Before ever I picked a fly rod up, I remember thinking 'Why make fishing deliberately difficult when there are easier ways of catching fish'. Of course, what I didn't appreciate back then was the sheer versatility and enhanced level both of sport and of achievement that fly fishing could deliver. Using simpler methods, and by that I was thinking of bait, can actually turn out to be more of a hindrance than a help, particularly in situations where fish are feeding three dimensionally. This happens all the time with trout on still waters. What it less often appreciated is the level to which it can also happen at sea, or more to the point, can be persuaded to happen. The vast majority of UK sea anglers fish in a two dimensional manner. In other words, while they may place their baits in different places either by casting or by moving the position of the boat, always those baits are either at or near the bottom with positive bottom contact maintained by the lead. Invariably, fish that can be regularly tempted with a fly outfit are happy to do some or most of their feeding in a three dimensional world, the third dimension being a willingness to move vertically up and down the water column from the sea bed to the surface, as well as foraging at the bottom in the horizontal plane. Note the use of the term 'fly outfit' as opposed to fishing with a fly. This is where a level of snobbery and division can creep into the proceedings. The pure definition of fly fishing has to be dressing a hook in a manner that resembles either the aquatic or the wind blown aerial phase of an insect. Stretching this a little also encompasses small crustaceans such as freshwater shrimps and fish fry, which even the purists now accept. Dressing the hook with anything other than an actual imitation, or to put it another way, 'lure' fishing, tends to get looked down upon and may even by banned in some circles. Fortunately, not the kind of circles I am dealing with here. Or course, it still can pay at times to 'match the hatch'. In other words try to kid fish into thinking they are seeing that which they are naturally feeding on. A good example at sea might be a long green and white lure designed to mimic say a sandeel. But in the final analysis, it's the use of the fly fishing concept that is paramount here. Not the colour, size, or design of the hook dressing.

So why might anyone be persuaded to give fly fishing a go. Well, for starters you can travel light with just a rod & reel, a landing net, and a box of flies in your pocket, and you will never have to worry about gathering or ordering bait, which for a quick last minute opportunity can at times present problems. What you also have, if you carry a good selection of colours, sizes and patterns, is versatility to a degree you could never hope to cover with bait alone. In one pocket sized box you can have all shapes and colours of 'bait' fish, crustaceans and just pure lures, or if you are fishing in freshwater, copies of just about every conceivable invertebrate and fish fry going, and it won't start to go off out of the fridge. Another reason for fishing with a fly outfit, even if you only take it out onto some put and take small trout water on weekends when its too rough at sea to go afloat, is that hooking a trout on light tackle such as this, besides being fantastic heart in the mouth fun, will also teach you, or if you are already experienced, then keep you on the ball with the art of actually having to play a fish. With a few obvious exceptions, much of what we catch at sea either puts up little or no resistance at all through being out gunned by the tackle used (often through necessity), or in the case of bigger fish, is often grunt and groan stuff. But more important than all of that is the fact that on trout lakes, especially when boat fishing big reservoirs, and on occasions at sea, having the ability to readily cover the full three dimensional scene will bring into the reckoning fish that two dimensional fishing on its day can struggle to attract. Fish like mackerel which are fantastic fish to hook on light gear and can be anywhere between the top and the bottom. Bass too will follow bait fish shoals right up to the surface, and pollack, even when they are lurking just above the kelp in clear water, will quite happily move up huge distances to pick off a meal travelling past them overhead.

The one big drawback at sea can be the fact that you may well have the force of the tide to deal with. Not a major problem when the run eases off, though very often the urge to feed in many species also tails off at the same time. Fishing a floating line with say a popper can actually be helped by a bit of run just as it would be when salmon fishing on a river. This will give movement and ground coverage to the fly. It's when you are trying to tempt sub surface fish, particularly those either well down in the water column or in deep water that tide starts to have a limiting effect. If you anchor the boat its effect will be even worse. The boat needs to be on the drift, to some extent keeping pace with the fly, in order that is able to sink either under its own weight by using a heavy hook or incorporating lead wire into the body of the dressing, and using a very fast sinking fly line. Drift fishing also does two other things. Obviously it offers enhanced ground coverage. But it also helps in ways that are a bonus to people who are still learning to fly fish. If you are a competent caster and are quite happy to work hard with the rod, then you have the choice of casting either uptide or down tide from a drifting boat. On large reservoirs, trout anglers cast in the direction of the drift using a drogue to slow the boat down, which for them is only being moved by the wind. As they drift down on the fly, they retrieve line at a rate just slightly faster than would be necessary to maintain contact with the hook so that they are giving it a very slow rate of movement in the water. This is known as loch style fishing. The advantage at sea would be in having a better chance of getting the fly down in the water when drifting on to it, as opposed to the other side of the boat where it will get a degree of lift as the line is pulled tight by the drift. That said, if you choose to work the uptide side of the boat, then you can pull line off the reel and snake it out through the rings a huge distance in the tide without having to cast.

