fishydreams

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 →

This weekend was my first chance to get out on the river for a while and I managed to fish on the evenings of both Saturday and Sunday. The river was in pretty good shape and there were a few fish around.

The gypsy barbel seemed very spooky initially and I was forced to go down in size both in nymph and leader. Curiously the fish would often be frightened of the little splash created by the nymph as it landed. When they are “on” they can often be attracted to this and even swim over to investigate, often accepting the fly in the process. I found that it was better to offer the fly from slightly upstream and often give the nymph a little movement when it was close to the fish. Continue reading →

The weather people said that on Sunday the rain would appear. That´s good news. The reservoirs are low for this time of the year and need some winter rain now to top them up before the long summer arrives. So Saturday seemed like a good time to take a look at the river before the change in weather shakes things up. If the rains are sustained and heavy it can knock the river out of kilter for a while.

There is a very nice stretch of water that my friend Norman Smith introduced me to and I thought it might be nice to take a look at it again. The last time I was there it seemed that it had been recently polluted and I was told a goat herder had seen a lot of dead fish during the week between my visits. I was curious to see if things had improved. Continue reading →