Saturday's fish is Sunday's dinner

There are magical chalk streams and there is Sally Merison’s beat of the river Dever just a few minutes away from the busy A303. As a tributary of the River Test, the Dever is smaller than its more famous big sister, but no less pretty.

A small syndicate fishes the stretch that runs past Sally’s house but not at the weekends when she allows family and friends to fish. That’s when she’s not fishing herself. I had a great day fishing here last year with Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance.

This last weekend Sally invited us again. It’s not just the fishing either; she spoils us silly with a trencherman’s lunch in the hut. One or two Mayfly were coming off the water but not enough to interest the fish yet.

We started fishing shortly before noon and I soon found a feeding fish in mid-stream on a 15 yard cast. But just to the right and closer there was another larger fish in the shallows under a tree. It’s a difficult cast with a tree behind and a need to slot a sideways cast below a branch and above some bank-side vegetation.

The fish needed the fly just a little in front. It took an interest but not enough. I changed the fly to a small brown spinner imitation. Another cast or two and he went for it. Once the fish was returned I started casting to the farther fish that was feeding midstream a little way up from the bend. The trees allowed a long straight cast and the fish took the fly quickly. With two early fish I was thinking it was going to be a day of easy fishing. Far from it. Most of the fish were sitting deep, sullen looking. But there was still plenty action for the dry fly.

I notice that the trout pigmentation varies quite dramatically on different fish. Sally says the fish take the hue of their surroundings. She thinks it has something to do with visual information passed through the eye. Fish that have spent time in a culvert, she says, are dark coloured, while those that have been sitting on shingle are sandy coloured.

The trout today are quite choosy. There are just a few feeding fish but I’m picking them off as I find them, sometimes with a change of fly, often spending some time on one fish. You know you have a fight with a 3 pounder on same strength tippet fished off a 3 weight line on a light seven foot rod.

I read a lot about matching the hatch but when not much is hatching, what do you do? The fish seem to be taking small flies so I try small grey dusters and klinkhammers. Both work with different fish. I end up with eight for the afternoon, all between one and a half and three and a half pounds.

These would have been caught on perhaps five or six different flies. I kept one fish and had a look at its stomach contents. There were four different insects, two different coloured midges, a Mayfly larva and a cardinal beetle.

The point I would make is that article after article in the fishing magazines will concentrate on fly types, yet if you can present a fly well to a feeding fish and if that fly looks a reasonable approximation to an insect there is a good chance you might get it to take.

I found one fish, almost tempted it, then spooked it and I moved on. Later I came back to the spot and saw it was feeding again. I tried a different fly and it took. All the fish were well hooked and all came to the net. It doesn’t always happen like this.

The fish I kept weighed in at 3 lb. I gutted it on the Saturday evening and rubbed some sea salt on the insides and flanks, wrapping the fish in silver foil. The next day I cut off the head and tail, stuffed the insides with herbs from the garden, propped the flanks open with sticks and laid it belly down on the grill in the smoking tin, leaving it to smoke over wet wood chips on a burner for about forty minutes.

The result was a meaty, lightly smoked and herb flavoured fish great with a bit of lemon, mayonnaise, salad and new potatoes and plenty for four of us.