The Fly is Up

By Terry Lawton

The Fly is Up is the story of fly fishing in times very different from today. -Times of friendship forged between anglers, who though they may have lived on different continents, met regularly on the banks of English chalk streams or at the Shannon River in Tasmania to enjoy exceptional fishing triggered by truly prolific fly hatches.
Anglers today may be surprised that many of their forebears greeted the start of the Mayfly carnival with neither excitement nor great enthusiasm. Before fishing the Mayfly hatch assumed its prominence in anglers’ imaginations, the season opened with the grannom. This caddis fly’s fluctuating fortunes show how sensitive wildlife is to man’s management of rivers. The demise of the Shannon Rise demonstrates how man can create and then destroy habitat that was ideal for a particular species of fly.
The Fly is Up is more than the history of three famous fly hatches. It is a story of man’s inter-action with the natural environment, for good and bad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry Lawton
• Release date: Jun 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301715688

Terry Lawton

Terry Lawton is a writer, author and committed fly fisherman who fishes for trout, and also pike and grayling, at home and abroad.His first book, Nymph Fishing, A History of The Art and Practice was published by Swan Hill Press in England, and in the USA by Stackpole Books, in November 2005. Since then he has written Fly Fishing in Rivers and Streams (2007), Flies That Catch Trout (2009), Marryat, Prince of Fly Fishers (2010) and The Upstream Wet Fly (2011). Two new books are scheduled for publication in 2013.He has had articles published in leading UK magazines including Fly Fishing & Fly Tying and Trout and Salmon; Flyfishing & Tying Journal in the USA; FlyLife in Australia and Kajman in the Czech Republic. His most recent article - about fishing vicars - was published in The Church Times.

Book preview

THE FLY IS UP

Terry Lawton

The hatch of the Mayfly was ‘a spectacle of unrestricted natural life.’

JW Hills, A Summer on The Test

The Fly is Up

Terry Lawton

Copyright Terry Lawton 2013

Smashwords Edition

The right of Terry Lawton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Cover photograph: Ephemera Sancerre - with thanks to Morten Harangen http://mortenharangen.no/

And special thanks to Michael Kearney for his helpful and creative editing and constructive comments

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

Introduction

1. Before the Mayfly – The Grannom Rise

2. The Mayfly and its Natural History

3. The Mayfly is Up

4. The Shannon Rise

Bibliography and Sources

Introduction

For a fly fisherman to have some prospect of being able to catch trout, the fish need to be feeding actively. For the dry fly angler that is feeding on flies that have hatched and are floating on the surface of the river. The greater or more prolific the hatch, and therefore the more flies on the river, the more feeding fish there will be for the angler to cast to. In the early days of fly fishing, and the start of dry fly fishing, anglers tended to concentrate on a specific hatch, the grannom is good example, and once that hatch had finished many anglers would put their rod away until the next season. Those that fished on for the Mayfly hatch would quite likely desert the river after another month or two of sport.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century up to the early years of the next were a time of great change in England. The 1840s experienced the biggest growth of railways in England. The advent of rail travel provided fishermen with a reliable mode of travel and one that was faster, and more comfortable, than on horseback or by a coach and four. A few years earlier, on 25 July 1837, the first telegraph message had been sent by Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke who sent a message to each other via telegraph between Euston and Camden Town in London. Interestingly the wires ran alongside the line of the recently built London and Birmingham Railway. The creation of the telegraph network saw the introduction of a public telegram service which was a convenient and speedy means of communication. In 1846 Cooke and others went on to found the Electric Telegraph Company, one of the world's first communications companies, from which today’s BT (formerly British Telecom) is directly descended. The fact that a river keeper in Victorian Hampshire could send a telegram to an angler who lived and worked in London, meant that anglers who lived away from the river could be on the river within hours, helped by a train journey including the Sprat and Winkle line.

The rivers where the grannom and Mayfly hatched – and in many cases still do – were, essentially, natural rivers although the use of water to power mills and irrigate the water meadows had effected their ‘naturalness’ to greater or lesser extent, Tasmania’s world-famous Shannon Rise came about as a direct result of a major diversion of the flow of water out of the Great Lake. When the lake was dammed to create a hydro-electric power station, it created a tailwater fishery with just the right combination of factors that enabled the Shannon moth to hatch in truly enormous numbers. But then, almost as quickly as these ideal water conditions had been created, they were destroyed.

While the grannom is but a peripheral fly for many anglers today, the Mayfly is still very much with us but sadly not in the vast clouds of the early years of the twentieth century. In the USA tailwater fisheries are numerous and some have specific and prolific hatches of fly. It is unlikely that many modern anglers would curse the presence of Mayfly on a trout stream in the way that some of our forebears did. In fact demand for fishing rivers where there is a good hatch of Mayfly is still very high. Catching trout during a hatch of Mayfly is not always as straight forward as the often disparagingly-known Duffer’s Fortnight might suggest. Today’s trout do behave in a very similar way at the start of the hatch that they have always done. Although a natural Mayfly is a big fly it has taken many of today’s anglers a long time to realise that trout can often be caught more easily on an artificial that is smaller than the natural. But this was known to observant, thinking dry fly men a hundred or more years ago. The lessons are there for those prepared to take the time to study the old texts, to learn from them and put into practice the knowledge imparted.

