fishydreams

Some bastard went and stole my brother´s boat.

The boat was called Mojo and my brother Sean built it himself from marine ply from a template he ordered from the internet. He did a fine job. It was a beautiful boat.

Like any fishing boat, her design was a compromise between being heavy and stable enough to drift well, light enough to transport and launch single handed, and sufficiently fast and easy to handle to get around easily using only oars. The perfect boat does not exist and the compromise Sean made between these inherently conflicting demands was as good as he was going to get. And she was pretty to boot.

Why Mojo? The name was given in recognition of the first of his four kids to put in an appearance and incorporates part of each of their names. His oldest child is Molly and her younger brother is John. The other children, Dan and Nancy, came in the wake of the boat´s launch.

Mojo is a fine name. It is an Americanism meaning the art of casting magic spells or an object considered to carry some kind of magic.

I fished from the boat only a couple of times and her magic yielded me a small pike. But Sean has taken much better fish, one of which can be seen in the picture below. But the boat was more than just a fishing platform. It was also a source of adventure for Sean´s kids and my own.

Sean took the loss of his boat philosophically. He did, of course, use some pretty heavyweight expletives at the time he discovered it had been stolen. That is only natural. He is only human,

The plus side, if there is one, is that he will go ahead and build a successor to Mojo when the kids are a little bigger and he has some more time on his hands. In the meantime, I would like to pay my own little tribute to the boat and to the man who built it.

Mojo

A fly-caught pike taken by Sean from Lough Inniscarra. The fish was not weighed but Sean reckons it is 15 pounds or better.

Most of us return all the fish we catch unless we decide to keep the odd one for the table. Personally, I return everything.

So what is the best way to land a fish with the fish´s welfare in mind? I think that the answer to the question, like the answer to many questions is ……it depends!

The usual way is to land the fish in a landing net. These things are now made with very fine knot-less mesh which is less likely to catch in fins and spines. Landing nets come in all shapes and sizes. Carp nets can be huge and swallow up really big fish comfortably, whereas smaller scoop nets, like the lovely wooden framed model Mark McCann owns, are pretty to look at and easy to carry around. I think nets of this kind are more popular in the States among trout fishermen. There is a trade off between ease of carrying around (short handled nets) and ease of landing fish (bigger long handled nets). I guess everyone makes their own mind up here. My own net is something of a compromise having a double extendable handle and the net itself has a joint allowing it to fold back over the handle.

Black bass have huge mouths and, when they are landed, obligingly open them up making it a simple matter to hold the fish by the lower jaw and gently pick it from the water. The fish can usually be unhooked and returned without being handled anywhere but its lower jaw.

And pike too, even big ones, can be picked up by hand  by gripping carefully on the underside of the head between the gills although it is a good idea to make sure you see how this is done first! Pike are scary and have a lot of teeth! This approach to landing pike particularly lends itself to fly fishing because a single hook is used and there won´t be extra treble hooks flying around. Many float tubers routinely land their fish this way.

Out on the river I rarely carry a net. The fish I catch are always beached. This is possible because of the suitable shallow banks and the soft muddy substrate. I think that from the point of view of fish welfare this is the best way to go for a couple of reasons.

First, the fish can be landed sooner than if you had chosen to use a net. It is not necessary to be so close to the fish as when netting them and the fish´s own movements can be used to beach it. The fish needs to come close to a fisherman to be netted, particularly if the net has a short handle. As a result it may need to be more “played out” and quite a lot of strain is put on the tackle. The sight of the fisherman is often enough to give the fish a new lease of life and off it goes again!

The second reason I prefer beaching is that the fish has less contact with the fisherman. Less of the fishes surface comes into contact with hands or mesh. With care, it is possible to unhook and photograph a fish lying in the shallows without handling it very much at all. Finally, with wet hands it is simply helped into water deep enough to support it and off it goes!

Trout can be landed by hand or by net and the decision is made by the angler depending on the particular circumstances. They say that a trout, if turned upside down, will lie calmly in the angler hands. I am too nervous to find this out for myself! Other things being equal, I think I would opt for a net. I catch so few decent trout these days that I don´t want to take any risks!

A gypsy barbel beached in the shallows where it can be returned with the minimum of contact.

The river here is shallow and so beaching is possible.

A bass can be lifted by its bottom jaw – no net needed!

A beached fish is quickly photographed and gently eased back into the river

On the face of it this sounds like a dumb question. But I am trying to be serious. Maybe “friends” is too strong a word. It seems appropriate only when describing people. It seems nonsensical to consider other animals, like say, cows in a herd, as being friends. But if you have dogs, as we do, the notion doesn´t seems quite as outlandish.

Two of our dogs, Bonita and Chica, are sisters. The other two, Barney and Boris, are just puppies. We all spend much of our time falling and tripping over the damn things. It is clear however that they are “friends” in the sense that they interact enthusiastically and spend time in one another´s company, much as Bonita and Chica have done for many years.

