This week I spent a day's fishing on one of my favourite rivers, the Hampshire Avon. It was a day blessed with beautiful weather and loads of fish... but ultimately cursed with failed photographic equipment and a broken rod tip.
Fishy tales and more images after the jump...
The Avon
The chalkstreams of southern England are truly world-renowned. These rivers begin as rain water, falling on the Downs, which is filtered and purified as it passes through the chalk and into subterranean aquifers. The water re-emerges as springs, which feed rivers like the Test and Kennet with cold, clear and nutrient-rich water; perfect habitat for a range of plant and animal life including trout and grayling.
These streams can rightfully boast of a proud heritage and feature heavily in fly-fishing lore and literature. Names like F M Halford and the Houghton Club are somehow synonymous with what many the world over consider to be the very essence of fly-fishing - casting imitative dry flies to large, wily fish in gin-clear water.
Compared to its more glamourous sisters the Test and the Itchen, the river Avon is sometimes miscast a poor man's chalkstream. Access to the Avon is certainly more readily available than on either the Test or the Itchen (you can tell this by the lack of tweed in the above photo!)
Critics rightly point out that the Avon suffers from a relatively sparse mayfly hatch and that it is not, in fact, a 'true' chalkstream. Rather it flows over a combination of chalk and greensand on its way to meeting the English Channel at Christchurch.
However, I have found the fishing between Pewsey and Durrington to be nothing short of remarkable; good value for money, ideal for sight-fishing and stuffed with hungry trout.
The River at Manningford
This week, I returned to fish the river at Manningford for a second time. My previous outing had been in search of grayling last December. While the grayling were present in small numbers, I spent the majority of that day carefully releasing out of season brownies. This visit, then, presented an opportunity legitimately to pursue these glorious fish.
Thankfully the trout were by now in fine condition and, more importantly, hungry!
The approach here is fairly simple. Spot your fish in the water. Don't let it see you. Creep up within casting range. Finally, using the lightest of tackle - a 6'6 rod with a long leader tapering down to a 3lb tippet in my case - roll, flick, drop or catapult a small pheasant tail nymph a few feet upstream of the fish.
Employing a combination of observation and intuition, you then try to look for any sign of a fish taking the nymph (I try to watch the fish, or the leader, or both). If you are quiet, crafty and lucky in the appropriate combination, fish will come relatively easy to your net.
I managed somewhere between 25 and 30 fish in a 6 hour session.
The largest of the brown trout was around 1 1/2lbs and I caught four grayling to about 1lb. I also hooked a rainbow trout of about 2 1/2lbs, which I played and netted only for it to jump out of the net and break me off while I was faffing around with the camera.
The broken rod-tip was also a consequence of photo-related faffage as I was trying to capture an image of the trout in the following photo. The exact circumstances of this particular misadventure are too embarrassing to share. Thankfully a replacement tip is already on its way courtesy of kpspares.
The fishery is wild at heart and despite running alongside a pub, a campsite and a rainbow trout fishery, the river is more or less entirely secluded from the outside world. This made it a perfect location for a few self-portraits.
Self-portraits
Having scoped out a suitable location during the afternoon's fishing, I hauled my camera, tripod, studio strobes, battery pack, speedlights, three lightstands, an octabox, umbrellas and various accessories down from the car park - a distance of little over a kilometer. My arms were both aching and I was sweating so badly that I almost had to cut myself out of my waders!
It took me a further 20 minutes to set up the two strobes and light modifiers on stands, the radio triggers, the additional speedlights and shutter release for a complex and staggeringly beautiful four-light setup.
Finally, when I was all set to power up and shoot, I went to plug the strobes into my Paul C Buff vagabond and realised I had left the adapter required to connect the strobes to the battery pack at home. Nightmare!
But not to worry. I could still do a pretty sweet two-light setup using the speedlights. Although I couldn't quite overpower the sun with small strobes, I could position myself in the shade and do a nice key/rim combo.
Turning on the speedlights, however, I discovered the batteries in one of my SB80dx's were flat... as were the 12 spare AAs that I carry with me!
I later attributed this to a faulty battery charger.
At this point, part of me felt like chucking the camera into the river. But another part of me remembered the decent results that can be achieved when you combine low, direct sunlight with the harsh, directional light of a bare speedlight.
A few minutes later I was heading for home having fired off a few one-light wonders. Not the epic, technically complex images I had in mind. But they turned out ok, I think.
In the photo at the top of the post, I'm basically cross-lighting myself using the speedlight as a key (it's on a stand right in the river, camera right and infront-ish) and the sun as a rim. The shadows end up being a bit harsh but I do like the transition from light to shadow to light again on my face.
In the shot below, the setup is almost exactly the same except the speedlight is on the left instead of the right.
A day that ends at 7pm with sunburn, 25 fish, a couple of decent images, a broken rod and an unfulfilled artistic vision has to go down as a bit of a mixed bag. At least I have a good excuse to return to Manningford with a new rod tip and some properly functioning camera gear... as if I really needed an excuse!
Thanks for looking!
Sean
all images © Sean Afnan 2012, all rights reserved
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