The Dorado

by John Bailey

Through the good offices of Nick Zoll from Nervous Waters, (listen to his entertaining talk in our podcast library) a trip to Argentina has been facilitated for me. It’s likely to take place in the March upcoming and I’m agog already, planning, collecting gear and seeking out every bit of information that I can about the golden dorado. This is a fish I’ve always fancied. In the photographs they look just so good – a mixture of beauty and menace, delicacy and power. It really is one of those ‘can’t wait’ scenarios!

So, last Friday, when I’m sitting in the library of the Fly Fishers’ Club researching a book that refuses to be written and is two years late already, my eyes light on the classic of these goliaths…there, on the shelf above me stands propped ‘The Dorado’ by J W Hills and G H Harrison. This very rare tome was published in 1932 by Philip Allen and follows up on ‘The Golden River’ of a decade earlier, another classic again revolving around the dorado. Between these two books, all dorado lore was created and I’m not sure that a whole lot has been added since.

What an excuse for me. My research was immediately thrown to one side. A bottle of the Club’s house wine was ordered and I poured myself a foaming glass. I moved to sit by fire and prepare for a treat…a book to die for is in my hands. The Club has had it for three-quarters of a century, I muse. Through whose hands has it passed, I wonder. I feel a shiver down my spine. This is what angling history is all about.

I begin obviously with page one, chapter one – What The Dorado Is…it’s often called the golden salmon but it’s NOT a salmon at all. Rather it’s a member of the characinidae family, inhabiting tropical and sub-tropical South America. Hills writes some great stuff. “He is formed to take his pleasure in racing water…his main colour is what is known as old gold: a deep and yet glowing hue. He attains a length of one metre forty centimetres, between sixty and eighty pounds. You will hear rumours of monsters of fifty kilos or a hundred and ten pounds.”

I’m squirming with delight! I get to the bottom of page nine, I turn over but fumble. I can’t get rid of page twelve. It takes a minute to dawn on me: pages nine and ten and eleven and twelve have never even been cut! The book has sat on these august shelves for seventy years and chapter one has never even been read before!

What do I do? I have no knife or scissors to hand. My fingers are too clumsy to deal with a treasure like this. What do I think? Well, as an author myself (but not in the Hills’ class of course) this is a come-uppance. If an author like Hills isn’t read by an audience of hundreds of Fly Fishers’ members over seven decades, what chance do my books have? I actually get up and shuffle around the room and stumble on a few Bailey books…all suspiciously but understandably pristine! Oh God! Writing…what a conceit! But I compose myself and move on to page twelve and onwards through the book. There are lots more riveting passages…and lots more pages uncut…thirteen and fourteen, twenty-five and twenty-six, and so on and so on. You get the picture.

I said ‘riveting bits’? How stupid is that. The book is a stream of gut-churning excitement. It’s full of brooding dawns and mighty waterfalls. It’s all about a land from a lost world. It’s full of massive fish and heroic battles. How about this one… “The rod hoops to breaking point and the line is humming like a harp string. He was dragged down the river, at one moment allowing himself to be reeled in, then tearing the line savagely off the reel. He had been on for forty minutes and we must have gone down a mile of water, before he swirled up to the top, fifteen yards off, shaking his great head and lashing the agate water into ivory foam. My companion reeled in as fast as he could and I very nearly got a chance with the gaff when down he went again into the invisible depths and the fight was renewed as though it would never end. Finally, after a struggle of one hour and forty minutes, fought out down two miles of water, he had to give in and I gaffed him. The fisherman was nearly as exhausted as the fish.”

When I’m back from my own trip in the spring, I’ll tell you all about it as graphically as I am able. You’ll be the first to know what sort of creature the dorado is. But I won’t be saying a word to any member of the Fly Fishers’…seems they’re not interested in this sort of thing!