GOING FISHING with Kotare

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33479, 9 March 1974, Page 12

GOING FISHING with Kotare

The letter came wrapped around a phial containing what at first sight appeared to be tranquiliser pills. Someone was really going to take this columnist to task, I thought, but had had the foresight to enclose a remedy for the fury he was about to engender.

But the letter was all about Doughboys. The writer very kindly enclosed three samples for me to try. The phial contained raw materials for Doughboy manufacture.

What are Doughboys? Well, they’re an original pattern of trout-fly. I hasten to add that they’re not made of dough, which is just as well for purists’ and rangers’ blood-pressure. According to my correspondent, Doughboys get results. And that’s the most important recommendation for a lure that fishermen can give

The writer was prompted to send a letter after reading about the day on which a friend and I hooked six out of 10 rainbows in a pool, using lures which bore some resemblance to bread pellets. Before I go any further, I must assure the aforementioned purists and rangers that I repudiate any suggestion that bread pellets were actually used to catch fish on that particular day, although you could say that a few pellets were used, purely in the interests of science, as a contribution to a fisheries study known as Exotic Food Preferences of Back-Country Trout. But they were totally hook-free. I admit that the spirit of some completely unprincipled poacher of old did urge me that day to use a

pellet of bread on a hook. But I exorcised that depraved spirit faster than you can say Thick and Thin, and applied myself to trying to solve the problem those br e a d-pel)eting rainbows posed, using lures which were the acme of piscatorial respectability. My correspondent's three doughboys, which look for all the world like pellets of super-white bread, suitably hackled, of course, came in three sizes.

The two larger ones, possessing a thorax and an abdomen, were labelled Double-Barrelled Doughboys. The smallest example possessed only a thorax (or perhaps an abdomen). This one was unlabelled, but I assume it should be known as a Single-Barrelled Doughboy. Presented at trout, both single and double-barrelled weapons apparently catch fish. The lures are floaters, and presumably can never be anything else. For the little “bubbles” that form the bodies are in fact polystyrene pellets, averaging about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter.

It is polystyrene’s nature to float, so these Doughboys cannot be regarded as anything but dry flies (although if F. M. Halford ever got to hear of them he would turn in his grave for about 50 years).

Perhaps it would be just as well to call them something else, because I have an uneasy feeling that any connection with bread, in whatever form, may prejudice the Doughboy’s chances of success as a marketable fly. And if my correspondent’s faith in the lure is anything to go by, the Doughboy certainly has a future. If the Doughboy is fished as a dry fly, and trout take it readily, I think that when aforementioned purists and rangers appear on the scene we must convince them we

are fishing an exact imitation of the egg-capsule-carrying lesser errant spider (Eccles for short), which just happens to be falling off its favourite waterside foliage in numbers that afternoon.

The name Eccles agreeably preserves connotations of bakery origins, and at the same time allows us to talk knowledgeably to purists rangers about the habits of this particular spider and the devotion to exact imitation we exhibit as fly-tiers and anglers in pursuit of our quarry.

Actually, the egg-capsule-carrying snider may very well be taken oy trout in some numbers. I’m sure most people, and especially gardeners, have come across a species of spider which clings lovingly through thick and thin (sorry), to its “round-white, vanilla-white, super-white” (sorry, that’s biscuits) capsule of eggs when disturbed. Often the ball is at least as large as the spider, which is thus unable to pick up its burden and rush off in all directions with it like a loose forward.

The fly’s inventor has perhaps unknowingly introduced a quite separate idea which could be a boon to nymph-fishermen like myself whose sight isn’t what it used to be.

Older anglers who favour upstream nymph-fishing use a “flag” of some kind on the cast, at varying distances from the nymph, in order to signal the take of a fish. Some fishermen use a dry fly with a light-coloured wing, some a small piece of cork painted white, some a white feather. But I for one will be trying a small super-white polystyrene bubble next time I go upstream-nymphing. A slit made with a razor-blade is possibly all that's needed to hold the bubble on the cast