Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

He also had a steel fly rod, of the kind you just don't see today. This came from a visit to Canada when he fished the Lakes with help from an Indian guide. Father caught trout, especially the Loch Levens he introduced into the Bray.

Then he caught just one big salmon '“ and promptly lost interest in the species. He found it disturbing to see how quickly this king of fish changed colour from all the colours of the rainbow to a dull pewter sheen in just a few hours. He gave me the black steel rod but kept the split cane for trout in Norfolk's River Stiffkey.

Not having access to trout as a teenager I had a go at the next best thing: dace.

The picture I show here is from History of the Fishes of the British Islands by Jonathan Couch (1789-1870), which may be familiar to anyone with an interest in our native fishes. Like father I tried a fly. I had spotted a small shoal of dace on a shallow stream with a gravelly bed.

The water was never more than six inches deep on this rill, often much less in summer.

It was typical of some stretches of the Rother, with some deep black pools where all kinds of delights such as grayling and trout, roach and rudd might harbour safely through the winter months.

Father had once tried to show me how to cast a fly on a line of gut but being a stroppy youngster I had not understood the need for patience to get this to the state of perfection needed to place a piece of feather thistledown through a gap in the bushes on to a patch of water 10 yards away without being seen by the fish which did not want to know. So I eventually resorted to a Devon minnow, which is a tiny brass spinner.

Bingo! My first dace.

This was more lively than any trout I had ever seen father catch. It became a silver whirlwind, thrashing like an aeroplane propeller in the morning sunlight.

In those days, being hungry all the time, I reckoned to eat anything I caught, so mother fried my eight-inch dace in butter as a special treat. But like father with his salmon, I never caught another dace. Pretty as a picture in silver and gold, this tiny member of the carp family was like eating cotton wool stuffed with pins.