The black bass at Concepción can be contrary and moody creatures, given to ignoring whatever we might tie to the end of our lines to tempt them. But yesterday evening, for reasons best known to themselves, they decided that they were going to play ball. Whatever we were offering they were having it, and then some. No questions asked.
Continue readingCategory: Folks I know
A couple of weeks ago I had a day off and my wife Catriona was away for her work. So it occurred to me that I could do a lot worse than head off fishing in the Conde del Guadalhorce reservoir at El Chorro and have a crack at the carp that occasionally venture into the shallow margins.
Continue readingSean and I spent a few hours fishing Lough Guitane in County Kerry on our last fishing day together last week. Guitane is about 10 km from Killarney and, at over a mile in length, it is a reasonably big lough, though it will raise few eyebrows in the west of Ireland.
Continue readingMore often than not Sean and I will fish together but on a couple of evenings we were joined by Sean’s son, Dan, who is serving a kind of sporadic fly fishing apprenticeship. We began each session with what has become something of a tradition – the group photograph. We fished twice and so there are two of these. Sean is unable to have a serious face and so he is the one with the strange grin. I am the one holding the camera and am usually looking a bit perplexed. Dan, posing alongside his old man and his uncle, is the only one who looks even remotely normal.
Continue readingMy brother Sean lives in Ireland just a short hop form Cork City. The city centre is situated on an Island between two channels of the River Lee and is on the doorstep of one of the largest natural harbours in the world. On an another island, this one in Cork City´s harbour, is the town of Cobh from which the ill-fated Titanic set sail in April 1912 as well as, in earlier times, many ships carrying emigrants. The locals dub the departure point for these journeys, evocatively, Heartbreak Pier.
Continue readingI 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.
Continue readingThe 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!
fishydreams 