fishydreams

One of the nice things about fly fishing is that if things don´t go your way you have an endless supply of things to blame. There´s no need to point out that your lack of success is down to your own ineptitude when you can point out that the wind was blowing too hard, or not hard enough or the the time of the day was all wrong, or it all came down to the unsuitable temperature, phase of the moon or climate change. These, and many others, can be used either singly or in any combination to allow you to blank for the entire season with perfect justification.

Personally, when times are tough I like to blame goats. Goats somehow materialise whenever I go fishing and they amuse themselves by allowing me to creep up into some likely spot before they trample all over the river bank and scare the shit out of any fish I might have had a chance of catching. I can´t complain though because I have a particular fondness for these ruminants and nobody appreciates better than I do their quirky sense of humour. Today, it was the turn of sheep to pull off this particular stunt. Maybe the goats are having a well-earned break.

Today´s flock enveloped much of southern Andalucía. Life is too short to go counting sheep (although insomniacs swear by it) and so I can only give you my best estimate of how many there were. I reckon that there were, give or take, about a hundred million of them.

Never mind. I tracked further upstream to see if there were any fish for the taking. There were a few around but they were pretty lethargic in the mid-afternoon heat. In the end I found some gypsy barbel in shallow margins which were covered in a light dusting of flotsam and two of these accepted a little foam beetle I put together a few days ago.

So there you have it – one beetle, two fish and more sheep than you could shake a stick at.

Look who´s coming

I was about to work a nymph through this water when my old buddies turned up.

You can´t blame them. It´s hot out here.

I managed to shake off my ruminant friends and came across a few fish further upstream.

This is looking a little the worse for wear now but the fish took this dry fly. There´s not much to it, just some hackle and a foam body on a size 12 jig hook.