Matt Eastham stares down his tying vice before tackling grayling in the gnarly River Hodder
IT’S CURIOUS HOW ABRUPTLY THE seasons change, how quickly the light starts to go as the Indian summer suddenly gives way to chill evenings and Atlantic fronts.
In the wake of the trout season, I hadn’t even contemplated fishing for a couple of weeks, and then on my early morning walk, I suddenly became aware of a thousand robins tutting at me from the hawthorns and the dying leaves of the big white poplars fissling quietly in the breeze. I thought of grayling and returned home to root through my fly-boxes in preparation for the winter season. Immediately, I was horrified at how depleted my stocks of tiny dries and weighted nymphs had become after last back-end’s outings.
Fly-tying doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve been doing it for long enough to have become halfway competent but have never really enjoyed the process — at least not to the extent that I’ll tie for tying’s sake through the season. I admire those experts who seem to spend the whole year at the vice, tinkering and experimenting and continually churning out innovative, beautifully tied patterns. I am not one of them; I just pinch their ideas.
After several months without even picking up a bobbin, the prospect of plugging all those gaps in the fly-boxes sent a chill down my spine, and I procrastinated for several days. My initial efforts were wobbly to say the least, but I did eventually get back into the swing of things and started turning out something more or less useable. Penrith legend Terry Cousin once told me that in the 1980s, when sensing his reading vision was starting to fail, he embarked on an extended tying splurge with the intention of building sufficient stock of his most trusted patterns to last the rest of his angling days. That’s a conversation I think more about as the quality of my own tying deteriorates.
A few days later, I had the pleasure of fishing one of Lancashire’s most picturesque rivers. The Hodder wends its way southward out of the Forest of Bowland and cuts a convoluted course deep into the pastureland north of Longridge Fell. Characterised by steep wooded banks, short pools and riffles that tumble over ledges of mudstone bedrock, it is a wonderful place to fish. Bowland Game Fishing Association (BGFA) controls several miles of excellent water on the lower river. A friend of mine is a member, and I’m lucky enough to benefit from the occasional guest ticket. Such days are a treat.
We’d hoped for dry-fly sport. Falling leaves and their cargo of
