The Secret Angler

How do you recognise an expert angler? Fly fishing experts seem to be instantly recognisable. They wear baseball caps, beards and a lot of accoutrements dangling from their chests, as this collection of American experts shows. The UK has its own collection of beardy fly fishing experts too, mostly men of course, but a few women too (they are typically beardless).

These experts almost all have their own websites on which they publish articles that show off their expertise, videos that record copious catching of fish, and most important, inventories of fishing tackle for sale. They will generally advertise their expert guiding services to the non-expert. At one time guides were called ghillies and were to be found only in Scotland, their role to help the well-to-do holiday angler catch a salmon. Now guides, following the model of America, where they have been popular for a long time, have proliferated. Coarse fishing and sea fishing have their own experts too but fewer of them — fishermen with plenty of cash to spend on guides are more common amongst fly anglers.

You may ask what constitutes an expert. Some may have formal casting qualifications but aside from those the only requirement is for experts to show themselves to be prolific fish catchers, hence the action packed videos. Now of course this is not necessarily a reliable indication of expertise. To catch a lot of fish you need to fish where there are a lot of fish. Expert articles and videos tend to concentrate on methods and minutiae of fly patterns in the case of fly fishing, float shapes and shotting in coarse fishing, and fancy rigs in sea angling. Since all of these are innumerable the advice of an expert boils down to opinion or habit much of the time.

That’s not to say that there is no such thing as an expert angler. Too many dismiss the value of genuine experts nowadays, as we saw during the pandemic. Only the very foolish would subscribe to the view of Michael Gove who declared we’ve had enough of experts. Presumably he is happy to consult a plumber when he has toothache. The trick of course is to select the real experts from the glib, the boastful and the fanciful. I’m happy to seek out the guidance of more experienced anglers than myself, especially when faced with an unfamiliar water, but I’ve often found their advice falls short, or at least poorly translates into practice. In nearly all cases the best experience is that which you gain yourself.

Nothing wrong with watching our online experts displaying their skills if you like it; you never know, you might pick up a useful wrinkle. I don’t mind viewing a bit of rod-bending action myself although the boredom threshold is quickly reached. So in the interests of public service, I would like to offer the Secret Angler’s definitive guidance on how to catch fish.

1. Fish where there are plenty of fish.
2. Don’t scare them off before you’ve begun.
3. Learn to cast well enough to put tackle near the fish and not, for example, in a tree.
4. Offer them something, fly or bait, that they are likely to want to eat.
5. Hook and land fish and release.

Alas, I am unable to offer a guiding service. But you don’t really need one, do you?

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I’ve got to hand it to Simon Cooper, purveyor of fine fishings (at a fine price) and house polemicist of Trout and Salmon, he’s lately provided quite of lot fodder for this blog. His magazine columns are like so many of those ill-informed and misleading opinion pieces in the tabloids. In the October edition he thunders about chalk streams and climate change, not as you might expect on the threat of higher temperatures but how a warming climate is nothing to worry about. In his attack on a Daily Mirror article, he complains of ‘dog whistle phrases’ such as ‘more heatwaves’ and ‘climate emergency’. The expression ‘dog whistle’ refers to insidious communication but there is nothing hidden or deceitful to pointing out the obvious. The climate really has begun to change rapidly.

Maybe Cooper doesn’t feel the heat but he must be aware our summers are getting hotter. Last year 40 degrees was hit for the first time. Chalk stream temperatures rose in places to 20 degrees, the point at which trout begin to struggle; some angling clubs banned fishing. He is remarkably insouciant if he believes these changes, never mind all the other global impacts, do not constitute an emergency. It seems that far more than dog whistles are beyond his perception.

Cooper’s attitude is a good example of the phenomenon of simplism, a term coined for the current tendency to oversimplify or to propound simple solutions to complex problems. Climate change science is certainly complex and too many can’t be bothered to read up about it, preferring instead to get their (mis)information from rants and slogans on social media. But you don’t get anything useful from the fruitcakes who fritter away their lives online. Details certainly don’t trouble Simon’s equilibrium. He claims that the south of England gets a ‘steady 32 inches of rain a year’. In fact it’s less, about 28 inches give or take 4 inches. But that isn’t the point. Added to higher mean temperatures, rainfall is predicted to become more concentrated, that is droughts and storms more extreme . Drier summers and stormier winters do not make a good climate for chalk stream health. Cooper’s other ‘killer fact’ (the death of all understanding?) is that we only need 6 inches of rain a year to match our water consumption. No mention of where this figure comes from. The problem of course is not so much the rainfall but the storage of water for consumption without draining the aquifers that supply the chalk rivers. He has nothing to offer here either.

All is simple in Simon’s world. His truth is whatever allows him to carry on without a guilty conscience. If there is no climate problem, he tells himself, he can go on driving his hefty gas-guzzling SUV, carry on stocking trout fed from the products of marine fisheries, already grossly overfished, and safely ignore anything else that might disturb his comfortable existence. Unfortunately for us all, the real truth is that climate change is happening at the fast end predicted by the scientists; only those with their heads buried deep in the sand will not see. Chalk streams, though many are still good fly fisheries for the moment, will be the earliest to suffer. Cooper’s rent-a-rod business will shrivel alongside them. His denial of the obvious will not prevent this. Simple, Simon.

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