National News & Information > Features November 2007

At the end are the rainbows by Hugh Creasy

My boots have fallen apart. The glue that held them together has, I am told, melted in the heat of the sun. The boots were left in the boot of my car, the sun shone and they fell apart.

 Apparently there are expensive glues that are heat-proof, but if you buy cheap boots this is what you can expect.

Many years ago, I purchased a pair of boots described as “suitable for working in the garden”. They were cheap and unlined, which I preferred for wading in rivers and streams, because lined boots carried too much water. I trekked hundreds of kilometres in those boots,  and spent many hours in the water wearing them. They were old technology, just leather fused to a rubber sole. They are not made any more.

Fashion dictates too much of what we wear. Modern boots are made in many pieces, requiring intensive labour that can only be performed in low-wage economies. All the pieces have to be stitched and in every stitch there is a weakness. It’s called adding value, but it is value to the manufacturer, not the user.

Wouldn’t it be great if advances in technology moved toward simplicity, rather than complication.  Microsoft programmes would work, cars would be repairable,  buildings wouldn’t leak, boots would not melt, rods would not shine in the sun, nor would reels, flies would be made of natural materials, instead of being products of polluting industries.

Sometimes I feel like a Luddite, raving against progress. I do like to wear clothes softened by age and washed to a point where they feel comfortable. I love the familiar feel of a rod with a predictable flex and a cork grip bearing the imprint of my hand.  When a March Brown dry fly touches gently on the water and is taken by a trout, I give thanks that old patterns work as well as  new.

Wouldn’t it have been great if the silk fly line had been perfected by technology, rather than supplanted. 

These are the thoughts that occupied my mind while waiting for fish to rise. It was too early in the evening, the sun had not set and the river ran low. A week or two without rain was enough to shrink the pools and reduce rapids to riffles. I sat among the rubbish on the riverbank – old plastic bags and discarded clothing, rusty car parts – shaded by willows and watched the water.  Fantails worked the riverbank in the shelter of the trees, their prey invisible, avian contortionists as they gathered insects on the wing. A sharp pain on the inside of my wrist revealed their possible prey, a sandfly, body swelling with blood that left a smear as it was crushed.

The light changed as the sun approached the horizon. The river blazed a pretty pink and welcome swallows took wing, swinging low over the water and leaving ripples on its surface as now and then a wingtip touched. They paused to rest on an overhead wire, before resuming flight. Trapeze artists and tightrope walkers combined. Darkness fell on the water, though the sun still shone on the surrounding hills. The water took on an oily hue, thicker and slower than it was in the light. I stood up and disturbed a fat Dobson fly that clattered away with all four wings working furiously.

Upriver, a pair of Paradise shelduck was swimming downstream towards me. They were a pool or two away, chatting to each other as they came. I moved out of the cover of the trees to warn them and they stopped in alarm, calling warnings to all wildlife that I was there, before taking wing upriver. I may have spooked a nearby fish, but the shelducks would have spooked every fish in the pool if they had come any closer. 
It grew impossible to see the far margins of the pool as the gloom of night descended, and another sense came into play. I had to listen for a rise – that subtle slurp of surface water taken in when a floating bug is sucked down a fish’s throat.

The swallows had ceased their flight, their place taken by a squadron of red-billed gulls in purposeful flight upriver. They swept overhead and disappeared in the darkness. This was the half-hour or so in which the fish would begin feeding, taking insects hungrily and carelessly, giving the angler a real chance if the fly matched the hatch of insects coming off the water.

I felt a fluttering on my cheek, and looked down to see half a dozen caddis flies clinging to my jacket, and a few metres away there was a swirl of water and the humpback rise of a trout taking insects just below the surface. 

The caddis pattern I used was an old one, tied on a 2x long-shank  #16 hook using a pair of half hackles from a cock’s cape with the fibres tied back to form a pair of wings.  It’s hard to tie, so it will never be a commercial pattern, but it works when the fish are taking flies from the surface. It’s a Veniard pattern from about 30 years ago.

There was a splash from the head of the pool and I cast into the darkness. The fly drifted back to me, and I cast again, and again, and again – to the point of hopelessness, when casts grow careless and only laziness and a glimmer of forlorn hope prevents a change to a wet fly. Then the fish struck and all wishes were realised. Joy made all the more piquant by the sheer relief of an end to despair.
Homeward bound and happy.

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