It's not just catching that matters - the daffs are a clue

Most of them are all helter skelter, huff and puff, the blood sweat and tears of our younger selves. For men and women, football boots are hung up sometime in your 30s (although I wheezed on long beyond that) and even those squash and tennis racquets might be ditched in your sixth or seventh decade.

But not your rod. Take the great Bernard Venables, who caught perch when well into his 90s... he might have been as short sighted as a slow worm but his young disciples  alerted him to a dithering float and told him when to finally strike. Yes, there’s a timelessness to our sport that is at its core. Take match fishing out of the equation and for most of us, angling is at least in part about tranquility, peace and reflection.  None of us ever want to pack up: perhaps because we might want a last fish, but more like we don’t want to break the spell and enter back into the real world of bustle and stress.

Back around the beginning of the century, when I wrote more books than I do now, a reader got in touch with me, not to go fishing as such, but rather for me to give him a guided tour of the river Wensum. He wanted to physically stand on the great roach swims of the 70s and witness for himself where the great episodes of the past had taken place 30 years earlier. Bintree, Elmham, Worthing, Lyng. I took him to all the legendary battle sites and told him all the stories, but elected to save the best for last so, towards dusk, we pitched up at the island on the river above Elsing mill.

Conditions were perfect and with the light softening and the wind dying, it was as though you could reach back to 1976 when I fished a winter there with the inimitable John Judge. Those blissful nights of suspense, success and, more often, despair flooded back to me and it was as though JJ were with us, perhaps holding his giant river bream or helping me weigh that first 3lb roach of mine. I squatted down in the exact place JJ would settle his canvas stool and there, half hidden in rush and reed, poked his ancient rod rest. It had lain there untouched and untroubled all those years and we simply left it there to maintain its vigil.

The mighty Dee doesn’t merely flow, it roars! (Image: John Bailey)

I was reminded of this three days ago up on the Dee in Scotland, one of the classic salmon rivers. I walked the entire three miles of the fishery with Keith, the aged ghillie (slightly younger than me) and what a river it is. Fearsome in its voracious energy, the Dee doesn’t flow but rather it foams. No wonder the big silver salmon we saw caught fought like a cross between a Trojan and a dervish. Roach and bream are magnificent, but they don’t pull like that springer did, a fish with the power and speed of a missile.

But the gist of all this is that Keith pointed out clumps of daffodils randomly growing here and there along the bank. These were the places where a one-time owner had planted the spring blooming flowers decades ago. They marked the exact spot a salmon caster should stand to cover the very best of the water and have the very best chance of one of these sensational fish.

Of course, the original daffs had died years back, but the great sportsman’s grandson had planted fresh bulbs season after season to help anglers on the beat and more importantly to maintain those family memories that mean so much. How many salmon anglers had caught from those flower-marked hotspots and thanked the old man watching from above, I wondered as I drove away.

There are several plaques and memorials to great salmon anglers on the river Wye that I know of. There are many banks where benches stand, recalling departed anglers who have passed but whose love for the water magically lingers on.

I have personally spread a score of anglers’ ashes on rivers as far flung as Mongolia and watched the waters receive their spirit and soul. I suspect many older anglers like me have lost the religious faith they were brought up to believe in, but that does not mean we have lost faith in everything. Angling is a sport to entrance from the cradle, almost, to the grave and it means so much more than simply catching fish alone.