Beaver Lake

Dawn on Beaver Lake. Mist rolls across the water and the black silhouettes of pine trees stand like cut-outs against a backdrop of a painted pink-and-ink sky. It looks like the start of a slick TV commercial, shot in HD. A large bird flaps across the water. It's a bald eagle that comes here every day at dawn, about an hour ahead of the local osprey.  A great blue heron stands alert on the little dock in front of me. To complete the image of a backwoods paradise, a loon calls as it too comes to start fishing. All these birds eat fish so that's a good sign, but  by 5.30 am the first kayaker will be fishing right in front of our cabin and by 6.30 there will be an array of water craft passing by, all with guys on board, fishing for large-mouth bass.


Every day starts the same, although it's busier at week-ends. Because the fish "seek structure" they like to hide among the legs of docks and under moored boats along the shore, so boating anglers like to cast towards the shore with rubber worms or frogs using light bait-casting roods. I prefer to beat them to it by fishing a short fly-rod from the shore.

The thing on the end with a hook in it can't really be called a fly; its made from a small cork, painted bright yellow and it has three white rubber bands threaded through it and a red tail made of feathers to finish it off. It's called a pan-fish popper and it could represent a bug, a frog, a grasshopper or an injured fish. The technique is to plop it down with a splash almost under the neighbour's dock and watch the ripples spread. If nothing happens you give it a twitch which causes the flat face of the cork to make a popping sound while creating a bubble and more spreading rings. It's great fun because you can see the action the whole time and you can keep the popper in the "hot-spot" near the dock for quite a long time by making very short pulls and long pauses.

Because my rod is very short and light, it can't cast big "bass-bugs" very far, so I use the smaller panfish sizes. This means I might miss a few strikes because the hook is small, but it also means that I don't just catch large-mouths. Mostly I catch beautiful sunfish that look like something you would expect to see around a coral reef. The one's here have iridescent scales of green and blue.

My tactic is to start at the shore and cover every likely spot, then work my way out along our dock to the end where I might spend half an hour casting towards a swimming platform moored off shore. Sunfish like to come in at dawn to take up territories at  the edges and can be found in only four inches of water. As I move out to deeper water, the chances of catching a bass increase. The popper might need a couple of chugs and then there will be a noisy boil where your fly was. If you see the actual take, your fly is just inhaled into a hole about the size of a jam-jar or a seaside bucket. The noise is a "glug" rather than a splash.  It stops you dead; but you wake up when your reel starts singing. Even small  largemouths are impressive fighters on light tackle. They can pull your line around the dock or they can go airborne, rattling their fins as they do so; and they keep it up for ages.


Unless you are in a big boat, a landing net is not necessary; you just put your thumb in the fish's big mouth and lift him up by his lower jaw. Don't try this with pickerel though. They have needle sharp teeth despite being much smaller than our pike.

New England is really small-mouth bass territory. Largemouths don't belong up here in the cool zone. The big ones are found down in the deep south where there is no winter ice cover, so a good fish at Beaver Lake would be less than three pounds. But once you have caught one you can see why they are widely stocked around the world, not just in the USA. You only have to look at the boats and gear that anglers buy to catch these fish to know that bass fishing is a multi-million dollar business. There are "Bass-pro" shops, magazines, DVDs and TV shows.

A fully rigged bass boat has a huge outboard motor on the back to get you to the hot-spots ahead of the competition. The flared V-shaped hull lifts the boat high so that it almost flies but, when you stop, it drops down to become a stable pontoon to fish from. Usually one angler fishes from a swivel-seat on the nose, guiding the boat around with a little electric motor controlled by foot pedals. He can read the relay from his fish-finder/GPS/echo-sounder from there too. Another angler may fish from the stern. These flash, bass-boats have everything from cup-holders to bait-wells built in and they fit on a small trailer that even a mini-car could tow. They are immensely desirable, but they are not my style.

After breakfast I take out an ancient, aluminium, Canadian canoe and fish from that. Others might prefer kayaks, but for fly-fishing the canoe is more stable. This is the ideal way to fish for me and it's a great way to approach wildlife and take photos. There are still beavers on the lake and any beaver lodges, logs or even old tyres will have turtles sunning on them by mid-day. I always wanted to be Davy Crockett when I was a kid, so that tradition is probably part of the appeal for me. Ideally I'd have a vintage wooden canoe but the aluminium one works fine.

