Troutsmith (17 page)

When we returned to the hotel, I walked across the garden to a hexagonal stone building with a rooster weathervane on the peak of the roof. The structure dated to the fourteenth century and was originally a cock-fighting pit, but was now a fully stocked fly shop. Roy Buckingham was more concerned about our relatively poor showing on the Lyd than we were, and he encouraged us to wet a line in Tinhay Lake that evening.

Tinhay Lake is a flooded limestone quarry at the bottom end of the village, and the trout we saw there were a marvel. In still-water trout fishing, England can justly claim to be world class. Cruising the margins of the blue-green lake were brown trout and rainbows in the five- to ten-pound class. Teresa and I are old hands with trout in lakes and ponds, and as we rigged our fly rods we chattered like little kids on Christmas Eve. This was going to be easy.

It wasn't. Yet again we showed British trout every fly in our boxes without generating a flicker of interest from the fish. Some kids fishing nearby caught a couple of rainbow trout by stripping Woolly Buggers on sinking lines, but their fish were only about fifteen inches long. I smiled when I thought how we treasure a fifteen-inch trout from the small spring creeks of Wisconsin, but the game changes immediately when larger fish are a possibility.

After a couple of hours our leaders had lengthened to nearly twenty feet and our flies had shrunk to various midges on size 22 to 28 hooks. I finally did manage to catch two rainbows, on a #24 Midge Pupa tied to the end of a 7x tippet. The first trout was thirteen inches, but the second was twenty-two inches and when weighed in the net proved to be a few ounces over five pounds! It felt good to get that fish, and I was happy and contented as I walked along the lake to a grassy area at the lower end, near a vertical limestone cliff.

There was a place where the angler's path cut through a belt of brush and small trees that came right down to the water's edge. I scanned the shallows casually as I passed by. Suddenly I froze, and looked more intently. The glare of the low sun on the water was severe in that place, at that time of day, but with the benefit of polarized sunglasses I had caught just a glimpse of a long, silver shape with black spots moving slowly beneath the surface of the lake. A nonangler would never have seen it or would have dismissed this silver-on-silver flicker as a trick of the light and moved on. But I waited and watched intently. A few minutes later there was the same shape moving by very close to the bank, and then turning smoothly out and away to deeper water.

When it had gone I moved right to the water's edge and stood still again, watching with an intensity of purpose seen in herons, otters, kingfishers, and anglers. Sure enough, the trout swam by again in a few minutes and this time I could see that it was a brown trout about a yard long. Believe me or not if you wish, but I'd seen brown trout of similar proportions in Lake Michigan. This was a small lake in a typical English village.

It was pointless to fish for this trout with a 7x tippet, so I cut back and rebuilt the leader to 5x and tied on a classic British fly that was made for this situation; a #16 Pheasant Tail Nymph. It was impossible to make a conventional cast from this brushy place, and in any case the big brown was likely to swim right past my feet if I was patient. I extended the nine-foot rod as far out as I could reach and dapped the fly onto the water. Then I lowered the rod tip and watched it sink. The nymph was lost in the glare, but I kept watching the water where I thought it should be.

The fly couldn't have sunk more than a foot before a chunky one-pound rainbow hammered it, chewed it for a few seconds, and then spit it out. Then another rainbow of similar size charged in and did the same thing. Again I refrained from striking, and the trout eventually spit out the barbless Pheasant Tail and swam off in a huff. Minutes passed, minutes that felt like years. All at once I realized I was looking at a huge silverback with dime-sized spots, suspended motionless in the water about where my fly should be. I struck, and the surface of the lake erupted.

I can see it now as I write, frame by slow-motion frame: a cloud of spray like shining pearls, and a gigantic, hook-jawed trout suspended in the midst of it all. Its adipose fin flopped to and fro like a hunk of leather as large as a man's thumb. Then the great fish slapped back into the water and shot away on a reel-screeching run almost straight down into the depths. As the backing whistled through the guides I learned that Tinhay Lake was about ninety feet deep. I didn't really expect to land that trout. I just smiled wistfully when the 5x tippet finally popped beneath the weight and drag of thirty yards of weed-fouled fly line pulled through the water at speed. A yard-long salmon or trout from Lake Michigan weighs about fifteen pounds, and that's what I think this trout would have weighed, probably the largest inland brown trout I've ever tangled with in the course of a long and happy fishing life.

