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| Fishing Chum(p)s |
My good friend Harry is older than me - by 4 days! It might not be much, but at my age, I'm starting to care about such fine detail. Like my hair, opportunities to be younger than someone in the same vicinity are beginning to thin and as my 55th birthday approaches I become more circumspect about these things.
We try to fit in a fishing trip each year sometime around our birthday week if we can and although most of our trips involve cake of some kind, it jumps higher up the priority order for this particular day. So we arranged to meet at a local Trout Fishery in Herstmonceux where they have a small, but very nice Lodge Cafe within the complex. We relaxed over a nice cup of tea and a slab of Coffee and Walnut sponge while we caught up with each other's lives, ruing the intervention of work and family life into our fishing time. We're both Grandfather's now but I don't think either of us can believe that, I certainly don't feel as my perception of old age tells me I should - I feel fit, healthy and just as broke as I was in my youth and Harry is trimmer and fitter, but also better off than me! I, however, have more hair - for the moment. Yet we can't chat for very long as the water beckons and trout are waiting to be fooled with the fly.
Usually.
Not today.
Four, nearly five, hours later, we both found ourselves with one trout each.
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| If only the trout had been as greedy... |
You can always tell when the fishing has been difficult. Open up any Fisherman's Fly box and it becomes obvious. If he has done well and caught with relative ease, there will be regimented ranks of matching flies, each correctly positioned in its own sub section; nymphs, dries, buzzers, hoppers and wets - and of course, by colour. If he has had a trying time, as we all seemed to on this afternoon, flies will explode like furry, feathery snow as the box is opened, nothing will be in its place and the sodden, intermingled lures will be a sad testimony to the increasingly frenetic search for "The Catching Fly" as the afternoon drew on.
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| Harry takes care with his Fish |
Such was this day. The sun was warm for September, the breeze stiff at times, sending clouds scudding across the skies and casts into reeds, trees and bankside water mint. The high temperature kept the trout near the bottom away from floating lines and light flies and thus were unable to see our crafily concocted wonders of natural pheasant tail and hare's ear fur. But the company was good, nobody showed us up with a bagful of fish - we all struggled equally, and, of course, there was cake.
Birthday Cake!
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| The "Catching Fly"? |
