I mentioned as an aside here last year that, a week or two previously, I had landed a 19lb carp on a dry fly. Seeing the fish had been a matter of chance but catching it, as it happens, had not: I had deliberately stalked, cast to, hooked, played and landed the fish on a dry fly fished from a trout rod.
There we were on the lake bank, quietly sipping a coffee, when we had seen a pod of carp approaching close to the flat, calm surface. I had dropped my fly a couple of yards ahead of the biggest, it had mooched up, hummed and hawed for long moments and then slurped the fly in.
The fish had taken off like a heavy locomotive, spent much of the afternoon exploring the ins and outs of the French coastline and eventually came to the bank a week the following Thursday. The net we tried to land it in was duly respectful and broke under the fish’s weight.
That carp was the biggest I have ever taken, but by no means the first I have tried to catch on fly tackle. Indeed, my pals and I have made a bit of a thing about fly fishing for coarse fish, both on the surface and beneath it. Over the years we have had wonderful sport with roach, rudd, dace, chub, carp, bream, tench, perch, gudgeon, barbel and the rest.
Plenty of anglers, both coarse and game, may find this surprising.
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It is trout and salmon that are usually associated with flies: coarse fish are associated with baits. This distinction is less useful shorthand than historical baggage: the fly, above all the dry fly fished for trout in rivers, was for a century the focus of division in angling’s ranks. It was a division based in part on snobbery and misconception and traces of it can be found in the backwoods, today. One result is that even now relatively few anglers, coarse or game, see fly-fishing for coarse fish as a worthwhile activity in its own right.
For the better part of a century after Frederic Halford published his two great works for river trout fishermen — Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (1886) and Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889) — an aura of exclusivity attached to this form of fishing. It was a light, mobile, effective and elegant way to pursue fish that regularly feed on natural flies floating on the surface. In the eyes of many of Halford’s followers, especially the upper-crust chalk stream set who had free-rising fish on their doorsteps, dry fly fishing became the only acceptable way to fish and trout the only fish worth attention.
The prejudice grew and travelled and in time, on too many rivers that contained trout, coarse fish came to be regarded as vermin. And so there entered into angling not only a tactical divide, but a social and even a class divide. Trout in rivers were pursued with flies and flies — dry flies especially — were used by toffs. Coarse fish, inferior fish, were pursued by everyone else.
It was not all as black and white as that and the prejudice was not universal — but it was pervasive and it persisted until the last decades of the 1900s. Then the postwar programme of reservoir building was undertaken and many of these new lakes were stocked with trout. Lots of coarse fishermen, finding trout suddenly close to hand, decided to give fly fishing a try. They loved it and in time a few began to pursue their old quarry, the coarse fish, with the new techniques they had acquired.
Today, even though the prejudice and snobbery have all but gone, fly fishing for coarse fish is still regarded by many as an esoteric pursuit.
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Why all this background and why now? First, because a new season for coarse fish on rivers gets under way on June 16. Second, because a bridge-building new book requires it.
Dominic Garnett’s title alone, Fly Fishing for Coarse Fish (Merlin Unwin, £20) will confront trout fisher and coarse fisher alike with an angling option that might never have occurred to either.
Any coarse fisherman open-minded enough to look inside will soon find notions of elitism attending fly fishing and thence game fishing, ebbing away. Here, he will quickly come to see, is just another fascinating way of getting among familiar species. Likewise any trout purist willing to set his prejudices aside could soon be kicking himself for his earlier blinkered views and the exciting fishing opportunities they have cost him.
Garnett is not the first along this stretch of bank. Edward Ensom, writing as “Faddist”, published a pamphlet on the subject in 1923 and expanded the theme in a short book in 1946. In 1998, Alan Hanna, an Irishman, produced a solid work on fly fishing for pike, since taken farther by others. But Ensom was writing at a time when the divide was still deep and wide and Hanna’s work, for all its value, was narrowly focused.
Fly Fishing for Coarse Fish covers the whole field and gets the timing right. Yes, there are nits to pick and yes, most readers will find some redundancy because Garnett addresses both coarse and game fishermen at the same time and so the former will be familiar with the species he mentions and the latter will be familiar with the techniques. But he covers enough ground, accessibly, to enable both sides to get stuck in.
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Angling is the most ancient and popular of sports and, viewed from dry land, may seem the most tranquil. Beneath its glassy surface, though, prejudices exist and currents swirl. The prejudice attaching to the fly has been among the most ludicrous of the lot. Garnett’s book could at last consign it to the deep.
• Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month