That evening I got an after-dinner drink from the bar and spent some time in the hotel's “common room.” Classic tackle was displayed in glass cases here and there, and a battery of ancient fly rods made of greenheart and lancewood were mounted on the walls. One of the wooden rods even had a few yards of horse-hair fly line strung through the guides. No distinction was made regarding methods; spinning, casting, and fly tackle were displayed together, and there were pictures of all these sorts of tackle being used on local rivers and streams. How different from America, I thought, where people who fly fish often have little to say to those who use spinning rods and vice versa. In America we tend to ruin our rotator cuffs fly fishing at all costs in all places. UK anglers are more likely to select the tool to fit the job and adjust their fishing methods to suit the conditions. Yes, there are some British streams, typically chalkstreams in the south of England, which are restricted to upstream dry fly and nymph only. But when we fished those streams we found that the rules made sense
in those places
.

Always we came back to our amazement that the landscape around us in Devon and Cornwall looked so much like southwestern Wisconsin, even though the fishing was very different. We mentioned this to Roy Buckingham and he had a ready answer: Devon and Cornwall are the only counties in England that weren't covered by glaciers during the last ice age. We were fishing England's Driftless Area.

Do you think it will rain today?” Teresa asked our host during breakfast. I was too busy enjoying a tasty Dovedale sausage to join the conversation. “There now,” said the innkeeper as he gestured expansively through the tall windows next to our table and across the grass-grown sheep pastures that surrounded the little white-washed hotel. “Do you see that green height off to the northeast? That's Thorpe Cloud that is. When you can see Thorpe Cloud it's going to rain, and when you can't see it, it's raining.” We were at the Izaak Walton Hotel in the heart of the Derbyshire Peak. Two hundred feet below us the historic River Dove purled and growled along the limestone floor of the dale, in a chasm so deep that evening shadows fell at midday. How could I not fall in love with a river that has defied developers, road builders, and “progress” for centuries? Even today only a gravel footpath parallels the stream for much of its length.

The Dove is much more than a pristine trout river flowing through one of England's finest national parks. It looms larger in fly-fishing legend than any other trout stream on earth but one: ancient Macedonia's River Astraeus, whose true identity and location have been lost over the millennia since the Roman Claudius Aelianus set down the first written description of fly fishing for trout. The Astraeus has become a river of the imagination. The Dove is a river of reality. On the Dove you can lift a handful of icy water and let it run through your fingers back into the stream. You can smell it, listen to it, fish it, and become one with it.

The legend of the River Dove began in February 1676, when, “in a little more than ten days' time,” Charles Cotton wrote the second part of Izaak Walton's classic,
The Compleat Angler
. Walton was a generalist who appreciated all forms of fishing with rod and line. There are chapters about fishing for grayling, salmon, trout, pike, perch, eels, and a wide variety of cyprinids, including tench, carp, chub, and barbel. But among some forty pages devoted to trout fishing, barely seven deal specifically with fly fishing, and Walton borrowed (some say plagiarized, but the practice was much more accepted in Walton's day) much of this material from earlier writers like Thomas Barker. Even in the seventeenth century there was more that could be said about
How to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream
, and Walton knew that his good friend Charles Cotton was the man to say it.

What we know about Cotton's life illustrates the fine line that many people walk between a passion for fishing and an obsession. Thirty-seven years younger than Walton, Cotton has been described as “the dissolute aristocrat, the spendthrift courtier, [and] writer of obscene poetry.” In most respects, except for politics and a true love of fishing, he was quite different from Walton. Yet somehow these two men became the best of friends. I like to think they met on the river, since no bonds of friendship are as strong as those forged between trout friends. Tangible evidence for this still stands beside the Dove a few miles above Dovedale. There, near the ruins of Beresford Hall, stands the red brick fishing house built by Charles Cotton in the late seventeenth century. The initials “IW ” and “CC” are carved in cipher above the door.

