Beneath the Black Water by Jon Berry

Author:Jon Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752463957
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

14

FISHING FOR FEROX

In the 1950s, London publisher Herbert Jenkins began issuing a series of short instructional books for fishermen. The How to Catch Them series was one of the most enduring in the sport and was still preaching its pocket-sized gospel in the 1970s when my brother and I began to fish. There was a book for each species of fish, as well as others that concentrated on the minutiae of the sport. Tench, Pike, Barbel, Roach, Flatfish, The Fixed-Spool Reel, Gravel Pits and Artificial Flies all made it into our collection at one time or another, but it was the carp edition, written by D.L. Steuart, which was the best loved and most dog-eared.

I met the author years later and told him so. He thanked me, but told me that the books were ‘rushed off in a weekend, and the money was bloody rubbish’. It didn’t change my opinions of the books, or of him. The series offered beautiful garish covers, clear illustrations and succinct advice, and all for the price of a few gob-stoppers. I loved them then, and still do.

Brown trout, rainbow trout, sea trout and brook trout all got the How to Catch Them treatment, but ferox never did. This was not surprising. By the fifties, salmo ferox had disappeared from the angling public’s consciousness. The Victorian heroics of John Colquhoun were long forgotten and those who wanted gigantism could find it at one of the new stillwater trout fisheries, in the guise of pot-bellied, crimson-striped rainbows. These upstarts from the United States could be grown to ludicrous sizes in bathtubs and then released to sate the ambitions of the trout men. Elusive dinosaurs in the Highlands were just too much trouble and their book was never written.

Ricky had grown up with the same series and loved them, too. Sometimes, on long days in the boat, we joked about what a ferox edition might have said. Go fishing in a loch. Start trolling. Use spinner or bait, it really doesn’t matter. Expect nothing. When ten years have elapsed, give up and go and try for a rainbow. They really are frightfully accommodating.

It would have been a very short book.

My fishing friends in Wiltshire might have agreed. Trolling was mindless and the hunt for ferox nothing more than a triumph of patience over good sense. To them, the method, if it could be dignified as such, involved little more than throwing a dead fish (or something cunningly designed to imitate one) behind a boat on a long line and dragging it around until something happened.

The Alness boys and I knew differently. Trolling for ferox proved far more exacting than we had ever expected it to be. There were considerable choices to be made each day and every one of them might condemn us to twelve hours of frustration and inactivity. Lures had to be chosen, depths agreed upon and trolling speed regulated. A single change to any of these would throw the others off-kilter, and it was at these moments that lines would tangle or reels would spontaneously combust.

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