On Fishing

Arthur Ransome

IT MUST be fascinating to have someone we thought we knew well, cast in a new light by a sudden turn of events. The mere possibility that long-held assumptions could be wrong would have us sitting bolt upright and curious.

Even news about someone remote can, we all know, have this effect: for example, when damaging allegations surface about a national figure. The charges do not have to be based on fact to set the weevils at work – all they need to do is to appear. Ideally, for the media, they should surface about a revered figure who is long since dead and so cannot lodge a defence. Tarnished Idol Syndrome always makes news.

IT’S NOT EVERY day that I get to think kindly about Lenin or Trotsky or even, come to think of it, about certain personages in mi5 and mi6. I mean it wouldn’t be, would it? We angling correspondents have plenty to do without getting mixed up in politics and revolutions and counter-intelligence, thank you very much.

Still, credit where credit is due. Had it not been for the foregoing folk, Arthur Ransome would not have been making the news the way he has in recent years, at first identified and then exonerated as a possible Bolshevik spy – and then I would have had no peg on which to hang my own information about him.

Of course, it had long been known that the famous foreign correspondent and children’s author got close to the revolutionary leaders while reporting from Russia around 1917. And we can assume that he got a lot closer still to Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, because he had an affair with her before the two eventually married.

Yet the fact that Ransome might, just might, have been a spy or a double agent was not aired until some of his private papers came to light in 2002. In 2005, the National Archive released mi5 files relating to the time Ransome was a journalist in Russia, between 1913 and 1925 – and raised similar questions.

The mi5 files made it clear that Ransome had been watched by the security services because they feared he had become a propagandist for the Bolsheviks while working in Petrograd, then the Russian capital. One informant claimed that Ransome was expected to move into the Kremlin to live. Another report said that Ransome had been considered such a potential risk to British interests that a top-secret paper on him was circulated to the ‘King and the War Cabinet’.

As late as 1927, by which time he was back in England and domestically ensconced, a ‘confidential source’ was reporting that ‘Arthur Ransome is a traitor, married to a Bolshevik woman, he is an undoubted Communist and in the pay of the Russian Secret Service’.

While all of this was being filed away by mi5, other material was giving rise in the agency to the contrary view: that Ransome was not only not a traitor but actually a spy for mi6, working against the new Russian leadership. (How, it must have seemed as reasonable to ask then as now, could mi5 not have known for certain, one way or the other? What does it tell us of communication between the two in those tumultuous times?).

Whatever the truth, such exotic possibilities in Ransome’s background will have surprised many a reader of Swallows and Amazons. More prosaically, perhaps, some others may be surprised to learn of Ransome’s background as an angler. Ransome was not only a passionate angler but wrote extensively about his sport. He became one of the finest angling correspondents to write for a national newspaper in the 20th century.

Though many aspects of Ransome’s life have been extensively chronicled, Ransome’s work as an angling correspondent has been as submerged from view of late as split-shot beneath a float.

Fishing and fishermen stimulated some of Ransome’s best writing and led to one of the best collections of essays in a sporting literature that goes back to 1496. It led to a second collection of angling pieces and to a fine exploration of Ransome as both writer and angler by Jeremy Swift – Arthur Ransome on Fishing – published in 1994.

Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884, the son of an angling professor of history who was himself the son of an angling father. Early family holidays were spent near Coniston, in the Lake District, walking, boating and learning to fish – experiences that were later to be deeply mined for his children’s books and which, between his travels, constantly drew him back.

A somewhat chequered education that took in an unhappy spell at Rugby, eventually led to a place at Yorkshire College – later Leeds University – where Ransome surprisingly began to read science before dropping out. He headed for the bright lights of Chelsea, having determined to become a writer and threw himself into it with huge energy. By the time he had reached his mid-20s he had a string of books behind him – including a critical study of Edgar Allan Poe – and had married for the first time.

This marriage, to Ivy Walker, of Bournemouth, was a disaster and Ransome was soon looking for an escape. From 1913 on, Ransome spent much of his time in Russia, writing the kinds of insider reports for the Daily News and the Observer that caused the security services to take an interest, dallying with Evgenia – and fishing wherever and whenever he could. He returned to England with Evgenia in 1925 and settled in the Lake District. The same year he began an angling column for the then Manchester Guardian.

