A many-splendoured thing

Our correspondent savours the challenge of casting a few flies on the fabled Naver for the first time and ponders the endless paths a life of fishing roves

- David Profumo

MUCH of history can be explained by Mankind’s pursuit of the new and it strikes me that some of the nuances of angling’s appeal derive from a constant mixture of novelty and the familiar. Its experience is a stipple of energy and stimulus, like a Pointillist painting; as with love, fishing is ‘a many-splendoured thing’.

I was thinking of this towards summer’s end, when I had an invitation to the fabled Naver—a river where I had never yet managed to swim my hooks. Although I have been blessed with fishing in some 40 countries, from the Arctic Circle to the South Seas, the fin-feverish anticipation of visiting ‘pastures new’ (in this case, treescapes and gravelly meanders) was still as delicious as plunging one’s spoon into a freshly opened jar of jam.

Angling’s geographical spectrum is nowadays astonishing and (except in Covid times) has been expanded by entrepreneurs to cover much of the globe. In any fishing hut, you will hear folk discussing their wish list and, before I hand in my dinner pail, I hope to visit Chile, Bhutan, Brazil and Tasmania, as well as further acquainting myself with New Zealand, Montana and the outlying Seychelles atolls. I guess it’s only a matter of time before some tour operator begins offering trips to the Bay of Rainbows on the moon.

Some of my travels have seemed genuine explorations. In the early days of fishing off southern Cuba, the guides were still working out the flats and, when chasing giant trevally off one Tahitian motu, my boatman admitted that he didn’t even know what lay around the next corner. On the Kola peninsula’s River Umba in Russia, many of the salmon pools still had no names, and my Venezuelan canoe-paddler in the jungly creeks where we were hunting tarpon had never before seen a fly rod.