Fly Fishing for Trout

Yesterday, I may have actually achieved real fame. My photograph has occasionally appeared in the papers before, but always in relation to minority-interest stuff, such as computers and mathematics. Yesterday, January 23rd, I featured on the fishing column of the Irish Times, page 22. holding a big trout. Everyone knows that fishing is the number-one sport, by number of participants, in Ireland; maybe everywhere. There is something deep in the blood that draws us to it.

Michael arranged a trip to Rathbeggan Lake on the Wednesday of Christmas week for Colin and myself.

(Tried to add a photo of Colin here, but I'm doing something wrong.)

Rathbeggan a private fishery, and you can fish there in the off-season. Never did that before; I'm not completely sure it's moral. Anyway, it was pretty cold, and the fish lay low and took a lot of coaxing. We laid all sorts of flies across them, and they ingored the lot.
No-one was catching anything. At the same time, they did regularly break the water, big fins and flukes rolling by, more like little dolphins than trout. There were essentially no flies on the water.

We were impressed by one fellow who rolled up and hauled out four fish in about an hour or ninety minutes. When he caught his first, I went over to have a look. Rainbow trout of about two pounds. He was fishing with a pink Marabou streamer, with a heavy gold head to sink it, and a palmered brown hackle over a pink chenille body. A sinking lure, basically, imitating a small fish; not that we have any fish remotely like that. Lord only knows what trout think about these things, but they certainly went for it. He told me the trout were only surfacing for air. He fished a very long leader on a floating line, and jerked the thing along just off the bottom, which was 6 to 10 feet down.

I had nothing like that pink yolk in the box, and went up to the lodge to see if they did. Sure enough, they were, as Huck Finn would say, plumb out of pink streamers. The nearest thing to our friend's arrangement was a hairy looking thing with a big gold head and a lot of rabbit-fur. I forked over two euro for one, and went back down.

We tried whatever we had that was pink, and then I had a go with this rabbit-fur do-dah.
I cast ahead of a fish that had just broken the water, and seemed to be cruising in an oval pattern, and he grabbed it as it sank, quite high in the water. Mighty fish. Just then the proprietor came down with his camera to get a shot to send to the paper, who had requested something, so he advised my as I brought this animal to Michael's net, and got him out.
Hence the photo in the IT.

Better things happened the following week. Michael got me a book about fly-tying for Christmas, and I worked through it. I made a pink Marabou streamer, and some other stuff, including a red-brown nymph with gold ribbing, and a wet and dry effort. It's a lot of fun, and mighty interesting. These fly-tying folk have preserved a vast amount of lore about the characteristics of natural plant and animal materials, and there is a whole new vocabulary.
We went back up to Rathbeggan the following week, and I hauled in two trout, one on the pink Marabou (after I clipped a bit of weight onto the head), and a truly mighty fish on the gold-ribbed nymph. Funny thing, I wasn't even holding the rod when he took it. It was a warmer day, and people were catching fish. There were a couple of pensioners there, doing pretty well,
and I'd stopped to talk to one of them about his flies, leaving down the rod with the fly in the water. Colin let a yell when the line jerked, and we were in business.
It measured nineteen inches.

So now I've caught fish on my own flies! It doesn't get any better.