Beaver Lake lies on the outskirts of the little town of Derry in New Hampshire. It's about an hour from Boston and just off the main highway, so its a popular spot, especially for ice fishing when other lakes may be difficult to access by road.  The NH Fish and Wildlife Department, which has a generous stocking programme, posts information on the lake with a useful map showing depths and access points.

New Hampshire is "The Granite State" and so it's no surprise that this spring-fed lake is low in nutrients and crystal clear, even after rain. Erosion is minimised because of the surrounding pine forests and besides, there is almost no soil around the shore to run off in a storm. The lack of weed in the main lake is probably due to low nutrient levels and the effects of the long, hard winters here.

Almost the whole shore is in private hands. An array of cabins, week-end homes and permanent residences lies beneath the trees, each home sporting its own dock and boat, but you can access the water from a public boat ramp and there is a swimming beach with a lifeguard on duty when it is open.

There are thousands of lakes like this in New England. The most accessible ones are heavily stocked and heavily fished while the more remote ones may have wider access from the shore and could be good for small-mouths, brook trout and lake trout. Bait fishing on the bottom might bring you a surprise catch. Burbot are extinct in the UK but these freshwater cod are still found in the north-east USA where they are called eel-pout. There are also some catfish down there in the depths.

For someone like me from the Old Country, every cast is an adventure.

Dawn Patrol

My perfect south coast sea-trout stream has a tide pool at its mouth. Long shore drift has piled a pebble bank eastwards along the beach-crest, almost cutting the river off from the sea and hemming it in against the cliff that brings the beach to an end. The pool is always deep and mysterious and the current swirls around in an intriguing eddy. It's like a huge bathtub full of water with only a small plughole, so the waiting water ambles around until it can escape.

The summer holidays on a Devon beach are not going to give you much peace and isolation except, possibly, at night. This corner of Paradise is a sun-trap, sheltered from the wind. The pool is a swimming hole for dogs and people and the lovely, round stones which are all different, come to the hand so readily. Boys and their dads find them ideal for throwing into the water. You can forget fishing for the time being.

I tried an evening session, coming down to the pool at dusk from upstream, dragging a small salmon fly down and across the stream. It looked perfect to me. No dogs, no-one at all in sight. I was sure there was a fish nosing the far bank under the cliff. I carried on working down to it as calmly quietly as possible. When I was almost opposite it, it was still there, but ignored every cast. I changed flies: Still nothing. That was because it was a mullet.

Entering the main pool, the shingle bank gets too steep for safe wading. The whole structure can start to roll downwards into the depths, no doubt because all the stones are the same size and perfectly oval. You have to fish from a stable spot above the water, which can put you on the sky-line.

As I climbed up on to the bank I was joined by a large local family composed of women and girls and one rather quiet and contented man. One of the girls was their fishing expert and so I watched her for a while as I chatted to the grown-ups. She was really competent at working a luminous rubber tailed lure across the pool using a light spinning rod. The rig looked ideal to me and she told me of a recent magical evening when they had caught bass after bass in this way, but not sea-trout.

I returned at dawn to repeat my run but after two casts the first two dogs were already in the pool and a queue of cuboid looking women in sensible shoes was making its way from the beach to give each Fido his bit of fun. I took off upstream, beyond the salt marsh to the first bridge. Mine was the second car there. The other one had a strange rack on the roof and I had to think what it might be for. Canoes, of course! And they were out there on this little river before 6am.

I jumped a wall and landed up to my neck in nettles, so it was obvious that no one had been that way for months. It was also obvious why that was the case. Walking was bad enough but fishing from that steep, overgrown bank was going to be tricky or impossible, except with a worm. I fought my way upstream looking for a gap where I could get into the water. I found one and slid down the bank onto a hard, gravelly bed. This looked like a real trout stream, only a few hundred yards from the sea. The long, slow pool above me even showed a lazy, dimpled rise or two. I crossed to the far side where I discovered not just a public footpath, but a canine motorway, and dammit, along came the canoeists.

I absolutely agree that all these doggy and boaty people have their rights. This river is in a public space, criss-crosssed with rights of way and the fishing on this last mile is free. Its no good getting cross or indignant: You have to have a plan.

Mine is this: I will return on a very rainy day around high tide, hopefully early or late in the day and fish down from the top of the beat on the public footpath. Of course, it mustn't rain hard enough or long enough to cause a muddy spate; just enough to deter everyone else. To increase my chances I will put up signs in advance. These will say "DANGER! LAND MINES" and "BEWARE; RABIES".

Plan B is to simply fish through the night.