Читать книгу On Fishing - Brian Clarke - Страница 9

THE affection that many of us hold for our rods can border on the irrational. There is something about a rod that, once owned, can make it highly personal whether mass-produced or not. I don’t mean carbon fibre rods, marvellously functional though they are. I mean cane rods. Once cut and tapered, glued and varnished, cane comes to life again in the hand. Or, at least, we fancy it does. We fancy we can feel the throb and pulse of it clean through the corks.

With carbon fibre, all this wonderful subjectivity is lost. Carbon fibre performs better. It can be manufactured to produce any action required of it. We can abuse it constantly without impairing its performance. Carbon fibre has replaced cane for very good reasons. But still it is synthetic stuff, inert and characterless. It cannot tap into the emotions the way split cane used to do.

To lose a cherished split cane rod – worse still, to break one – can be a shattering experience in every sense. I know it only too well.

I HAVE many fishing rods, but I have only ever loved three. All were made of cane. One is a Wallis Wizard, the brilliant wholecane butt, split cane middle-and-top design by F.W.K. Wallis, the legendary Avon barbel specialist. I bought it as a lad by doing a newspaper round. I have it still. It is still in good heart and, more to the point, still in its original number of pieces.

The second rod is a Fario Club, one of the great creations of Charles Ritz, the famous hotelier who, in fly-fishing circles, is infinitely more famous as a designer of trout rods. I bought this 8ft 5in piece of honey-coloured delight with the first royalty cheque from my first book, half a lifetime ago.

I did most of my dry fly and nymph fishing with the Fario Club for ten years after that. Eventually, I broke its back – literally – when trying to keep low on a treeless bank while casting to a fish in distant mid-river. Down on one knee, while concentrating hard on the fish and reaching for distance, the line fell too low on the back cast, snagged a meadow buttercup – and did not come forward.

The third rod, a 6ft 9in aftm-4 brook rod built by Constable, was as light and delicate as a fairy’s wand and it cast spells as well as lines. It was as crisp and precise as a rapier – and as deadly. My wife gave it to me on one of my Big Zero birthdays, and I was thrilled to have it.

Cliff Constable was one of the finest builders of split cane this country has produced and his staggered-ferrule brook rod was his finest achievement. I asked my friend Stewart Canham, master fly-tyer and furnisher of cane rods so exquisite that they would not have looked out of place in a Bond Street window, to finish the cane for me.

Now Stewart is an extraordinary man, a big, multi-talented man with hands the size of bin lids. For all that he has an exquisite delicacy of touch and specialises in creating delicate things. One of his one-time interests, for example, was icing cakes and he iced the wedding cake he made for one of my daughters. It was so wonderfully done, so decorated about with sprays of flowers he had made from icing that guests were peering at them this way and that, wondering if they were real. His fly-tying was, a doctor friend of mine said, more delicate than brain surgery. At one time, interested in butterflies, he bred them by the hundred and produced cases of them so delicately spread and pinned that they could have been exhibits in the Natural History Museum. Everything that Stewart Canham decides to do, he does to perfection.

When it came to my rod, he never produced a more personalised thing. All the usual restrained touches were there, from the subtlety of the matt varnish instead of gloss to the near-transparent whippings, tipped with black. But it was the rest, the attention to so much tiny detail, that made the rod truly unique.

When he delivered it, I found that Stewart had got Constable to autograph the cane. A tiny ephermerid nymph, beautifully drawn in Indian ink, was crawling up the butt amid the details of rod length and line weight and the like. The 20-inch stopper that extended the butt section to the length of the top section for carrying purposes was wound about with ivy, drawn in Indian ink, in-filled with white. And so on and so on. He had produced less a rod, more an artwork and it carried a freight of sentiment for me.

Mayfly time in Dorset. A friend invited me down. It was a lovely day, warm and sunny but with – note it – a downstream breeze. The hawthorn blossom was out. The ranunculus was in flower. Swifts curved and sculpted the air. From time to time, wagtails wagged and kingfishers skimmed. In a sidestream, we saw a fish lying awkwardly just downstream of a tree. Mike suggested I give it a go. I slipped under a barbed wire fence and slid into the deep water.

It took several minutes to get into position and feel comfortable. All the time, the fish went on rising and moving steadily upstream towards the tree, narrowing the angle where my fly would have to go. To have any chance, the leader would have to overshoot the fish and be squeezed into the space between the water and the branches. It would take a driven cast, all wrist, to create the tight loop I was going to need. And I would have to take care with the back-cast to avoid the alder that grew over the water behind me. I studied the situation and looked back at my friend. ‘Thanks a lot, Mike,’ I remember saying.

It must have been on the fourth or fifth attempt that the breeze suddenly strengthened. In mid false-cast I took account of it. I tightened the loop still more. I applied yet more wrist. I let the final back cast straighten and then drove it forward.

It did not come. There was an odd sensation, impossible to describe, but something, somehow, somewhere seemed to grate. In the concentration of the moment, I assumed that I had snagged the alder. I have snagged trees a thousand times. Foolishly, I did not bother to turn. I flicked the rod again, expecting either the fly to come free or the branch to give and cushion the movement. I have done that and seen that a thousand times, too.

Nothing. No give. Absolutely no give, but again a grating feeling and this time a sound. I turned and instinctively looked for my line and fly. The line was well clear of the alder and to the right. The fly was on the barbed wire fence that I had forgotten about. My eyes followed the line back from the fence to my rod. I saw the oddity of an angle in the silken curve, two rings back from the tip. I saw the cane splintered and light shining through the long, loved fibres.

For a long time, I could not take it in. I suppose the realisation of what I was seeing, the pain of it, was somehow dulled, the way that the shock of an injury sometimes can be. Then, all the things I had loved about the rod – its exquisite beauty, the occasion it commemorated, the scores of magical moments I had experienced with it – rushed through my mind in a torrent.

Mike said it was two minutes before I spoke. I simply stood there uncomprehending, staring at one of the three or four possessions I treasured most in the world, now utterly ruined. I know we all have such moments, but that gives no comfort. It was – it still is – terrible.