No place like home for the finest fishing

Our correspondent has angled all over the world but says an English trout stream in June takes some beating.
One of the perks of writing about fishing is that, from time to time, the opportunity to travel bobs up. This travel, over many years, has taken me to most of the world's great fishing experiences, Montana and New Zealand notably excepted.
It has enabled me to catch, among others, salmon in the Russian Arctic, sea trout in Tierra del Fuego, rainbow trout in Alaska, bonefish in the central Pacific, marlin from the Indian Ocean, tiger fish from southern Africa and shark from the Great Barrier Reef.
A result is that I have often been asked which experience I most enjoyed and which would I recommend to someone seeking the experience of a lifetime. A linked but rather different question is: which fishing experience would I opt for, if I could choose only one? The problem in attempting such choices is that they are all so unlike one another. How does one compare a 7lb Arctic char to a 70lb sailfish, the lushness of tropical Africa and its Garden-of-Eden wildlife with the empty, honey-coloured plains of southern Patagonia where condors make silence against the backdrop of the Andes?
There are other complications. What might thrill me might not thrill the person asking the question - one man's meat is another man's poisson, so to speak. Also, there are cautions that need to be injected. First, much of the fishing offered on the international market is hyped in terms of consistency, fish sizes and fish numbers: always, one seems to need rods that will stop an ocean liner, lines of several tonnes' breaking-strain and backing that would go twice around the earth.
Second, no matter how great a location's track record, results can never be guaranteed. Rivers can be high when they need to be low, low when they fish best with plenty of water. There may be freak tides or winds.
Migratory fish may run early or late. On a trip to Minnesota, I smashed my two favourites rods in a truck door on the day after arrival and ended up fishing with borrowed tackle that took the edge off the whole trip. The chance of disappointment and a willingness to accept it, no matter how high the expectation or the cost, has to be built in, every time.
There is a last point before I take the questioner's bait. Often, the quality of a fishing experience depends less on fish than on the specific circumstances in which it occurs and the company in which it is enjoyed. Indeed, some of the most vivid memories I have brought home have hinged on something else entirely.
My warmest memory of a trip to northern Russia - indeed, the warmest memory I hold of any trip - was not of the wonderful salmon there, but of a meeting with a remarkable old woman. Babashula, a dignified, eightysomething widow in a desperately poor village, invited me in for a cup of tea. She gave me a cup and my interpreter a cup, which exhausted her supply: she talked vividly of a life of unbelievable hardship and drama, all the while sipping from a saucer held aloft on her finger-tips like an offered chalice.
A highlight of one African trip was when my accompanying photographer tried his hand with a rod and got a crocodile tangled in his line. In a small boat off the coast of Newfoundland, a humpback whale rose through the surface 20 yards away, seeming to shut out the light and black out the sky. In Alaska, while wading down a river, I rounded a bend and found myself face to face with a grizzly sow and her three cubs wading upstream - a situation that effortlessly held my attention for minutes that seemed hours.
But enough. Which fishing would I recommend for that one-off trip? Well, it would have to be for a species that can be caught on a fly, because, though I coarse-fish as well, I prefer fly-fishing above all else. I would narrow the options farther by excluding the monsters - shark, full-grown tarpon and the like - because success with them can depend on brute strength and stamina.
Which leaves the manageable fish. For consistency, drama, involvement and delicacy my choices, in descending order, would be for bonefish off somewhere such as Christmas Island in the Pacific, for sea trout in Tierra del Fuego and for wild rainbows in Alaska. Bonefish are the hardest-fighting fish I know. They are so iridescently silver that they reflect all light, becoming almost invisible. Often it is a case of stalking the shadows they cast, while wading far from land beneath an unblinking sun, as manta rays waft by and frigate birds dive. The sea trout on rivers such as the Rio Grande consistently deliver salmon-sized fish, on single-handed rods - sometimes to dry flies and nymphs. The big rainbows also can be individually stalked as they range about like pack animals, hunting for spawned salmon eggs after winter's long hunger.
Now the second question. If I had to choose a place and a time to fish above all others, it would be none of these. It would - yes - be England. It would, if I could get it, be fishing for sizeable wild brown trout on a chalk stream in the last two weeks in May and the first two weeks in June. In other words, right here, right now. The cuckoo would be calling and the swifts and swallows would be sculpting the sky. The water crowfoot and its flowers would be sweeping the currents like drowned hair. The mayflies would be hatching, the fish would be up and the surface would be punctuated with slow, oiling rings.
Then, God would be in his heaven and I would be in mine - transported, I'd like to think, metaphorically.
- Brian Clarke's fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month.
Source:The times