My friend’s stride faltered and his jaw dropped. “Blimey,” he said, somehow conveying that his entire life was flashing before his eyes, “you can’t do that — you’ll put us all out of business.”

It was a joke, of course, but for all that, the essentials of fly fishing would consume very few trees. Just before Christmas, I squeezed quite a few of them into a reply to the youngest Times reader to write to me so far — Peter Cox, 13, from Bristol.

Peter, who enjoys coarse fishing, wrote at his father’s suggestion. On a trip to Wales, he had seen somebody catch a grayling on a dry fly and had been fascinated. What exactly was dry-fly fishing and how could he get started? Here, more or less, is what I told him.

Dry-fly fishing is a way of catching fish — mostly trout or grayling, but plenty of other species as well — on imitations of the kind of natural flies that they are accustomed to taking from the surface.

To do it, I told Peter, he would be best off with a fly-rod about 9ft long, rated what is called AFTM-6. He would need an AFTM-6, double- tapered, a floating flyline to use with it and a reel to put the line on. He should persuade his father to buy him a couple of lessons with a professional fly-casting instructor. The instructor would teach him how to cast correctly and practice would take care of distance and accuracy.

He would also be shown how to do fiddly things — such as joining a nylon leader to the line and a fly to the leader. He would be using only one fly at a time and it would be treated to float. At the water, the aim would be to get that fly to the surface in front of a targeted, rising fish in a natural way.

When Peter approached a river, I said, it should be in the knowledge that a fish is a wild and wary thing, easily “put down”. What is more, he should know that, in a river, fish have to face the flow so, when they are hungry, they look upstream for the flies and bugs that the current brings downstream towards them.

What did all of this mean? It meant that he should avoid alerting the fish to his presence, either by the way he dressed or the way he moved, and that the best approach to a fish looking upstream was from downstream — from its blind side.

On the flies to be cast, I explained that most of the natural flies that fish eat are not much more than a centimetre long and that if Peter wanted to maximise his chances, his artificial flies should be tiny as well. This question of size, I wrote, was the single most important factor where artificial flies were concerned. The only other important factor was colour and because most natural flies are drab as well as small, his flies needed to be drab also; browns and blacks worked best.

With these matters taken care of, the need was to ensure that the cast fly floated towards the fish as daintily and unhindered as the natural ones around it. That meant avoiding drag. Drag is what Peter would often see, after casting out: the current would push on the line and leader floating on the water and create a downstream curve in them. This curve would pull on the fly and cause it to skate across the surface in an unnatural way.

Minute amounts of drag, quite invisible from the banks, could be enough to kill all chances. Drag can best be avoided, I wrote, by having the minimum amount of line lying on the surface in the first place and by careful choice of the position from which the cast is made. Most often, the best place will be from just behind the fish and a little to one side of it; but often, paradoxically, it will be from directly opposite the quarry, as well.

When he had got everything right and his fish had tilted up, opened its mouth and taken his fly, I told Peter that he should give it a moment to close its mouth and tilt down again before lifting — not yanking — the rod end upwards and setting the hook. A few words about landing the fish, fishing barbless, the value of joining a local club and — well, all right then, the names of a couple of good books — rounded off the letter.

Peter replied by return, promising to do everything I had suggested and to let me know when his first fish was caught. I do not expect to wait long because he now knows where he is headed. I also know that, in my letter, I have the makings of chapter one — “All You Really Need to Know About Dry Fly Fishing” — in that seven-page book I had talked about.

Chapter two — “All You Really Need to Know About Wet Fly and Nymph Fishing” — surely cannot be far behind.

My friend will be appalled.

source: Times – 5th April 2004