My brother Sean and our old angling buddy Mark have just completed their annual pilgrimage to Lough Arrow in search of brown trout. They do this every year but, unfortunately, I am never able to join them for reasons of work and geography. In dribs and drabs they have been sending over information, mainly in the form of Whatsapp messages and emails with attached images and I am piecing together them together. I asked them if I could write a few words about their adventures on this blog and they graciously consented, possibly because they thought that if I said anything they did not approve of nobody would be likely to read it!

When I started writing up my little report I began by detailing what they caught, the flies they used, what the weather was like, and all that kind of thing. But I realised quickly enough that this stuff, while important, is peripheral. Most of what makes these experiences memorable is nebulous and difficult to nail down, but maybe trying to describe what fishing with these guys “feels like” might be the right place to start.

Fish or no fish, there is little you could do that would be more entertaining than spending a day on a boat with characters like these. In a boat, even on a good fishing day, most of the time there is not much happening beyond the routine picking up of line and recasting and this creates the perfect environment for yarn spinning, lying, leg-pulling, mickey-taking, and general tomfoolery. If bullshitting of this kind was ever recognised as an olympic event, as perhaps it should be, Sean and Mark would qualify to represent Ireland and, after the competition, would return to the country as heroes with gold medals around their necks.

The theory of mayfly fishing on an Irish lough is pretty straightforward: you drift in a boat, the wind blows, mayflies hatch and you attach something that looks like one of those mayflies to the end of your leader. Then up comes a trout and gobbles the thing up. It´s as simple as that! And everybody bangs on about how even a noddy with some elementary casting skills should be able to get a few fish into the boat.

Sure! Like many things in fly fishing the reality is different from what everybody says. Any number of things can scupper your efforts. The mayfly can decide to lie low (and then go nuts as soon as you leave!). The wind can drop leaving you marooned, or it can blow a hoolie. The trout may not have read the script and understood the part they are supposed to play in the whole drama. They can, and often do, refuse to play ball, which is downright inconsiderate considering the amount of time, effort and cost everyone has made to catch them.

This year the particular challenge the fishing gods set was to catch fish under cloudless skies and a tropical sun. Several Irish fisheries closed because of the unseasonably high water temperatures. Daytime fishing on Arrow in such conditions would be a bit like flogging a dead horse and so our heroes, adaptable as ever, made the decision to travel further afield and fish the river Boyle and a couple of Loughs in Mayo.

It looks like they had a blast!

Sean took this lovely Arrow brown trout on a spent gnat of his own tying. In the evening small pods of fish would surface to forage briefly and getting a fly among them gave them a decent shot at fish like these.
Mark caught this beautiful fish on the Boyle river. If I remember correctly the fly that did the trick was a Diawl Bach size 14.
Back it goes!

Given the choice, I think we would all opt to fish for wild brown trout but there a several waters where rainbows can be caught and these provide a great alternative if the going gets tough.

Look at the tail on this fish!