Upstream Worming

Upstream worming is simply the art of wading up a river casting a worm in front of you. It doesn't sound difficult does it?

As a boy I found it the most effective way to catch trout in fast flowing rivers and the becks of the Pennines. In those days, most trout were caught on worms, especially during a spate when many Dalesman would stock up their freezers. Spate rivers like the Swale, Ure, Nidd, and Wharfe are almost always un-fishable due to either too much water or not enough, so a nice, peaty-brown raising of the river by about a foot was treated as manna from heaven by the locals.

Upstream worming is useless in a flood because the stressed fish simply take refuge in back-waters and eddies. You really need some weight and strong line because this is also where all the logs, detritus and dead sheep wind up too. Imagine after heavy rain, sitting in a cloud of midges holding a poker with a line attached, fishing at your feet with only a few feet of line out, using half a tin of shot, a size 10 hook and a fat worm to catch a few trout. OK, I admit it was great, but nothing compared to what came later.

The long school holidays of high summer meant over a month of freedom at my grandmother's house in the Dales. My brother and I would fish for days on end, either covering miles of river or frozen, stock-still like herons on the side of a deep, mysterious, almost inaccessible pool at the foot of a cliff, right below the house. The river was usually "showing its bones" and we could cover almost every inch without getting our boots wet.

In a summer drought the water could be crystal clear and only inches deep. Dawn and dusk were the only times when you might get a fish; the rest of the time you could be forgiven for thinking that there were no trout left. On hot days we would paddle and swim, damming the riffles to make small pools where we could catch bullheads and loaches with our bare hands.

It was in those bright, tricky, dog-days that we discovered the finer points of trout fishing. We mostly fished for trout that we could see, or at least sense were there due to a bulge in the water or some sixth sense. We knew to approach fish from behind, and that trout always point upstream, so we would always approach a pool from below. If you plopped a worm into the middle of a pool, the fish would scatter in all directions, so we learned to either drop them into the turbulent water at the head of the pool, or bounce them off the bank. We agreed that the trout might expect a worm to arrive that way, but not fall out of the sky! Even so, we often watched trout after trout rush over to inspect our craftily delivered worm, then swish it about by creating an eddy with their tail, only to swim off in disgust. (All of this will be familiar to fly fishermen who try to float a dry fly down the pool without it being dragged about by the line.) You could almost hear the trout laughing at times.

We both had rather good general purpose rods for the job. My split cane Avon rod was a bit too heavy really, but it was my pride and joy and I never used anything else. My brother had a Sealey hollow-glass match rod which was better; though I would never admit it. They both had eyes that stood well off the rod so that there was no friction between the wet line and the cane or glass. Floats were never used. A single split-shot would help with the casting but ruin the natural drift of the worm, so we went weightless, free-lining, using the finest nylon and slim spade-end hooks.

To cast a single worm with no added weight was easy enough if the wind was behind you, or if the worm was really big. Unfortunately most Pennine rivers flow West to East so the prevailing wind is downstream. Having really fine line, loaded right up to the brim of a Mitchel fixed-spool reel helped to get distance, but mostly we fished at very short range, even in the big river.

The valleys are glaciated; U-shaped with steep sides where tributaries tumble into the the rivers from the high pastures above. In school we learned to call them 'hanging valleys'. To fish the little becks we would start at the confluence with the big river and clamber our way up through rough-and-tumble woods and shady gorges, fishing a steep series of falls, rapids and glorious, dappled, dark pools. This is where the technique really comes into its own. As the beck rises in steps you can actually fish the pool above you on eye level: It's as near as you can get to being in the water with the trout. Swing the worm under-arm to get a pendulum effect and then let go. If the vegetation is too restricting you can pull your worm up to the top ring, poke your rod through the vegetation and drop your worm in the space available. There is no way you can cast a fly or anything else in there.

Dry-fly fishermen also know this trick of retrieving your fly from any tree that happens to be in the wrong place when you are casting. You just wind the hook right up to the top eye of your rod and push it off the branch, just like using a disgorger. This works for free-liners too, as long as there is no shot or swivel in the way, you can wind the hook right up to the top eye and (mostly) get it back.

I loved exploring the secret woody gorges and would often go back without a rod to watch flycatchers, redstarts and at dusk, woodcocks making their courtship rounds, looking like large moths and sounding like flying toads.

Some days we could pick off a trout at every pool in the beck, losing count as we broke our way into bright sunlight on the open moor. Still we caught fish, even up here among the curlews and grouse, but they were tiny.