My brother Sean says that you should never pass up a chance to go swimming in the sea and, true to this philosophy, he will leap into the cold Atlantic whenever he has a chance along with his kids. It takes some cojones to do this and, because the Atlantic is cold as hell even in summer. Those cojones, however large they might have been to start out are bound to take a hit, becoming greatly diminished in size once immersed in icy seawater. View full article »
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Yesterday I went fishing with my son. This has become a pretty rare treat and we probably now only manage to fish together once or twice a year. The fishing was slow, as it happens. We had only one fish between us and Leo caught it. View full article »
This morning I had a couple of decent bass in the Conde del Guadalhorce reservoir at El Chorro. It is a long time since I had a good bass and they were taken on successive casts. Those big bass seem to be like London buses. There is an interminable wait before two of them turn up at the same time! View full article »
I fished the Guadalhorce the other day with Johan Terblanche who is a veteran of previous campaigns on the river. After we had set up our gear at the cars and just before we each headed to our chosen piece of water I took a picture with my phone and when we took a look at the photo we both agreed that we looked remarkably cool.
There wasn´t much else that was remarkably cool though. We fished through the hotter hours of the afternoon and relied on some wet wading and an pretty steady upstream breeze to prevent us from cooking. View full article »
My brother Sean joined Mark McCann this year for their annual mayfly fishing sortie on Lough Arrow. He caught a very fine trout this year and sent me a picture at the time but I was hoping he might find time to write a few words about the trip before I put something on the blog. View full article »
The Nore runs up past the village of Inistioge in County Kilkenny and has a good reputation as a trout and salmon river. I have not yet caught a salmon or had the chance to fish for one but I do have a soft spot for our old pal Salmo trutta and was keen to see if I could catch a few. View full article »
There are three pubs in Inistioge which, as it happens, is just one more than the number of churches. On the face of it, it seems that there must be a pretty virtuous community there. After all in your average Irish town the pubs outnumber the churches by about a million to one. View full article »
Every now and again Catriona has to travel with her job and she abandons me for a few days. She away at the moment and so I have the place to myself. The Spanish have an expression for when a bloke is left to his own devices like this. They say of whoever is liberated in this way that he “esta de Rodriguez”. I don´t know how widely used the expression is even here in Spain. I used it once or twice on the natives and they looked at me as if I had two heads. Incidentally, the guy who told me about the expression is a colleague of mine called Julio Rodriguez. Maybe he was pulling my leg. I wouldn´t put it past him. View full article »
