Harry Abbott and I organised a rendezvous at the river the other day. It took us a little while to meet up. We both arrived at our chosen spot on the river at different times and Harry wandered off upstream and I ventured downstream! Continue reading
Category: Fishing reports
My friend Harry Abbott has returned to Spain after a long journey which took in some fishing in Thailand and New Zealand. He told me that yesterday, while I was trying to stuff some understanding of Science in to unreceptive brains of indifferent teenagers, he popped off to the river to see if he could catch a few fish. Continue reading
Earlier in the week I broke a story about a huge pike allegedly caught by a work colleague. It seemed too good to be true. The fish was, after all, absolutely massive. At the weight claimed for it, some 29 kg, this fish would have been one of the largest pike caught anywhere in the world, ever. Continue reading
Here´s an odd thing. A colleague at work, David Días, told me on Monday morning that he had caught a huge pike. When he told me how big it was I though he was just pulling my leg. He claimed that his fish weighed, wait for it…. 29 kilograms! Continue reading
I normally fish alone but today I was joined by Norman Smith and John Langridge and I could not have wished for better fishing companions. I had not met John before although we have corresponded by email a few times. He is one of these guys who eats, sleeps and breathes fishing and is the author of several fishing books. I have read one of these, Aphrodite´s carp, and highly recommend it, and I am very keen to read the others.
John decided to try bait fishing as well as fly fishing and went off to see if he could interest the fish in some luncheon meat. Norman and I just stuck to the flies. Continue reading
If you cast an eye over this blog from time to time you may remember a guy Called Harry Abbott. Harry lives here in Spain and we meet up from time to time to go fishing together. He is not only an accomplished fly fisherman, but a fellow float tuber, a bird watcher and wildlife enthusiast. He is also great fun and his après pêche “raconteuring” over a beer or two always winds up a day´s fishing perfectly.
For the last few years he has been setting off on fishing adventures in Thailand and New Zealand and sends me back pictures and updates from his travels. I try extremely hard to contain my jealousy! Continue reading
It looks like the weatherman was right. Outside the heavens have opened. The French have an expression for weather like this:
“Il pleut comme une vache qui pisse”
It was because this weather was due that I was particularly keen to get to the river on Saturday before the rains bring the water up and colour the river. Continue reading
Christmas this year was spent in England and Ireland and it was great to see family and friends again. There was, not unexpectedly, a lot of sitting around and not a little consumption of alcohol.
In the UK the brown trout have their feet up too and are enjoying the closed season but the fishing for rainbows in many still water fisheries continues and there is good fishing for grayling for those who want to get out on the river and are prepared to brave the cold weather.
Back home in Spain, I lost no time in making for the river. I was in some need of solitude and space and fresh air, all of which the Guadalhorce provides in abundance.
I hooked a barbel pretty soon after starting up but the fish was hooked in the cheek rather than having taken the nymph properly. This is always regrettable, but it happens from time to time. Fortunately the fish was unharmed and, after apologising profusely to it, I released it and it made its way back upstream to the head of the pool from which it had been taken. Continue reading
If an experienced fisherman wants to figure out whether it may be a good day for fishing he might start thinking about the way the wind has been blowing, recent changes in atmospheric pressure, rainfall patterns which might affect water levels, and that kind of thing.
Real experts go a little further, factoring in fluctuations in solar wind, subtle changes in the earth´s orbit and the possible distortions to the fabric of reality resulting from the curvature of space time.
Personally, I´m to dumb for any of this and so I rely on a relatively simple method of figuring out if it is going to be a decent day for fishing. I just listen to the radio.
In this neck of the woods we only get decent reception for Kiss FM and, thankfully, they tend to drop a lot of the DJ yapping and get on with the business of playing music. All is well with the world if they play Dire Straits, or Eric Clapton or something equally easy on the ear.
