March Blue

Some Emergers

What to expect on the first day of a new season on the river is a fly fisher’s conundrum. There is though one element that retains certainty, the river itself.  A rough cascade, tumbling through a tight upland valley, its waters foaming and burbling though narrow straights and glassy slicks, with only the occasional pool affording it chance to catch its breath.  Gnarly trees stand sentry on its banks like old soldiers, their branches raised in defiance of every cast; their roots unyielding to the angler, offering sanctuary to wise and large trout.  

Around me are reminders of the ephemeral nature of our season, The sight of daffodils and anemones emerging from dark, dank nooks in the riverside woodland, a chaotic assortment of farmyard noises announcing the painful emergence of new life; Spring is uncoiling, and with it surely, at least in the mind of the optimistic trout man, a new trout season is revving up to burst into life?  I am starting to learn that such optimism is usually wildly misplaced. Walks along the river reveal nothing as to the whereabouts of fish, indeed they indicate the contrary and perhaps that all of them have disappeared over the winter. Prospecting forays into banker pools go unrewarded; and those watch and wait vigils on the bank are generally just that.  Only previous experience reminds you this place holds a good head of fish, ranging in size from slender fingerlings to muscular brassy slabs with tails like shovels and pectorals like rudders. 

The trouble with a new trout season is that we’ve been anticipating its arrival with childlike eagerness, expecting it too to be full of youthful exuberance from day one. The reality is that a River Monnow trout season rarely leaps from its bed like Lazarus, no, it emerges from its sleep gently and steadily, a slow, gracious wandering from the hall of winter’s slumber but it does have its moments…  Moments which were worth the pre-season preparations, the kitchen table-top mayhem, the blue-numb fingers and the getting out bed for… A first trout, plump and lively, tempted by a heavy nymph fished hopefully through the tail of a riffle, and a superb grayling, all muscle and liquid silver taken from a gentle gliding pool after a stubborn fight. 

 

 

 Such moments are what sustain dreams and remind that whilst there may not be expectation there can always be hope.