My brother Sean joined Mark McCann this year for their annual mayfly fishing sortie on Lough Arrow. He caught a very fine trout this year and sent me a picture at the time but I was hoping he might find time to write a few words about the trip before I put something on the blog. Continue reading
Category: Other bits and bobs
The Nore runs up past the village of Inistioge in County Kilkenny and has a good reputation as a trout and salmon river. I have not yet caught a salmon or had the chance to fish for one but I do have a soft spot for our old pal Salmo trutta and was keen to see if I could catch a few. Continue reading
There are three pubs in Inistioge which, as it happens, is just one more than the number of churches. On the face of it, it seems that there must be a pretty virtuous community there. After all in your average Irish town the pubs outnumber the churches by about a million to one. Continue reading
Every now and again Catriona has to travel with her job and she abandons me for a few days. She away at the moment and so I have the place to myself. The Spanish have an expression for when a bloke is left to his own devices like this. They say of whoever is liberated in this way that he “esta de Rodriguez”. I don´t know how widely used the expression is even here in Spain. I used it once or twice on the natives and they looked at me as if I had two heads. Incidentally, the guy who told me about the expression is a colleague of mine called Julio Rodriguez. Maybe he was pulling my leg. I wouldn´t put it past him. Continue reading
I don´t know if a watercolour painting is ever really finished or whether you just reach a point at which continuing with it might do more harm than good. The other day I showed Catriona the picture of the trout I had been painting and she said that it looked fine to her and that maybe I ought to leave it alone.
She is probably right. Making a watercolour painting is like building a house of cards. If you go for an extra level it might all crash down. Continue reading
Every now and then you feel as though you are invited by nature to observe an event or a behaviour which normally goes unobserved and it invariably comes as an unexpected treat. This happened to me on the river about three weeks ago when the gypsy barbel were so preoccupied with feeding in broad daylight that, when silently approached, I was permitted to see them from very close. I made a film of them but for reasons I do not fully understand, I am unable to load it up on to the blog. Continue reading
Remember in “A River Runs Through It” when Brad Pitt hooks that big trout? It´s a long time since I saw the film but I do remember this sequence vividly. Pitt plays the character Paul MacLean and, in the scene in question, he manages to hook this leviathan trout in a river in Montana. In the ensuing battle he ends up being washed down river attached to the mighty fish. At times you can only see his hat and his elevated rod connecting him to the rainbow as he bobs and weaves among boulders as the rapids carry him downstream. Continue reading
