Terry Lawton

1. Choice of equipment Rods, reels, fly lines, fly floatants, clothes, glasses and other useful items.

My current rods are home-built on New Zealand blanks. One is a CTS Affinity MX 8’ 6” 3 weight and one a CTS Affinity X 8’ 2 weight. Although both rods are light line weights they are very powerful for their weights. When I bought the Affinity MX I took a chance on what it would be like as I had never seen one but I was not disappointed. I have bought blanks from CTS because they are high end and very much cheaper than Sage blanks, for example, and they will make blanks to order which enabled me to get the length and line weight that I wanted which were only available from perhaps better known manufacturers and then not always exactly what I wanted.

I virtually always fish with a weight forward line and have done so for many years. Now I am using a Snowbee XS Plus Thistledown2 2/5 weight floating line with great success. It felt slightly odd first the first couple of times I fished with it but now like it very much.

I really do lust after an Argentinian hubless reel. They look so sexy. I fished once, in Norfolk, with a woman who owns some fishing on the river Itchen who has one. Unfortunately they are difficult to buy and expensive but I did manage to find an inexpensive Chinese one on the internet. Unfortunately a lot of makers’s websites are well out of date and these hubless reels no longer in production. I fished once, in Norfolk, with a woman who owns some fishing on the river Itchen who has one. Interestingly there are a number of hubless reels that can be downloaded and 3D printed.

I have made myself a rod clip along the lines of a Smith Creek Rod Clip which is a real boon when changing flies or changing tippets etc. It’s a genuine extra hand. You can also use it to hold a fly rod when walking along the river bank.

My fishing glasses are habervision.com Bentota glasses with copper polarised glass lenses. This colour works well everywhere that I have fished. I always have a landing net. If you don’t carry a landing net you can’t give a caught fish time to recover before releasing it. Not good for or fair on the fish. My landing net is home made and is in two parts so that it will pack easily. The handle is a carbon fibre tube and the net frame aluminium with a rubber net. I hope to make a carbon fibre frame one of these days. I hang my net from the back of my waist coat using a magnetic net release attached to the top of the net frame and the retaining lanyard to the opposite end of the frame by the end of the net handle. This means that the net hangs against my back so that the actual (rubber)net is less or very unlikely to get tangled up in brambles or vegetation. It’s very easy to reach behind you and grasp the handle when you need to use the net.

I use wading boots with rubber soles and studs. I don’t usually fish rivers with rocks covered in slime or algae so don’t feel the need for felt soles. The studs work well on wet and slippery meadows and river banks. I carry two fly floatants - Ghink for flies tied with traditional materials and Frog’s Fanny or SKB Bob’s Bobbing Dust, which I have found to be the best alternative, for CDC flies. Good old-fashioned Mucilin is the best for greasing leaders which I do always, apart from the tippet.

I use a pair of forceps for de-barbing hooks and extracting flies from inside a fish’s mouth when it can’t be removed with your finger and thumb. My club asks all those who fish its waters to measure the length of all wild fish that are caught. To do this I use a waterproof dressmaker’s tape measure and carry a waterproof note pad and biro to note the lengths. I carry a priest for when a fish might need to be despatched if badly injured for example and because we have some stock fish in our fishery which we are allowed to kill. Odds and ends include a length of cord which will often come in handy and some loo paper in a plastic bag to keep it dry for any time I get caught short.

I do go through all the pockets of my mesh waistcoat to try to reduce the load that I carry but I rarely succeed in removing much. I am not a minimalist I’m afraid as much as I would like to be. I like a mesh vest, or waistcoat, as it is the coolest for summer.

A trout from the Bourne Rivulet made famous by Harry Plunket-Greene in his book Where The Bright Waters Meet    

2. Leader material, build up, length and knots.

I have been using Stroft for my tippets for many years and hardly had a failure with it. I don’t remember how I first came across it, I think that it was probably in an article in a fishing magazine, and I have stuck with it ever since. It knots easily and securely and seems up to strength for its small diameter. I have no reason to change. I use a variable speed cordless drill to transfer the line from the manufacturer’s 100 metre spools, which don’t clip together, to spools which do. I can just get 100ms of 0.22mm, 11.4 lbs, diameter line onto a 25 metre Rio spool. Smaller diameters and strengths fit easily.

I have used home made twisted leaders for a number of seasons now. You can find instructions on how to make them on line. I use standard monofilament. They are very basic in that they consist of only two sections: a four strand butt that tapers to a two strand section. With care one leader will last a season. The leader that I used last season had a four foot butt section which stepped down to a five foot section for a total length of nine feet. Both ends of the leader are finished in a loop which makes attaching a tippet and the leader to the fly line very easy. Making a leader an exact finished length is not an exact science. After a fair bit of experiment and measuring the amount of mono needed I have found that you need three times the finished length of leader material to make one leader ie thirty feet of mono will result in a ten feet leader. I have also made a ten feet leader and a thirteen foot one. My tippets are usually three to four feet long which I change when I have used half of it changing flies.