Although Robert Hartman wrote how trout would carry on feeding on Mayfly ‘and even then continue to rise at flies for which they can find no room but in their mouths.’ it is strange that many of his contemporaries and predecessors blamed the Mayfly for trout becoming sated towards the end of the hatch and losing interest in rising to other flies. Trout in Argentina will stuff themselves with a type of crayfish, the pancora, and in New Zealand, in years when the abundant beech trees produced large quantities of seeds and the numbers of mice that eat the seeds reach plague proportions, big brown trout will feed voraciously on the mice. New Zealand trout with a belly full of mice can still be caught on nymph patterns, as well as mice patterns. In comparison with just one mouse, a mouthful of Mayflies for a trout is pretty insignificant. Perhaps the late Oliver Kite put his finger on the reason for the perceived problem when he suggested that there are fewer flies hatching after a good, prolonged hatch of Mayfly.

Another common feature of the developing world of fly fishing in the later years of the nineteenth century, was the personal friendship of the members of what was a relatively small coterie of fly fishermen. The Houghton Club was started by a small group of friends and most of the writers of fishing books and angling reports for The Field and The Fishing Gazette either new of each other or were good friends both on and away from the rivers and chalkstreams. The friendship of anglers was not confined to the British Isles. Once the fame of the Shannon Rise in Tasmania started to reach the wider world, the anglers who were able to travel to the other side of the world became good friends and would meet annually on the banks of the Shannon River.

Although as far as the trout angler is concerned the days of vast hatches of fly are mostly a thing of the past, some flies do still hatch in mind-numbing numbers. In Europe there is the so-called ‘blooming of the Tisza’ river in Hungary and on Lake Victoria in Uganda, and other East African lakes, the midge and caenis hatches look like billowing plumes of smoke filling the air. Palingenia longicauda, Europe’s largest mayfly, lives in the slow-flowing River Tisza, a tributary of the Danube which flows through Ukraine, Romania, Hungary and then Serbia where it meets the Danube. This slow and deep river is populated by fish that feed well below the surface, unlike trout which feed both on and below the surface. These flies can have a body length of 12cms and measure up to 25cms including tails. The hatch is known as the blooming of the Tisza because the number of mayflies covering the surface of the river create an impression of a field of flowers. The flies are known popularly as ‘Tisza Flowers’.

Apparently locals living around the shores of Lake Victoria gather adult midges (diptera), caenis and mayflies, which hatch during synchronous lunar periodic emergence, to make a type of cake. The midges are squashed into solid masses, moulded into cakes, called kungu, and dried in the sun. It is rich in protein and forms an important part of their diet.

The story of the comings and goings of the grannom show how sensitive wildlife is to man’s management of rivers and the destruction of the Shannon Rise demonstrates how man can create and then destroy habitat that was ideal for a particular species of fly. The book is thus more than the history of three famous fly hatches. It is a story of man’s inter-action with the natural environment, for good and bad.

1. Before the Mayfly – The Grannom Meeting

Spectacular hatches of fly – such as the Mayfly (Ephemera danica) and Duffers’ Fortnight that results - can produce extraordinary fishing and catches of brown trout. Stirred from deep pools and bankside runs shaded by willow and alder, leviathans will rise to a fly if large enough to promise a good meal. Massive hatches of Mayfly and in the years before anglers started to fish the Mayfly hatch, the smaller sedge (or caddis), the grannom, provide as much food as hungry trout can eat at the start of the season. For many decades before the first World War, a majority of anglers who fished the chalk streams of Hampshire concentrated on fishing only the major hatches and often fished relatively little before or afterwards.

Members of the Houghton Club on the river Test in Hampshire, which was founded in June 1822, did fish for grayling in October, and November which often proved to be the better month of the two. Others spent quite a lot of the winter fishing for pike. It seems likely that those who maintained that Victorian anglers fished for only a few months were, perhaps, over-influenced by the Revd. Richard Durnford, of Chilbolton, Hampshire, who started his season at the very end of March or the beginning of April and put away his tackle in mid-June. G.E.M. Skues, writing in his long introduction to his friend Norman McCaskie’s book Fishing, My Life’s Hobby, tells us that

‘For years I have made a practice of ending my Itchen season on or before 1st September because I have found the September trout caught were almost entirely hen fish, feeding up in preparation for spawning.’

The Chronicles of The Houghton Fishing Club, 1822-1908, describe the ‘leisurely old days of mail-coach and po’chaise’ as affecting how club members arranged their affairs concerning fishing. In the early 1820s members could not wait for a telegram to tell them that the flies had started hatching nor could they return to London quickly if conditions were unsuitable. They had to stay in Stockbridge and wait for the hatch to start or for conditions to improve. An example of this was in 1828 when the club met on 7 April for the grannom hatch which did not start until the 12th when it was ‘upon the water tolerably strong’ although no fish rose to them. Fishing in the early years of the Houghton Club depended on the rise of the grannom in April and the Mayfly towards the end of May and ‘it was to celebrate these two feasts that the regular meetings of members were held.’ In 1823 the members decided to have a Spring meeting which took place on 14 April and was attended by four members plus two guests. This Easter or Grannom Meeting became the official start of the club’s fishing season.

Later the telegram sent by Hampshire river-keepers stating that ‘the mayfly is up’ became the rallying cry for almost every London-based chalk stream angler to pack his tackle and take the next available train to Hampshire to take part in the Mayfly festival, or for those who were friends of Francis Francis, the Mayfly Mess. Anglers travelling from London to Hampshire by train would have used the Andover and Redbridge Railway, known affectionately as the Sprat and Winkle line. This line ran from