We all went out for a late lunch today and afterwards nobody was up to much. Grandad was soon crashed out on the sofa and Trinny and Pippa settled down to watch something on the telly while Leo was plugged into youtube. With everybody else happily occupied, or fast asleep, it struck me that this might be a good time to tie up a couple of flies and sneak out to the river to see what the fish were up to. Continue reading
Category: Fish and fishing
Yesterday I went off to Concepción reservoir with my son Leo to see if we might catch a black bass or two. The prospects were looking good and the level of the reservoir is as highs as I have seen it. When we arrived we saw a guy out on a float tube. He was out after bass too but fishing more conventionally with lures. Leo and I, of course, are purists and target bass only with flies. We are also, as it turned out, pretty crap fishermen having taken only one fish between us! Continue reading
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”. Continue reading
Everybody knows that cool people take millions of “selfies” and send them out to their flocks of admirers. You just need to look at the Daily Mail to see that the beautiful people out there are busy taking photos of themselves and that the images they capture, which usually portray them wearing little or nothing, become instant “news.”
Inspired by the success of the celebrities in the media, I thought I might boost my own profile by posting some selfies of my own (I could become another Kardashian!)
You will be pleased and relieved to hear that I will refrain from parading in my underwear.
Check out my selfies below: Continue reading
The way things work around our way is that if you don´t have internet you can´t watch the telly, or at least you can´t watch British telly. Most of the time this is no great loss but things are different during the spring when the six nations is underway and the best rugby teams in the northern hemisphere are slugging it out.
On Sunday the internet signal was on the blink and I had no way of watching the Ireland England game at home. What was more, the few guys who had been talking of meeting up to watch it over a pint called it off for one reason or another. Continue reading
An odd thing happened this afternoon. I spent a couple of hours on the Río Grande seeing if I could catch a barbel and did catch one in the end in a rather unexpected way. Continue reading
I used to work with this guy a long time ago and he told me an interesting little story one time. He had left home when he was only sixteen and his old man had a word with him as he was setting forth into the big wide world. His Dad said “Son, you´re going to be on your own now and it will be up to you decide how you live your life. The only thing that I would ask of you is that you steer well clear of incest and morris dancing!”
Fair enough! I just remembered that story today as I was driving to the river and I regretted having had no similar words of guidance to offer Leo when he headed off to university in October. Mind you “steer clear of incest and morris dancing” – who could improve on that? Continue reading
A couple of good things happened yesterday. First, I had a chance to meet up with Steven Lawler, another fishing nut living not a million miles away and, second, I had a chance to take a look at a new reservoir in Cadiz province. The reservoir is Zahara, a fine piece of water and sitting in very pretty countryside. In fact both events were related. Steven is familiar with Zahara and has taken a lot of bass here and he was kind enough to meet up to show me around. Interestingly, there are smallmouth as well as largemouth bass in Zahara and, according to Steven, the smallmouth make up the majority of captures.
At this time of year the bass are unwilling to play ball and we figured that pike might turn out to be our best bet. Unfortunately nobody told the pike that they had been scripted into the little drama we were hoping would unfold. The pike, it turned out, had other plans and only the sunken trees showed any interest in swallowing the pike flies we threw around. Continue reading