What about fish?

I have experienced very “odd” behaviour on many occasions on the river. It is not infrequent to play a barbel or a carp which, as it runs around the river is very closely “shadowed” by another fish, or sometimes more than one. To my knowledge, similar claims have been made for salmon although I have never caught one myself. The “companion” fish may even swim quite close to the angler during the heat of battle throwing its normal caution to the wind. Why?

Any serious suggestion that fish can be “friends” would be greeted in the scientific community as hopelessly anthropomorphic. A scientist might suggest I get a bit of therapy at the funny farm. But if the word “friends” is very loosely defined in the limited sense that it describes an individual with which another individual might spend time in preference for others of the same kind, maybe it is not so crazy after all.

To my knowledge, the shoaling activity of fish is well understood and the advantages to individual fish in terms of protection from predators are clear. Each fish benefits from the extra “eyes and ears” of those around them, and a confusing melee might make individuals more difficult to pick out by predators.

As I write this my two teenage kids are sitting on the sofa opposite. Leo has earphones stuck in his ears and is watching something on Youtube. Pippa is glued to a TV rerun of “Friends”. It sometimes seems like they live in a different world from us. Generations of humans certainly differ now more than perhaps they ever have in the past. Later I will run the kids over to friends´ houses where they will hang out with others of their own age.

This behaviour, familiar to all the parents of teenagers, does not seem confined to humans. Fish very often shoal with others belonging to a particular year class. If you catch a particularly big perch or bream it is a fair bet that there are a few more nearby.

But the benefit of hanging out with your mates may depend on how you plan to make a living for yourself. If you are actively competing with your siblings for a particular lie in a stream, as trout do, or a source of fodder fish, as pike do, then it might make sense to be intolerant of others of your kind. Maybe it makes more sense to chase them away or even to eat them. Of course, when they have reproduction on their minds, both pike and trout will ignore the usual rules and override their natural intolerance of one another.

Fish, in my view, have a kind of PR problem. Everybody thinks that they are thick! They are not credited as being smart like the “higher” vertebrates. Birds and mammals are considered to be quite adaptable and “clever”. We used to keep hens until a semi-feral campo dog broke in and killed them all. Hens are fine birds but, however much you love them, there is no getting away from the fact that they are pretty thick. Sheep are too.

But even hens have a social awareness which is well established and a means for determining individual rank within the “pecking order”. So clearly each individual is “known” within the group. Fishermen, more than scientists, know just how canny a fish like a carp can be. After all we spend so much time being outsmarted by them! In my book a wily carp is as “smart” as a hen and I would be inclined to credit them with knowing the others in their group as individuals – maybe even to the point of getting on better with some than with others. Some might have “personalities” which make them more likely to be leaders, and others to be followers. Maybe there is also some kind of rank within a shoal?

Although few would disagree that it makes sense for fish to form associations if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, maybe I am alone in thinking that, under certain circumstances, fish develop allegiances and “friendships” which are more complex than anyone might suspect.

And if I need to spend a spell in the loony bin weaving baskets out of spaghetti, then so be it.

Leo and Pippa taking it easy along with the two puppies, Boris and Barney

Carp like these are often “shadowed” by others while they are being played

Everybody knows that only a complete loser would even consider taking up golf. So it probably won´t surprise you that I, myself, have a soft spot for the game. Or, at least, I used to have.

Over recent years I have pretty much abandoned golf for several reasons. First, I am no good at it. Secondly, with only a few hours each week during which it is possible to extricate myself from work and family commitments, I would rather be sneaking around on the bank of a beautiful river than searching the rough for the ball I just sliced off the fairway.

And then there is the prohibitive cost of playing here on the Costa del Sol, a golfing Mecca for those well-heeled enough to jet off from the frozen or waterlogged courses of Northern Europe, and wander around in the sunshine instead. And, finally, it is a relief also not to be associated, in any way, with men wearing stupid trousers.

The golf I played in the past was of such a consistently poor standard that we took some perverse pleasure in how awful we were. My “best” shot saw the ball not only leave the fairway, but the entire course, landing eventually on the corrugated roof of a barn in which a number of cows had been sheltering. The dome roof effectively acted as a giant amplifying drum panicking the little herd and causing the cows to gallop out of there in all directions.

My brother Sean went one better on the very first tee. He  managed to hook a shot so that it went flying at around knee height straight into the club members car park where it bounced from car to car until it eventually ran out of steam. For a while it looked like a ball in a pin ball machine.

The reason I find myself thinking about golf is that the golf swing is quite a technical thing and the steps that need to be followed and refined in developing a decent swing are, in a broad sense, not unlike those needed to develop a reasonable fly casting stroke.

