A summer of top-notch sport

While success with a rod or gun isn't always guaranteed, Laurence Catlow perseveres and finds plenty to enjoy

- Laurence Catlow

I think I have already told you that, if push came to shove, and if the shove was equivalent to something way up there on the Richter scale, demanding that I should renounce one of the two sports that I so love, I should almost certainly choose to remain a fisher rather than a shooter.

A winter without the opportunity of lifting my gun on to a bird or two would be a grim and cheerless prospect. If, perhaps, I was still allowed to work my spaniels and in this way play my part in shooting days, although it would still be a deprived and diminished life, I can just about persuade myself that I might find it tolerable. But the thought of a spring and summer without fishing, a spring and summer without long days on my rivers in pursuit of trout, is completely unbearable. A life without fishing seems, to me at least, a life that is no longer worth living.

And why, you may be wondering, am I telling you this all over again? Well, a couple of weeks ago a bright and breezy day found me sitting, at about 4pm, on the banks of the Wharfe. There had been heavy showers the preceding day and the river was something like a fly-fisher’s dream; it was the middle of May, it was also warm and there were hawthorn flies on the wing.

Altogether you would have expected such conditions, by about 4pm, to have put as many trout in a fisher’s creel as he would probably reckon enough for a single day’s sport. But there I was, sitting on the banks of the Wharfe and telling myself that I hated fishing, that I was a star-crossed bungler of a fisher and that it was time for me to give it all up and spend the trout season trying to improve my performance on clays.