FISH ON!
The Silence of the Stars
Pat O'Reilly extols the virtues of sea-trout fishing
It is midnight, and over a silver stream a gaunt moon glides between wispy cloud-ships becalmed in an azure sea. An owl calls half-heartedly, as if to rend an otherwise seamless silence more than in hope of any reply. Beneath a leaning alder a shadow twists and turns restlessly. By day she has lain patiently, head among the roots: now is her hour. Shuffle position, settle, shuffle, then settle again until something, an indefinable something, says the moment is right. It is time to leave the silent underwater world, to tear in tatters that other alien silence, the silence of the stars.
Up she comes: bold head, sleek body, thrashing tail. The crystal mirror shatters, stars multiply, explode, collapse - a million light years reduced to a wink. The twisting shadow glints ghost-like in the steely light as, sinews arching, she falls back to her watery domain. Star particles meet and reunite, shudder, and return to their accustomed orbits. The show is over. Next performance? Any minute now. And so it goes on through the night, throughout the summer and into autumn on a hundred rivers and streams here in West Wales, for this is the showground of the shyest of show-offs in the world.
In Scotland, a fish means a salmon; anything else is unworthy of the name. On the chalk streams of southern England the brown trout reigns supreme and lesser species, if tolerated at all, are treated with disdain. Further north, old enemies Yorkshire and Lancashire unite in their reverence of the lovely grayling, the Lady of the Stream. But here on the western coast of Wales there is a game fish the like of which, either by name or nature, can be found nowhere else in the British Isles. Our pride is the silver sewin, the secretive sea trout, which runs in from the surf and up the majestic rivers Teifi and Towy, and the lovely little Nevern, the Taf and Daucleddau - up into the tiniest of nants and pills - in search of clean gravel on which to spawn.
Who knows why a brown trout should suddenly decide to leave its brothers and sisters and run away to sea? Its mother will probably have been a prodigal trout, a sewin, but its father is as likely to have been a stay-at-home brown trout. And who knows how a sewin can return not just to the same river of its birth but to the very same pool, year after year, to spawn future generations which will either go nowhere at all or, one March morning, dash out to sea with thousands of like-minded brethren as if in a mass tantrum.
On sea-trout rivers, summer days are a time for siesta. Fishermen rarely sally forth until the sun has slipped beyond the rim and tall shadows have faded into a colourless background. But as the last blood of a dying sunset soaks into the horizon, solitary folk with rods and lines slink across the meadows to their favourite pools or gentle glides, there to settle and wait and watch as kingfishers roost and otters seek their suppers. Then, when six bats say the night is dark enough, they cast their flies onto the calm surface, searching for the resting places of the unseen sewin.
The beauty of these wild rivers is not lost on the nocturnal fishermen of Wales. What strange attraction it is that binds them to the loneliest reach below a rocky gorge, or a glide beneath tall oaks whose boughs meet in mid-stream straining the starlight so thinly that a hand before the face is visible only as a faint shimmer. The long trek from the town is part of the mental preparation for nocturnal sewin fishing, for it is a sport demanding intense concentration as the angler watches his pale line drift round with the gentle current.
When it takes the fly, a sewin may either move the 
line no more than the thickness of a thumbnail or wrench from the angler's hand with unparalleled venom. Then, as the rod arcs skyward, battle is joined and the odds are heavily in favour of the sewin making it to the safety of some root filled bolthole. The rewards, for those with the iron nerve to stand, in the dead of night, in a wild spate river alone and severed from the umbilical of civilisation, are great: no fish dish can compare with fresh Welsh sewin baked in cream or grilled with flaked almonds.
Scientists tell us that the trout of England, Ireland and Wales are all of the same species, but each river has its own genetic strain of sea-trout and there must be something special in the water here: nowhere have I met such ferocious fighters as the sewin of West Wales.