Teresa and I knew that the present owner of the fishing house didn't allow visitors, so we contented ourselves with a few nights' stay at the Izaak Walton Hotel near Ashbourne. The hotel had limited fishing rights on the Dove downstream from Ilam Rock, and by booking early we were able to secure “a rod” on this historic water. The view from our upstairs room was magnificent and, surprisingly, a little eerie. I couldn't quite figure out why until I returned home and opened my reprint of the 1897 Le Gallienne edition of
The Compleat Angler
. There was an illustration of Dovedale “Below Thorpe Cloud,” and it was precisely the same as the view from our window in 2004. That night our room was filled with the echoes of water cascading down the steep-walled valley. I could hardly sleep in the knowledge that tomorrow I would literally follow in the footsteps of two of the greatest anglers in history. When I finally did sleep, all of my dreams were haunted by sounds of falling water.

Naturally it was no trouble to be up and about at first light next morning. A gray, unfamiliar, dripping world cloaked in mist enveloped me as I walked from the hotel to the car park to tackle up. Never was I happier to see my old trout rod, a handsome nine-foot graphite stick with a Peerless reel at the bottom. Familiar tackle is a comfort to a stranger in a strange land, and I never pick up that rod today without a few visions of England flitting through my mind.

Teresa joined me just as I finished rigging up with a #16 Pheasant Tail Nymph on a long 5x tippet, and we made our way down to the river. There was an interesting little path marked with white stones that headed straight across the fields from the hotel toward the Dove, but faced with the mist and the unfamiliar terrain we elected to follow the gravel road down from the car park. Several large parking areas border the Dove at the foot of Dovedale, and if the place is in any real danger from the twenty-first century it is the danger of being loved to death. On July weekends after school lets out for the summer holiday, Dovedale and the surrounding heights are absolutely packed with families picnicking, playing in the shallows with inflatable toys, hiking the footpath beside the river, throwing stones, catching snails, and swimming in the broader pools like the Nursery Pool upstream from the hotel. Quality fishing on summer weekends is out of the question. But in the gray dawn on this misty Monday morning the car parks were empty and we were alone with the river, perhaps the river of all rivers, wellspring of powerful water-magic that we call fishing. It felt as if we had discovered something ancient and valuable that had been lost for a long time. As we crossed the Dove on the stepping stones we were very conscious of leaving the workaday world behind us and entering that dimension only anglers know.

My first impression of the Dove was that it was a cross between a valley spring creek and a mountain freestone trout stream. Steep, rocky heights studded with gnarled fir trees soared above us and lost themselves in mist. Below them the river chattered noisily as it snaked across its stony bed. But the stones were limestone and dolomite, and in several places large springs emerged from caves and fissures to add their strength to the gathering flood. It was a hot summer in England that year, but water temperatures in the Dove stayed around fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit all through the long, sunny afternoons as trout twisted scuds off of rocks on the bottom.

The water itself was clear in the shallows and at the tails of pools, but dissolved minerals produced a deep translucent blue in the deeper holes. Twenty to forty feet wide, the Dove was too deep to wade in some places, while in others the banks were too steep to walk on. This made it a challenge to fish, so we contented ourselves with fishing wherever the well-worn anglers' paths took us. No doubt they took us to pools and runs that Walton and Cotton knew well. As our lines rolled out across the azure Dove, those heady days of the Restoration no longer seemed so far off.

Our tackle differed markedly from the gear that Walton and Cotton carried to the stream. No reels graced their pliant rods, rods that were double the length of ours and constructed from a carefully selected variety of woods. Lines of plaited horsehair tapered down to just a single hair tied to the fly, which Cotton often made by hand while standing on the riverbank. This wasn't as hard as it seems. Cotton's flies were laughably simple creations compared with flies shown in today's tackle catalogs. Many were just a dubbed fur body with a pair of wings. Despite this simplicity, Cotton attempted to imitate specific aquatic and terrestrial insects, including mayflies, “cadis” (caddis), ants, and grasshoppers. Other flies were attractors chosen according to weather and water conditions. Cotton's “palmer flies” were direct ancestors of the popular Woolly Buggers of our own time.