fishydreams

More often than not Sean and I will fish together but on a couple of evenings we were joined by Sean’s son, Dan, who is serving a kind of sporadic fly fishing apprenticeship. We began each session with what has become something of a tradition – the group photograph. We fished twice and so there are two of these. Sean is unable to have a serious face and so he is the one with the strange grin. I am the one holding the camera and am usually looking a bit perplexed. Dan, posing alongside his old man and his uncle, is the only one who looks even remotely normal.

Showing the ropes to a prospective new recruit into the dubious world of fly fishing takes a little bit of thought. Sean was wondering if he would show the patience needed. After all growling at teenage sons is pretty much built in to the behaviour of any rational human being and he did not want to dampen the glowing ember that we hoped would develop in Dan’s soul. For this reason it was me who took young Dan under my wing on the first evening and Sean took over during the second. I teach teenagers for a living and so it was hoped that I might make a passable effort of imparting some of the wisdom that, mainly as a result of trial and error, we have managed to accrue over the years. Sean and I were never ourselves instructed by anybody.

Thankfully Dan proved to be a natural and is a quick learner. We fished the Lee which allowed us to avoid the various obstructions to casting which are present in Sean’s smaller and more overgrown local river, the Shournagh. We were not troubled with space to back cast but there were plenty of other challenges and so we focused on getting our little dry fly to drift downstream without drag which is central to everything. Of course there was also the business of the fly cast itself, when to accelerate, when to pause, when to lift off.

Teaching fly fishing is a little like teaching someone to drive a car for the first time. It is surprisingly challenging to communicate the raw essentials of what has, over the years, just become instinctive, without asking whoever is at the receiving end to have to think about too many things at the same time. Thankfully Dan was a fine student even if his instructors demonstrated various shortcomings and, crucially, he seemed to grasp the most important lesson of all which is not technical in any sense. It is simply the realisation that standing in a river in the last hour or so of light and seeing fish around you rise to flies drifting along the surface and having a chance to briefly handle and admire them is a captivating way of spending an evening.

Fly fishing is becoming an old man’s game and we can use all the recruits we can muster. We will need people like Dan to want to get out and keep an eye on the river. Nobody is as invested in maintaining the health of a river as the man or woman flicking flies upstream to trout or working nymphs and streamers into its hidden pockets and riffles.

Sean and I are never going to quit fishing. Why would we? We will both be at it when we are even greyer than we are now. Hopefully we can count on Dan continuing to join us from time to time and reminding us, when we are beyond thinking clearly, what the hell we are doing out there!

And day two.