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Thinking about it now, it seems very strange that it took me so long to discover the little stretch of river I fished yesterday. The river itself, the Río Turón, is not very far from home and apparently it has always been there! I guess the truth is, whenever I had been in that part of the world, I have been tempted into fishing the margins of the Conde del Guadalhorce reservoir and it is into reservoir that the Turón flows, ending its 40 kilometer journey from its source in the Sierra de Las Nieves.

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You may have noticed that I have been very quiet for some time on the subject of my own local river, the Río Guadalhorce. The simple truth is that it has been through some hard times in recent years but there are signs now, happily, that it is beginning to pull through. The river dried out in the summer of 2023 following a period of drought and the fish dropped back into whatever deeper pools they could find, or down towards the estuary.

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They say that an early morning swim in the sea is a good cure for a hangover and so at 08.00 yesterday we dragged ourselves to the stony beach by the harbour at Hastings and launched ourselves into the waters of the English Channel to test this particular theory.

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I wasn’t the first person to notice how good Carmelo is at spotting fish in the river. I imagine that most of his clients point this out to him. Carmelo and I were born within a year of each other and, being of a certain age, we might be expected to struggle somewhat in the eyesight department. This is certainly true for me, but it is not at all true of Carmelo. Few situations reveal deteriorating eyesight as clearly as tying tiny dry flies or attaching them to fine tippet, yet Carmelo can do all of this without the aid of glasses. When we discussed this, he pointed out that his mother, now 103, can still read the newspaper without spectacles. I guess it’s all in the genes.

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The weedbeds and shallows of the Embalse del Ebro are full of carp and yet you wouldn’t know it. Most have the good sense to conceal themselves, many in the thickest parts dense beds of weeds. Occasionally they reveal rubbery lips at the surface or the arched surface of their backs between the head and dorsal fin. More often than not, you will not see them at all. What really really gives them away is the kissing sounds they produce as they slurp under a giant tangled green blanket. And those kissing sounds seem to be coming from everywhere. It is like you just walked in on a Roman orgy! 

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A couple of nights back I tied up some flies for black bass. They were as ugly as Cinderella´s sisters and, even worse, there are three of them! Whatever the aesthetic shortcomings of these flies, I doubt it will have much bearing on whether the bass decide to eat them. Bass have history for ingesting any kind of thing when the mood takes them. They are not the wine connaisseurs who will take a tentative sip only after rolling it around in a glass and sniffing it. They don´t even drink wine. They don´t know what it is. It is beer for them and they slug it straight out of the bottle.

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A little over a week ago, I spent a few days in Ireland with my brother and my mum. In the mornings, before the others surfaced, I would head out for an hour or two and watch the day breathe life into the fields beside the quiet country road to Portlaw.

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If a person had even half a brain, they would not have given a second’s consideration to walking from Reinosa to Fontibre yesterday afternoon. The rain did not let up for even a moment, and that would have come as no surprise to any of those half-brained people who had kept an eye on the weather. So yesterday afternoon — as you will not be surprised to hear — I decided to leave Reinosa and walk to the source of the River Ebro at Fontibre.

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The last time Paul Reddish and I were together in the north of Spain he was kind enough to extend an invitation to fish for grayling on a chalk stream back in the UK and, never having caught a grayling or fished on a chalk stream, I would have been crazy not to take him up on his offer.

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Paul Reddish and I were in Cervera de Pisuerga the other day, a mountain town in the province of Palencia in northern Spain. We paused briefly on the street to count how many griffon vultures were circling overhead. We more or less agreed on our best guess — twenty-five and then, when we lowered our gaze again to street level, to our surprise, we found ourselves staring straight into the window of a fishing tackle shop.

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