I keep my spare leaders in a small Vision slim flybox from which I removed the slotted foam interior. I put the leaders in a self-seal plastic bag with a piece of card with the details of the leader written on it.

The river Nar is populated with wonderful wild brown trout

3. Approach and stealth.

When arriving on the river bank it is all too tempting to rush up to the edge and start casting. A much better and more productive approach is to stand back from the water where you are less likely to frighten any fish close to the bank and watch what is happening in the river and in the air. Can you see fish in the water? Are they feeding on nymphs or rising to hatched or hatching flies? Are they staying in one place or moving about chasing flies? Are there flies in the air and on the wing? A stealthy approach is always very important. To repeat keep back from the edge of the bank until you actually start fishing. Even then move slowly and quietly.

Always watch where your shadow falls on sunny days especially if it is onto the river. You need to be extra stealthy particularly on days when you can do little to prevent your shadow falling on the water. If fishing from the bank keep as far back as you can to reduce the length of shadow falling on the water or none at all. When wading keeping close to the bank will help reduce your shadow. Go slowly so that you don’t create waves and stir-up the river bed.

You must wade quietly and carefully so that you don’t make lots of surface disturbance, noise and waves. Making waves will put a feeding fish down and it will stop feeding.

Keep a low profile by kneeling when there is little or no bankside cover to disguise your presence on the river bank

4. Reading the water.

What does reading the water actually mean? Probably (slightly) different things to different anglers. To me it means looking for signs of spots that suggest where a fish or perhaps two fish could be holding in the water and therefore time can be spent studying them before you get too close and perhaps risk frightening a fish and putting it down.

As you fish your way upstream, either wading or on the bank, are the fishy spots that you concentrate on as you go as fishy as you expected when you have covered them and are standing by them? If they are you will start to build a mental library of what fish-holding spots look like as you approach. If some are not try to look for or work out what made it look like a good spot to find a fish that turned out not to be. Again try to make a mental record of what was wrong that you can call on another time. Trout like structure such as rocks or boulders or pieces of woody debris which provide shelter and safety particularly from predators.

Fishing foam and bubble lines can often be the most important part of the surface to concentrate on. The foam lines will be carrying nymphs and hatching and hatched flies on the surface and will bring them down stream to the feeding fish. Hungry fish will be feeding on these flies either in or alongside the foam line. As well as spotting foam lines you need to look closely for surface currents and which way they are flowing. Are they taking your fly towards a feeding fish or taking it away and out of reach?

Height helps you see into a river so staying on the bank rather than getting into a river and wading will make a difference. As well as using a pair of good polarised glasses when you are reading the water and trying to spot ideally feeding fish, you need to teach yourself to look through and into the water not simply at the surface. It’s all too easy to simply look at the surface of a river and declare that there are no fish to be seen. Look through it and into the water and fish will start to appear. I have met plenty of fellow anglers who rarely see fish in a river because they don’t know how to look for them as well as often not looking in the right or most likely places.

When a trout is not feeding it will most likely be on the fin in an area of slacker current. Resting and using as little energy as possible. So look for areas of slacker current.

Fishing foam lines will often be the most important part of the surface to concentrate on. Hungry fish will be feeding on flies either in or alongside the foam line

5. Casting ability which casts are essential.

I am not sure that a lot of different casts are actually needed. Accurate casting is the thing to concentrate on. Try not to false cast when getting line out over a fish you are trying to catch as it will in all probability frighten the fish. The length of cast needs taking into account. Don’t try to get so close that you frighten the fish but equally you don’t want to cast further than your really must. This is all about point 3 Approach and stealth. If you can hide from a fish you will be able to get that much closer and so need to cast less far. Standing close to the bank when wading will help you to hide and maybe get that much closer to the fish will help.

Bringing a fish to hand for a quick release and return to freedom once it has recovered from its ordeal

6. Entomology, what should we know.

I was involved in fly sampling for many years so learnt to appreciate the size, shape and colour of nymphs and the size and shape of the flies some of them hatched in to. Sampling the flies every month will help you to learn what are the most common flies where you are fishing. Some rivers will have a lot of different flies hatching while others will have only a few. The important thing is to try to learn the names of the most common flies that you see.

