Cardiff - The Taff

After two hundred years battling down the pit, the people of South Wales had to go fifteen brutal rounds with Thatcher. What’s left; a washed-up, punch-drunk shoulda-woulda-coulda-been? Fuck off, this is Wales boyo, and if you don’t kill them in fifteen rounds they come out on top. They’ve got a pristine river running right through their capital that puts London to shame. Once little more than an open sewer, a method of cooling industrial parts and running slag out to sea, it’s being put to better use now.

A word of warning: The river that runs through Cardiff is called the Taff. It’s best to remember that an English mouth loudly pronouncing ‘taff’ in Cardiff is soon likely to be filled with fist. But why do the Welsh call their capital river after an anti-Welsh racial epithet? It would be like the French calling The Seine ‘The Frog’, like the Irish calling The Liffey ‘The Mick’, like the Nigerians calling The Niger ‘The… Well, you get the idea. Wales is a foreign country though, and that’s why. You can tell the moment you arrive at Cardiff Central train station. The signs tell you you’re at Caerdydd Canolog. If you look across from platform 1, you’ll see, yes, platform 0, perhaps the only platform 0 in the world. And the people sing so well, how do they do it? They have the most beautiful accent in Britain. It always a pleasant novelty when Americans stop you, mid-conversation, to tell you how much they like your accent. For me, that is Wales. The girl with the best legs in the world berated me as I walked through the centre of the city in my flip flops, carrying my waders on Saturday night. ‘Apparently, some people don’t know it’s Saturday.’ It wasn’t the legs, honest, but I could listen to that voice say anything, she could read Jordan’s biography out to me and have me in raptures.

All right, all right, I realise I’ve waxed lyrical, but I’ve been to Wales and changed my ways.

Arthur Bale and Sons run a fishing and air gun shop at 166a Richmond Road. They have a limited selection of fly fishing gear. Tel. 029 20499889. They sell the permits for The Taff. I asked the guy all about the best spots and he told me freely. The other guy in the shop gave him dirty looks and head shakes. I noticed. The game was up. The guy serving me turned to his colleague, and said “It’s all right, he’s a trout man”. The permit is £12 a day, which is steep for urban fishing. This may be a reflection that you have a fair chance of a salmon or sea trout. The season ticket at £60 is only five times the day ticket price, heavily favouring locals. The permit covers the low tidal water, but this is almost a stillwater, and brackish with high banks and no casting so I avoided it. Walk upstream from the Millennium Stadium to the red bridge in Cardiff Castle’s park. The fishing begins around here. There is a very wide beach above which there are boulders and the water begins to run. A word of warning: Scum kids collect at this beach, and what with there being so many stones to hand, they find it hard to resist throwing some at fly fishermen (this happened to me both days with separate groups of kids. I learned some valuable life lessons.

1 – Pikey kids do not respond well to being asked to stop, and the word ‘please’ is unknown to them.
2 – Finding good throwing stones on the bottom of a river is not nearly as easy as doing it on a beach.
3 – Throwing stones while wading on a slippery bottom holding a rod in the other hand with a bag on your back does not result in optimum power and range.
4 – Throwing wet stones is really hard, the whole index finger purchase thing doesn’t work.

So, I stayed dry and didn’t get hit, but it was not a great experience. Avoid the beach unless you’ve got more street presence than me (I’ve got a bit of face, but less than Ray Winstone, you slag). The rest of the stretch is tree-lined and has few stones, and the kids don’t congregate there.

I also saw some kids throwing stones at a swan. A legal question: Are the swans of Wales still The Queen’s property? I know that killing a swan in England is an act of treason (it attracts me to the crime) but is throwing a stone at one in Wales also a minor form of treason? You can never find a Beefeater when you want one, can you?

The Taff is decidedly more Ali G than Aled Jones, but don’t let that put you off. For most of the stretch up to the weir (the end of the permit) it is like being in the countryside. It is extremely lightly fished, the water is clear and pure, there is very little debris. It’s hardly urban fly fishing at all. Actually, there’s a bowls club, where one ancient geezer asked another how he did it, and the other replied “I is a machine is all”. Which was very Ali G if you say it right, and Aled Jones if you don’t, and there aren’t many things that fall into that dual opposition.

The only problem for me is that it is filled with chub. I hate chub with a passion. I don’t hate them because they’re ugly, though goddamn they are ugly, I don’t hate them for their cotton-wool-tasting flesh, or their gin-trap bone structure. I hate them because they have no heart. When you hook a pike it fights like a bastard and then gives up, only to fight again moments later. Trout of any size will always, always freak out when you try to net them or bring them very close to you. They will always dig deep and find something, and freedom is what they find a frustrating amount of the time. Not chub. Maybe they’re depressed and tired of living, so they’ll readily swim into your hand or net. And The Taff is full to the rafters of chub. I only caught a few fish day one, but on the second day I must have caught forty of my bogey species, which is a bit of a shame. Another fisherman told me he once fished The Taff all season and didn’t get a brown trout until July.

On a brighter note I got a grayling of a couple of pounds, my biggest ever. Also a tiny dace. If you fancy the chance of a salmon or, god forbid, like chub, you could do a lot worse. It’s a very easy river to fish, good for beginners. I think the Birchgrove Angling Society could afford to look at their stocking policy, they’ve got a gem of a river that makes Fly Guy jealous of their capital city, it needs so little to make it brilliant.

Price: £12 a day. Steep.
Price/quality ratio: Could be better.
Quality: 5/10
Chavtastic: Hell, yes! Avoid the beach, unless you’ve been unfaithful to your husband and feel that a good stoning will help clear the air.
Debris: Surprisingly little. The classics were there, two shopping trolleys, two traffic cones, one kid’s bike.
Water quality/smell: Almost gin-clear, no scum, pretty pure, no smell.
Wildlife: Enough mink to make a nice coat out of, rich bird life.