies that followed had to be profuse and the reward generous, for the boy had found my beloved fly-wallet on the bank, 50 yards away, and seen me in time to put two and two together. His good deed was on one of my lucky days!
Then there was the case of Arthur’s net. At 60, my friend Arthur retired from accountancy “to allow myself ten years’ fishing”. At 82 he was, on this occasion, fishing with me on a Yorkshire stream amid the jungle of high-summer vegetation, and he had lost his net.
Now Arthur’s landing net has a carefully planned attachment, to make instant availability certain. He believes a hooked fish should have the least possible time to consider its predicament, and Arthur draws his net like a six-shooter. The net, therefore, is suspended at his waist on an open hook.
His arrangement is excellent on any well-manicured lawn or open shoreline, but its effective simplicity is deactivated by the smallest impediment or twig on a riverbank.
The search for the missing net was barely five minutes old when, from 50 yards away, Arthur called out in triumph and waved his find aloft. I was about to turn away from my section of search when something glinted at my feet in the tangle of greenery. It was my own wristwatch which, apparently, had slipped its buckle earlier in the day as I picked my way through undergrowth. Arthur’s lost net, and all the angels of a fisherman’s guardianship, had taken me back to the exact spot!
Inevitably, there is the other side of the coin of fishing fortune. As the small print in investment advertising reminds us, there may/will be downs, as well as ups. On that score I have to record a cascade of shattered vacuum flasks, broken rod tops, faulty nail- and blood-knots, dropped reels and other trifles, such as the beloved and flexible hat I sat on to cushion a rock beside the Falls of Shin, and remembered 200 miles later.
Beside a Yorkshire reservoir I similarly abandoned, forgetfully, a new pair of overtrousers rolled up to comfort my nether bones at lunch. Though the loss was promptly reported at the fishing lodge, and Izaac Walton also wrote confidently of “only anglers and very honest men”, the world remains imperfect.
As a youngster, lent (by my mother!) my seagoing father’s gold Hunter watch to go fishing for a strictly limited time, I climbed a tree to retrieve a cast of three flies, worth a whole half-crown. A branch gave way, and as I descended a couple of feet to more solid timber, a projecting twig whipped watch and chain from the breast pocket of my jacket. I got my flies back but the watch, thankfully glistening dimly in two feet of peaty water, was a further immediate problem.
Waderless, I did get it back — to my dripping cost. I opened back and front and poured water out. Perhaps time really did stand still during submersion, but a shake had it ticking again. And, miraculously, it did so thereafter. I now solemnly confess that at home, promptly at the permitted hour, I confessed only to falling in.
Age has its compensations. My long sight is so much improved that I no longer need to wear glasses to fish and to see a dry-fly. My oddest bad luck story is about glasses when I did need them. I had spent a couple of hours one evening on my local stream, ten minutes from home. While packing up I placed the specs on the roof of the car. They were, of course, still there when I drove off!
At home, I remembered immediately that fatal act. Fatal indeed, for when I motored back to the exact spot, I ran them over and squashed them flat.