ANGLERS, like golfers, tend to blame their misfortunes on the weather. They have many proverbial rules of thumb which assign to the elusive fish a meteorological perspicacity more than sufficient to explain even the emptiest of bags. One such, for example, was Colonel R. St. Leger Moore, a Wexford fisherman of the last century who had this to say upon the subject:
"The best weather for catching fish in Irish rivers is when the wind is south or west and rain has just begun to fall before a flood. One is almost certain then to take a catch, however bad the fishing may have been the day before. It is hopeless, however, when the flood is high and the water is discoloured.
Light, too, is most important: the fish apparently do not see the fly or do not care to see it - when the clouds are very low and the sky too much overcast; a bright sky, on the other hand, is also bad - because probably the fish can see the gut, and that the fly is an artificial product, not something good to eat or worthy of attack."
But the best known expert on the subject was Izaak Walton, who in 1653 published The Complete Angler - or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, a comprehensive handbook which combined practical information for the rod fisherman with snatches of mythology and folklore and quotations from the classics. Walton was a London ironmonger who became successful enough in business to retire to this native Staffordshire in 1644 and it was there that he indulged his passion for fly fishing and penned his classic masterpiece.
The book was much more than a simple vade mecum for the angler. It drew an idyllic picture of a rural life of well kept ins and tuneful milk maids, with pastoral interludes of song and verse and homely entertainment - typified, as he puts it himself, by "an honest ale house where we shall "find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the walls".
"Angling", Walton maintained, "may be said to be like mathematics in that it can never be fully learnt". Nonetheless he dispensed many useful tips to would be fishermen, among which was the following advice on the relevance of wind direction which does not disagree with that of the good colonel already mentioned:
When the wind is in the north
The skilful fisher goes not forth;
When the wind is in the east
'Tis neither good for man nor beast;
When the wind is in the south,
It blows the flies in the fish'
mouth;
But when the wind is in the west,
There it is the very best.