fishydreams

Last week while Catriona and I were exploring the north of Spain, my brother Sean managed to sneak off to do a little bass fishing back in Ireland. He managed to catch himself a lovely fish and sent a picture to me on Whatsapp.

More 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.

My 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.

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.

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.