fishydreams

Listen, I´m a pretty modest bloke most of the time, but it occurred to me that I might actually be the finest living exponent of the the art of fly fishing for the elusive Guadalhorce Nase. Despite my world-beating expertise I have only caught them on my last three outings to the river. The first time I took one on a dry fly and when I looked at the thing I said to myself “what the hell is that?”

On the next couple of visits I had it in mind that I would like to catch some more and I succeeded on both occasions. The most recent adventure took place this evening after I tied up a couple of flies that I thought the nase would approve of. They did. There was nothing special about those flies. They were just small. This brings my tally of Guadalhorce nase up to about a dozen. Surely a world record!

The reason that these fish had eluded me for so long is that they are very modest little critters. Imagine a sardine, well that´s pretty much what we´re talking about. The reason I think I had failed before was that even a modest sized nymph or dry fly is a big thing for the nase to get their mouths around.

That is what encouraged me, as a devoted specialist, to tie up a couple of wee flies on the very smallest hooks I could find lying around. One was a tiny version of my foam winged dry and the other was a little scraggly nymph.

I must thank Paul Reddish who helped me to identify this new species of fish (Pseudochondrostoma willkommii). In Spanish they are called “boga”. They are found on a handful of rivers and they like areas of strong current. Apart from the Guadalhorce, they swim in the Guadiana (Spain and Portugal), Odiel, Guadalquivir, Guadalete and Guadiaro.

On the river this evening I had enough sunlight on arrival to appreciate the a kingfisher´s kaleidoscope of colours as it sat on a riverside stone. Once I broke his skyline, he whirred off at speed flying low over the river.

Nase will rise freely to a small dry, particularly at the instant that it lands, but they are lightning fast and my reactions are simply not sharp enough to hook them unless a little luck comes my way. A surer method seems to be to allow a small nymph to drift with the current and the line to straighten. This may result in a gentle knocks and the odd fish becoming attached.

There are plenty of good barbel in this river but I was, at least initially, happy to do battle with their lilliputian companions. After a while though, I stopped annoying the nase, and instead decided to have a crack at the better barbel in shallow pools further upstream.

How many people fly fish for the Guadlahorce nase? No one I suspect, which makes it pretty easy to be a world beater in this particular field. I don´t expect there is a more successful catcher of the these little silver fish anywhere!

Except, of course, that kingfisher.