Thus I, faltering forward....

It was time to go.  I've been cooped up inside far too long. I’ve been living on my own for the last month. I've enjoyed the space and the knowledge that any hair I find in the bathroom is mine and mine alone. However, time and space can lead to a cluttered mind.  I needed a room without walls with water flowing right through it. Time to head outside.

So last night I packed up, sorted through reams of rotted reels of line and scrambled together a fly assortment of sorts. I bought Scotch-eggs and filled the thermoses. Yes, for the first time this year I was going fishing.

I’d been dying to try out the Pretty Ditch all season, work and rain and Swiss-based-husbands-to-be have prevented me so far.  The Pretty Ditch is my club water and I’ve been looking forward to working with her all year.  She was looking rather scruffy, like a deranged woman returned from drinking.  She had clearly almost flooded and the flow through her reminded me of the might River Eden.    After an hour trudging through her and up her, I learned so much.  Today she was cloudy but she is always high-sided and crowded with trees.  You can’t cast far, so controlling the drag on a sole nymph through a raging stream was difficult. I added a dropper and put a klink on, hopefully helping me see. This is a nod to allowing the dry fly fish more naturally. I am unused to duos, I am unused to casting with trees and bank everywhere and so very soon I got very used to ghastly tangles.

I switched to using a progressive New Zealand style.  Here you tie the dry and then attach the nymph to the bend of a hook.  Using this method, your dry fly really is little more than an indicator.
I needed it today, I couldn’t read the pull of my line fast enough in the water and this way the fly and nymph tangle up a lot, lot less.   If I had more space I would prefer to use a dropper but it was helping me get used to the weight of two flies.

Catching my first fish of the season was glorious. I paused when I spotted some flitting olives knowing that a rise couldn’t be far away. I snipped off the foreign klink and dink set up and put on a dry.  Two dodgy casts and one perfect one gave me a small and gorgeous grayling.

I ploughed on upstream and the Pretty Ditch gave me a big surprise in the form of a big drop into a deep hole. I nearly lost me and I certainly lost my net which ended my delayed season’s first trip prematurely.

Today was a start, not the one I hoped for but there’s plenty of time to make up for it. Next weekend I return to my Pretty Ditch.

Distractions

People, I have tied a total of three flies since January and I haven't been fishing yet. Something is up. I can blame a lot of it on work being quite busy but fun. However, it's something different, something new. It's not like trying coarse fishing. It's more familiar, yet different, maybe like nymphing. No,more glamorous, salt-water flyfishing. Not even like that, it's more of an adventure, more comfortable more joy making. Yes more joyful, glorious even. It's better than a generous sprinkling of may flies on damp day. The master river scribe Chris Yates has come closest to describing how I feel.
" It’s as if I’ve discovered – blimey, I can do other things in life, other than fish!  It’s exciting."
All evidence points to the fact that there is more to life than fishing, it's called physics, or at the very least a certain Physicist. Sod, it. Let's call it love.

Wannabe

Oh dear. I’m here again ranting about wimmin and fishin’ again. It’s very boring, and this is no way to start a posting. My lovely friend, who runs the brilliant Ladies Fishing, asked the editor of a very well known British Magazine when they would feature women on the front cover. Here was his response:

Tried it once, back in 1996. Pretty brunette, long, bare arms in a fishing waistcoat... remember it well. Thought: "with a huge male readership, this issue's sales are going to be sky high". So, can anyone tell me why it was the worst seller ever?

I suppose I had better answer his question. I think I have to think about what men were like in 1996. I like to think that all men were either mourning the split up of the Stone Roses and participating in lager fuelled Oasis V Blur debates. If they were in Edinburgh, they were clearly shooting up heroine and seeing babies crawl along ceilings and getting lost in the toilet and shouting “lager, lager, lager, shouting”. .. Were they indeed feeling guilty about living in a house, a very big house in the country and buying animals floating in formaldehyde? Did they take girls to the supermarket? Not knowing why but having to start it somewhere, so they started it. There. Did they wear three lions on their shirts only to tear them off again condemning them forever to mixed feelings about Gareth Southgate? A possible answer could be that they had other things on their mind like Kate Moss in Calvin Klein adverts and Louise Wener.

I was 14 in 1996 and buying the NME every single week. It was a ritual a sacrifice to music that was starting to dominate my life. My best friend and I decorated our room with images of Jarvis Cocker and pretentiously left copies of The Face strewn over our boarding school bunk beds. I would listen to John Peel every night and I felt like the coolest girl on earth. Come to think of it, buying The Face at 14 was pretty cool. However, I don’t think either of us really knew what on earth we were reading our minds were probably a little bit too addled by Tim Wheeler of Ash and that lad from the Bluetones.

My long-winded, nostalgia ridden point is this: 1996 was rather a while ago; John Major was Prime Minister, O.J Simpson went on trial. Times have changed.

More women have taken up fly fishing and its popularity is growing. We weren’t all killed by BSE, the Stone Roses have reformed. Oasis won. Dear Mr Editor, please roll with it, move with the times or I’ll have to draw upon something called Girl Power, invented in 1996 by the Spice Girls.