First Bite - Like Majic - Andrew Savs A regular witty column on all things flyfishing and beyond

Savs

I’m sitting on the tailgate of my truck staring vacantly ahead and contemplating the day. Bags, rod tubes and coolers surround me in an arc of disorganisation. I’ll only use a fraction of what I so hastily packed. I don’t mind, even the pretence of preparedness sits just fine with me.

From the street below I hear the sound of a motor decelerating and I slide down onto my feet. The street lights go out just as The Supermodel roars up to my gate, all headlights and familiar smiles. We’ve been doing this for years now and neither he nor I are ever late. It’s this sort of unspoken commitment that keeps the wheels of friendship running freely.

We no longer discuss in any real sense anymore what time we’ll leave. The terms of our accord were forged through habit and it has held fast. ’Early’ is five-thirty, ‘not too early’ is six and ‘we’re in no rush’ is six-thirty. It’s still within the first few weeks of the season and with the river running low large areas of it will not hold fish or will be impractical to approach. We’ll only fish parts of our beats today.

It’s a little after not too early and just as we’re transferring the last of my gear into Supermodel’s new SUV The Artisan pulls in. We feign irritation and give him hell for his tardiness. He plays along, remonstrating unconvincingly. To be fair he’s barely minutes late, but it needs to be done.

Pulling up for fuel at the regular stop Supermodel tops off his tank while we get coffee. We haven’t done this for what feels like considerably longer than it actually is and still the whole process feels natural, familiar and, given the times, almost reassuring.

It’ll take you half a lifetime to realise it but there’s a sense of ritual that insidiously creeps its way into most of what you do. You’re surprised to experience a vague sense of comfort from this. The innate value of ritual is difficult to describe, although we all recognise it. It is the natural result of something done repeatedly and is quite distinct from ceremony. You don’t have time for the self-important, unnaturally showy displays of ceremony. Ceremonies require planning. You abhor planning. Rituals just are.

Simple activities, like the order in which you slip into your boots or assemble segments of your rod, all have, when done properly and often enough, a ritual quality about them. Patting the pockets of my vest and mumbling “flies, tippet, floatant, net” before I turn my attention towards the water has for years been like a mantra to me. Disrupt his ritual and even the most confident angler will experience a spark of disorientation.

This is to be my second outing on a river this season. The first was a fortnight ago when I fished alone on a stretch that I don’t fish much but that I know can be productive in early spring. It has a series of long, deep pools separated by mixed riffle water. I fish it with a light nymph under a buoyant dropper and, if all else fails, which it often can, a small streamer can be bumped along through the pools with a reasonable expectation of success.

When you think of success in early September you need to be brutally realistic about it. At this time of year the difference between failure and success can be missing a single take. When you’re rusty from an extended layoff you’re bound to miss a few. You know that it shouldn’t piss you off as much as it does, but it does.

Targeting pools in low water is as pragmatic an approach as any. The problem with the tactic is that after doing it for any length of time it will inevitably begin to nag at your conscience. After pricking or landing a few you begin to lose the taste for it. You can’t get over the feeling that they’re huddled nervously together in the safety of deeper water. It’s probably still too soon in the year to be out and that you’re only unnecessarily subjecting yourself to an internal ethical debate. Still, they’re strong and aggressive and it feels good to be getting yourself back into a game where confidence is your best advantage.

I’ve never started a season confidently.

I’m sheer anxiety in a wide-brimmed hat.

The off-season can do that to you. You’d planned to spend it filling fly boxes and servicing gear but you spend most of it ruminating on the season that was. There were minor victories and, more frequently, abject defeats. Sure, you learned some lessons, but in the main what you’re left with are riddles that you try to find workable explanations for and can’t. You’re becoming obsessive and you realise with complete ambivalence that it no longer bothers you that this doesn’t bother you.

There are some days from the last season that you remember in their entireties. For the most part what you recall is a fleeting collection of snapshots - a slow take to a dry, a flash at a nymph, the sound of blood in your ears as a good one broke you off. You don’t remember individual fish. You find it strange that your memories are dominated by images of light on water. You really thought that there’d be more fish. www.saflyfishingmag.co.za

As you get closer to opening day the steady gnaw of apprehension grows. You don’t like to admit it but you worry that you won’t remember how to do it again. It just seems so implausible, this catching of a wild thing on a lure that you made at the dining room table while all of the sensible people in the house were fast asleep.

This sport, this most beautiful activity, seems to be designed to be as unlikely as possible to achieve its objective. You were attracted to it as a child when you read about it in wellthumbed books. You were drawn to it like a magic trick. The cunning sleight of hand fascinated you and the improbability of it all intrigued you. You stayed with it for its aesthetic, you like to think, but you’re not entirely certain of what that actually means. After all this time it's just still the most beautiful, most magical thing that you’ve ever seen.

Your first day on the stream turned out to be everything that you remembered it should be. It didn’t take long for you to raise and land a fish from the riffle at the head of the first short pool.

It was a good one too, seventeen inches and as plump as they get. You got more after this, on top and from below, and didn’t need to dredge pools for the bulk of them either. You didn’t even fish the next day, although you had nowhere pressing to be and could quite easily have. For once you quit while you were ahead. The entire experience was like an affirmation, a whisper in your ear that says “relax, man, you got this”.

The feeling never passes. The quality of the magic trick being performed never dulls. It still grabs you by some primal part and holds you fast.

Then you go out again and again and again and repeat the trick hundreds and hundreds of times and every time it’s just like the first.