Authors: Kevin Searock
Meanwhile on the River Itchen, George Edward MacKenzie Skues worked out the principles of upstream nymph fishing for trout, principles that were fine tuned and expanded upon by Frank Sawyer, a keeper on the River Avon during the mid-twentieth century. Dorset was the home ground of a youthful Roderick L. Haig-Brown before he followed his destiny to Vancouver Island and the Pacific Northwest.
For me the high point of the train journey came when we crossed a small chalkstream that ran beneath a high viaduct between Basingstoke and Andover. This was the little River Bourne that looms much larger in legend than it does in fact, having been immortalized by Harry Plunket Greene in his fly-fishing classic,
Where the Bright Waters Meet
. Spring creeks, no matter how small, are loved by trout anglers everywhere and in every time.
It was late afternoon when we left the train at Axminster and caught the bus down to Lyme Regis on the channel coast. Finally we rolled and hauled our luggage up a steep hill to the thatch-roofed Kersbrook Hotel, having traveled some four thousand miles in the past twenty-four hours. A European robin flashed from its perch in the garden as we entered and stacked our bags next to an enormous ammonite fossil that leaned against a bench. Teresa and I spent two days in Lyme Regis, slowly acclimating to a new place and a new culture that would be our home for the next month. Even in this relatively secluded corner of the United Kingdom there were wonders. The writer John Fowles lived just down the street from the Kersbrook and I thought about waiting nearby to see if I could talk to him or get his autograph. Writers must write about what they know, and Lyme Regis has several landmarks that feature in Fowles's best-known novel,
The French Lieutenant's Woman
.
We wandered down to the harbor and walked along the causeway known as the Cobb, which novelist Jane Austen describes in her classic
Persuasion
. Looking west along the shore in the clear morning we could see the Jurassic shale formation called the Undercliff, where Mary Anning and her family collected fossils during the early nineteenth century. Mary Anning discovered the first fossil ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs at a time when women were mostly barred from doing science. Fossils were everywhere in Lyme Regis. We saw a complete ichthyosaur skeleton gathering dust in the display window of a little pharmacy on the village high street. Any museum in the world would have died to have that specimen. Many of Mary Anning's personal effects, including one of her rock hammers and pages from her journals, are preserved in the Lyme Regis Museum.
The rhythms and habits of life in the UK were interesting. We noted that Britons tended to pay for things in coin, maybe because they had coins in denominations up to two pounds sterling (about four American dollars at the time). Britons were strikingly thin, no doubt from all the walking they did. It was routine to see families with young children lugging huge picnic hampers on hikes up to four miles one way, just to have lunch outdoors on some picturesque knoll. Tort law seemed to be unknown; if you did something stupid and got hurt, or worse, it was your own damned fault. Signs on the moors ( grassy uplands that do triple duty as national parks, grouse hunting areas, and aerial gunnery ranges) warned “Do not touch any military ordnance, as it may explode and kill you.” Most of the English ways of doing things were sensible in the context of a small island shared by some sixty million people. We would find the same was true with regard to the fishing.
We were able to take a cab from Lyme Regis to Exeter Airport, where we rented a car and continued our journey southwest to the counties of Devon and Cornwall. Driving was an adventure that was much more difficult for the passenger than the driver. If something happened I could deal with it, but Teresa could only hold on tight and pray. Rural roads in Britain were generally much too narrow for the bus and truck traffic that used them. Somehow everybody got along, but not without some exciting moments. Hedges and stone walls came right up to the edge of the pavement; there was no shoulder. However, we were surprised to find that driving on the left was easy. Maybe too easy; when we got home, Teresa innocently began driving to Baraboo on the left side of the road. Shifting with the left hand was not so easy, and almost all rental cars in the UK had manual transmissions. Roundabouts at intersections were confusing at first. We had to be prepared to come to a full stop and yield to traffic coming from the right at every roundabout, including “mini-roundabouts,” which were just circles and arrows painted on the roadway. Rural roads had signs, but the signs didn't tell us what road we were on. They told us which way to go to get to a particular village. If you try it, plan ahead and write a checklist of the villages you will pass through on your way from point A to point B. Above all, drive slowly and don't be discouraged. We found the freedom to go anywhere, in a foreign country, at our own pace was intoxicating.
