It looks like the weatherman was right. Outside the heavens have opened. The French have an expression for weather like this:
“Il pleut comme une vache qui pisse”
It was because this weather was due that I was particularly keen to get to the river on Saturday before the rains bring the water up and colour the river. View full article »
The world is more complicated than I thought. Long ago I reckoned I knew the difference between a woman and a man. It was obvious really. Men were sort of, well, manly. They went out from time to time shooting rabbits, ploughing fields or fighting fires. Women, by contrast, married them, fed them and generally attended to their various needs. And the TV confirmed that it was so. While Tarzan was wrestling crocodiles in the swamp, Jane was at home taking his loincloth out of the tumble drier.
Now, before anyone starts ripping my head off, let me say that this all happened long ago. Those were the thoughts in the mind of a boy. I have since grown up and discovered, as I say, that the world is complicated. For one thing there are now more men who are hair stylists than fight fires. Apparently some men wear aftershave, condition their hair and look in the mirror… View full article »
Christmas this year was spent in England and Ireland and it was great to see family and friends again. There was, not unexpectedly, a lot of sitting around and not a little consumption of alcohol.
In the UK the brown trout have their feet up too and are enjoying the closed season but the fishing for rainbows in many still water fisheries continues and there is good fishing for grayling for those who want to get out on the river and are prepared to brave the cold weather.
Back home in Spain, I lost no time in making for the river. I was in some need of solitude and space and fresh air, all of which the Guadalhorce provides in abundance.
I hooked a barbel pretty soon after starting up but the fish was hooked in the cheek rather than having taken the nymph properly. This is always regrettable, but it happens from time to time. Fortunately the fish was unharmed and, after apologising profusely to it, I released it and it made its way back upstream to the head of the pool from which it had been taken. View full article »
On Saturday I turned 50. This is something I am struggling to get my head around. It was a day spent travelling but I was looking closely at how the day progressed to see if the omens were looking good as I took my first tentative steps into my sixth decade. Unfortunately, things didn´t seem to be going particularly well.
First, the elastic on my underpants snapped and I was trying to get myself and the kids trough airport security at Gatwick. This meant that while fooling around with passports and boarding cards my underwear was rapidly making its way down my trouser legs.
And things didn´t get better. When I tried to look at the computer screen at home I struggled to focus and then discovered one of the lenses had fallen out of my glasses and disappeared somewhere in Malaga.
I was struggling to put a positive spin on life when my brother Sean sent me some interesting news from Ireland. He had chanced on an unusual raptor while out walking with his dog. It was huge. The great bird landed in a tree about 40 yards away and Sean managed to identify it as a juvenile golden eagle.
Golden eagles are being reintroduced to Ireland after an absence of almost one hundred years. Sean reckons that the bird he saw flew from Killarney which is some 50 miles from where he saw it. “No bother to an eagle” he says.
Golden eagles are one of the most widespread of the large eagles and they are relatively abundant here in Spain but, because they need large territories and don´t like built up areas, they are never common. A sighting is always exciting. Norman Smith, a fellow fisherman who lives nearby, also had a close encounter with a golden eagle recently.
I think that, in contemplating the omens for the future, I will ignore wardrobe malfunctions and temporary visual difficulties and think, instead, of Sean´s positive suggestion that the sight an eagle on your birthday is “a sign from nature of great things to come”.
The lovely photograph below of a male golden eagle was taken by Martin Eager of Runic.com
You might think that surrounded by soothing waters, my mind is emptied of its worries when I fly fish. But this is not so. When I fish, I am tormented by demons. There are several and, over the course of the years, I have come to know them pretty well. And, even though they are familiar companions at the waterside, I have never given them names or introduced them to anyone else. Today I will. There are five and they may well be strangers to you but, I suspect, you are already acquainted.
Among them there are two pairs. Like couples who have bitterly fallen out in the past each resolutely disagrees with the other. It is almost as if this is a matter of principle. There is simply no common ground. I shall christen the first pair Nymph and Dry.
Nymph has clear instructions it wants me to follow: tie on a nymph and drift it near the river bed. He argues persuasively that there are no signs of fish at the surface and points out that fish predominantly feed close to the bottom. If I don’t believe him he reminds me that analyses of stomach contents of trout overwhelmingly suggest that most of what is taken drifts or scurries on the river floor or close to it. Under his influence I reach for my sinking flies and rummage among the hare’s ears and pheasant tails. And, just as I am about to make a choice, his nemesis appears and yells into my other ear.
