Oh the joys of fishing,
it’s the perfect day out
We sat silent in the shimmering cobalt blue darkness that only mountains can wrap you in and listened to the roar as the river cascaded through the gorge.
We sat until a ribbon of pink outlined the peaks and then the top of the sun peeped over them. I felt as alive as I ever had. Time to fish.
Eagles wheeled in the sky, surfing the thermals, as we put up the rods and sipped coffee from a flask. Now that we could see it, the river was not as powerful as it had sounded in the dark. But it looked fishy.
Flyrods in hand, we walked along the road until we saw below us a promising pool and then scrambled down over shale and rocks to the riverside. We looked around us to see what flies were hatching and tied a matching imitation to our leaders.
I walked up to where a fish was rising just below a stone bridge. Three false casts to extend the fly line and measure the distance, then I dropped that fly three feet upstream of him. A splash as he took it, a bend in the rod. A fish with my first cast.
I was fishing with my late brother in law, who lived outside Bayonne, in the Basque country of South-West France. It is a pretty town on a tidal river, the Adour, where you can fish for seabass at the docks, and Jacques often did.
But after a conversation over dinner, he had promised to take me to his fishing haunts in the Pyrenees – “We need to start early, though.” He meant rising before 4am.
It was an hour and a half drive south to the mountains, through Basque towns of maroon-timbered houses, then dull, grey, weather-beaten villages cowering in the valleys, the sullen peaks brooding above them.
We fished all day. Jacques was full-hearted in everything he did and only the promise of my sister in law’s dinner could pull him away from the river. We caught other fish that day, though nothing big enough to keep legally.
Such days live in the fisherman’s memory for ever. It is not necessarily the catch – either the number or the size – that matters. Often, it is the surroundings, nature itself.
The flash of a kingfisher blazing a blue and orange trail downriver; the excitement of a duck crashing through the undergrowth to escape a voracious stoat, then floating serenely off down the stream; or just a salmon making its determined way upstream to spawn – these are the experiences that make fishing magical.
Or sometimes it is the après pêche: gammon, egg and chips at that comfortably old-fashioned pub in the village with a pint of Shere Drop beside a roaring log fire. In the company, of course, of your fishing buddy, who shares your passion and has his own tall stories to keep the evening going.
For fishing fosters friendship. If you doubt it, watch Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing on BBC iPlayer. I have only just discovered it. It is two ageing comics with dodgy hearts travelling the country, fishing, philosophising, having a laugh.
They have done eight series since 2018, plus specials, and each episode is the same mixture of japes, jokes and verbal jousting. Fishing is the hook but what makes it good telly is the fondness, the bond between them: like the Hairy Bikers, but fishing, not food.
My own fishing buddy, no longer with us, drove the car and my role was to remember to bring two things: the tape of War of the Worlds, with Richard Burton narrating, and the tape of Billy Connolly doing the routine that would keep us in stitches for mile after mile.
Oh, and egg mayonnaise sandwiches with anchovies, my favourite buy from the Fleet Street sarnie shop. I introduced Mike to them and he insisted I make them for every one of our fishing trips.
Funny things would happen too. One day I caught a nine and three-quarter pound trout, a monster. As I carried it back to the car a passing angler offered to take my picture with this specimen rainbow.
Handing my phone back, he said: “That’s Fish of the Month, for sure.” I walked round the lake to boast to Mike about my mighty catch – and he held up a fish of eleven and a half pounds. Fish of the Month? It wasn’t even Fish of the Day.
Every fisherman will offer to teach his son or daughter to fish. My elder boy loved it, and still does. His interest was piqued on a holiday in Yorkshire when he hooked (and lost) a six-inch trout in the brook that bisected the village green.
I used to call him Little Chap and then I discovered there was a dry fly of that name. So I visited the old Hardy’s shop in Pall Mall, where the King used to have his rods made, and asked them to tie me some Little Chaps.
I went back a couple of weeks later and the trout flies, constructed with peacock herl, a feather from a hen pheasant, fine gold wire and red silk thread, were all ready. I’m still using them and they’re still catching.
As a fisherman, my son possesses a superpower. He can see through the water, even without polarising glasses, and spot trout loitering among the weeds or above gravel runs. It is a natural skill that has made him a far better fisherman than me.
He came with me to a lake once and almost emptied it… 25 rainbow trout between two and four pounds. He was a piscatorial Pied Piper that day.
My own love of fishing grew from dangling a line in the River Welland and hoping a roach or perch would take the bait. A polio scare meant we were banned from going there but we found other likely spots on the Nene or at nearby gravel pits.
Gradually, my interest was fuelled by an instructive book called Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, by Bernard Venables, the angling adventures of a father and son with beautifully-drawn illustrations. Generations of fishermen have grown up on it.
Fishing is one of those pastimes (don’t call it a sport) that invites books to be written about it. In this country, they tend to be “how to” books: how to find the fish; how to knot a hook to your line; how to cast your float out; how to tie a fly.