There are lots of excellent books and magazine articles out there to be consulted on the finer points of fly fishing, including doing it at sea. What I would like to do is recall a few instances where, having learned how to do with trout, I have gone on to use the technique for fish other than trout, including at sea from both the shore and the boat, some examples of which along with their video and article access links for my site are included at the end of this article. For reasons which will very quickly become apparent, the trip I perhaps ought to start with was a couple of hours spent stalking coalfish from Hamish Curries Cushendall based boat Predator II. It was a rough old weekend. So bad in fact that the Stranraer to Larne ferry was cancelled. But we still put to sea. Cushendall takes a westerly gale off the land, and being a 9.1 metre RIB, Predator II is an excellent sea boat. That said, we were still restricted to where we could go, so Hamish steamed out to the salmon cages at the southern end of Red Bay. These fish are fed on pellets, many of which pass through the mesh at the base of the pens where huge shoals of big coalfish to double figures make an easy living picking them off. Throw a handful of trout pellets into the water while drifting past the pens and the sea suddenly becomes alive with a huge, dark, compact ball of hungry coalies. IGFA rules make it illegal to chum fish in this way for record claims, and to be honest, because the ball of fish is so compressed, with the tide running, you hardly have enough time to sink the fly to the correct depth before you have drifted past them. Far better not to chum them and have a longer shot at them while they were scattered about hunting for food. Virtually every lure I put in front of them they took. I was using heavy gauge wire 4/0 to 6/0 hooks on a fast sinking line. The problem was that I kept hooking in to fish so big that with my limited experience and lack of a braked salt water fly reel I was unable to control. But eventually I did hook in to a few more modest fish which I boated, including one of 4¼ pounds on a 4 Kg tippet armed with a large orange Fritz pattern lure which was successfully submitted as an IGFA 4 Kg tippet world record.

On the subject of IGFA world records, two sessions aboard Ian Burrett's Drummore based 19 foot charter boat 'Onyermarks' in the company of Allan Everington and different parties of his pals put on a pollack catching show I will never forget. The Mull of Galloway adjacent to Drummore is a large rocky finger forming Scotland's most southerly point. It is littered with small rocky coves all the way from East Tarbet Bay around through the tide race up to Port Logan. Outside the tide race the run is a lot less severe and can be slightly different in terms of actual timing at a number of the coves, which offers the chance to find fairly slackish conditions and stick with them by hopping from one mark to the next. All the fishing was done on the drift in around 30 to 40 feet of water (see more detailed article on the site) with fairly fast sinking lines and large sandeel like lures which the pollack were quite happy to come up from the bottom to mid water for. Heavier sinking lines taking the lures into closer proximity to the fish at times got too far down and snagged. Having done it many times before, Allan had the balance absolutely right and took record beating pollack in a number of tippet categories, in addition to being smashed up out of sight by some bigger fish. It was this that inspired me to try for the coalfish at Cushendall several weeks later. My claim went through because I was willing to kill the fish which I wanted as part of a bait gathering exercise for big common skate the following March. All Allan's (and his pals) fish were returned un-claimed as Ian Burrett operates a return everything policy for which there are no exceptions, even world records, several of which were beaten on each of the two visits.