But if they are in the frame of mind to play, say, Wham, or the Pet Shop Boys or Madonna or Culture Club, it becomes immediately clear that things are simply not going well. So the music on the radio has become a kind of barometer of fortune and indicates whether a day is going well and has the potential to get better or is heading downhill fast. And this goes for fishing too. A selection of good songs augurs well for any proposed fishing venture but if you end up with a lousy song selection you might as well stay at home, throw a few logs on the fire and put your feet up.
Yesterday I started thinking about sneaking off to the river around lunchtime. At the time I was driving Leo home after he had some tennis coaching. It was likely that people had other plans for me, but the sun was shining and the river, as I imagined it, was seductive in the gentle breeze. There were good fish flashing their flanks as they turned in the current.
Would the fishing be any good? I listened to the radio to find out. Kiss FM was playing one of those annoying Christmas tunes that are designed to mislead you into thinking that a whole pile of joy is just around the corner. Normally this would be a sure sign that the fishing was going to be a waste of time. The river might have dried up, or become a raging torrent or that all the fish have had been poisoned. A song like this is a portent of disaster.
But then a funny thing happened. I resisted the temptation to switch the radio off and Leo and I listened to the song together. It was such a classic of the “let´s make a few quid out of Christmas” genre and was so cheesy and awful that we began to find it, somehow, brilliantly entertaining. And so we cruised along the road between Marbella and Coin with the radio turned up high and the car resonating with cracker pulling, family-loving, carol singing, fire crackling, merriment. Suddenly Leo´s father, known in the family as a miserable bastard at this particular time of year, was full of the joys of the season.
That settled it. The fishing was on! And it turned out to be pretty good too. All the fish took a little nymph fished under an indicator but the takes were so quick and tentative that sometimes no movement of the indicator was registered.
I managed to find a way of changing the position of the indicator pretty easily. The indicator is a piece of coloured foam with the leader threaded through with a needle. A couple of slip knots are tied either side of the indicator to allow it to be re-positioned. I must remember that!
The fishing was so good, in the end, that I had to drag myself away from the river and get home in time to dress up to go out for a formal dinner bash with the other teachers and the sixth form.
A nice carp
This is the thing they seemed to want
The first barbel
The other barbel
Here is Leo and me getting ready to go out to the sixth form Christmas bash.
Yesterday, while I was fooling around on the river, my friend Harry was off enjoying the kind fishing adventures guys like me can only dream about. Like me, he landed a couple of fish, but his were absolute stunners. One was an Arapaima, one of the largest-growing freshwater fish in the world and the other was a Pacu, a deep-bodied fish, not unlike a piranha to which it is closely related. I have seen both of these before swimming around in various aquaria and know a little about them. Both come from South America and so, when I saw Harry´s photos yesterday evening, I assumed he was having some crazy adventure on the Amazon.
As it happened he was in Thailand fishing a water stocked with various kinds of large tropical fish. The other anglers fish more conventionally using bait but Harry is, in his heart, a fly fisherman and he took both of his fish in the fly.
Arapaima are fascinating things. They need to surface periodically to breathe air and can survive in places which are so depleted in oxygen that many other species fail to survive. They also have such tough scales that they are able to resist the attention of piranhas. What I was little prepared for, when I saw Harry´s photo was just how beautiful they are. They have a flattened head which appears almost reptilian, and large scales protecting an elongated body.
Harry said that the Arapaima hit the fly pretty much as soon as it hit the water and that it was dark before the great fish was finally released.
The Pacu are as strong as hell. The specimen pictured was estimated to weigh 9 or 10 kilos. Apparently they have extremely sharp teeth and will bite through anything that is not made out of steel. Harry hooked his fish with a nymph and it was not taken in enough to result in his line being bitten through. Apparently hooking these things is like getting you fly caught in the 10.23 from Paddington, and they will do their level best to snag you in some underwater obstacle if they have not already bitten through your line. I had always thought of them like big docile herbivores, like swimming sheep, but I obviously underestimated them.
Harry is on his way to New Zealand and was kind enough to allow me to report on his adventures. So hopefully we will have more stories to report soon.
Pacu
Harry with his beautiful Arapaima, estimated at 25 kilos.
fishydreams 