“Forget that crap!” Dry has climbed up onto his soap box. “You know what’s going to happen. You are going to snag your hook on the bottom! Okay, so no sign of surface activity – big deal!” Dry is a purist, but he argues convincingly too. A dry fly may well draw a good fish to the top even though no rise appears to be underway. And prospecting new water can be done quickly. Takes are easy to spot. Drag is immediately obvious. And nymphs, he tells me, should often move more slowly than the water surface because of drag created by the river bed and it is hard to make this happen in deeper water without getting closer, maybe too close, to the fly. And those takes can be much more difficult to detect.
While these two are battling it out the other pair of demons shows up. Let’s call them “Fast” and “Slow”.
Again they act antagonistically. Fast tells me to keep moving, explore new water, to see what’s around the next bend. Slow tells me to get a grip. “Be stealthy” he says, “Cover the water slowly so as to spook as few fish as possible, and keep low.”
Now the problem for me is that all these demons are experts and each has proven himself a useful guide in the past. But they agree on nothing. In the end, the day’s fortunes, whether good or bad, are simply the compromise reached after their interminable bickering.
The last demon you have surely met. We all have. Let’s call this one “Stay.” He just wants me to stay at the river. Forever! And why not? It’s peaceful there. Stay convinces me to break my promise to make this one my last cast, to fish into the dusk, or even into the night. Maybe of all the demons I should fear him most. After all, that extra cast rarely produces and I can never find the car in the dark and, of course, my wife will be pissed off with me again. Unlike the others, who have an opposite to check his capacity to dominate, Stay and I must fight it out between us. And he wins. Always.
Published by Fly Fishing and Fly Tying Monthly, April 2011
I was first taught the “birds and bees” lesson about human reproduction in my last year of primary school. Before that I had given the matter no thought at all, unlike the kids of today who seem to know enough to write a PhD thesis on human sexuality by the time they are 10.
I can remember the lesson very clearly. While we were out on the playground playing our customary game of football with a tennis ball, Miss Howe had been busy drawing enormous diagrams of human genitalia on the blackboard and these diagrams became, naturally, the focus of our attention as soon as we returned to our desks.
This was a kind of awkward situation and I was keen to see how the other kids were going to react. Would they giggle? Would they blush? Did they look as though they knew all this stuff already? Most of them gave little away but I noticed something odd about Jimmy Simmonds.
Jimmy was one of those kids with thick lenses on his glasses which distorted his eyes and made it look as though he viewed the world through the bottom of beer glasses. What was immediately obvious about Jimmy, and this image I will never be able to erase from my memory, was that his reaction to the huge chalk diagrams could not be read from his eyes because the insides of his spectacles had completely misted over. The structures of the human reproductive organs were hidden from him by a thin layer of fog.
It’s funny how things work out. I am now a teacher myself and, Like Miss Howe, I find myself explaining to a new generation where babies come from.
It is difficult to think about sex and sexual reproduction without our natural bias towards reproduction in humans. If kids are told that the next topic is sexual reproduction they will assume it is about human sexual reproduction and turn up to the next lesson on time, or even early, and foaming at the mouth. But sex is, biologically speaking, what makes the world go round and is overwhelmingly common in just about every species you might care to think of. Even flowers and trees contrive to reproduce sexually in the majority cases although they have no awareness that they are doing so.
Biologists have often been puzzled by how commonplace sexual reproduction has become. It is not necessarily the easiest or most reliable means of producing offspring. For one thing you need to locate a reproductive partner or organise, as flowers do, for your sex cells to be delivered to one. But the benefits in terms of genetic reshuffling during the formation of sex cells, and the new genetic variability resulting from combing the genes of two parents, seem to outweigh the costs involved.
I usually introduce the sexual reproduction topic by getting the kids to think of organisms which are not human, and among my favourite are the fish. And, among the favourite fish of fly fishermen everywhere, and at the top of the list for many, are the salmonids.
