fishydreams

Big brown trout are hard to come by, or at least, I find them hard to come by. And so I am full of admiration for people who are able to catch them consistently. One person who has caught a shed load of large trout is Dennis Moss and he wrote an interesting account of one of his big fish, taken in Lough Arrow, in his book “Irish Rise”.

The capture of this particular fish struck a particular chord with me because I have tried to take fish on Arrow myself a few times in the last few years and drawn a blank each time.

I managed to get in touch with Dennis and we have exchanged some correspondence over the last few weeks. The lovely trout that Dennis caught was a male and he describes it as a having “Autumn” colours.

I asked Finny Dodd, who knows a great deal the lough and its trout, about the colour of the Arrow trout. He told me that on the fish really do colour up around spawning time but that it is more noticeable in the females. On the redds the sexes often be told apart by colour alone.

Here is a photograph that Dennis sent me of his Arrow trout. The fish was duly returned to the lough after the photograph was taken. I have attached also a photo of my watercolour painting. I realise, of course, that nothing I can do is ever going to look as pretty as the real thing.

The painting

The real thing!