Life is but a dream

Freed from the shackles of Scottish lockdown, The Prof ventures south to ‘kick some fin’ in pursuit of brownies on his annual chalkstream fix

- David Profumo

THANKS to the Tartan Curtain, it was not until after the summer solstice that I could head south in search of my annual chalkstream fix, so by the time I arrived in Stockbridge I was fish-hungry and ready to ‘kick some fin’. I started loading up with yet more flies from the irrepressible Alistair Robjent’s excellent emporium and awaited my host, Michael, who had kindly invited me to an exclusive Test beat for the day.

There had been a severe heatwave (34ËšC in Hampshire) and any sensible fish would have been lounging in the shade with a sombrero and a nice margarita; as we began my belated trout season with a tumbler of Champagne, the mid-morning glare was already almost audible and the prospects of a hatch looked slim. To compound matters, the nymph was forbidden, so it would be a case of trying to coax up a brownie that was on the fin. I plumped for a size 12 Rat-Faced McDougal (originally called the Beaverkill Bastard) and we set off merrily downstream.

I have previously in these pages expressed my preference for nymphing when permitted: it’s not that I am blind to the spectacle of a fish slurping at my surface representation, but there’s something that more deeply pleases me about the three-dimensional aspect of the sunken bug, the need for lipreading, that slight milky-white gape of the trout’s acceptance, the thrill of coming tight to him successfully. Perhaps it’s because my home water as a boy was an unkeepered and dishevelled Hertfordshire chalkstream where classic floating fly tactics were impossible, but my instinct is to go subsurface if the fish are feeding in the basement, as we know they tend to do for much of the time.