Irish Interlude

My son Tom was explaining to our Irish friends Matt and Katie that he would prefer to go to South America. “The food is more exciting in Bolivia. The local markets sell the ultimate takeaway: guinea-pigs on sticks.”

Matt, slightly taken aback, recovered quickly. “Tom,” he said, “I promise you: come to Ireland and I will ensure that you get a guineapig on a stick.”

Frances, Tom, Jane and I arrived in the Emerald Isle in late August, at the end of what was being forlornly described as ‘the second summer of rain.’ We said a quick hello to Matt and Katie, who were busy tending a lame bull on their farm in County Meath, but were desperate to see the wild west coast. We promised that we’d be back in time to celebrate Tom’s seventeenth birthday.

My homework for the trip had largely consisted of reading Peter O’Reilly’s Rivers of Ireland and Loughs of Ireland, which proved to be essential, if only for the contact addresses and phone numbers of the numerous fisheries’ owners. From all that I had read, it was clear that the fishing was vastly more expensive and mostly inferior to that in Australia and New Zealand, so I resolved to immerse myself in the traditions of Irish fly fishing. My first choice of venue was Lough Corrib, a huge public fishery, dotted with countless islands, where the fishing is world renowned and free.

Lough Corrib lies almost at sea level, but is separated from the ocean by some 10 km of mighty outflow stream. Sea trout seem loath to tackle this current, but not Atlantic salmon. We saw countless grilse (fish which have spent only one year at sea) swimming through the River Corrib past the Spanish Arch in Galway city, and also some ‘spring salmon’ which must have weighed 10 kg. Apparently salmon can hold up in the lough for up to a year before running into lake tributaries to spawn.

Corrib once boasted native populations of landlocked Arctic char, but the Corrib char became extinct in the early 1990s following the introduction of roach in the 1970s. Corrib, then, is predominantly a brown trout fishery. Most fish weigh 0.5 to 1.3 kg though some, especially the deep-dwelling, piscivorous ferox variety, can exceed 5 kg. In summer there are good rises, and wet flies are supposed to be effective throughout the rest of the season, but the news, when I made contact with one of Corrib’s most renowned ghillies, wasn’t good. ‘The weather’s shocking,’ he lamented.

Accordingly, over the next blustery ‘day or two’, we absorbed the lough’s cultural highlights. At Oughterard we visited the restored Aughnanure Castle and dined in quaint pubs with names like the May Fly Inn and The Anglers Bar. There were also charming tackle shops, which all seemed to have a sideline in something obscure, like push bikes. One in County Mayo also sold music, guns and lingerie.

On the north-eastern shore, on the banks of a tributary called the Cong, we visited Ashford Castle. Here, on a bridge overlooking a 15th century ‘Monk’s Fishing House’, we spotted numerous salmon, only to learn that the season had closed the day before.

Eventually, three days after our arrival, our guide pessimistically agreed to take Tom and I out on the lake.

The traditional Irish lough boat is a long, narrow, clinker design constructed from larch. The boatman sits in the middle, with an angler at each end. The craft always drifts square to the wind, at a perfect speed so there is no need for a drogue, and the oar on the windward side is used as a rudder, enabling the boatman to deftly tack this way or that across the breeze.

Our ghillie knew his craft well. He explained how large swathes of the lakebed comprised infertile schist, how it was best to concentrate on limestone shallows where the weedbeds and insect hatches were prolific. He also explained that patchy sky was problematic because the trout feed predominantly on daphnia. “As soon as there’s a bit of sun, the daphnia go deep, the trout follow them, and the fishing stops.Today is pretty cloudy, but not cloudy enough.” It was also pretty damned choppy.

