ACTIVITY BREAKS ANGLING
LET’S GO...
Fly fishing Jonathan Manning chills out, immerses himself in nature and rediscovers the joy of angling
W
allop! The water swirls, there’s a silvery flash, a slight splash, and then the tip of my rod is yanked double. In an instant I understand what all the fuss is about. Five minutes earlier, standing thigh-deep in chilly water with 11 square kilometres of reservoir before me, I had been beginning to wonder. Fly fishing had seemed quite straightforward in the classroom – how hard can it be to outwit a trout? – but wading through the shallows of Rutland Water had made the epic scale of the lake apparent. Suddenly, finding a fish felt like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. And why should the artificial fly on the end of my line, about half the size of a fingernail, look any tastier to a trout
34 December 2020
than Mother Nature’s bountiful buffet of pupae, shrimp, nymph, fry and flying insect? This, I supposed, explained why the sport is called ‘fishing’, rather than ‘catching’. Last time I fished there was a 19 at the start of the year, but spare time during lockdown and the search for a socially-distanced outdoor activity drew me back to the water. And I’m not alone. The Environment Agency reported in August that over 100,000 more people have been fishing this year, with rod licence sales up by nearly a fifth compared to the same time in 2019. Plus, the TV hit of the summer was surely Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, the bucolic series that followed comedians Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse as they fished their way around the UK. It looks as though fishing can be good for you too. Interestingly, the gentle programme celebrated the blissful waterside locations and
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