I had a lovely visit to the river on Sunday and a chance to try out one of the little nymphs I tied up the previous night during a “fly tying” zoom call. This zoom call was a lot of fun. The tying was done by myself and my brother Sean but we were joined by our old fishing buddy Mark McCann and various family members including my son Leo, Sean´s son Dan and his daughter Nancy. Our respective wives even dropped in at various stages. Our women folk were pretty much uniformly of the view that we are all a bit silly sitting around at vices, swilling red wine, and talking bullshit.
Continue readingCategory: Folks I know
A friend of mine, Johan, has just gone and bought himself a sport fishing boat! She is christened “Impi” and is moored on the Island of La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, sitting way out there in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Johan´s idea was to create a charter operation to allow people like himself to have a chance to get out into the ocean and fish for some of the most iconic sport fish that you can find anywhere.
Continue readingYesterday I spent the morning and early afternoon fishing on the river with Johan Terblanche. Johan and I have fished together several times over the last two or three years and when he pops over to this neck of the woods from his home in Luxembourg he drops me a line and we meet up to see if we can catch black bass or, as was the case yesterday, some gypsy barbel from the river. Continue reading
When Steve Lawler and I reached the second fishing spot he had planned to show me on Friday we both chickened out of the trek across an open filed to the shore of the reservoir. There were a few cattle in the field there and neither of us trusted them. In particular there were three shady characters standing in the shadow of a tree and one of them had a mean look in her eyes. Continue reading
My mother doesn´t look anything like a trout, which is rather unfortunate for me but probably rather fortunate for her. This observation becomes particularly relevant now that my brothers and sisters, widely scattered throughout the world, have decided to run an art competition and the subject we are asked to paint is no less a person than our mother. Continue reading
We fly fishermen tend to delude ourselves sometimes and begin to imagine we are gifted observers of nature and that we have, through painstaking observation and craft, infiltrated the mysterious world of our quarry. At the vise we whip up near-perfect impersonators of the little bugs that drift downstream to the waiting fish. It is just a question of showing up at the river and success is preordained. Continue reading
Fishing with PR is a good laugh. He is one of the best fly fishermen I know and is one of those guys who has been everywhere and caught just about everything that swims. He also has a touch of that particularly English kind of eccentricity that makes him something of a “fish collector.” He would have made a first rate Victorian. Targeting a “full house” of Mediterranean barbel species is part of his quest to tick off all nine species that swim around here in the Iberian Peninsula. But searching for these fish is part of a wider adventure. It is a means of discovering all kinds of wonders hidden among the nooks and crannies of this remarkable country. Continue reading
One of the problems that PR and I had when trying to catch a Mediterranean barbel is that not terribly much seems to have been written about them, and little specific guidance seems to be available. The sources of information that we consulted included John Langridge´s book on Spanish barbel and a few blog posts and snippets of information on the internet or short film sequences on Youtube. The simple truth was that this was to be something of a journey into the unknown. Continue reading
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