Immortality of sorts

Combine a man that is passionate about something like, for example, flyfishing. Add a bit of nerdiness, a zest for literary immortality (albeit via the most glancing of blows), extreme frustration brought on by a lack of fishing so far this year and then a love of very well written and conceived coffee-table books (a rare combination) and you have the perfect storm, to mish-mash a metaphor. Coming rattling down from Cambridgeshire to Kings Cross on the train this morning I was reading Brad Burns’s beautifully produced, photographed and written book, Closing the Season, which I recently ordered from Paul Morgan’s Coch-y-Bonddu Books. One of the reasons I bought it was that the bulk of the book is a log that Burns wrote about the end of the 2012 salmon season fishing the Southwest Miramichi and the Cains rivers at the same time I was out there with my pal Christopher, who has a fishing camp and owns pools on both rivers. As I got to the entry of September 28th, 2012, I thought that’s the week we were out there, and on the Cains, and then I saw it:

“On the way in [I like that, you have to drive ‘in’ to the Cains forests, it is a mini-wilderness], about three miles downriver from the camp, we came to the Moore pool, one of the finest on the river where Gary Colford, the third generation of men in his family to guide on the river, was fishing with anglers from Country Haven. I stopped and asked Gary about the fishing. “We got a big cock fish, maybe 15 pounds or so, this morning,” he said, grinning broadly. [And I like this bit:] “His anglers were furiously flailing away at the water.” So there it is. Well it made my morning, I shall write to Brad and say, “Flailing?! – I thought I was doing a rather nice double Spey down that right bank!!!”