Halford & Skues

The prompts for this little piece of meandering prose are:

Itchen Memories by Skues - almost finished reading

Classic angling review of Marryat,Prince of Flyfishers by Terry Lawton reviewed by Geoffrey Bucknall.

The review, I'm afraid says far more about the reviewers prejudices than about the book or about Marryat, who was indeed the Chalkstream Prince. The reviewer talks about chalkstreams today being easy, stuffed full of stocked easy fish unable to lock onto fly hatches etc.

While some chalkstream beats are manged intensively and commercially run, the beats I fish, which were in fact also fished by Skues are mainly wild fish and very very challenging, and carefully managed.

I gather the reviewer enjoys fishing our wilder waters for their inhabitants. Certainly moorland fishing has charm, but in my experience is far easier than upstream chalk stream methods.

Reading Skues it strikes me that he was rather unkind to Halford. Halford proposed him for the Fly Fisher's Club, where Skues found a piscatorial home.

That Halford tried to write a dry fly code at a time when nonesuch existed was hardly his fault, and, it is interesting that Prince Marryat seems to have been far more a companion of Halford than of the opinionated Skues.

I think I may order the book from the public library, assuming our wonderful government haven't scrapped libraries by the time I get there.