I like a close season when I can forget my fly rods (other than for the occasional session of casting practice on the canal) and spend lots of time with another passion, out on the estuary chasing wildfowl. I did have two days at the begining of November, warm benign days of the type that we ought to have enjoyed in ‘summer’, with the dry fly and grayling on the Ribble and Hodder. The Ribble day yielded seven fish, with one 16½in in length, and the Hodder five, with one a great deep grayling of 18in in length.

Early in the month it was my privilege to be after-dinner speaker at the 50th anniversary of the founding of York Fly Fishers’ Club. This is one of two such clubs in Yorkshire, which meet every month through autumn and winter (the other, Halifax), and are solely about fine food, good company and talk of fly fishing. The food was excellent. The wine probably so, though I had to abstain as I had to drive home afterwards, alas. And the company was splendid. They asked for a 10-minute speech. I started to talk at about ten o’clock and finished at a quarter to eleven. It was their fault that I went over my allotted time, because they would ask questions. One I found easy to answer.

"What is the most memorable fish you have ever caught on a fly?"

"That’s easy," said I. "One Wednesday in 1981 I heard the Hodder was full of big salmon. I was still a salary-slave at the time. So at a quarter to nine the following morning I rang in to say that I had eaten a bad meat pie and was suffering from vomiting and the runs. At 9.30 I reached the river. At just after eleven a salmon took hold and it was such a deep, dour fish that it was a quarter to twelve when Jimmy Fleet tailed it out for me. It was a pristine, sea-silver twenty-one-pounder with a sea louse on its flank. Twenty minutes later I repaid Jimmy by tailing out an identical fish that had taken his Yellow Dog and tired itself quickly by zooming around the pool. Next day I went into work with the salmon still in my mind’s eye. “Guess what?” I said to my colleagues who were sitting drinking coffee in the prep room before starting work. But then I stopped talking because I remembered I was supposed to have been ill! I returned to our Hodder beat the next day, Saturday. Not one salmon did we see. The run of big fish had moved on, to the next beat."

Last month I promised to give the dressings of a couple of salmon flies. Both are very easy to tie, for that was one of my aims in devising them. Simple flies that catch salmon.

Hooks: For both I prefer to use Esmond Drury treble fly hooks, sizes 8-14; and I press down the barbs as I return most salmon that I catch.
Thread: Fine orange or red.

Orange Hackle Shrimp
Tail: Sparse bunch of hot orange hair, about twice the length of the fly’s body, plus about four strands orange or pearl Crystal Hair. I used bucktail initially, but now like a more moble hair such as Arctic fox or ‘Icelandic runner’.
Body: Orange floss, with a small thorax of dubbed synthetic fluorescent orange fur at front.
Rib: Fine oval gold tinsel.
Hackle: Henny-cock (i.e. a cock hackle that is not a stiff as a dry fly hackle) dyed hot orange. The hackle fibres should be at least as long as the body.
That is it. Dead easy. As well as lots of salmon throughout the British Isles and Scandinavia, this fly has had some huge sea trout in Sweden.

Orange Mallard Shrimp
Tail: As above.
Body: Tip fluorescent red floss, the rest black floss.
Rib: Oval silver tinsel.
Hackle: Drake mallard breast/flank feather (the finely barred silver feather) dyed hot orange.
Note that you take the tip of the feather by stroking back the rest of the fibres, and tie the feather in by the tip. Make three full turns, and tie it in before snipping away waste. Don’t worry if the thing looks scruffy at this stage. Now pull the fibres back and tie them so that they flow backwards as you create the head of the fly.
Again, easy. This is the fly that I gave to a deeply depressed pal in October and with which he had a brace of biggish salmon that afternoon from the Derwent, and a third the next day on the Border Esk. Tie this also with a yellow hair tail and a mallard feather dyed hot yellow. Sometimes salmon seem to prefer yellow to orange, especially fresh fish straight off the tide. Some years ago, on the Sea Pool of Co. Antrim’s River Bush, I had 19 offers from a large pod of salmon still in the brine. I didn’t land them all, they were so soft-mouthed. But they refused the orange and insisted on the yellow. We got that on video! On another occasion I fished through a pool that I knew had a good head of salmon with the Orange Mallard Shrimp. Nowt, as we say Up North. I tied on the Yellow Mallard Shrimp and had three salmon in an hour.

Happy Christmas, and I’ll be back early in the new year.