The Secret Angler

Looking through the Wild Trout Trust spring auction listings, I feel like a kid with a Hornby train set catalogue, full of desirable goodies I couldn’t possibly afford. The auction offers a range of fishing trips, books, paintings and other odds and ends on which we are invited to bid. Proceeds go towards the conservation and restoration work of the WTT.

I have yet to win a bid on the WTT eBay auction. Guide prices suggest bidders need fairly deep pockets, deeper than indicated in fact, since the winning bids are often twice the guide figure. The lowest guide price I can find for a river is £40, which could get you a day on a Welsh river, or one on the River Wear in County Durham. This doesn’t seem too bad, except that one can get a day’s fly fishing for a tenner on parts of the Wear. An especially good stretch perhaps. But worth 80 quid?

The North-South divide is acutely obvious when you browse the South East section. Heading the list of covetable chalk stream fishing is a day for two on the River Test at Mottisfont. If this lot proves as popular as its association with Halford might imply, expect to pay £1900, though that does buy you a day’s fishing for two. Such a sum would buy you a season ticket on many chalk stream beats, although not Motissfont, for which season tickets are as rare as the iron blue. Don’t expect much change from a thousand quid for most of the better Itchen and Test lots, despite the common stipulation that the fishing is to be taken after the mayfly season, when it’s supposed to be cheaper. This is neoliberal fishing in action: the ‘clubs’ who hold the fishing rights to these beats are registered companies whose directors are very wealthy individuals.

The cheaper fishing is confined to the minor streams dotted about the South, usually on short reaches. Some of the lots are very inviting, but from my own prior knowledge, some of the fisheries are not so great. Could be a lot of money for little fishing, particularly if the weather is bad.

The fishing overseas section has been cut back and replaced with ‘fixed-price trips abroad’ — did past bids not cover the costs? In the auction is lower cost fishing on the continent, some of which looks quite attractive, if a long way to go for a day’s fishing. The faraway trips are now part of the fixed-price section — trout in Patagonia, bonefish in the Bahamas, and other long-distance destinations. Now I wouldn’t mind wading some pale blue tropical flat or casting to exotic trout in the Southern Hemisphere, if I had a few grand to spare for three days’ fishing, but is this something any of us should be doing in this climate-changing world? More to the point, is this something the WTT, a conservation organisation, should be encouraging?

Many will say that it’s all for charity, and so what if those with the wherewithal buy up the posh fishing. All the more funds for the WTT’s bank account from those who have the means. Inevitably the WTT’s annual auction emphasises the truth that the finest, or at least the most famous, fly fishing is the province of the very well off. Pay up, board the aeroplane, push those vague thoughts of carbon footprints to the back of the mind, and console yourself that the WTT will be faggoting some stream or other next season.

One has to ask where genuine environmental improvement for the long term survival of the wild trout and indeed ourselves will come from, a future that will surely depend upon reduced consumption. Apparently not from anglers, nor it seems the Wild Trout Trust.

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Outdoorsy writing has been around since Gilbert White published his letters on Selbourne, and probably long before. His work helped inspire other naturalists like the Victorian, WH Hudson, and more recently, White’s biographer Richard Mabey, to write books on natural history. WH Hudson’s books inclined more towards travelogue and detailed observations of wildlife and landscape, whereas those by contemporary writers have been more about personal journeys and quests for inner discovery. Authors like Olivia Laing, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deacon have all contributed to this genre of outdoors writing.

The outdoors theme has become popular enough for its own website to be created. Caught by the River has been going for nearly 12 years and features art, poetry, photography, some music, and a lot of outdoors writing. To the angler this should be quite appealing, especially as a few fishermen have contributed. We spend a lot of time outdoors and take an interest in the wildlife around water. The drawback with CBTR and the outdoorsy books is captured in the website’s description of itself as ‘stepping out of daily routines to re-engage with nature’, creating ‘perfect symbiotic harmony’ in a world ‘full of endless discovery’.

None of these phrases really means anything. They come from the language of the ‘new-age’, the stuff the flower children were saying over fifty years ago. Many of us feel sympathy towards the idea of escape from the concrete world in which most of us spend our working days, especially anglers who’ve read the peregrinations of BB, as much wanderer through nature as fisherman. The question is whether we really can escape from the JG Ballard scape of tarmac and tall buildings to a Wordsworthian idyll by immersing ourselves in pages of rural metaphors.

Nevertheless, sales are good for some of the writers. Macfarlane’s are particularly popular. Reading several other examples it becomes clear that filling a book’s worth of pages on the subject is not easy. There is only so much description possible for a walk through the country and many discursions are required to keep the narrative going. Laing’s To the River, a journey along the Sussex Ouse, draws on a favourite author, Virginia Woolf, to add backbone, to the extent that she tends to adopt Woolf’s ‘cocoons of language’ to spin out the landscape description. Mabey in Nature Cure does something similar and I’ve never quite managed to finish the book, frequently bogged down in exhaustive detail of wildlife (he wrote Flora Britannica so is well qualified on that aspect). Similarly Macfarlane’s travels never seem to go anywhere beyond elaboration of his surroundings and numerous references to other authors, easily parodied. Roger Deacon’s Waterlog is the most interesting of the bunch yet sits on my bookshelf unfinished. He does, however, have more to say than the other outdoors books I’ve read; his reflections on the effective privatisation of the Test and Itchen will be of interest to fly fishermen. Even so, the subject of swimming in the streams of England has not held my attention beyond the first few chapters.

CBTR also suffers from these shortcomings in my view. The poetry tends to be of the poetry school variety, formal and technical, rather cold. The prose often gives that feeling of an author working hard to put some texture into the writing, which ends up overcooked and lacking in substance. Some contributions are better than others but much of it makes CBTR seem like an outlet for the unpublishable. Meandering and staring into the distance, they never really seem to find their subject.

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