Between August that year and September 1929, Ransome produced 150 pieces, most of them as polished as gemstones. He wrote on people and places, tackle and trout, wet flies and the weather. He wrote on ‘Bulls and Kindred Phenomena’, on ‘Talking to the Fish’, on ‘Failing to Catch Tench’ and on scores of other subjects besides. He wrote about them all with knowledge and insight and warmth and wry humour. He crafted every piece in a style that engaged the non-angling reader as well as the smitten.

Fifty of the best pieces, plus a translation of angling passages from Sergei Aksakov, the great chronicler of Russian life, appeared in Rod and Line (1929) – a book which Sir Michael Hordern, another keen angler, brought memorably to life for television.

The opening sentence of the first piece in Rod and Line, is a corker: ‘The pleasures of fishing are chiefly to be found in rivers, lakes and tackle shops and, of the three, the last are least affected by the weather.’

Among several later penetrating essays is one on the theme that angling is ‘a frank resumption of Palaeolithic life without the spur of Palaeolithic hunger’. In that piece, as often elsewhere, Ransome goes to the heart of it: ‘Escaping to the Stone Age by the morning train from Manchester, the fisherman engages in an activity that allows him to shed the centuries as a dog shakes off water and to recapture not his own youth merely, but the youth of the world’.

Ransome’s second collection, which included the scripts of some of his radio broadcasts, was published as Mainly About Fishing (1959). A portrait of Ransome tying one of the flies shown on the cover of this book, his favourite Elver Fly, still hangs in his old club, the Garrick, in London.

Ransome finally gave up his angling column when he decided that the pressure of producing it weekly was beginning to take the edge off his own fishing. He gave his editor three months’ notice of his intention to quit in March, 1929. By May he was well into Swallows and Amazons.

Ransome fished – and on and off wrote about fishing – late into a life that was increasingly plagued by ill-health. He caught his last fish, a salmon, in 1960. By 1963 he was confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1967, aged 83. Among the papers he left were parts of a new novel. It had, like so much else in this public man’s private world, an underlying angling theme.

Coarse Fish on the Move

OOFFICIALLY it is the salmon and the sea trout that are the ‘migratory fish’ – the fish that begin their lives in rivers and that go to sea before coming back, in turn, to spawn. The rest – eels excepted – are the ‘non-migratory’ species: the stay-at-homes and the moochers-about; the sidlers from this side of the river to that; the fish that limit their forays to a trip to the shallows downstream from time to time, or just occasionally to the deeps around the bend.

That, anyway, is the official view and, as it happens, the view of many anglers. The reality, though, is more complex – and surprising.

BIOLOGISTS have known for years that coarse fish, for all their stick-around reputations, are given to travelling astonishing distances – often at astonishing speeds. It is just that somehow the results of their researches rarely reach the riverbank and even long-established facts will come as news to most on it.

Like, for example, the fact that barbel can range tens of kilometres upstream and downstream in a single season. Like, for example, the fact that bream can leave their daytime swim at dusk, roam several kilometres during the night – and be back where they started off by next morning, leaving the local anglers no wiser.

Research into behaviour like this is highlighted from time to time at fisheries management conferences and when biologists get together, but not on many other occasions. In fact, an Aquatic Animal Research Group at Durham University has been studying fish movements for years. Scientists there have tagged and tracked barbel, chub, dace, bream, roach and a range of other species on the Nidd, the Ouse and the Derwent in Yorkshire, and on other rivers and lakes further south.

Much of this work has been undertaken in an attempt to understand the effects on river life of man-made interventions – from the building of weirs and fish passes to flood prevention works and significant water abstraction. It is the insights into fish behaviour coming out of it all that will fascinate anglers most.

Barbel have been tagged and tracked five and even ten kilometres upstream and down again in a single season, with individual fish undertaking round-trips of 60 kilometres to find suitable spawning gravels. Chub heading upstream for places to spawn have been found to make repeated attempts to use fish passes built for sea trout and salmon – one memorable fish on the Derwent entering a pass seven times in seven nights before finally giving up.

A study of bream on the River Trent revealed that individual shoals covered beats of up to six kilometres long in the course of a season. Within a shoal, different fish would behave differently as dusk approached. Some would leave the ‘home’ reach occupied during the day and move several hundred metres upstream and down in the course of a night. Others would range three and even four kilometres afield and still be back before morning. The extent to which a given reach meets the needs of the fish in it is likely to dictate when, how far and how often fish will travel.