Salmonids, which include char, trout, salmon and grayling, can be taken as pretty representative of fish in general in terms of how they reproduce. Sperm cells can swim quite happily in water they are released there by the male fish and fertilise eggs, which are also released into the water by the female. This typically happens in fast flowing, cold, well-oxygenated water in the upper reaches of rivers and streams. This external form of fertilisation is typical of fish and frogs and other animals that reproduce in the water. Of course, problems arise for animals that live on dry land and it is the absence of a liquid medium through which sperm can travel that drove the evolution of internal methods of fertilisation of land lubbers like us. In humans the sperm need to be deposited inside the reproductive tract of the female which results, among other things, in the giggling of the kids sitting in the back of the class in Year 9.
Before returning to the salmonids, here is an interesting thing that happened at work a few years ago. One of my colleagues came into my class in an agitated state. She was, at the time, teaching the “Sexual Reproduction” topic to Year 7 and was having to fend off probing and embarrassing questions on the topic by one of the boys. There seemed to be nothing he was not prepared to ask. I could only sympathise. Fearless kids like this can make teaching this stuff tricky. It was only some time later that I got wind of the fact that the other, more timid boys, were paying the other kid to ask the questions on their behalf. They were egging each other on, each trying to come up with a question to make the teacher most uncomfortable.
The going rate for questions about sex? One euro a pop.
Where were we? Okay, I remember, back to the salmon and trout. Once the fertilised eggs are deposited and covered by stones they are pretty much on their own. Mum and Dad are not going to be around to take care of them and, invariably, a punishingly high level of mortality results in very few of the offspring surviving even their first year. To offset these huge losses, large numbers of eggs are deposited and this, again, is quite typical of fish.
It is probably fair to say that it is the reproduction of salmonids which is best known by people with no particular interest in fish. The image of a salmon navigating obstacle and dangers to return from their ocean feeding and growing to the rivers of their own birth is vividly etched in the popular imagination. We have all seen the waterfalls they leap and the grizzly bears trying to hunt the fish as they push their way endlessly upstream. It is the salmon, and particularly the half dozen or so species of Pacific salmon that swum through our television sets and into our living rooms. They provide a spectacle that is unrivalled in natural history.
But the price to be paid for sex by these salmon is death. The Atlantic salmon may survive the rigours of spawning, although most do not, but this is not true of their Pacific counterparts whose spent bodies, post-spawning, litter the watercourses like the petals of flowers that have served their purpose and remain scattered on the ground. The nutrients within those remains are locally recycled and the whole migration can be seen as a swimming conduit of nutrients from the cold ocean to the interior of a continent hundreds or thousands of miles distant.
Reproduction of brown trout is essentially similar although the migratory distances will be relatively short. Some sea-going trout will have returned from their coastal wanderings to spawn, like the river relatives from which they are genetically indistinguishable, they are very likely will spawn in the rivers in which they were born.
Most of this drama is unseen by the fishermen who might have spent hundreds of hours chasing after trout during the fishing season. I came across some beautiful photos taken by Miguel Aguilar which show trout spawning. If you would like to see them, you might like to follow this link:
http://issuu.com/flymagemagazine/docs/flymage_15_october_2012_eng/33?e=0
I got a present of a book by Bob Wyatt for Christmas. It is called “What trout Want”. Wyatt is a good writer and this is a fine book from which I learnt many things. It also threw light on a mystery: the giant trout of the back country rivers of New Zealand.
I have long been puzzled by these iconic fish. Their large size and the remote pristine landscape they inhabit probably draw thousands to New Zealand each year. The thing I found odd about these fish was that most of them seem to be males, often broad in the back and with the characteristic kype. Why is this? And how could such huge fish sustain their bulk in these headwaters?
The answer, according to Wyatt, is that these are fish which have remained in the reaches of the river close to their spawning grounds after the others have dropped back to the more hospitable reaches of the river further downstream, or into large lakes into which these rivers drain. The fish may indeed struggle to maintain their bulk here and many will, in due course, work their way downstream where the food supply is more likely to meet their demands. And there they may remain until the powerful reproductive urges drive them upstream to spawn again.
It is difficult for me to think about things like the back country trout and the powerful drive that push salmon to the spawning grounds following their ocean wanderings. It is enough to make my glasses steam up!
I found this lovely drawing of a male (top) and female brown trout (bottom) on a blog called The Weedbed Blog. It was made by a Canadian guy called Nick Lafferiere.