Natural Mayfly   -   England’s biggest upwing fly. Although famous for the Duffer’s Fortnight in May can be seen on the wing as late as December

7. Rise forms. Can they tell us something?

One thing that I learnt within the last few years is a that feeding, rising, fish isn’t always where you think it it is. Some fish will see a hatched fly floating on the surface of the river coming down towards it and rise up to look at it and follow it downstream some distance before eating it. This may be some distance from its feeding station. If you then cast to, or upstream of where you saw the fish rise, your fly will be landing downstream from and behind where the fish is actually on station and so is unlikely to see it. To prevent this from happening you need to watch the fish’s movements very carefully and then cast further upstream to ensure that you fly lands upstream from your target fish.

Yes rise forms will tell you quite a lot about what a rising fish is feeding on if you watch and study them carefully.

A tranquil bend on the river Wensum near its source.

8. Fly selection, size, shape, materials, which flies are essential, favourite fly.

I used to tie my flies mostly on Kamasan hooks but when I first went to New Zealand I broke or bent a number of hooks and since then I use Umqua U series and some Partridge Klinkhamer Extreme. I had used them as well as Kamasan for some time and then Peter Hayes recommended them to me and I have used them ever since. I have had no failures so far. They are maybe not the easiest to buy in England but they are available in sensible quantities - packets of 50 - and at a sensible price too.

Over the last five or more years I have started fishing smaller Mayfly imitations than I used to. I would have fished size ten or twelve Gray Wulff imitations when the Mayfly are hatching because they are a big natural fly. But I have found from experience that smaller artificials - twelves or fourteens - are much more effective. Could it be because the fish think that a smaller fly will be easier to catch when it rises?

I fish plenty of CDC flies: cripples and emergers in particular. I found two New Zealand emerger patterns which were designed for the Mataura river on the South Island which have worked very well for my local river, even when the fish were taking Mayflies. Cripples and emergers are easier for fish to take than perfectly hatched flies and therefore provide a greater reward for the effort of rising to a hatched fly. I like buggy-looking flies and am not seeking to produce Halfordian-style, exact imitation dry flies. CDC flies are great because you can fish them straight out of the box. There is no need to dress them with fly floatant before casting them.

My favourite flies are the “F” Fly, CDC and Elk, David Murray-Orr’s CDC Emerger and Quill Emerger, Gray Wulff, Adams and Parachute Adams. While I carry far more fly patterns than I actually fish I wouldn’t want to be without them for those days when nothing seems to work and you end-up trying almost every pattern in your fly boxes. Healthy and abundant bankside vegetation will encourage and support prolific hatches of different types of flies according to the season. A strip of vegetation a metre wide should be left uncut. As well as encouraging fly life it will also give the angler something to hide behind and so less likely to frighten fish in the river.

I think that it is important to fish flies you have confidence in as you will fish them - and all that that entails - so much better even if it it is not necessarily the best or most accurate imitation of what the fish are feeding on.

Sparkling water in New Zealand’s Waipunga River

9. Presentation and drifts.

Fishing for trout feeding on willow grubs in New Zealand has got to be some of the most exciting trout fishing going. Some you will see cruising around a defined route sipping-in the grubs as they fall to the surface. Others will perhaps wait for the grubs to come downstream to them. In my limited experience most of the willow grubbers will be in slack water under over-hanging willows and so have to go for the grubs. Some fish will take a grub the minute its lands and other will rush for it covering some distance.

I mentioned earlier the importance of casting to where a rising fish actually is, rather than where you think it is. Concentrate on where a rising fish goes after it has risen if you have not caught it. It may stay in the same area or it may swim away some distance. Whatever it does if you do not watch it carefully you will probable end up positioning your fly away from where the fish is.

A very silvery New Zealand brown trout.

10. Upstream or downstream?

I fish downstream with very rare exceptions. For example a fish may rise alongside you or downstream within range and I would then cast to it. When setting the hook fishing downstream it is quite likely to pull out of the fish’s mouth whereas fishing upstream you are pulling your fly back into the fish’s mouth. Fishing upstream means that you are downstream and thus behind the fish you are trying to catch so that it won’t or is less likely to see you.

There is a great variety of rivers on the North Island of New Zealand.

11. Fighting fish.

This is one topic where I have not got a lot to say as most of the fish that I catch do not need to be ‘fought’. Side strain helps turn fish. Try to play fish firmly and get them to the landing net as quickly as possible so as not to have to play them any longer than necessary. The longer you play them the longer they will take to recover.

I read somewhere some years ago that you should set your drag before you start fishing and then do not touch it - increase the tension - once you have caught a fish as it is all too easy to increase the tension too much and a sudden powerful run could end up breaking your tippet.

A near four pound wild brown trout from the river Wensum