Studies have thrown up other fascinating insights – like the disadvantage of being released into the wild after being bred in captivity. Stocked coarse fish, it seems, can travel at the wrong times. Whereas native fish lie doggo while the sun is up and travel under the cover of darkness, farm-bred fish will shift location in broad daylight.

‘Presumably there is an advantage in native fish moving at night – they may be less susceptible then to predation by birds, pike and otters’, one of the study team has suggested. ‘The movements of reared fish – if they’re looking for food – may reflect the times of day when they’ve been fed in captivity and that could prove a disadvantage.’

It is not only the extent to which fish move and when that is surprising, but also the speeds at which they move. Twelve-hour round-trips of six and eight kilometres by bream are startling enough, but the speeds of other fish – and especially the speeds of small fish relative to the speeds of large – can leave the portly bream standing.

Whereas a metre-long adult salmon can swim at better than two metres a second for hours and days on end – a formidable feat of strength and endurance – tracking has shown that salmon smolts a sixth of that length can sustain close on half a metre a second without difficulty. River lampreys have been recorded travelling 10 kilometres a night upstream, against a steady current – a distance and speed many would find surprising in a fully grown sea-trout.

What does it all amount to for the angler on the bank? In the case of swimming speeds, probably not much, other than to cause him or her to marvel yet again at the wonders of nature. In the case of in-river migration, it will be to cause anglers to see coarse fish in a new way – and to encourage them to be more adventurous in their choices of swim as daylight fades and each season progresses.

Fish movements also throw two of angling’s most commonly heard statements into a new light. The fact that a fishless day for one angler is followed by a night of frenzied action for another in the same place might not be simply because ‘fish come on at night’ – a well-known saw – but because a hitherto fishless swim has had travelling fish come into it.

And the heartfelt ‘there are no bloody fish in this bloody swim’ might sometimes not only be an excuse of a kind but that rarest commodity in angling – the truth.

Buying Tackle

I AGONISED over my first fly-rod. I was a wholly self-taught fisherman and, when I became interested in the sport, I had no-one to guide me. So, like countless others, I went to a tackle shop to seek advice. This was not a local tackle shop, because I did not have one. This was a big, posh tackle shop in a big city.

The staff saw me coming. I ended up paying far more than I should have for a big-name rod that in the event, was an indifferent performer. It is a trap that newcomers especially can fall into. Every beginner would benefit from independent advice on what rod, reel and line to buy. Here is some.

A FEW years ago I went to buy a new fly-rod. I did not need a new rod – I have accumulated more rods than you could shake a wading stick at – but I had convinced myself I needed one. All anglers, I know, will have sympathy with this sensation. Perceived Tackle Deficit Disorder (PTDD) is a kind of medical condition and tackle shops are the places where it is treated.

I went to a well-known store and told the dealer what I wanted – a fast-actioned, 9ft five-weight. He listened sympathetically and made soothing noises. Then he turned to a glass case behind him, opened it with a key and lifted out a 9ft wand. Naturally, this was not any old fast-actioned, 9ft five-weight, he explained. This was the Dollar-Sign Flabbergast fast-actioned, 9ft five-weight. It looked fabulous. It was made of deep-green carbon fibre and was wonderfully varnished. It had lots of gilt lettering on the butt and the kind of maker’s name that evokes candles and incense.

The Dollar-sign Flabbergast – the dealer turned and angled it so that it flashed in the light – was made of the latest High-Modulus, High-Five Technology. It provided faster back-loading of the thingy than any rod before it. In tests, five spindles of torque had been achieved. This rod was practically guaranteed to improve my casting distance by 50 per cent and my Accuracy Quotient Factor (AQF) by very nearly the same.

How much did it cost and where could I try it, I asked? Naturally, the dealer inferred, a rod like the Dollar-Sign Flabbergast did not come cheap but I was clearly a man who not only appreciated the best but would positively demand it.

Yes, but the price? The figure he mentioned sounded like the distance to Mars. Outside, the rod cast like a piece of wet string. Caveat emptor can be as good advice in the fishing business as it is in the motor trade – especially at the start of a new season. Then, spring is in the air, cuckoos are on the wing and the air is filled with the song of tackle-dealers pushing wheelbarrows to their banks.