I´ve got to be honest. I am really not sure about Santa Claus. Doubts have been brewing in my mind for some time and I have developed two different hypotheses.
The first is that he simply does not exist at all, unbelievable as that may sound. A lot of people seem to say this, mainly children.
The second is that he does exist but he is a mean-spirited sod. This may seem like a harsh thing to say but there is some evidence to support it. For a start, at the sixth form Christmas bash “Secret Santa” got a present for all of the people in the room except one. Guess who?
And another thing, have you noticed how Santa gets really cool and expensive toys for the kids of rich families and the kids from the wrong side of the tracks get worthless crap or nothing at all? What the hell is on his mind? Surely he should give the poor kids a break, after all the parents of the rich kids can make sure they don´t want for anything.
No, Santa seems to like to preserve the status quo and I´m pretty pissed off that he hasn´t given me a damn thing since I was a kid.
If hypothesis number two is correct and he does actually exist, I thought I might ingratiate myself to him by forging a letter and send it off to the North Pole. I pretended it came from my own kids and bank on him not realising they are now both teenagers and no longer in the business of writing to Santa. I have reproduced a copy of the letter below which will appear if you double click on it.
Who knows? It might be a long shot.
23.4 ° turns out to be a pretty significant measurement for all fly fishermen. It is not, as you might first imagine, a measurement of the temperature at which something meaningful happens. It is, in fact, an angle. It is the angle of the earth´s tilt. To an astronomer this angle is also known as the “obliquity of the ecliptic,” a term which has no meaning whatsoever to me but, in the interest of appearing well-educated, I shall also adopt.
Why is this angle such a big deal?
Well, the result of this angle is that most of the world´s fly fishermen are sitting at home with a whiskey in their hands dreaming of the next fishing season, or reminiscing over the events of the last one. Many of them will have turned their attention to reading books or tying flies.
For them, today is the shortest day of the year. Many of the rivers which they remember the adventures of the summer are cold and dark, maybe even frozen over. The musical rivulets of the spring are frozen fingers of ice. Trout are close to the time they will spawn on many rivers, a drama unseen by most of us.
Meanwhile, down in the southern hemisphere things are on the up and up. The Mataura river in New Zealand, where I fished during my couple of seasons living in the South Island, will now be coming into its own. My friend Harry Abbot will now be on the New Zealand leg of his trip and I hope he enjoys good sport with the famous rainbows and browns.
Here, in southern Spain, we avoid the worst of the winter blues which descend on northern Europe. My local river, the Guadalhorce, has been fishing well, even into December. I had never tried the river in the winter before and look forward to revisiting it in January and February.
For the gloomy fly fishermen of the North I would like to offer a picture or two to cheer you up. Spring and summer may seem a long way off but the “obliquity of the ecliptic” which robbed you of daylight and warmth today, will repay you in June.
We have no reindeer in Spain but I have used some state of the art graphics to convert Tony, our resident pony, and one of our two puppies in reindeers of sorts.
If you have a whiskey in your hands, enjoy it.
Boris, the little reindeer
Honesty is a character flaw that besets too many of us and it is wise to keep it in check. Of course politicians have known this for some time and are adept at steering away from the dangers of truthfulness. This, presumably, is the reason we elect them in the first place. As fishermen, we are widely assumed to be economical with the truth by those who choose not to fool around on the riverbank, and it is reassuring to know that others, who know very little about what else we get up to, can at least acknowledge this shared attribute.
No other activity I can think of provides such rich opportunities to inculcate among its followers the traits of dishonesty, duplicity, trickery and corruption. And long may it continue! After all, we spend much of our time alone in wild and desolate places, often in that murky and distorted world where the day merges with the night. Nobody can see us, and if we return with tall tales of triumph they just have to take our word for it.
And of course the prevailing catch and release philosophy is a terrific asset. Now we can claim to have taken heaps of good fish without the need to produce any physical evidence whatsoever while, at the same time, pretending that we care about ethics, value conservation and are remotely interested in the long term health of our fisheries. We’ve never had it so good!
You are probably reading this fine publication because it provides excellent guidance and tips by acknowledged experts with diverse areas of specialism. They can tell us how to cast with tight loops, improve the timing on our double haul, tie delicate posts on tiny dries, identify hatching insects, and so on.
