On Sunday I met up with Norman Smith and showed him some of the rudiments of fly tying. Norman was introduced to fishing at the age of three and there is not much he doesn´t know about it, but fishing with a fly rod is a relatively new interest, and fly tying is newer still. Continue reading
Category: Folks I know
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.
I met up with Norman Smith this morning and we headed off to reconnoitre the river. We did not have too much time. Norman said that if he was not back by 1.00 pm his wife would kill him!
The stretch of river we looked at was well known to Norman although he had not been there for a few years. He has fished this part of the river pretty extensively in the past and there is probably no part of the river he has not seen at some time.
It can be surprising how a river can change. In one spot we took a look at the entire river had been moved, or most likely diverted for some construction work on motorway flyover. The boys with earth moving equipment can also pull a few surprises on us.
Between one thing and another we did manage to do a little fishing and, in the end, we managed to take a couple of carp. The fish seemed a to grow little nervous as the morning wore on. A half dozen or so people on horseback decided to cross the river quite close to us which didn´t improve our prospects particularly! It always surprises me how friendly people are. I´m sure that it never occurred to the horsemen, as they waved to us, that they were scaring the hell out of every fish in the river!
The carp in the river have only put in an appearance in 1979. Norman´s first carp was a mirror which, these days, is very rare capture. Until the carp showed up, the river was the exclusive preserve of gypsy barbel. It is likely that the carp, in the form of fry, made their way into the river from the reservoir at El Chorro. Today, it seems, both species coexist quite happily.
We managed to get back to Villafranco for a quick beer and a couple of tapas. Norman headed back to his wife but just after his 1.00 pm. deadline.
I wonder if he is still alive?
Norman spotting carp
One of the carp
This weir provides a barrier to mullet and prevents them swimming further upstream.
Thanks!
I read a story one time about a fly fisherman in Africa who inadvertently hooked a hippopotamus. He had been boat fishing in a river swarming with catfish and tigerfish. Naturally, he presumed he had just hooked a massive fish and his fishing companions, fed up with his interminable battle, told him to get out of the boat and finish playing the fish from a mud island, so that they themselves could get back to their own fishing.
It was only when he gained some line that he saw the hippo emerge from the water and start charging towards him. So the guy does what any thinking angler would do: he drops his gear and legs it into some rushes. Hippos are notoriously bad tempered and dangerous things and, having had a fly stuck in its snout, this one was in a particularly foul mood and proceeded to jump up and down on the abandoned fishing tackle smashing the rod into a million pieces, although his reel, miraculously, survived undamaged. The reel manufacturer, it turns out, used this event to market their product being able to claim that their gear was proven to be hippopotamus-proof!
Having a run in with bad tempered mammals is just one of the hazards of fly fishing. I remember a story told to me by Michael Roche, a terrific yarn spinner I knew in New Zealand, about a fisherman chased into the river by a bull, and I myself was fully prepared to leap into the Guadalhorce river one time when a wild boar and her half grown youngsters trotted up to within 10 metres or so to drink from the river. Thankfully, they took no notice of me.
I have become acquainted over the last few years with a fisherman called Norman Smith who is a veteran angler and who has fished throughout Spain, along with his wife Maureen. Norman is excellent company. He has a fine beard and a terrific store of fishing tales. He makes me think of Ernest Hemmingway, another guy with a beard who knows how to tell a story. Norman and I have never fished together, although we are planning to put that right shortly, and our encounters have been over a few beers at the local watering hole in Villafranco del Guadalhorce.
Norman told me a tale one time which goes something like this……….
One time himself and Maureen were fishing some reservoir somewhere which could only be reached by walking through country where fighting bulls were on the loose. You know what these things are like. They have been bred over the years to be mean, bad-tempered, sons of bitches and, if you come across one you better get the hell out of there. Fast.
