‘Nymphmania’ brought a change of life

Press, 9 April 1977, Page 15

‘Nymphmania’ brought a change of life

PETER LAWLOR

Overnight I became a maniac of the nymph and the whole course of my life was changed.

What happened was that I learnt from a friend a very subtle form of flyfishing — nymphing, a delicate art that by comparison makes a downstream wet-fly- fisherman look like a stumblebum. And generally catches a lot more fish.

One bright day, with the warmth that brings on nymphs, my tutor took me out to his own special stream and showed me his deadly beautiful art. From a match box in his pocket he produced some nondescript stuff that could have been just a collection of pocket fuzz that got mixed up with a few small hooks.

But on minute inspection they turned out to be beautifully formed and each as delicate as a fairy book nymph. Tied on a small hook of size 10 to 14, small as a fingernail and smaller, nymphs represent the larvae of the little underwater insects that eventually rise to the surface to become such delicately winged river flies as the may-flies on up to the

larger dragon and damsel flies.

The trout love the larvae, often quite forgetting the winged ones on the surface, and gulp them by the dozens as they wash down the current under the water. And this is the challenge to the nymph fisherman. He has to make sure that they are a good imitation in the way they look and the way the swim, and to be able to drop them directly at eye level for the fish.

It is a matter of popping them in its mouth because the fish is facing upstream with a converging range of vision that takes in only a fewfeet.

After showing me the characteristic style of casting direct upstream and quickly retrieving the line slack as it floated back my expert friend took off and left me to it. A nympher has to be alone and find his own waters. The fascination of the nymph is that the floating line stops in its course in a mesmerising fashion

and the tip of it is drawn slowly downwards. The fish take it quietly and let it sit in the mouth like a lolly for a second or two before suddenly rushing away to try to eject what they find out is actually a lolly with strings attached.

It uses all the tricks and quite often gets rid of the imitation nymph because the rod hasn’t been brought up quickly enough to set the hook. There is no day-dream-ing for the nympher, and

it is said that more fish get away in this style of fishing than others — but there are more takes, too. 1 lost a lot. The unseen force that slowly pulled the tip of my line down into the quiet depths where things undreamt of lie, completely hypnotised me. Also the leader line had to be thin, about 41b. and nymphing fish are strong; so the breakage rate was high — part of the excitement of it all. I covered a lot of term ory — which a nympher has to do — and discovered many stretches of glorious bubbling water

that I would never have found with my old style of fishing out one spot. Even if I had not landed one the voyage would have been worth it; but 1 was lucky, too. To complete the transformation my advisi t showed me how to tie a nymph, insisting that I read a long piece on the life of the caddis fly first. I needed a magnifying glass to tie the body and legs on such a small took — a pinch of fur dubbed tightly on the winding thread, a piece of partridge feather for legs, some fine copper wire wrapped on to build up a thorax and to weight it. A nympher has to tie his own, especially for the weighting of it, because only he knows the diningtable depth of the fish in that special stream. Now I am a changed man through all this. The nymph has captured my soul. If I am found some day floating downstream with a last smile on my face it may be due to some irresistible creature which has beckoned to me from the depths, and I have given up all thought of the trout and other worldly matters.