Which way is up?

The other day I was on the Kennet and having carefully crept up to a pool below a sluice I was disheartened to see a large fish shoot off into the deep water. I had been spotted. I do try to keep a fairly low profile but this fellow had seen me because he was facing the wrong way. He was orientated downstream to the general flow of the river and upstream in the eddy that he had made his feeding station.

There was nothing unusual about this fish in fact anyone who fishes a river where there are strong eddies will encounter fish at odd angles relative to the main flow of the water. The fishing on this part of the river is dry fly and upstream nymph only. Assuming that I wished to fish with a nymph and I fished from the downstream position relative to the main flow of the river I would actually be approaching that fish from ‘upstream’ and visa versa. Common sense prevails and we fish on.

It’s a good job that the government or heaven forbid the EU isn’t in charge of such local, club or syndicate rules. Can you imagine the result? We would be in the river measuring the flow rate and the angle of the fish, then the thought police would be along to check if you were thinking of casting to a fish that may not be at quite the right angle…

Reading T&S the other say I was of the opinion that the magazine had joined forces with one of the computer games magazines there was discussions about triploids and diploids all we needed were steroids and haemorrhoids and we would have had everything covered. What was wrong with the term infertile or sterile? At least we all knew what it meant; now we have triploid. Ah you may know triploids are not just sterile, their growth is enhanced. Is that because they concentrate on feeding and don’t get distracted by the opposite sex or if is it a side effect or worse a planned effect of being a triploid. Answers on the back of a twenty pound note (it used to be a fiver- that’s inflations for you).

I can see the logic of not stocking fertile fish in waters that have never been stocked before and do have a population of native fish but if a river has been stocked for the last 100 years or so with normal fertile fish why must we know change over to sterile fish.

On the subject of sterile, I have heard that term used recently to describe stretches of water that for some not immediately obvious reason do not produce fish. Is it that the fish really are not there or are they not visible and never fished for. On both the Kennet and the Avon there are stretches of water that are non productive – not sterile. The fish are there, careful observation will support that but as they do not rise, the water does not get the attention so the fish aren’t caught. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

Back to where we started, fish in pools with whirlpools and odd currents. There was a pool on the upper stretches of the Avon where you never saw a fish rise or for that matter you never saw a fish. I say was because now the water is that much lower and the character has changed and is no longer a pool. This is where I caught my first trout ever and it was on a dry fly in a pool below a weir. The fish was tucked right into the side by some pilings that were supporting the bank. The cast was terrible, the fly landed on the far bank, which luckily was someone’s lawn. I gave a feeble tug of the rod and the fly and the entire leader fell into the water in a pile only to be whisked up stream and then back over the fish – the rest is history.

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