E clamber over a wire fence and swish down the grassy slope to the river. To reach it we must scramble across broken branches and stones, tossed aside by the floods.
This has not been a good summer for the North Yorkshire fisherman, says my companion John Aston. Torrential rainfall swelled rivers to bank-breaking point, churning up the waters so even the hungriest fish could not see the fly on angler’s line.
But today he is more hopeful. We are on a twist of the River Swale, upstream of Northallerton. Close to the bank the water is clear enough to see the pebbles on the bed. John bends down and scoops a smooth, brown rock from the flow, and points out the various fly pupae clinging to its surfaces. What look to me like bits of muck are vital parts of the river ecosystem, future food for fish unseen. And it becomes apparent that anglers like John are the guardians of that ecosystem.
‘Some people have devoted their lives to butterflies. And birds, of course,’ he says. ‘The only people who give a bugger about fish are us. We look after their environment and we know about them.’
TV viewers are enchanted by film of tropical fish darting around the coral reef, yet ‘we have got just as nice fish in this river. But you only see them when you are catching them.’
John can’t remember not being a fisherman. Aged two he would watch bloodworm larvae thrashing in the water butts in the garden of his family home in Allerton Bywater near Castleford. From that moment he had an undying fascination for all that swims.
In the 50-odd years that followed he took a law degree at Leeds University and moved first to Lincoln and then to North Yorkshire, where he now works as senior lawyer for the county council. And all the time he was fishing. In small becks, large lakes and fast flowing rivers, using one of his burgeoning collection of rods, he gradually learned the art of the angler.
Now John has poured his knowledge, passion and experience into a wonderfully evocative book, A Dream of Jewelled Fishes.
It will not teach the reader to fish. There are no tips on casting technique or advice on which bait is best. But the fresh vitality of his prose revives the inevitable fisherman’s tales about his struggles to land a monster, or the ones that got away. Mainly, however, the book is a very enjoyable muse upon why he does it. ‘I wanted it to be the Fever Pitch of fishing,’ John says. ‘I wanted to convey the passion of what it’s about, to reach out to people who are curious, who just like to read.’
The book meanders like a river around John’s life, taking in his semi-detached relationship with his GP father, the ex-miner and childhood mentor who taught him how to catch fish, student days and modern ways. On the way there are entertaining diversions into tackle shops and onto Scottish Lochs, and even a discourse on the metaphysical nature of fly fishing.
Standing on the bank of the Swale, you soon adopt this meditative state of mind. With the swish of the trees and bubble of the water and the darting appearance of electric-blue mayflies, you fall into a trance only to be jolted from it by a jet fighter screaming its way back to RAF Leeming.
Much of this is enjoyably incidental to John. ‘Some people say it’s good to just have a day on the water,’ he says. ‘It isn’t.
You want to catch a lot of fish and lots of big ones if you can.’ He has pointed out otter tracks in the riverside mud and gliding overhead is another angler, a grey heron. But John is not here to bird watch as he points out while wading to the middle of the river.
‘I focus on what I am doing and by doing that you see interesting things. I have had a kingfisher land on the tip of my rod. I’ve been a few metres away from roe deer.’ John is after a trout and is employing all his intuition and skill as a fly fisherman to entice one to bite. He speed-reads the various eddies and bubbles and can spot the flicker of a fish tail where I can see nothing. A few times the trout snaps but John fails to reel it in. ‘They’re not clever but they can be infuriatingly difficult,’ he admits. ‘They might become obsessed by a particular food item and won’t look at anything that exact size.’
John has shown me his collection of flies. These tiny scrolls of wire adorned with tufts of feather and wool have names like the klinkhammer and the pheasant tail nymph. Each is designed to represent a specific insect.
They are only part of the kit for a seasoned fisherman. John is wearing £300 made-in-China chest waders. His carbon fibre rod cost the same: at 8ft 6ins long and weighing just 2¾ ounces, it feels like an extension of your arm when you flick the line.
Anglers become very attached to their rods. John’s wife Joanne has a passion for opera rather than fishing but she occasionally goes along. ‘The last time she came fishing she sat on an extremely cherished rod,’ John recalls with a wince. ‘It wasn’t tears before bedtime, but I wasn’t overwhelmingly impressed.’
Since John first tried catching roach in the polluted waters of the West Riding, rivers have been cleaned up and the fish are more plentiful. But other things have been lost through the years including opportunities for young people to take up the sport.
Kids want instant gratification, John says. That doesn’t happen in fishing. And he laments how risk-averse parents and the hysteria over paedophiles mean he feels unable to take lads out fishing like his mentor took him four decades earlier.
We have been up and down this corner of the Swale now for several hours and John has still not caught a fish. ‘It’s incredibly frustrating not being able to show you one,’ he says and at that moment his line jerks. John shows me the glistening trout before sliding it back into the water (he puts them all back). He beams with pleasure.
‘I have driven racing cars around a circuit and enjoyed it immensely,’ he says. ‘But I don’t think there’s anything that gives you the same adrenaline as landing a big fish on a river like this.’