Anyway, it just so happened that Norman wanted to get to the reservoir one morning at such an early hour that all was in darkness. He was about halfway from his car, where he had spent the night, when he became aware of the sound of a heavy animal nearby. He froze. This is one of those nightmare moments when the adrenalin kicks in and the mind is forced to work through the options. He realised that, even if he ran and jumped into the reservoir, he could not outpace the creature and had a pretty good chance of being gored to death. So he remained perfectly still in the vain hope that he might not draw attention to himself. He knew that bulls have poor eyesight. But even this strategy was doomed as the dawn was breaking and it was only a matter of minutes before he would be seen. And things turned out that way. As the light increased Norman, frozen in terror, emerged from the darkness and at the same time, only yards away the brooding presence itself came into sharp relief…….. a horse.
I like to show a photo or two on this blog thing if I can lay my hands on something suitable. Below there are three pictures. One of them shows Norman himself fly fishing on the Guadalhorce river. Norman is a coarse fisherman and is relatively new to fly fishing but I hope that fly fishing will grow on him.
There is also a picture of a horse, also taken on the Guadalhorce, where they are often tethered.
Finally, there is a picture of a pony. This is not my pony but I am getting pretty fond of it. It belongs to Juan, a builder who is doing some work on our place. He texted me the other day to ask if he could put his pony on our land to graze for a while.
Why not?
Norman fly fishing on the Guadalhorce
A horse chilling on the bank of the river
Juan´s pony
It´s high time we were introduced to Mark McCann.
Mark has the distinction of being one of my oldest fishing buddies. Sean and Mark and I started off fishing together back in our school days in Dublin and have been fishing together on and off ever since.
Among the venues we have fished over the last few years is a Lough up in the mountains somewhere that we simply call the Mountain Lough. It is reached after a long trek up a boggy mountainside. I love this place and have written about it elsewhere. It is special, among other things, for giving my son Leo his first trout.
The trout of the mountain lough are really beautiful things and are remarkably uniform in appearance. They are not generally very large. I would guess most are less than half a pound but, every now and then, a much better fish puts in an appearance. Here is a handsome fish Mark caught on a wet fly and which is, by some margin, the largest we have taken.
I am hoping to make a painting of Mark´s trout over the next few days and will lay the keel tomorrow. I will post a picture of the painting when it is done. Meantime, here is Mark´s lovely brown trout.
Mark´s big trout from the Mountain Lough
Nancy enjoying a day of fishing
Dan in action
Molly shows how it´s done
John fishing the Shournagh last year
Leo with a Carra trout he caught a while ago
Pippa being cool in the rain on Lough Arrow
While old guys like me and Sean have quite a few fishing seasons under our belts, our children are taking their first tentative steps into the world of fishing and are already showing great promise.
This summer we had a number of successful outings to the harbour in Valentia in search of elusive shore crabs and little fish and shrimps and Molly and Dan and John all proved to be great fishermen along with their older cousins Leo and Pippa.
There were other notable successes too. Dan also caught a huge wrasse (what a fish for a five year old!), and John (8) caught 12 mackerel all on his own – spinning from the beach. The girls Molly (10) and Nancy (3) and Pippa (14) like fishing too and are great at it. They all caught loads of small pollock and crabs on holidays.
Here are some pictures of the next generation in action!
Leo and Pippa wade the Guadlahorce River in Andalucia in June.
It is now a week since my fly rod was tipped overboard and begun resting peacefully at the bottom of Davy Jones´locker. At this time of enforced abstinence from fishing, and while the rod´s successor is being procured, I figured it might be a good time to introduce Jake.
Jake is my brother, although he is not called Jake at all. Somehow or other he just happened to pick up this name and it seems to fit him so well that I have abandoned his usual name (Sean) as well as his actual name (John) during our informal correspondence.
Sean, or Jake or whatever you want to call him, has been fishing pretty much forever and I don´t know anybody else who is more completely besotted with the whole business.
During July we sneaked off fishing a couple of times to fish from the rocks off Valentia Island. The rocks can be quite slippery here, and before the rain had turned the place into a skating rink threatening to deposit Jake´s two boys into the Atlantic, we cast flies out in the hope of picking up a pollack or two.
Sean had a single cast and the result was a nice fish which we kept for dinner. My own efforts were rewarded only with a tiddler which was returned. Leo float fished with limpet and took a nice ballan wrasse. All in all we had a fine time until the heavens opened and the and we all got thoroughly drenched.
Sean with a fly-caught pollack taken at Valentia Island
fishydreams 