It was late in the afternoon when we wheeled into the village of Lifton, in Devon. Lifton is what Grandmother would have called a “stone's throw town,” meaning she could throw a stone from one end of it to the other. At the heart of Lifton is a massive gray building that has catered to travelers for hundreds of years, and to hunters and anglers for generations. Troops of jackdaws squeak a loud greeting to visitors as they arrive. A modest sign identifies the Arundel Arms, the quintessential British sporting hotel described so brilliantly by American author and editor Edward Weeks.
Ted Weeks edited the
Atlantic Monthly
(now the
Atlantic
) from 1938 to 1966, the longest tenure of any editor of the magazine. Weeks was a great discoverer of talented writers, like James Hilton, who wrote the modern classic
Good-bye, Mr. Chips
. Weeks authored several books, including
Fresh Waters
, a book of fishing stories that appeared in 1968. Like many people he discovered fishing relatively late in life and quickly fell under its spell. His stories included an extensive chapter on fishing in Britain, and when I read them for the first time a desire formed in my heart to stay at the Arundel Arms and fish the local spate rivers, such as the Lyd, Wolf, Tamar, and Ottery. Spate rivers are what we would call freestone streams, fed mostly by surface runoff.
In 2004, Anne Voss-Bark still owned and operated the Arundel Arms as she had since 1961, and she was one of my fly-fishing heroes. In her own book,
West Country Fly Fishing
, she collected and edited a series of fishing essays about the local region from an amazingly diverse set of authors. Among them were brilliant fishermen like Brian Clarke, Dermot Wilson, David Pilkington, and Conrad Voss-Bark; writers like the poet Ted Hughes; and salt-of-the-earth West Country men like Roy Buckingham, who recently retired from his position as fishing instructor and riverkeeper at the Arundel Arms after thirty-nine years of service. To our delight, right after we checked into the hotel, Anne Voss-Bark herself greeted us and joined us in the Arundel bar for drinks and a light snack. It was a conversation I will remember happily for the rest of my life.
Around us the bar was decorated with sporting memorabilia, including a display of photos, flies, and pages from the fishing journal of Major Oliver Kite, who popularized the now-famous Pheasant Tail Nymph. According to local legend, Major Kite made something of a nuisance of himself when he befriended Frank Sawyer, keeper of the Officer's Fishing Association water on the Hampshire Avon. Sawyer happened to live across the street from Kite in the village of Netheravon, and even today there is talk among older folks in the pubs that much of the material in Kite's book,
Nymph Fishing in Practice,
was taken directly from Sawyer, a modest man of modest means. It was a bit of a thorn in Sawyer's side to look across the street and see the shiny white Jaguar XKE parked in front of the Kite residence, purchased with royalties from
Nymph Fishing in Practice
and also from the popular BBC television series
In Kite's Country
. Envy and politics play a part in every human endeavor, and fishing is no exception.
Anne Voss-Bark was everything a fly-fishing hero should be: amiable, gracious, fun loving, with a razor-sharp wit and a lovely smile. Winner of the “Woman Hotelier of the Year” and “Sporting Hotel of the Year” awards, she took considerable time from her busy schedule to talk to two Americans who were far from home, and she made us feel welcome at the end of a hard day when we really needed a friend. Teresa and I will always be grateful for that.
The next day was overcast with occasional rain showers. For the first time, we threw our fishing gear in the boot (trunk) of the car and went fishing in England. Our “beat,” or assigned stretch of water, was the River Lyd, from its junction with the larger River Tamar upstream to the next bridge. We knew about the English beat system, which ensured that each angler fishing the hotel water had his or her own stretch of water to fish, but we were somewhat concerned about how much water that would turn out to be. These concerns vanished when we stepped over a stone wall via a wooden stile and got the first look at our beat.
