Latest Entries »

Being nice to mice

We have a mouse running around at home, or more likely a few mice. There´s one in the kitchen and there´s another that does the rounds of various bedrooms.

I have a lot of time for mice in general but they are beginning to take liberties in our house. Last night I was awoken by the sound of scratching and turned on the bedroom light only to see a mouse scurry, with commendable athleticism, from under the chest of drawers on one side of the room to under the curtains on the other side. When I lifted the curtain the mouse wasn´t there. That´s one of the things mice are good at – vanishing. I went back to bed but the little bugger repeated the exercise, in the opposite direction this time was now back under the chest of drawers scratching away. View full article »

There are no signs yet of the rains that autumn usually brings and that breathe a little new life into the river. The reduced flows have tended to push fish into areas which can be difficult to access but they are still there and  can still be taken. This fishing is challenging but good and so I leapt at a chance to go to the river on Saturday once I had returned from dropping my daughter to friends on the coast. View full article »

Shark scare

Nothing spoils a day at the seaside more than being eaten by a shark. It´s worse even than getting sunburn or having some little bastard jump up and down on your sand castle.

And it seemed last Sunday that this might be someone´s fate when a shark was spotted off the beach in Fuengirola. Everybody was ordered out of the water for fully five hours. Shark sightings off Mediterranean beaches are noteworthy events and happen only very rarely and so the Fuengirola shark sighting was a pretty big deal. View full article »

I remember reading some time about scientific research had shown that an absolutely perfectly symmetrical face appears odd and unattractive and that punters shown “doctored” images producing this effect did not find them appealing. View full article »

Every now and then I come across another fisherman´s box of flies and think to myself “Christ, I wish I could tie a few like that!”

That was certainly true of Mariano Alcaide´s flies. These live in various multi-compartment fly boxes in orderly rows and remind me of soldiers on parade during an inspection. My own flies do not march in line and are merely tossed into compartments of a couple of fly boxes. They look less like soldiers on parade than battlefield casualties in the bloody aftermath of some military catastrophe. View full article »

My son Leo has been at home for the summer but he is soon off to London for a work placement with PWC as part of his degree course at York. Despite having been here for several weeks we never managed to organize a fishing trip. This evening we put this right. View full article »

Back in June a few of us got together to do a little trout fishing in Jaen over a weekend and one of the aficionados attending that event was Mariano Alcaide. Mariano has an apartment in Fuengirola which he uses in August and, since he was just down the road we decided it might be fun to wet a line on the Guadalhorce. View full article »

One time my friend Harry Abbott got himself badly stuck in mud in a tidal section of the Clutha River in New Zealand. He realized that the incoming tide would drown him if he couldn´t free himself. In desperation he hollered like hell and was eventually rescued by his fishing buddy, David Blair. This is a story he Harry has kept from his wife for fear of having further adventures curtailed although I did let the cat out of the bag in my book Dry River. View full article »

Today I had a chance to pick up some bass flies that Johan Terblanche very kindly tied for me. I was away from home during his recent visit but he was good enough to leave them with some nearby friends and when I dropped in on them today to collect my daughter who had spent the night there, I was duly given the flies. View full article »

A couple of weeks ago we treated ourselves to a few nights away in Andalucía and Extremadura. We started out in Sevilla and moved on to Zafra and Trujillo, both in Extremadura, before returning home via a town called Palma del Río in the province of Córdoba. We were lucky enough to visit some lovely places but the cream of the crop turned out to be a former Franciscan monastery in Palma del Río which has now become a hotel. Columbus himself stayed here after one of his journeys to the New World but I don´t know which of his voyages or what year this was. View full article »