Now I don’t want to play down the contributions that these guys make. They really do know their stuff. But don’t worry too much. You can continue to tie rubbish flies, fling them into nearby branches, wade clumsily, put down every fish in the river and still promulgate the myth that you are an expert. There are many ways to do it but let’s start with a technique which is easy to master.
Imagine that, after a day of fishing, you come across another fisherman. Inevitably there will be an exchange of pleasantries and each will want to know how the other got on. My tip here is to ask the other guy before he has a chance to ask you. When it’s his turn to ask, you simply state your own results which are similar, but of course a little better than his. Don’t overdo it. The intention is not to humiliate him but merely to imply that you are a more accomplished angler than he is.
Here is an example of how this might be done in practice.
Angler A: Hi there, how are you?
Angler B: Hello. I’m very well
Angler A: Any luck?
Angler B: It’s been okay. I managed a couple on a sedge.
Angler A: Excellent. Well done. What kind of size?
Angler B: Nothing special, but one might have been a pound and a half. How about you?
Angler A: It’s been pretty quiet really. I think I had four in the end. Like you say most were pretty ordinary. Best was just about two pounds.
Game, set and match.
Published as “The Fine Art of Lying” Fly Fishing and Fly Tying Monthly, April 2012.
If an experienced fisherman wants to figure out whether it may be a good day for fishing he might start thinking about the way the wind has been blowing, recent changes in atmospheric pressure, rainfall patterns which might affect water levels, and that kind of thing.
Real experts go a little further, factoring in fluctuations in solar wind, subtle changes in the earth´s orbit and the possible distortions to the fabric of reality resulting from the curvature of space time.
Personally, I´m to dumb for any of this and so I rely on a relatively simple method of figuring out if it is going to be a decent day for fishing. I just listen to the radio.
In this neck of the woods we only get decent reception for Kiss FM and, thankfully, they tend to drop a lot of the DJ yapping and get on with the business of playing music. All is well with the world if they play Dire Straits, or Eric Clapton or something equally easy on the ear.
But if they are in the frame of mind to play, say, Wham, or the Pet Shop Boys or Madonna or Culture Club, it becomes immediately clear that things are simply not going well. So the music on the radio has become a kind of barometer of fortune and indicates whether a day is going well and has the potential to get better or is heading downhill fast. And this goes for fishing too. A selection of good songs augurs well for any proposed fishing venture but if you end up with a lousy song selection you might as well stay at home, throw a few logs on the fire and put your feet up.
Yesterday I started thinking about sneaking off to the river around lunchtime. At the time I was driving Leo home after he had some tennis coaching. It was likely that people had other plans for me, but the sun was shining and the river, as I imagined it, was seductive in the gentle breeze. There were good fish flashing their flanks as they turned in the current.
Would the fishing be any good? I listened to the radio to find out. Kiss FM was playing one of those annoying Christmas tunes that are designed to mislead you into thinking that a whole pile of joy is just around the corner. Normally this would be a sure sign that the fishing was going to be a waste of time. The river might have dried up, or become a raging torrent or that all the fish have had been poisoned. A song like this is a portent of disaster.
But then a funny thing happened. I resisted the temptation to switch the radio off and Leo and I listened to the song together. It was such a classic of the “let´s make a few quid out of Christmas” genre and was so cheesy and awful that we began to find it, somehow, brilliantly entertaining. And so we cruised along the road between Marbella and Coin with the radio turned up high and the car resonating with cracker pulling, family-loving, carol singing, fire crackling, merriment. Suddenly Leo´s father, known in the family as a miserable bastard at this particular time of year, was full of the joys of the season.
That settled it. The fishing was on! And it turned out to be pretty good too. All the fish took a little nymph fished under an indicator but the takes were so quick and tentative that sometimes no movement of the indicator was registered.
I managed to find a way of changing the position of the indicator pretty easily. The indicator is a piece of coloured foam with the leader threaded through with a needle. A couple of slip knots are tied either side of the indicator to allow it to be re-positioned. I must remember that!
The fishing was so good, in the end, that I had to drag myself away from the river and get home in time to dress up to go out for a formal dinner bash with the other teachers and the sixth form.
A nice carp
This is the thing they seemed to want
The first barbel
The other barbel
Here is Leo and me getting ready to go out to the sixth form Christmas bash.
fishydreams 