Itchen for fishing

Patrick Galbraith casts about for reasons to be cheerful

I DON’T CAST PARTICULARLY well but on my third attempt, the mayfly pattern dropped onto the water just upstream of the trout on the edge reeds. The fly came round right over the fish, then it drifted up towards the surface, knocked it with its nose, then descended again. I was fishing on the Itchen, just downstream from Twyford with Mark Hedges, the long-standing editor of Country Life. The river, he kept telling me, apologetically, should have been alive with hatching mayflies and the surface should have been dappled with trout rising to gorge themselves on the insects but all was still. The river, on account of the rain there had been over the previous few weeks, was high and rather than being gin-clear as it tends to be in…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024

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