Prior to trying the boat stuff, I took a hike up to Heysham power station one day to have a crack at the bass on a white surface popping lure fished from a floating line. As these were potentially never going to exceed much more than a pound in weight, I decided to fish with a standard weight 7 still water trout outfit. The warm water outfalls from the two adjacent power stations have attracted and retained good numbers of school bass virtually since the day they were switched on. Unfortunately, as you can probably imagine, this has also attracted a great many fish mongers who see the taking of undersized bass as a very lucrative way not only of supplementing their income, but of surpassing what the state hands out while occupying their spare time. I remember the day well. It was low water, so I put some of my camera gear on a rock well up the beach and waded out to where the running warm water channel joined to natural channel creating slower back eddies here and there on the corner. I remember also the threatening suspicious looks I got walking around with the camera taking pictures. Obviously someone had something to hide. But I ignored that and fished on. Bass were actually topping both in front and behind me, and I could feel intermittent bursts of warm and cooler water hitting me through my chest waders. There were plenty of fish about, and lots of activity with them chasing and grabbing at the poppers right on the top. But not as much in the way of actual hook ups compared to what Dave Devine was getting on the spinners. I think he caught and released over 60 bass on a small spinner. Obvious then why the fish mongers were there. My problem was that of fish giving chase to the lure and me running out of line before they grabbed it. But I did nab a few and was getting increasingly more successful, and as a result less frustrated as the day wore on. However, I was to get more frustrated still as suddenly I saw one of my shoes come floating by. Wading around and being so wrapped up in what I was doing, I hadn't noticed the tide creeping in, and lost all my camera gear apart from the one camera I had around my neck as a result. It's a damn good job it was insured.

There have been many other instances where I've used fly fishing for species other than trout. Far too many probably to mention, and definitely too many to go into a great detail with here. So I must limit myself to examples either of interest or where something specific was learned. On the subject of learning, I very quickly came to appreciate the benefits of a proper salt water fly reel with a braked slipping spool. It was while fishing off Cape Cod with Ian Gaskell for albacore, striped bass and bluefish, which I was happy catching on an ultra light fixed spool outfit. Ian on the other hand is a very accomplished fly fisherman and was having a field day, so I decided I would give it a go, and pretty much immediately hooked up a big hard fighting bluefish which well rattled my knuckles with the reel handles when it took off. If that had been an ordinary fly reel my hands would have been battered and bleeding by the end of the scrap. Fortunately for me it designed for the job. Similarly I hooked up a tigerfish on Lake Nasser in Egypt on the fly, this time on a standard fly reel. Good job it was only a small one, because pound for pound they get my vote as the hardest fighters on the freshwater scene. But almost matching them in UK waters are shad, which while they are a marine species, run back in to freshwater in the early summer to spawn. The River Severn at Tewkesbury used to be very good, and I have taken them on the fly on the River Monnow near Monmouth. Fantastic never say die aerial fighters. Pike too will regularly take a large fly, particularly for some reason if it has green in it. I've also had char on the fly up in the Lake district. And while it isn't exactly fly fishing in the true sense of the words, on a couple of occasions I have attached a short wire trace to the mono leader with a 6/0 hook and a strip of mackerel which I've put down on the fly rod using a downrigger. Tope are brilliant fish to play on such a light outfit. As you might imagine, even the small ones are quite a handful. It's when a thornback comes along that the problems really start with the rod tip disappearing into the water as you try to prise it up off the bottom. Bull huss are not that much easier, and inevitably lots of dogs, dog being a derogatory term trout fishermen use for big cannibalistic rainbows on some of the Hampshire rivers where they have a lure designed especially for the job known as a dog nobbler.

Shortly after catching that IGFA coalfish record, I developed quite a large calcification around the tendons in my upper right (casting arm) that stopped me from fly fishing altogether. After suffering it for a couple of years, frustrated by the problem, I sold all my fly fishing tackle. Eventually there was a surgical solution which restored the use of the arm back to where it was before. But somehow the enthusiasm to go back to the fly fishing tackle counter never returned along with that use. Fly fishing was an episode in my past, and looked like remaining that way until one rather weekend in early May of 2009, rather that staying at home tidying the garden because we couldn't could get the boat out plaice fishing, I was persuaded to borrow some fly gear from Charlie Pitchers, and along with him and Dave Devine try 'whipping the water' once again. I wasn't sure if I could still do it and was also concerned about aches and pains afterwards. But I needn't have worried. The feel of a trout on the end of the line was all it took to re-kindle the interest, and as for suffering after the event, well that was minimal. So it looks like it's the fly fishing shop for me soon, which should mean no excuse for missed weekends fishing, unless of course, as was the case last winter, lakes start freezing over. For a different reason than usual, at the mercy of the weather again.

Fly related articles and video's uploaded to the site.....

Articles:
Polloack on the Fly
Fry Feeders, Draycote
Reservoir Boat
Lake Nasser
Esthwaite

Videos:
Pollack on Fly
Cape Cod Stripers