Into the mystical waters

I’d love the luxury, or irresponsibility to say, “Sorry folks but I’ve had this ‘jolly’ of mine planned in the diary for months and months”… If only I was a banker or a politician and I could let people down. I deal with living plants that need planting, especially when they are bare rooted. Here Spring has sprung, in fact Spring in ‘old Blighty’ is now in full boing mode!  As I have already paid for these many plants, I sadly can’t charge clients for dead plants… so I had to get them to the various far flung sites and God forbid, dig some holes.

So I expected a carefully planned and prepared-for retreat, with the luxury of a day or two put aside to get my shit together, check lines; furl some  leaders; check tippets; tie some flies and write some copy for my FP, pack the work essentials to manage sites remotely. And enjoy the process of imagining everything I would need and planning all eventualities.

Instead at 7pm the night before I’m due 200 miles away, I finish my last essential work and slump into the pit of a house. What followed was a mad grab and frenzy to throw stuff in bags and escape in barely half an hour’s mad rush. The rods hit the back seat first.. priorities!

For weeks this has been the break ahead of me that I could really do with, and deserve… a little glimmering bright light on the horizon, in the gloom and yet more gloom of your typical English winter. This year seasoned with a generous lashing of precipitation and smothered in mud..

Now this dreamed for moment had arrived and I was in the house panic-packing, going away was the very last thing I needed or now wanted.

Driving up into the night getting gradually more stressed the further from home I got, a growing dark shadow of wondering what I had forgotten. First realisation was a sickener, I had to drive back for my essential chargers for both computer and camera, that was 50 mins of wasted life I will not get back.

Then back into the car worrying what else I would discover I’d left, when I got up north or reached for by the river,  Not the toothbrush, deodorant; life prolonging pills; enough undies and socks, spare credit card; emergency cash; etc that mundane shit could be coped with. But the crucial stuff, new line for the four weight, the box of flies I’ve been slowly working on over winter, and just how much tippet was left on the dispenser and my favourite fishing hat…. ”oh My god Not the hat!.. .the more the miles past the more I remembered what I might have forgotten and couldn’t remember seeing, and the closer I felt to arriving at a week or so of rude awakenings and regrets.

The next day I’d be picking up my new landing net (which sounds about as inspiring as the sentence “I’ve just bought myself a new shovel”!) and being taken fishing for the first time this season. 

This isn’t ‘any’ net though , it’s an Eden Made hand-made wooden net. I’d already been up to the workshop to hand select the cuts wood for a handle of beautiful burr Oak. Roger of Eden Made nets is also inscribing a fish measurement scale on it.

I’m buying this for scale sampling the Trout caught, that’s my excuse anyway. A frame that floats on the water with the deep mesh cage-like net. Here the Trout can sit, hopefully stressfree, while I get ready to take the sample, and with the measuring scale on the net , I can return it quicker to the stream with less handling and with less wresting tackle.

Now it’s Tuesday morning and I’m sat in my sister’s kitchen on the fringe of the Lake District finishing this FP. I’ve rung Steve Parks and got him to send some of his brilliant fly lines ahead to Scotland to be waiting when I arrive. I’d forgotten two reels, as well as flies and there’s little tippet left on the spools, I’m a shambles.

Roger took me to the local River to christen my net on Sunday, thankfully I’d remembered wading boots, I had to borrow a four weight line and a furled leader and lost some of his flies for him.

I stood in the river and felt the push of water and caught the rhythms and started to notice the diversity of the flows, and my peripheral vison gradually woke up and I was sort of functioning again. And calmness kicked in.

The Dippers flying past desperately on the feed, the occasional clumsy Grannom tumbling across my little world under the leafless canopy, and I was noticing life beyond my own little headspace.. The pink flowered Butter Burr sprouting on the banks that I could picture clearly being here on a the late spring day, its flowering fading, when the warmth creeps into this valley and the water will have lost its icy bite, those massive round leafs would unfurl just when the leaf canopy of the trees was complete again above and full of birdsong. The harshness of the Rookery caws and the croaking male pheasant muffled in the new dense foliage, and the sky above and over the meadow alive with swallows and swifts. ”I’ll bet there’s cuckoos here too”!

Each fly passing me and lifting off was scrutinised and guessed at.

I now felt back in my element, my happy space; and the amassed stress of the past week finally dissolving and flowing away downstream. If it hadn’t been for the rod in my hand and some obligation to join in, I could have just stood there, stock still, and pricelessly wasted an entire afternoon,  just blankly staring at nothing in particular, feeling my way into the place feeling the water flow and learning its narrative.

Its not for nothing this rivers and its valley is called the Eden.

I’d had a few little encounters with water at the end of last season, but this was my first time back really fishing for 10 months after the Achilles went pop. Poor Roger was desperately trying to put me over fish and talk me into changing my tactic. He expected I guess I was taking it to heart. I however was just loving the respite of my river therapy too much, I starting to feel my casting coming back and finding some shape and range, I even tried spotting fish but not with any real conviction. The last thing I wanted was to feel desperate and compelled to catch.

He caught some lovely, seriously handsome, Brown Trout and was showing me pics on the camera. The first snappy take to a dry fly I had came off, as soon as it was on. And I found myself feeling relieved, I wasn’t really in the mood for fighting fish at the time, adding any supplementary stress of any kind, that would distract me from the river therapy and my return to simplicity and the serene.

Tomorrow I set of to Scotland up to the Tay, for the March Brown hatch, if the river’s up, we’ll head for the hill lochs, and no doubt my fishing mojo will return along with the mystic of the moving waters.

As blanks go it was one of the most welcome, and I’m really glad now, that I came. 

Happy Wednesday to one and all, all the best

Chris Avery