Yesterday evening my son Leo and I went off to the river to see if we might be able to catch a carp. Leo has accepted an offer to study Management at the University of York and will be off within a month. He may well join a fly fishing club if the university has one. If not there is always squash, the gym, or the swimming club (he is eyeing up the University´s 50m breast stroke record and is our school´s record holder for this distance.) Personally, I would advise him to sing in a band. He has a great voice. Girls always seem to have the hots for the lead singers of bands. If I were young and single and was not the owner of a voice box like that of a frog in a swamp I know what I would do!
Category: Fish and fishing
My wife unexpectedly suggested yesterday evening that I wander off to the river for the last couple of hours of daylight. The alternative was sitting around watching Doctor Who on the telly and so I jumped at the chance. I was also keen to see if the curse of Madonna, which had destroyed my fishing prospects in the morning, had finally been lifted.
I decided to fish the reach of the river closest to home, very close to the confluence of the Guadalhorce and the now largely dry Río Grande. I was hoping for a carp and knew of a good pool where I had seen them in the past. I was hoping also that the last hour of light might have them throw caution to the wind and settle down to feed and, sure enough, there were several fish stationed at the head of the silt trails which indicate that the carp are not only present but are feeding.
I managed to catch one of these carp and it was a beautiful strong fish. This carp was quite preoccupied with feeding and was doing that curious “mud shuffle” motion where it rocked from side to side, its upper back sometimes coming clear of the water. Continue reading
I tend to use the car radio as a predictor of the quality of the fishing. If Kiss FM comes up with a string of decent tunes I feel confident that the fish will be biting and things are going to pan out just fine.
Today I slapped on the radio and out came Material Girl by Madonna. I should have just done a U turn there and then.
“Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me
I think they’re O.K.
If they don’t give me proper credit
I just walk away”
For Christ´s sake, what a load of crap! Continue reading
Yesterday evening turned out to be as good as I could have asked for. The shadows were lengthening when I got to the river and I figured on about and hour and a half or so of decent fishing light.
August seems to be the month for carp on the Guadalhorce. I remember making much the same observation last year. The barbel resolutely refused to play ball and, even in shallow runs where they will often grab at a passing nymph, they were nervous and inclined to scatter when the fly landed in the water. Barbel can be like this and so I left them alone and wandered off to see if there were any carp about. Continue reading
Sometimes it is difficult to decide how to use the morning you may have gone to some lengths to secure for the purposes of fly fishing. Initially, I had it in mind on that I might fish for bass from the float tube, particularly given that the forecast was for very hot weather and having the lower part of your body immersed in a reservoir is a pretty effective way to prevent over heating.
But in the end it was the river that won out, as it so often does, and the prospect of some gipsy barbel or, if I was lucky, some carp. Continue reading
It is 36 degrees Celsius in the shade at the moment and the dogs, normally happy to sleep in the shade outside, are stretched indoors cooling their tummies on the tiles. Outside there is not much happening. The cicadas are doing their thing but almost everything else seems to be sitting out the hot hours in whatever shade is available. Here indoors, things are much the same for us. Grandad, who is staying with us for a couple of weeks, is having a snooze on the sofa because the cat is sleeping on his bed while Pippa is crashed out on mine!
Yesterday I spent the evening at the river. I arrived as the sting of the heat was beginning to subside and I stayed, not quite until darkness but until I had just landed a nice fish and didn´t give much for my chances of getting another before darkness arrived. Generally, the fish can be taken throughout the day, although during the mid summer they tend to have times when they succumb to the general torpor that afflicts us all. It is really the comfort of the angler that leads to the decision to approach the river early in the day, or very late. Continue reading
Today some bird told me that I was I was good looking. I was told this not just once but several times. This does not happen to me very often, as it happens, so I felt pretty flattered. More precisely I was called “guapo” the Spanish term for good looking, which is pretty much what you might expect here in rural Andalucía.
Things might have been even better if I had been called “guapo” by a human being but, like I said, it was a bird. My admirer was a red tailed parrot which, I understand, is also known of as an African Grey.
This particular bird was in a cage at a roadside service station on the A357. It had a pretty impressive repertoire which, in addition to “guapo,” included the greeting ¡hola! and I am sure it has a much broader vocabulary had we had time to become better acquainted. It was certainly well able to wolf whistle! Continue reading
We have just returned from the Province of Cadiz, where we spent a couple of nights staying at a place called Tajo del Aguila on the shore of an enormous reservoir called Embalse de Guadalcacín.
The group consisted of me and my son Leo and three of his school buddies, Ryan Edwards, Damian Le Chat Lewis and Daniel Porter. Our aim was to see if we could catch a few black bass on the fly. Leo and Daniel had fished here before but both the reservoir and fly fishing were unknown to the others. Continue reading
When I was a kid, at about the age when I felt my first stirrings of sexual awareness, I came across a rather curious object. It was a pen. It had a picture of a woman in a bathing suit on its side. The curious thing was that when the pen was held upright, as it would be in use, the woman´s bathing costume slid down revealing her naked figure beneath. As far as I was concerned, this was an invention as awe inspiring as any I could imagine. It was right up there with the great pyramids of Egypt and the hanging gardens of Babylon. The human imagination is capable of great things and the “swimming costume” pen was testimony to our creativeness. Continue reading
My kids tell me that we are living in the 21st century. Fair enough, I will have to take their word for it. And one of the benefits of living in these enlightened times, they tell me, is that our lives are enriched by technology.
I´ve noticed this myself. If you find yourself in a social situation everyone seems to have their head buried in some little hand held device checking emails, finding out about the bowel movements of their favourite celebrity on Twitter, or just surfing the web. Boring old farts like me, who like to regale fishing stories to whoever happens to be sitting nearby, have our work cut out for us. Continue reading
