fishydreams

If I had had any brains I would not have gone fishing at all yesterday. There were only a couple of hours left before Catriona got home from work and the house needed tidying. But I went anyway, but mindful of the fact that my time on the river would have to be short.

All this has happened before, many times. A decent kind of guy would forego the pleasures of the riverbank and, instead, attend to the chores that accompany marriage, fatherhood and domestic servitude in general. Thankfully, I am made of lesser stuff and so it was off to the Guadalhorce for me while the washing remained in the washing machine and living room looked as though a tornado had passed through it.

Sometimes, though not often, everything seems to just come together when out on the river and that was the way things panned out yesterday. I stepped into the water just upstream of the river´s confluence with the Río Grande.

The river, at this point, is bordered by rushes standing between waist and shoulder height, and it is necessary to work your way to the edge to see into the water. As soon as you break the skyline, or even the thin profile of your rod appears above the rushes, the carp in the shallows become edgy and more often than not your approach, no matter how careful, simply results in a cloud of silt to mark the places the fish had been. I have lost count of how often this has happened in the past.

And exactly the same happened yesterday. A fish close to the margin bolted, and the one or two I had not seen followed suit and I was soon standing in what appeared like an empty river. I didn´t follow the disturbed fish that had swum upstream but just stood still to see if I could spot anything within casting range.

And then I noticed a turbid trail of discoloured water hard on the right bank and reasoned that a carp was likely to be feeding right in the vegetation on the margin. I kept watching and after a few moments, sure enough, the fish edged outwards and came into view.

I pitched a little nymph just upstream a couple of times and on the second or third cast everything went solid. I was surprised because I had not seen the fish move to the nymph and suspected that I might have foul-hooked it. As soon as the fish felt the resistance it worked upstream and the two of us slugged it out for a long time. The fish never ran far and was probably rarely more than 15 metres upstream. It occasionally swam into the vegetation in the margin but never with the kind of conviction to cause real problems.

I managed to work the fish back towards the shallows of the left margin where I figured I had the best chance of beaching it but the carp had strength enough to pass on downstream and I had to land it in a shallow tight into a little island of rushes. Unfortunately the carp had enough depth of water to swim into the rushes and I thought I had lost it. I followed the leader with my hand down to the tippet and was expecting to find the little nymph deposited in the rushes. This is a little trick that gypsy barbel occasionally pull off. Instead, as my finger and thumb followed the tippet into thick vegetation I felt the head of the fish and managed to get my hands around it and haul it out. The nymph had been taken well and was a couple of inches inside the mouth and the barbless hook slipped out easily as I carried the fish to the bank where I could take a photograph or two.

To a carp fisherman, a fish like this will not raise any eyebrows but from a little river like this one, this carp was pretty decent and I was over the moon at having landed it.

Just before I released it I held it into the current so that it could catch its breath again and I could catch mine. In the shallows you could see every olive scale along its broad back, the raised nostrils, the thin pink margin on the edge of the operculum and you could see its eyes swivelling above its wide, pale mouth. It was as pretty as a picture and I thought to take a photograph of the fish as it regained its strength. But this was just a moment for the two of us and I decided against it. After a short while the rhythm of its gill movements steadied and the fish was fully recuperated. It eased itself out from between the hands that supported it and, unhurriedly, made its way upstream and was gone.

After manhandling the fish grounded in the rushes I had a chance to lay it down and have a better look at it.

A very handsome carp.

This is the little nymph the fish accepted. It is looking a little weary after its adventure but, to be honest, it was never too beautiful to look at even in the flower of its youth.