Brotherly Bonding

I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday camping in Swaledale with my brother Alex. The objective is really to get together for some "quality time", which in our case means fly-fishing.

The drive to Yorkshire was pretty quick so I was at the rendez-vous point on Ivelet Bridge by 1pm. Alex had the kettle on and so we had a brew-up while I set up my tiny LL Bean rod which Hanna bought for me last year in Maine. Actually, Alex cooked up sausage potatoes and baked beans on the river bank, then we fished and fished until we dropped, catching two or three trout each. The cool, windy overcast conditions meant that there was very little fly life about so rising fish were hard to find.

In the evening we retired to The Farmer's Arms in Muker, where we lulled ourselves to sleep on conversation lubricated with Black Sheep bitter. It rained in the night and dawn more or less broke sometime near lunch so we headed over to Wensley Dale for a cooked breakfast in the market town of Hawes. It was fabulous. The weather looked better down the dale at lower altitudes, so we went to Bainbridge where the river Ure (or Yore) has some long pools that hold grayling as well as trout. As before, there were very few visible fish but we managed to get one or two trout. Grayling took our flies on several occasions, but only tentatively and we never hooked-up.

We had supper at the Farmers Arms, but I stuck to a lighter brew called Muker Silver, which is named after the village silver band and is styled after German or Belgian blonde biers. We were both asleep before 10pm, so we should have been fresh for Friday, but again the weather looked pretty dismal so we headed downstream to Reeth for another full English breakfast followed by a totally fruitless session of "jungle fishing" up a wooded gorge with no path. The pools looked fantastic and we saw lots of wildlife and flowers, but no fish at all.

Finally back to Muker to visit the family graves and then the long drive home. I like to cross to Wensley Dale and follow the river down to Ripon before joining the AI motorway south. It's a beautiful drive through a classic glaciated landscape. All the settlements are basically Norman, so it looks like Brittany.

Meanwhile Alex and Sarah have gone to the Isle of Man for a few days. Nick calls it Craggy Island, not because it is rocky, but because the people there remind him of characters from the Irish TV series, Father Ted (look it up, it's hilarious.)

You can see the slide-show of my Yorkshire visit at http://s255.photobucket.com/albums/hh129/jimstevenson2/Yorkshire%2008/?albumview=slideshow