With rare exceptions, they do not venture into the realm of literature. Not so in America. There, they revere top sports writers and have a tradition of “literary outdoorsmen”. These are people imbued with the love of fishing who write novels or short stories with wild and savage nature as a backdrop.
The last of these men, I learnt from The Atlantic last week, is Thomas McGuane who, at 85, farms 2,000 acres of prairie in Boulder River Valley, Montana. He has written 10 novels, four volumes of short stories and many essays that often focus on fishing, hunting and ranching. He has a new book of short stories out called A Wooded Shore.
As a younger man, he lived a raucous, rackety life in Key West, Florida, boozing, fishing for tarpon and raising hell. He was known as Captain Berserko and knew Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Hunter S Thompson. He also wrote The Longest Silence, a series of essays, which some consider the finest book ever written on fishing.
The Key West link, the drinking and the fishing meant he was often compared with Ernest Hemingway, a lion of literature and no mean carouser himself. He wrote The Nick Adams Stories, including Big Two-Hearted River, about a young man returned from the First World War shellshocked who goes on a fishing trip to sort his head out.
And he clinched his Nobel Prize in Literature with The Old Man and the Sea, the tale of an ageing fisherman, something of an outcast because he is considered unlucky, who rows out to the Gulf Stream with a handline and hooks a giant marlin. Clinging to the line as it zips away burns his hands.
But despite the pain, he patiently brings the fish to the side of the boat and lashes it there. Then the sharks find him and pick the marlin’s carcass clean as he rows for the shore. It is a simple, heartbreaking story, a mere novella at 26,500 words, and the finest book I ever read.
The only British writers I have come across who attempted anything like this are a former Daily Express foreign correspondent who took his flyrod with him wherever he went and wrote some good stories, part travel, part adventure.
I cannot remember his name but I have twice owned his book and twice lent it out, never to be returned.
The other is Welshman Clive Gammon who, having been recommended by his friend George Gale, wrote a weekly fishing column for the Daily Express through the Sixties.
He also wrote for the Sunday Times under the pen name Nicholas Adams – his son’s Christian name and his first wife’s maiden name. And, knowingly, the name of Hemingway’s short story protagonist.
He ended up writing for Sports Illustrated and fishing with his friend, who once held the British record for a pike of 46lb 6oz. You might have heard of him, he played a bit of rugby, too. Gareth Edwards is his name.
*****
Talking of books, here’s one for the Christmas stocking: The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman. It is set in an international newspaper written in English but produced by expat journalists in Rome.
Rachman regales us with tawdry or heart-wrenching or downright funny tales of the staff on a paper that is heading, like they all are, for oblivion as print gives way to digital.
Every character you have ever met on local or national newspapers is in there: the cocky war reporter who shafts the naïve Cairo stringer; Abby, the financial officer, known to colleagues as “Accounts Payable”, who finds herself on a plane sitting next to a man she has just helped to fire; a Paris correspondent, old and broke, who is desperate for a story just to pay the rent.
It's an absolute treat for anyone who has worked on a newspaper.
*****
The Falkland Islands, where I passed a portion of my youth, has hit the jackpot.
In the early 2000s, an oil exploration company found a rich field 137 miles to the north of the islands. It could eventually yield 700 million barrels.
But it is in water that is 1,500 feet deep, so tricky to get at. Now engineers have found a way to make it economically viable to drill.
That means a £3 billion royalties bonanza for the Falkland Islanders. There are just 3,500 of them. That’s more than £857,000 each.
The cash though will go into a sovereign wealth fund and incidentally surely makes the islands a prime target again for anyone who might want to invade.
When I was first there, the only industry was sheep farming for high quality wool. It was a declining business by the time Argentinian troops came ashore.
When Thatcher’s Task Force booted them out and built a garrison with RAF fighter jets on the islands, fishing became the main means of creating wealth.
I returned to the Falklands to report on the 20th anniversary of the war in 2004 and saw the changes. The islanders issued fishing licences to those huge factory ships from Poland and Russia.
If you went for Sunday lunch in, say, Walton-on-Thames and ordered the salt and pepper squid, the chances are it came from Falklands waters.
The village-sized city of Port Stanley had grown. A smart new housing estate provided homes for Brits who had tired of life back home and wanted a new start.
Now they have struck it proper rich. As an islander said to me back in 2004: “We are lucky, lucky little islands.”
*****
With a name like Helena Handcart, we can safely assume that the lady enjoys a drink. My fellow columnist calls me out for suggesting lemon is the fruit to add to a gin and tonic.
No, it’s lime we must have, says Helena. Something to do with scurvy, which I have decided not to take personally. But lime? Helena, darling, that’s a bit outré, even for you. A bit Rebel Rebel, pet.
RICHARD DISMORE
16 December 2025
