The art of patience

“Somebody is out there waiting for that hatching nymph,” says Ray Curran, eyes riveted on my tiny, pink tuft drifting on water as still as a millpond. 

We’re standing waist-deep in waders in Tasmania’s Macquarie River through the kind of drowsy, insect droning day that would induce a stupor were it not for the unshakeable optimism of this man.

Ray Curran is an experienced fly-casting instructor who owns Red Tag Trout Tours, so there’s no doubting his tale about wild brown trout that erupt from the water, curve into the air to hang for a breathtaking second at the top of an arc, then fall back to vanish as a mercurial shadow. I cannot imagine how a lure less than a centimetre could excite such madness, but a myriad of tiny bugs are drifting in the warm air, and Curran is pointing with urgency under a bended willow. 

This river runs through the Tasmanian northern midlands, clear as gin in parts, murky as a swamp in others, but it isn’t given to everyone to see into these secret places. “Now!” Curran exclaims, suddenly. He’s pointing at radiating circles of rippling water that look as if a shower of pebbles has been tossed across the surface.

As instructed, I whip my thin carbonite rod behind, arc it forwards, let the line rise then fall over water like the shuttle of a spinning wheel. The fly hovers on its gossamer thread in the glare of the sun, then pings off Curran’s sunglasses, hooking his pocket with impressive precision.

Catching my guide isn’t the done thing and he mentions the ‘c’ word again - “concentration” - while delicately unpicking my hook from his vest. 

“Try for the midstream,” he suggests. I cast again, watching as a gracefully burnished loop of line as thin as a cobweb dances in the breeze then plops, limpidly, into a reed bed. “I’m sorry,” I say, mortified by an appalling lack of technique. “Don’t say sorry,” replies Curran. “You’re excited and I don’t blame you.” 

Is that what this is? Excitement? I’m certainly charged with something standing next to an infinitely patient instructor, a first responder to the Port Arthur massacre, who worked for decades with the Tasmania police search and rescue squads. Happiness has come to him through 30 years of taking trout at the end of a fly rod but, surely, he’s deluded thinking I’m going to catch a whopper. 

Tasmania lures a steady stream of anglers to its network of rivers and lakes for some of the best fly fishing in the world. Some ardent anglers live double lives as celebrities, novelists, billionaires or heads of state and most benefit by having a guide for an insiders’ introduction to favoured fishing spots. 

The Macquarie River flows through a world of buzzing insects with a symmetry all its own but it’s little known unless you’re an angler or a midland local. The river flows through the town of Ross before reaching its confluence with the South Esk River near Longford.

The land through which we meander on a serpentine stretch of water is only accessible to the occasional angler (shearers, farmers, Scottish comedian Billy Connolly) by permission of the owner Jon McCure. His sweet-natured son, Hugo, joins us as an eager first-timer taking to the sport like, well, a duck to water. It’s a new skill for the boy who was born to hunt but he’s never seen the river like this before. The teenager is engrossed by nature. No phone in sight.

We wade upstream, silently, unwinding the delicate balance between too much and too little power in the graceful flick and whip of the cast.

Curran uses what he calls the Goldilocks approach. “It’s neither too strong nor too soft but in the middle – it's just right – same as porridge." I’m trying to remember not to bend my wrist, not to throw the line or send it backwards past two o’clock, then release the line at 10 o’clock having delayed the forward movement until the line streams horizontally behind, but fly fishing isn’t just about catching fish.

It's about understanding the subtle dance between water and insect and trout. Curran spells out the acronym KOCPIT. “Knowledge. Observation. Concentration. Positioning. Imitation. Timing. This is the secret to fly fishing.”

He carries boxes of flies, concoctions of feathers and silk artfully constructed as facsimiles of delicate nymphs, mimicking the larval stage of insects coming up to the surface to hatch. Each is designed to deceive and entice, ‘emergers’ like mayflies or midges poised to break through the water's surface, or dry flies that float like insects upstream.

"Some days," he says, pulling out a grasshopper fly, "the fish will want this. Other days, they'll ignore everything you offer and that's the beauty of it." 

He demonstrates how to choose the right fly with such meticulous attention to detail that it brings forth the memory of Ernest Hemingway's hero in The Old Man and the Sea who waited 84 days to catch his fish. 

That’s exactly the right moment to propose “Lunch?” We bask on a river bank with a thermos of coffee and pies from the woodfired oven of nearby Ross Village Bakery, going since the 1860s in the historic town that lies 78kms south of Launceston. 

The lazy afternoon stretches ahead with Curran seeking out river erogenous zones, stroking the wind, lingering in deeper pools. There isn’t a flicker of a fish but we will stay till sunset, so long as the wind doesn’t rise to whip the surface into a frenzy of wavelets, driving the insect life from the water and bringing our quest to an end. 

"One last cast before we all turn in?" offers Curran, finally. “I don’t understand why there are no fish but I’ve a feeling the cormorants got here before us.” 

Calling it a day means that neither Hugo, nor I, will feel the pull of a wild trout fighting until it flops, exhausted, into a landing net. 

"I never tell anybody that they've done badly," Curran says, reeling in my line. "I might say, 'Look, that was okay, but you can do better.'" 

I can certainly do better but Curran is almost congratulatory. “You’re getting the hang of it,” he says, taking hold of my rod to trudge along the old railway line, across fields dotted with sheep, towards a handsome convict-built homestead next to its own small lake. 

We will stay the night here, at Old Wetmore, a magically peaceful lodging walled by a stone courtyard, a property settled by Europeans in 1824. Old Wetmore is a rural refuge in the heart of the Tasmania’s northern midlands, 78km south of Launceston, 10 minutes’ drive south of the historic town of Ross. The historic convict-built sandstone homestead can accommodate up to eight people and has been thoughtfully modernised with luxurious comforts on a working sheep farm. Nightly rates start from $455 (for the first couple).

The heavy timber door is unlocked and, in the kitchen furnished with cosy rustic flair, a fire has been laid. 

A kind-of do-it-yourself communal dinner will be shared at a long timber table. 

Fly anglers who are not vegetarian nor vegan, nor otherwise bound by the code of ‘catch and release’, may see this as an extension of the farm-to-table movement, but we do not. Had we caught our fish, we would have released it, so we’ll dine on roasted venison while entertained by anecdotes about fly-fishing addicts and trophy catching women who have taken to the sport in droves.

Globe-trotting fly-fishing enthusiasts travel the world for a wild fish at the end of rod in Patagonia (South America), Montana (USA), Taupo (New Zealand). Many of them, like us, will have nothing to show for their pectoral pleasure apart from the reflective passing of time and more thoughtful environmental consciousness. 

Wild brown trout are cunning and it’s a challenge to catch one. For Curran, the greater the familiarity, the deeper the mystery, because no matter how many years put into it: “We are always learning”.

Nobody gets into fly fishing because it’s the easiest, simplest, most efficient or cheapest way to catch a fish. The unattainability of perfection brings with it the simple necessity to relax. 

And more than that, to imagine that in this game of chance and hope, stepping into murky waters where there’s a brilliance beneath the surface, there’s a wild trout just waiting there for me.

The trout fishing season in Tasmania runs from August until April. Red Tag Trout Tours with Ray Curran arranges guided river fishing (with all equipment) starting at $755 a day including tuition, equipment, food and transport.