Category: Other bits and bobs


Red-necked Nightjar

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September 28, 2014

Every so often we come across a rather enigmatic bird here in Spain called the red-necked nightjar. You are unlikely to see one of these things outside of the Iberian Peninsula but it breeds throughout Spain and Portugal and is the largest nightjar we have in Europe. These are real stunners and I have grown more fascinated by them as the years have gone by.

My dog Bonita is now pretty lame and is not up to her once-daily walk through the campo but she and I have, over the years, seen plenty of these nightjars just as the light is fading in the evening. Even on the edge of darkness, when they are actively searching out insects, their hawk-like silhouette makes them easy to identify. Continue reading →

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Camels in Cártama

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September 21, 2014

One of the disadvantages of living in the middle of nowhere is that the mail never seems to get to you. We live in the campo in a place called Piegallina which is only a little off the beaten track but, as far as the Spanish post service is concerned, we might just as well live on one of the moons of Jupiter. If people are misguided enough to send post to our home address, and this sometimes happens for official documents of various kinds, there is a chance the mail might show up in the post office in Cártama which is about six kilometres down the road. And that´s if you´re lucky. Continue reading →

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September 6 – Looking over the river

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September 7, 2014

It is now a little year since Norman Smith showed me a nice stretch of the Guadalhorce. He asked me not to publicise it and, out of respect for his wishes, I will say little beyond the fact that it is a little way off the beaten track. It was November when we visited this particular stretch and there were fish in the margins. We saw a few carp, some nice ones too, and even managed to catch a couple.

I visited this part of the river again yesterday evening and it seemed well out of sorts. Some guy I met on here earlier in the summer told me that the river had been polluted some way upstream and a local goat herder had seen a lot of dead barbel and carp on the surface a few days previously. It certainly seemed yesterday as though many of the fish were gone. Continue reading →

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Fishing report of 15 and 16 August

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August 16, 2014

I am always hankering after a bit of fishing but extricating myself from domestic commitments is rarely straightforward. So it came as a pleasant surprise when Catriona more or less told me to go to the river yesterday evening. She and Leo had settled down to watch The Hobbit and realised that, having little interest in a watching a film I was likely to get bored and annoy them and so the best thing might be just to get rid of me. Fair enough! And this morning I just got up early, gave the dogs some breakfast and headed back to the river again.

One of the benefits of being on the river at the start or end of the day, apart from not being fried at this time of the year, is that there is always a chance of bumping into something interesting. This morning I came across two young foxes playing with one another just like a couple of puppies. I had been stalking carp in a shallow pool and the foxes just bounded down the opposite bank and played around for several minutes before one of them spotted me and they both vanished. Continue reading →

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Fly fishing, War and Murder

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August 15, 2014

My friend Norman Smith loaned me a couple books last week, one of which was written by GEM Skues. The book is called The Chalk-Stream Angler, Sidelines, Sidelights and Reflections. It is probably not his most important book. That particular accolade should go to “The Way of a Trout with a Fly” published way back in 1921 and “Minor Tactics of the Chalkstream” published even earlier, in 1910. Until now, I have I known Skues only by reputation and through the writings of others so it was quite a treat to be able to read the words of the great man himself.

What was so interesting about Skues? It was Skues who was involved in a quiet revolution whose ripples spread even beyond the esoteric world of fly fishing. A London lawyer, short in stature, Skues may seem an unlikely revolutionary but nevertheless he was one. From 1887 right up to 1938 he regularly fished the Itchen, one of the England´s exulted chalk streams. When he started out the prevailing orthodoxy was to fish the dry fly upstream, a practice followed almost religiously by Halford and his disciples. But then Skues put his mind to it and suggested it might be time to think again.
Continue reading →

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Clarinde´s Fish

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August 1, 2014

Teaching Science to secondary students is what I do for a living. This suits me pretty well. I like Science and I like kids and these, needless to say, are the two key prerequisites for this particular job.

Few students ever say thank you to teachers, even though they might consider you to have taught them reasonably well. And why should they you might ask. After all, as a teacher you are only doing your job.

But every now and then a student does seem to appreciate that, in their estimation, you seem to have given things your best shot and might make some kind of gesture to affirm this. Continue reading →

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What the parrot said

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July 19, 2014

Today some bird told me that I was I was good looking. I was told this not just once but several times. This does not happen to me very often, as it happens, so I felt pretty flattered. More precisely I was called “guapo” the Spanish term for good looking, which is pretty much what you might expect here in rural Andalucía.

Things might have been even better if I had been called “guapo” by a human being but, like I said, it was a bird. My admirer was a red tailed parrot which, I understand, is also known of as an African Grey.

This particular bird was in a cage at a roadside service station on the A357. It had a pretty impressive repertoire which, in addition to “guapo,” included the greeting ¡hola! and I am sure it has a much broader vocabulary had we had time to become better acquainted. It was certainly well able to wolf whistle! Continue reading →

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Embalse de Guadalcacín

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July 18, 2014

I have fished this huge reservoir, the largest in Cadiz province, several times now, most recently with a little “band of brothers” consisting of myself, my son Leo and a few of his mates and, despite this, I came to realise I knew little enough about the reservoir itself.

I have since tried to make amends and what I have learnt is very interesting. For starters it is the water which has produced the heaviest bass recorded in Spain, a 4 kg whopper. This fish was taken in 2000 by a Malagueno. Continue reading →

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A Brilliant Invention

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July 10, 2014

When I was a kid, at about the age when I felt my first stirrings of sexual awareness, I came across a rather curious object. It was a pen. It had a picture of a woman in a bathing suit on its side. The curious thing was that when the pen was held upright, as it would be in use, the woman´s bathing costume slid down revealing her naked figure beneath. As far as I was concerned, this was an invention as awe inspiring as any I could imagine. It was right up there with the great pyramids of Egypt and the hanging gardens of Babylon. The human imagination is capable of great things and the “swimming costume” pen was testimony to our creativeness. Continue reading →

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Fishing Report 5 July

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July 5, 2014

My kids tell me that we are living in the 21st century. Fair enough, I will have to take their word for it. And one of the benefits of living in these enlightened times, they tell me, is that our lives are enriched by technology.

I´ve noticed this myself. If you find yourself in a social situation everyone seems to have their head buried in some little hand held device checking emails, finding out about the bowel movements of their favourite celebrity on Twitter, or just surfing the web. Boring old farts like me, who like to regale fishing stories to whoever happens to be sitting nearby, have our work cut out for us. Continue reading →

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