Michael Daunt, who died at age 81, was a leading fisherman instructor, author, and journalist. In his time, he taught Spey salmon and brown-trout casting to celebrities including Eric Clapton, Jeremy Paxman, Guy Ritchie, and Ronnie Corbett.
A convivial figure and a raconteur, he was known to family and friends as “The Bounder,” a soubriquet in which he reveled.
LINK (via The Sydney Morning Herald)
Knew the man briefly in the early 1980s, when as an impecunious young flyfisher, I had been offered a “Rod” on a famous old trout fishery on the River Kennet (think J.W. Dunne’s book, “Sunshine and the Dry Fly”). I told the English Gentleman who had very kindly offered it to me that it was beyond my limited means by the order of 50% – that I could just about meet half the annual outlay by not penny more.
“Find yourself someone suitable to take and pat for a Half Rod with you, and the rod is yours, Paul…”
So I phone up a good many years older than myself, very well-connected fishing pal I had made after he had attended a talk on Trout fishing in Kashmir that I had given in London a year or so earlier, Peter Deane, the great flydresser, the man who invented the Frances salmon fly (named after his lady flytyer who tied so many of them for him – some call it the Francis nowadays, but it really should be Frances)….
“I know just the man, Paul….”
Michael Daunt.
I met him at his local “watering hole”, a small but very smart public house in London’s Chelsea, where he made me drink as much as he was drinking and so able to match his patircian English motormouth fishy raconteuring (I could do that sort of thing fairly convincingly and make people howl with laughter – I did Winston Churchill’s daughter, Lady Mary Soames, once, but she managed to dab her eyes with a hanki and tighten her lips then crease up and have to do the same again a minute later when the joke re-hit her, years later – if the mood took me and the company felt right back then).
So Michael took half of my Rod.
We never actually fished together on the Kennet, or anywhere else for that matter, but we shared occasional riotously chatty and gossipy phonecalls for the next couple of years or so.
Quite a “character” by all accounts.
Boote out.
PS – a few typos in the hastily typed above – “pay” … “hankie” etc. I won’t correct them – you can see where they are.