The narrow valley of the River Lyd stretched out before us, lined with fields of barley across the uplands and forested in the lower elevations near the water. The junction with the Tamar was more than a mile away from where we stood, and it was at least a half-mile upstream to the road crossing. Our beat wasn't very limited. Handin-hand we walked across emerald green meadows and pastures bordered with flower-studded hedgerows toward the line of the Tamar. A herd of Holstein dairy cows chewed their cud and took no notice of us as we passed by. It all looked eerily like home. Sometimes we felt as if we could just drive back to Durwards Glen when we were done fishing, but the feeling passed when we reached the junction of the rivers. For a moment we stood poised on the ancient boundary between Devon and Cornwall, nearly all of it contested by dint of sword on shield in earlier days. Then we turned back into Devon and began wading and fishing the River Lyd.
The Lyd was entrenched between cliffs of dark, finely layered shale and slate. The banks were covered with ferns where the slope wasn't too steep, but in places ladders were provided so that anglers could reach the better pools. Thick belts of oak, beech, and ash covered both banks, and the limbs of the larger trees arched all the way across the river, leaving just a few patches where the sky was visible. The river was clear but tea stained with tannic acid from its peat bog beginnings on Dartmoor. We were struck by the sudden changes in the character of the water as we worked our way upstream. Great care had to be taken while wading, because the water could be ankle or shin deep in one place and suddenly drop off into a twelve-foot-deep hole on the very next step. It was hard to read the water. Some likely looking places seemed not to have any fish at all, but then we would spook trout, both sea run and resident brown trout, from shallower areas where we didn't expect them to hold. In fact, we were learning a hard lesson that the farther one travels to fish, the more important it is to spend some time with a local guide in order to be successful. In previous fishing trips across North America we had done very well with Wisconsin flies and Wisconsin methods, but it was clearly a different ball game in the West Country of England.
Playing a hunch that attractor nymphs would provoke more strikes from trout in this relatively sterile stream, I fished a two-fly rig with a #14 Bead-head Pink Squirrel Nymph at the end of a 5x tippet with a #14 Partridge and Hare's Ear Soft Hackle on a dropper. A small strike indicator completed the rig, and I confidently waded to a good position downstream from the head of a good run. Sure enough, on only the second or third pitch into the run the indicator bobbed and I struck a very good fish. Roy Buckingham had told us that resident trout ran small in the local streams, and that anything eight inches or more was a good fish. My trout was easily a foot long, but as I brought it in it began to look strange and I soon realized that I hadn't caught a trout at all. When the fish was played out I lifted it from the water and there in my hand was a beautiful European grayling, almost a pound in weight, with red and blue highlights reflecting off its signature sail-like dorsal fin. In the back of my mind I'd hoped to catch a grayling somewhere in the UK, and here it wasâmy first fish of the trip and the first grayling of my life. For a Wisconsin angler, catching a grayling means you've traveled far and probably had many adventures, and so it proved for me.
When we reeled up in the evening and hiked back to the car, the grayling was the only decent fish that either of us had caught. A few tiny brown trout, or possibly Atlantic salmon parr, four to six inches long were the only other fish we had taken. Back at the Arundel Arms, another whole cadre of anglers was tackling up and setting off for the river. They were after
sea trout
, anadromous brown trout, which are mainly caught at night in this part of the UK. The best West Country rivers work hard. Fish in the Lyd and the Tamar can expect to see flies going past them every hour of the day and night during the prime part of the season.
I never did catch a large sea trout from the River Lyd, though I hooked several of them on a variety of flies during the daytime. The sea-run browns of the West Country are the only fish I've hooked in fresh water that could beat a Wisconsin smallmouth bass in a straight pound-for-pound fight. Violent is the word that best describes a fight with a sea trout. I lost sea trout in every possible way: they jumped and threw the fly, they jumped and landed on the fragile tippet, they rubbed the fly out on rocks, they cut the leader on rocks, and one heart-breaker ran upstream under a bridge and cut the leader on a piece of metal sticking out from the concrete.
The next day dawned clear and sunny, wretched weather for catching trout but wonderful for sightseeing, so Teresa and I drove across the moors to Land's End, the most southwesterly point of land in England. The rugged Cornwall coast is still one of the most sparsely populated areas in England. The continuous roar of towering waves crashing into the near-vertical headlands made it hard to talk to each other, and we sat atop the cliffs for a long time watching greater black-backed gulls ride the thermals and updrafts. The air was heavy with the salt smell of the sea, and only the cries of gulls and other sea birds rose and fell above the booming surf.