First off, if you really want to leather the ball in golf the chances are you will probably screw up one of the fifty million things you need to think about to get your swing right. If this happens you might make a complete balls of the whole exercise. Likewise, a reasonable casting stroke is not a forced thing. It is not so much about how much power you add but when you add it and, crucially, when you stop adding it.

I hesitate to say much more because I realise that there are many people who are far better qualified to offer instruction than I am. I am a caster of only moderate ability myself. There are big fat books that have been written on fly casting by people who cast pretty much full-time. And then there are You tube videos, instructional DVDs and all that stuff. My favourite instructor is probably the late Mel Krieger who seems to me like such a talented and enthusiastic teacher. He died not too long ago and was an inspirational figure to many. Here is a link which will take you to one of his lessons on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZDOON6pZ1Y

Just recently I took a bunch of students to do some Biology fieldwork on a local beach. The kids completed the tasks pretty fast and so I took out my fishing gear which was in the back of the car and we all had a casting competition. There were only two rules. First, whoever got the thread at the end of the leader furthest was the winner (no hook in case we impaled one another!). The second was that you had to wear the leather hat even if it made you feel pretty stupid. These kinds of rules have never deterred golfers! The final winner was disputed but all the students showed great promise. Here they are in action:

Thea Zabell getting to grips with fly casting

Clarinde prepares to take her turn

Clarinde in action

The competitors take a break from the intense pressure of competition casting! Left to right: Sami, Nico, Thea and Gary

I happen to own a boat. Well, actually that´s not true. I own a couple of float tubes which, to me at least, are boats.

My brother Sean went and built himself what is, indisputably, a proper boat. He made it from marine ply and uses it to fly fish for pike or fool around with his kids. He did a fine job on it too. He might be tempted to say to me that my float tube is not, technically, a boat. But the thing floats and you can sit in it and catch a few fish so it is pretty much a boat in every meaningful sense.

Recently though my float tube has begun to misbehave. In my last three outings bad things have happened while afloat and, while it is not really fair to blame all of them on the float tube, I am developing a feeling that this particular craft might be a tad unlucky.

First, I lost my rod and reel overboard and they sank to the bottom.

On the next outing my binoculars got flooded while sitting in a supposedly waterproof bag in the well of the boat. They are not waterproof. Now all I can see through them is a bunch of bubbles.

Most recently, air started leaking from one of the two main air bladders and makes one side dip deeper into the water.

Float tubes are not often seen in Spain and I am conscious of raising eyebrows whenever I am on the water. I am not quite sure if I am perceived as a cool fisherman out doing his thing in an innovative and modern way, or simply some ridiculous git lumbering around with a pair of fins on his feet. If I feel I am being observed I try to tidy my act up a little:  I make my casting a little less sloppy and work to land the fly consistently close to the margins where, I hope, some black bass might be holding off the steeply-sloping sides.

The last time I was out, I realised I had become the object of interest of a few bass fishermen standing on the bank who were fishing in the conventional way using lures. I have no idea what they made of me but, if they laughed, they were good enough to do it discreetly.

The fishing was poor and the bass showed zero interest in the little popper I was offering. Eventually I decided to paddle away and lose my little audience. This unfortunately wasn´t quite straightforward since the air bladder had leaked so much air, and I had lost so much buoyancy, that I was listing heavily to starboard. To compound things, the banks here are so steep that it is difficult to pull up ashore and pump up the leaking bladder. And so the bass fishermen were treated to the sight of me searching out a margin shallow enough to pull up, clambering out, and re-inflate  my ailing craft before setting sail again.

I have just taken the offending bladder out to examine it. The air is leaking from the valve. I guess I am just going to have to go ahead and get a new bladder. After all a leaking bladder is not only a problem, it is an embarrassment.

The bass often lie close to the steep margins

Where can I pull up?

My “boat” and everything you need to get afloat (as long as you don´t mind getting a wet arse!)

The offending valve

They say that the fishing on the Mataura river, in the South Island of New Zealand is the best in the world and, having lived a little while Southland and fished it myself, I wouldn´t argue.

David Murray-Orr guides on this river and knows it intimately. He was kind enough to tie me up a bunch of flies for a book I am writing and, by way of thanks, I painted a Mataura trout based on fish shown in the home page of his web site http://www.mataura.co.nz/

If you ever get a chance to visit the Mataura it is worth getting in touch with David. I doubt that anybody knows the river better.

David pointed out that I had forgotten to sign the painting that I sent him and asked me to send on a signature he could add to it before putting the thing in a frame. I managed to find another painting of the same fish which I painted at the same time. I have touched it up a little and sent it on to David. I made sure I signed it!

If anything I think this second version has a slight edge over the first due to some little tweaks I gave it to liven it up a little.

Of course no painting of a fish can ever be as pretty as the real thing but this is my best effort. I hope that he likes it!