I 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.
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The 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 readingMy daughter Pippa got it into her head that what she wanted from me for Christmas was a watercolour painting of a trout and that the trout had to be pink.
Pink!
And in order that the idea would not drift away, she dropped it every now and then, into conversations she was having with her mum. I was privately pleased that, at a time that most gifts come off a shelf or a cloths rack, that Pippa should ask for something that would, in our own particular way, engage us both more personally. It says a lot about her.
And so eight days before Christmas I took out the paintbrushes to make a start on the painting. I had no pink paint but, of course, pink is easy to mix up. I did have doubts, though, about whether pink had the depth to offer strong enough contrast to bring the little trout to life and so, jettisoning at least a part of my brief, settled on another colour when rummaging through my tubes of watercolours: cadmium red.
I have to say the “brown” trout came out looking pretty nice even though it looked as though it was wearing fancy dress. This is no particular credit to me. Brown trout are as pretty as you might hope anything to be and so all that was required of me was to create a plausible likeness. Catriona found a nice frame when she went Christmas shopping down on the coast and now the cadmium trout looks happy and at home inside it.
I hope that Pippa enjoys her little painting and that it should remain a little connection when we are separated in time and space. Who knows where it will end up? Maybe on a wall that none of us now even know exists?
And I hope that little not-quite-pink trout will swim strongly into a future that we will share together and maybe even beyond that into a future that belongs just to Pippa and to people who are not even here yet.
Not quite pink!
If 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.
Continue readingI have just returned from a field trip to the national park of Doñana in the south of Spain with a group of my sixth form Biology students. We were shown around by Aitor who is a guide and friend. Aitor and I have introduced this area to many groups of students over the years, but this time he took me to a place that we had not visited together before and it was quite an experience. It was the highest point around and he billed it as the place where two “oceans” meet.
Continue readingI don´t think I´ve seen a bigger smile on Steve Lawler´s face than that the one he wore yesterday evening when he was holding up a big black bass. We had been fishing Concepción which, to be honest, has been pretty hit and miss with us as far as bass are concerned. Whatever the outcome, it is a wonderful place just to be, and so we never regret visiting even on those days where the bass decide not to play ball.
Continue readingCatriona and I have just spent a few days in Glasgow to see our Daughter Pippa graduate. It was a real blast. The formalities took place in Bute Hall which is a really lovely venue and it was a very proud moment for us both.
Continue readingA little while ago I wrote a piece called “Naked Slovenian Woman” and it was published in a fly fishing magazine and also here on the blog. You can look it up if you are curious. I noticed from the statistics provided by the blog host that this particular post had an unusual number of “hits”. I was puzzled at first but, when I thought about it, I realised that maybe a few of the new readers might be chaps were surfing the web in the hope of finding a bit of titillation and that they were probably disappointed to find themselves looking at some boring old blog put together by a fisherman!
Continue readingSean and Mark and I managed to extract a few barbel from the Ríos Grande and Guadalhorce last the weekend but the pick of the bunch was taken by Mark in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Sunday was the Romería and the river banks were overflowing with horse riders and carriages and families picnicking in the shade of eucalyptus trees. And somewhere in the middle of all this commotion we found a little stretch of river which seemed relatively undisturbed. Above it a couple of dogs bounding around in the shallows, and below a couple of people were wallowing downstream. I cannot call them swimmers really as there was insufficient depth to swim. They simply sat in the river and took some respite from the heat.
Continue readingMy brother Sean and our friend Mark have been fishing together on and off since we were kids and this weekend we went fishing together and were kids all over again. Mark often comes out to spend a few days in Marbella but Sean has not been out here for years but he contrived to add a few days to a trip to attend a science conference in Sevilla and jumped on a train to Málaga. This was the first time that all three of us wet a line together in Spain.
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fishydreams 