fishydreams

Can you get an indian summer in the middle of winter? Well, it certainly seems we have one here! Yesterday I was off galavanting on the river in shorts and crossing the river, as I usually do, in wearing a pair of neoprene diver´s boots. It seems quite odd to get away with this while much of Europe is, if not yet in the grip of winter, not far away.

At this time of year many fly fishermen switch to species like grayling and pike which don´t seem to mind the cold too much or which are not excluded by close season rules. There are no grayling in my neck of the woods although nearby reservoirs contain pike. What we do get, here in my local river, are gypsy barbel and common carp and both of these were in fine form yesterday.  Continue reading →

The weather forecast for yesterday stated that there was a 100% chance of rain, which is a pretty lousy forecast in most peoples´ books. Of course, if you wanted rain this would have been about as good a forecast as you could possibly hope for.

Personally I don´t mind the rain one bit. I´m Irish, which means that an occasional drenching is part of my cultural heritage, like drinking Guinness. So yesterday I headed off to the river knowing that I had a pretty good chance of getting soaked but it was not so much how the rain might affect me that I was thinking about, but how it would affect the river and, indirectly, the fish. Continue reading →

I had a very fine fish on the Río Grande this afternoon. I was delighted with it, not only because it was a beautiful fish, but because I had my work cut out to catch it.

The Grande is a little coloured now following recent rain but I thought that the extra water it was carrying might encourage the fish to spread out a little and explore the reaches upstream of the deeper pools which are off limits when the river is skinnier. Continue reading →

My ancient car is acting up. On Monday morning it refused to start which was curious because the previous day it had taken me happily to the river and back. Maybe it was just drawing the line, as I am often tempted to do, at heading off for another week at work at some ungodly hour in the morning.

And then yesterday it failed, in spectacular fashion, its annual technical inspection. It often lets itself down on some little technical defect or other but yesterday it decided to pull out all the stops and fail with aplomb. The man with the torch who lives in a dark cave and inspects the underneath of the cars was so impressed by the defects that he surfaced into daylight and asked me to go down with him to look up. He said “look, see that broken bit?” and pointed to a broken bit and then he said “look, see that crack?” and pointed to a crack. I pretended to be surprised but knew perfectly well that the whole car was just more or less hanging together. Continue reading →

I had a simple plan for this afternoon. First I was going to head off to the Guadalhorce to see if I could fool a few fish with some simple nymphs I tied up yesterday afternoon. After that I was going to drop in to Café Europa for a cafe con leche.

There is nothing much to the little nymphs I use. I tie them on smallish (size 14) barbless grub hooks and they seem quite palatable to the barbel and carp. You could do a lot of fooling around trying different patterns but I tend not to. I have a lot of confidence in these things and stick to them out of a mixture of laziness and brand loyalty. Continue reading →

If I had had any brains I would not have gone fishing at all yesterday. There were only a couple of hours left before Catriona got home from work and the house needed tidying. But I went anyway, but mindful of the fact that my time on the river would have to be short.

All this has happened before, many times. A decent kind of guy would forego the pleasures of the riverbank and, instead, attend to the chores that accompany marriage, fatherhood and domestic servitude in general. Thankfully, I am made of lesser stuff and so it was off to the Guadalhorce for me while the washing remained in the washing machine and living room looked as though a tornado had passed through it. Continue reading →