The fly fishing world recently lost a legend, with the passing of Steve Rhodes — a lifelong champion of wild fish. We were honoured to receive a very thoughtful gift of £265 in Steve’s memory, which was kindly donated by his wife Barbara and some of his many firm friends. In celebration of an exceptional man, Steve’s friend Chris McCully shares his fond memories in this guest blog.
Anglers in Yorkshire and far beyond will be the poorer for the absence of Steve Rhodes from the waterside – and from their counsels. Steve was a passionate and thoughtful advocate of angling for many kinds of wild fish, but it was wild brown trout and grayling which came to occupy much of his time and affection. This advocacy and interest wasn’t coincidental: from youth, Steve had fished with his father, who instilled in him a love for the countryside. It was this love he later passed on not only to Barbara, whom he met when she was 17 and who later became his wife, but also shared with a wide circle of angling and shooting friends.
Steve’s ability to contextualise his fishing, to make it a part of a wider vision of ecological management, became ever more a part of his trenchant advocacy of wild fish and fishing. Beginning with early experiences on the banks of his local River Aire and on the Leeds-Liverpool canal, then running through times spent at Malham Tarn with his father, or on the banks of Yorkshire’s canals and stillwaters fishing for roach or pike, Steve served a deep and enviable angling apprenticeship.
Such accumulated skill, together with his knowledge of the countryside in general, later underpinned Steve’s roles within the Grayling Society (of which he was Yorkshire Area Secretary and later, chair — 2006 – 13) and within the prestigious Appletreewick, Barden and Burnsall Angling Club (ABBAC), whose waters on the River Wharfe Steve knew intimately. When in later life he gave up what he called his ‘proper job’ as office manager and, with Dave Martin, developed Go Flyfishing UK in 2002, it was on the Wharfe that he so often guided his clients.
He was persuaded from those encounters, together with data accrued from the River Ribble, the Wild Trout Trust and elsewhere, that stocking of brown trout on the ABBAC reaches of the Wharfe was not only unnecessary but detrimental to the wider ecology of the river. Eventually, ABBAC stopped stocking the Wharfe altogether. That policy resulted not only in enhanced stocks of brown trout (some of them bigger fish than had been expected under the then ‘new’ policy), but also, to everyone’s delight, increased stocks of grayling.
At Malham, too, Steve played a role in maintaining an angling presence on the tarn. In 2021 when the National Trust put the fishing out to tender, Steve, as a member of Friends of Malham Tarn, helped implement the protocols that would allow anglers to continue to relish the tarn’s challenges. Fishing Malham with Steve was one of life’s unique pleasures, and it wasn’t just the quality of the pork pies or Barbara’s lemon drizzle cake: it was like angling in the company of an almanac of great Yorkshire anglers of the recent past and present, nearly all of whom Steve knew or had personally fished with.
As ever, a deep knowledge of the ecology of the tarn drove Steve’s angling strategy, and he came to prefer fishing traditional loch-style or with a team of two or three dry flies in order to tempt the tarn’s exceptional and often dour trout. Dry sedges were often on his leader from July onwards, and he sometimes forwarded scientific papers about Malham’s trichoptera to his angling friends. He was never backwards about coming forwards, and endured our often pithy responses with great good humour. He also caught more trout, and more big trout, than any of us, particularly at Malham. A string of wild trout between 4 – 6lb came to his net on that most difficult of waters, and the biggest trout he released there pushed 7lb.
I can’t remember ever fishing with Steve without laughing, or without learning something. He will be greatly missed.
