Fools rush in...

I am sure we have all done it at some time or another, you know dangled a fly to a fish that you can’t cast to and bang, away goes the fish and there you are stuck with your rod through a Hawthorne bush and a few pounds of determined trout heading off downstream. You are lucky if you don’t break the rod tip, but you chance of landing the fish is somewhere between none and slim.

It may not be quite the done thing, a bit like shooting pheasants flying away from you – quite legal but just not cricket.

I have to admit recently to having spotted a very nice brownie above a bridge and in such a position that you could not cast to it from either bank. I was able to get myself in a position opposite to the fish, which was only about twelve feet away from me. Holding the fly in my left hand I was able to draw back the line, bending the rod tip so that I could flick the fly out into the river. The fish took the fly, I tightened and away he went downstream. Luckily for me I was able to convince him to go this side of the rough stone parapet. I get quite upset just thinking what would have happened to my nice new flyline if he had gone the other side.

Just to make matters worse I realised that I would be unable to land the fish; as in my haste to get to my precarious vantage point my landing net had dropped off my back and was up by the fence. My only option was to released the pressure and wait for him to shake the hook out. Thank goodness for barbless hooks.

It may be difficult in the heat of the moment to plan ahead but it is worth making sure that if you do hook a fish you are able to land it without harming it.

When I first started fishing, I went to the river on a few occasions with a very wise gentleman who would stand leaning on a post looking at the river for what seemed to me at the time to be a lifetime. Then he would slowly walk along the bank make a couple of casts and be into a nice fish. After that was landed he would wait a couple of minutes and cast again and be into another fish. It was a delight to watch. He was a perfect example of patience and river craft meeting in one place. It is such a shame that everyone now is in too much of a hurry to stop and look and learn.

I seem to remember there was a joke about and old bull and a young bull standing on a hill looking down on a field of cows and the young bull says to the old bull "let's run down there hand have our wicked way with a few of those cows". The old bull said "NO, we will walk down slowly and have our wicked way with all of them".

As they say “fools rush in....”.

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