December has just started and I realise I have never written, as I had planned, about the way another month ended. That month is not the November that has just slipped by but the October that preceded it. The last couple of hours of daylight were, for me, the highlight of the whole month. View full article »
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Things are pretty challenging on the river at this time of the year. The gypsy barbel seem to have abandoned the old haunts they prefer in the warmer months and are sulking, unseen in the deeper water. View full article »
There are nine species of barbel in Spain which makes it something of a European hotspot. The UK by contrast has only one (Barbus barbus) which is not found in Spain at all. John Langridge and I have fished for my local gypsy barbel on many several occasions on my local river, the Guadalhorce, and his book Fishing for Spanish Barbel is the definitive guide on the subject of Spanish barbel. View full article »
Paul Reddish and I went out to see if we could catch an enigmatic little fish on our recent adventure in Valencia. This is a nase which has a distribution limited to a couple of regions in this area. To the best of my knowledge it doesn´t have a common English name and scientists pin it down with a binomial that seems much more substantial than a little fish like this deserves: Parachondrostoma turiense. View full article »
If you suffer from low blood pressure and are advised to reverse that tendency an excellent remedy is to go about procuring a fishing license in Valencia as Paul Reddish and I discovered on Monday morning. View full article »
I have made a rule not to talk about politics on this blog. After all, if like me you follow the shambolic events in Westminster, you don´t need any other pundit putting in their tuppence worth. Nobody can agree on anything. People lie. People obfuscate. And, miraculously, we can remain bored, frustrated, hopeful and despairing all at the same time. What a circus! View full article »
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 »
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 »
