Sean and I spent a few hours fishing Lough Guitane in County Kerry on our last fishing day together last week. Guitane is about 10 km from Killarney and, at over a mile in length, it is a reasonably big lough, though it will raise few eyebrows in the west of Ireland.
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My local stretch of the Guadalhorce river is now reduced to a thread and you can step right across it in places. Even where it is too wide to do this, you may be able to walk across the tops of medium size stones and get from side to side without even getting your feet wet. It is difficult to imagine, during the heat of summer, that the lower branches of bank side trees capture the debris flushed down when the river is in flood. It is now as low as I have seen it for many years.
Continue readingMore often than not Sean and I will fish together but on a couple of evenings we were joined by Sean’s son, Dan, who is serving a kind of sporadic fly fishing apprenticeship. We began each session with what has become something of a tradition – the group photograph. We fished twice and so there are two of these. Sean is unable to have a serious face and so he is the one with the strange grin. I am the one holding the camera and am usually looking a bit perplexed. Dan, posing alongside his old man and his uncle, is the only one who looks even remotely normal.
Continue readingMy brother Sean lives in Ireland just a short hop form Cork City. The city centre is situated on an Island between two channels of the River Lee and is on the doorstep of one of the largest natural harbours in the world. On an another island, this one in Cork City´s harbour, is the town of Cobh from which the ill-fated Titanic set sail in April 1912 as well as, in earlier times, many ships carrying emigrants. The locals dub the departure point for these journeys, evocatively, Heartbreak Pier.
Continue readingI was a little worried about my local river until recently. The barbel seem to have vanished or, at least, remained well hidden. Paul Reddish and I fished it a couple of times last week and it seems to have recovered to its normal self, at least in two of the three parts we visited. The first stretch we explored was clearly suffering from some source of pollution. There was foam on the surface and the river here smelled “iffy”. Unsurprisingly, there was no sign of fish life. It is sad to see this but it is something, unfortunately, that seems to happen most summers when the flows are weak and the various pollutants become more concentrated.
Continue readingThe black bass in Concepción reservoir have not really switched on yet but it is only a matter of a little time and, perhaps, a degree or two of water temperature. Today Johan reminded me that soon these fish will be distracted by the prospect of procreation and some more aggressiveness and territoriality will begin to figure in their behaviour.
Johan and I covered the usual bases from our float tubes: the deeps and the shallows, the margins, inlets, submerged branches, drowned stone walls. The bass, however, were having none of it and refused point blank to cooperate. Nobody was complaining, though. Fishing can be like that.
Continue readingIf you have found your way to this blog there is a pretty good chance that you are a fisherman. If you are not, that´s no big deal. Welcome! It is likely, particularly if you have a fishing background, that you are familiar with the salmon farming industry and with the impact it has on wild fish. This is a widely known story but, I suspect, among a fairly narrow band of people. It is time that we spread the message a little further and I was hoping you might consider helping with that effort.
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