The journal · Habits
Keeping a Fishing Diary
Five minutes with a pencil at the end of each day, and in a few seasons you own the best guide to your river that will ever be written.
Illustrative account The scenes here are composites written to make a point, not a report of a real outing. Editorial note
· 4 minute read · 868 words
Good days on the river are remembered very clearly and almost entirely wrongly. Memory keeps the big fish and the gold light and throws away the river height, the hour the hatch began and the two flies that were refused first. A diary keeps the dull facts, and the dull facts are the ones that repeat. A diary may be begun out of tidiness. It is kept because it tells you things about your own river that no book can.
What to write down
Record conditions before results. The catch is the least useful line on the page, because it is the consequence of everything else. Write these down every time, even when they seem unremarkable.
- Date and hours fished. Start and finish times, so that a blank between eleven and one means something later.
- River height and colour. Read the gauge board if there is one, or the online river level for the nearest station. Failing that, choose a marker of your own, a particular stone or a step on a bridge pier, and note how much of it shows. Add whether the river was rising, steady or falling.
- Water and air temperature. Water first, taken in the flow, with the time of the reading. A second reading when you leave is worth the trouble in spring and autumn.
- Wind. Strength, and direction relative to the river: upstream, downstream or across.
- Light. Bright, broken cloud, overcast, drizzle. Note when it changed.
- Hatches seen. What, when it started, when it peaked. If you cannot name the fly, describe it: size, colour, number of tails, how the wings were held.
- Fly and hook size. Every pattern that took a fish, and the order in which you tried them.
- Tippet and leader. For example, 10 ft to 5X (0.15 mm).
- Where fish lay. The most valuable line. Not just the pool but the place in it: the seam, the tailout, a hand’s width from the far bank.
- What failed. Flies refused, water that was empty, an approach that put fish down.
A specimen entry
The form matters less than the habit, but fixed headings stop you skipping the awkward ones. A page from a May day on a northern freestone river might read like this.
| Heading | Entry |
|---|---|
| Date and hours | 16 May, 11.00–16.30 |
| Beat | Upper beat, road bridge up to the ash tree |
| River | 0.38 m on the gauge and falling after rain two days ago; clear, a faint tea stain |
| Water / air | 11°C at noon, 12°C at 16.00 / 15°C |
| Wind and light | Light south-westerly, blowing upstream. Bright until 14.00, then cloud |
| Hatches | Olive uprights from 12.30, thickest 13.30–14.30. A few hawthorn flies blown on. No sedges |
| Flies | Pheasant Tail 16 before the hatch; Parachute Adams 16 from 13.00 |
| Leader | 10 ft to 5X (0.15 mm) |
| Fish | Five trout, the largest about 30 cm. Two on the nymph, three on the dry. All returned |
| Where | Seam under the far alders; drop-off below the top riffle; one in the tailout at 15.00, under cloud |
| What failed | Size 14 dry refused three times. Drag on the far seam until moving up two paces. Nothing in the deep pool |
| Next time | Start at the tailout. Bring size 18 for the bright hours |
Keep the blanks
The temptation is to skip the page after a fishless day. Those are the entries worth consulting most. A blank with the river at 0.70 m and coloured, or with the water at 4°C under a north-east wind, marks an edge of what the river will do, and three or four such edges make a boundary.
The catch is the least useful line on the page, because it is the consequence of everything else.
Reading it back in winter
A diary earns its keep in January, when the rods are put away and there is time to read a whole season at one sitting. Go through it with a second notebook and ask the same questions every year.
- Sort the days by river height. Mark the lowest and highest levels at which you caught fish; the band between them is your river’s fishable range. Note how many days after a spate it took to fall back into it.
- List the first date you saw each hatch: large dark olives in March, hawthorn flies around the last week of April, mayfly in late May. After three seasons you will know them to within a week.
- Put water temperature beside each good day and each blank. Look for the reading below which the dry fly stopped working.
- Count how many fish each fly took, and then empty the box of patterns that have taken none in two seasons.
- Copy every lie that produced a fish onto one sketch map of the beat. The crosses will cluster.
- Write down three things to do differently, on the first page of the new year’s book.
None of this needs much. A pencil, a notebook that fits a wader pocket, a thermometer on a cord. What accumulates is not general knowledge but something better: the particular habits of one stretch of water, written by the only person who was there.