When choosing tackle it is essential to keep function in mind, above all. The principal job of rods, reels, lines and the rest are to help an angler put his fly where he wants it and to handle effectively any fish hooked as a result. Many an angler buys tackle for other reasons – for example, assumed status – but among the sensible the ability to do the job required, comes first. The truth is that many a lowly priced outfit will do that as well as some top-priced kit, though the actual rods may appear much the same.

A fly fisherman on small streams will want a rod in the 7ft to 8ft range, carrying maybe a 4-weight line. An angler tackling larger rivers and many stillwaters will want something between 8ft and 9ft 6ins, carrying 5-weight to 7-weight lines. For some lake fishing and angling for sea trout, rods of up to 10ft or a little more carrying lines up to 8-weight or so, will be useful.

Large numbers of rods for all these purposes are priced at astronomical levels while entire and wholly serviceable outfits – rods, reels, lines, leaders and flies together – can be bought for a third of their price. The two rods I use for virtually all my own stream and lake fishing cost £120 apiece in 1990 – a fraction of top prices, even then – yet they have had the users of rods costing four times as much gasp at the silken ease with which each puts out a line. My favourite loch-style rod cost me £25 second-hand and its original owner £70 new. When, in the mid-1990s I wanted a salmon 15-footer, I sought advice from a hugely experienced, money-no-object salmon angler. What did he recommend out of all the rods available, most of which he had tried? Why, the same rod he used himself – a product costing less than half many on the market. That is the rod I bought – second-hand, again – and it performs like a dream.

The reality is that few rods and anglers are born for one another. Often enough we buy a rod that feels good in the hand and that gives the impression of being up to the job we want doing. If, having bought it, the rod shows a less-than-fatal quirk we often fish on and find we adjust to it. More often than not, the rod we fish with ends up becoming the rod we know and learn to love. When the time comes for a change, use of the old rod will likely have made the next new rod feel strange – and we repeat the cycle.

It is much the same with fly reels. Plenty of fly reels now cost hundreds of pounds. I have never spent more than £50 on a fly reel and the two of that price I do own both incorporate superb disc drags. Some of my expert friends are wedded to reels that cost between £20 and £40 apiece. The reel I use on my 7ft 3-weight cost £14 in 2003 and does everything I ask of it, which is not much.

On the high-priced reel options, this or that gizmo justifies a little extra cost and hype delivers the rest. Statements like ‘the days are long gone when a reel was regarded largely as a place to store line’ are now heard repeatedly – and are wrong. The prime function of a reel will always be to store and, of course, dispense and recover line. The essential qualities – lightness, reliability and an exposed rim – cost very little in themselves.

In truth, the rod has not yet been priced that will turn an indifferent caster into a good caster and no rod-reel-line outfit has been assembled that will make up for a lack of fishing skills. Unless the angler behind the rod knows the value of a cautious approach to the water, can read the currents when he gets there, knows where a fish is likely to lie and can present the right fly in such a way that it comes to his quarry’s attention naturally, every penny spent on gear will be money down the drain.

This is not to say that much expensive tackle is not superb or that good tackle will not give a good fisherman an edge: simply that expensive tackle will not necessarily be good tackle and that quite superb gear can be had at a very modest price. Telling the difference in the shop or from the products in the catalogue is, of course, the problem.

For the angler who can be persuaded that he needs the most expensive in anything and can afford it – or who just wants the top names regardless – the issue is neither here nor there. For many more – and especially gullible newcomers confronted by honey-tongued salesmen – the issue is often central.

My advice to anyone inexperienced who wants new gear is to seek independent, experienced advice if he or she can and to spend any money saved on instruction.

Dry Fly, Wet Fly, Nymph

FISHERY managers love rules. On some trout waters, the list is as long as your rod. There are rules about fly sizes, net and mesh sizes, the distance one angler must stay from another on the bank, the distance boat anglers must stay from the shore. There are size limits and bag limits, guidance on how fish should be returned and when not to return them; directions on when fishing may start and must stop and all else.

One of the most common rules, applied almost exclusively on rivers, is whether a water is dry-fly only or whether nymphs may be used. Naturally, this invites definitions of what exactly an artificial nymph is and what exactly constitutes a dry fly.

Quite rightly, everyone has a view.

MY OLD English master might well have shed a tear. Cyril Pybus was not only one of the great influences on my life but the man who named two kinds of question, frequently raised in his classes, after me.