Last week I took a look at the Río Guadiaro in Cadiz province. It was a hot afternoon and so I decided to have a swim in the river. When I had swum a little way downstream I noticed a glossy ibis standing on the stony margin just where the pool became shallow and before it was funnelled and broken in a shallow section of fast water. It was a beautiful place this and I guess it would be relatively undisturbed since the bankside growth was difficult to pass through. The only way to get here was to swim. Since there was little of me sticking out of the water I tried to get as close as I could before frightening the ibis away and managed to come within about 8 metres of it before it decided it didn´t like the look of me and took to the air. View full article »
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On the way back from the river last night I heard on the radio that the final of the Champions League was underway and that Barcelona was beating Juventus by a goal. Football matches don´t come any bigger than this one. Both teams were set up to take the “treble” should they win this final.
I figured that I might catch the end of the game at Masia bar in Villafranco and so pulled up and shouted a pint and a tapa of boquerones en vinagre. There were three televisions blasting out the game. One was in the main part of the bar. The biggest screen was in a kind of function room behind the bar. It was pretty quiet in there – just a three or four expat types. The third telly was in a little covered extension out the front. This was where the action was. Everyone bunched up at the tables offering the best view of the game but there was some space on the tables on the opposite side and I decided to settle there. View full article »
The famous physicist Schrödinger once set out a little thought experiment of the kind with which Physicists love to bamboozle us. It makes little sense to me so I asked my Physics teaching colleague to explain it in really simple terms. He told me that to get a useful explanation I should read a little of a book of his that he happened to have to hand called “Physics for Absolute Morons” or something similar. The book makes everything crystal-clear by offering the following explanation: View full article »
On the river the other day I had a conversation with a goat herder. He was a kind of wild-looking guy but he was friendly. He was walking along with his flock of goats, dogs working around him, in the direction of the water I had been fishing. Ours was less of a conversation than an exchange of shouts because we were on opposite sides of the river.
Initially we exchanged greetings and he asked how I had done. I think I had at that point caught four barbel. Then I asked him how many goats he had and he told me he had about 400. That sounded like a good answer to me. Chances are there are new goats being born all the time, and old ones popping their clogs so the number probably fluctuates around that figure. Still, that´s a lot of goats whichever way you look at it. View full article »
There´s not a whole lot of shade if you fish my river at this time of year so if you are going to do anything more than a few hours you might want to plan for a pit stop to grab a bit of shade and maybe a cold drink.
On the A357 which runs along the Guadalhorce river valley you can choose from a couple of places. One of these is the Cepsa service station and the other, right on the opposite side of the road, is the Cafetería E.S. Europa. This leaves you with a decision to make: Cepsa or Europa? View full article »
My brother Sean and our old fishing buddy Mark McCann have just done a stint fishing the mayfly in Ireland. They fished Lough Arrow in County Sligo where Sean and I used to live many years ago in an building which had previously been a school house. I asked Sean to report back on his adventure and he sent me an email today. I will stick photos on some time if I can extract any out of Mark.
That´s enough of a preamble from me. Nobody writes a better fishing report than Sean so here we go…..
I came across an interesting piece of drama at the river on Saturday. It involved a night heron and some fish.
The heron was standing in water which was only a couple of inches deep, a shallow sill between one sprawling turbulent pool and another. Any fish moving upstream from one pool to the other needed to swim across this shallow ridge in water that barely covered its back and the chosen route was just where the heron was standing. When the bird became aware of my presence it took a few steps further away but resisted the urge to take flight. Presumably the heron, in the moments before I disturbed it, had been waiting for a fish of the right size to run the gauntlet before seizing it. View full article »
Remember Indiana Jones? This guy was as tough as nails and he never backed out of a fight even when seriously outgunned. His chin was chiselled out of granite. If you knocked him down he just got back up again, madder than he was before. He was scared of absolutely nothing.
Except snakes. View full article »
If I could be in any one place at any one time I would be hard pressed to suggest anything that would trump an evening like this one on the Guadalhorce river. In many ways I can appreciate it more for having been a spur of the moment decision. The weather looked good, I didn´t have much work to do and so I just said to myself “why not?”
The fishing was good too. I picked up a three barbel in pretty short order. The first of these was wounded in the middle of its back around the dorsal fin. The wound looked like the kind made from above, by a heron perhaps. View full article »
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