Hat trick

Anglers love their hats. It's not only about vanity, striving for identity or even striving to belong, its a practical thing. In winter a hat will keep you warm and in summer it will keep the sun off. If you spray it with chemicals, it may help to keep the midges at bay.

Most hats have a brim or a peak that shades the wearer's eyes and face. This helps to make him less visible to fish and improves his own vision. Polarised sun-glasses are amazingly effective at cutting out surface glare and permitting you to see the underwater world, but not if there is a lot of light coming at the back of them from over your shoulder. In effect, you need to be looking out from a darkened room and your hat does this for you.

That brim or peak performs a health and safety task as well, especially for fly fishermen. It (mostly) prevents you from getting a hook in the eye. Glasses work better of course but, when you are waving 20 yards of line around above your head, it's less likely to run across your nose. Wherever that snaking, speeding line goes, the hook will follow. That's why I like an all round brim; because most hooks hit you in the back of the head or the ear.

Hat colour is important too. A light coloured hat might be good against the sky but a dull hat better against the trees, but be tasteful, please. Its not only the fish you have to consider but fellow anglers too. Red is outrageous: You should be sent home for wearing it.

A lot of my favourite big waters such as reservoirs and oceans are also windy places. Most of us have lost a hat or two and so few of them have a strap to keep them on. The Tilley Hat is an exception. Retrieving your hat from the water with a landing net is OK and I have hooked them out with a spinner before, but a hat is never worth risking your life for, unless its my lucky hat. But that's what the adventure story in Part Two is about.