We began fishing with a team of three Irish wet flies. Unlike most Australian patterns, these are worked in, or faintly below, the surface film. Tom and I splashed, retrieved and dibbled for several hours without any result. Periodically, for no apparent reason, a giant salmon would launch itself skywards, but we were assured that they were not worth chasing after. Eventually our ghillie said, “Look, I know you’re keen, and I can see you’re experienced, but honestly, there is absolutely no chance of catching fish in these conditions. Why don’t we go home and see if things improve over the next few days.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon fishing from the shore near our accommodation house. Prospecting with nymphs and wets resulted in nothing except redfin perch, but towards dusk the odd trout began rising and I eventually landed several fat browns to 1 kg.

The next day I resolved to go grilse fishing on a small beat on the Dawros, one of the rivers that drains directly to the west coast. I tried to buy a ticket from the Kylemore Abbey, but the warden said he’d be ashamed to take my 70 pounds. “The river’s in spate and barely fishable. It’ll be good when it starts to clear though, if it ever does.”

Not to be dissuaded, I looked further afield in County Mayo. Here, tackle shop staff were just as bleak. “Too much rain. Don’t waste your money,” they said.

Not everyone took their advice. Driving home past the famous Erriff River we noticed half a dozen anglers working flies through the floodwaters. After talking to them, I accounted for 30 angler-days over the previous week for not so much as a single hook-up.

Sea-trout fishing in Screebe Fishery west of Lough Corrib should have been a good fallback, except stocks had dwindled alarmingly. This has been largely blamed on an explosion of sea lice, which in turn has been attributed to poor fish farming practices, though commercial drift-netting has also wreaked havoc. In 2008, for the first time, anglers throughout Ireland were required to release all sea trout: quite an anathema in a place that has been remarkably resistant to the catch-and-release ethos. Mind you, the law was almost irrelevant considering how few sea trout were being caught.

I ended up fishing shallow tarns like Maumwee Lough and Loughanillaun on the wild moors west of Lough Corrib. Such waters are all privately owned, but being brown trout fisheries, not major salmon or sea trout fisheries, fees were minimal or nonexistent. Like most waters in Ireland, they were heavily peat stained, and because of the wild weather there were no rises, so I was reduced to prospecting with a small bead-head nymph. I was ridiculously successful. True, many of my fish were only fingerling size and precious few exceeded a pound, but boy what fun.

Finally, on the last day, we managed to talk our ghillie into taking us back out on Lough Corrib. “It won’t be good,” he warned. “Things are calm but still too bright.”

We ended up pottering out to an island, Inchagoill, where fish were rising sporadically in a sheltered bay. Our boatman didn’t chase them. He just got us into a drift and made us sit our team of dries lifelessly on the water in front of us. Once, I attempted to dibble the flies in the English style, but this caused our ghillie to have a small coronary. “Don’t! You’ll spook the fish!”

What fish, I thought. Mind you, the water wasn’t too tea-coloured out here, and when we drifted over some shallow reefs, I managed to spot a trout or two cruising close to the bottom.

The ghillie wasted no time contradicting me. “Don’t be stupid, you can’t possibly see anything down there.”

It took enormous self-restraint to remind myself that I was here to experience the Irish way of doing things, to try to be positive about our ghillie’s tactics. I noticed that he would tack the boat towards a fish that rose reasonably close by, and that he gave chase to any sort of shade cast by a passing cloud. But that was pretty much it. Froth lines and windlanes were ignored, as were the currents that swung off the ends of islands. Polaroiding was a mystery not worth bothering with.

At one stage I said, as humbly as possible, “Does anyone ever try to get their flies down in amongst the fish? You know, with a team of buzzers or something?”

“The English come over here and do that sort of thing. Me and a lot of other ghillies would like to have it banned.”

“They catch too many fish?”

“Not all the time, but on days like today, yes.”

Despondency is too gentle a word. “Perhaps you blokes should ban fishing during mayfly hatches too,” I proposed. At least he had the grace to laugh.

Late in the day, just before Tom finally managed to boat a good trout, our ghillie praised him for ‘raising’ seven or eight fish during the session. “You’ve done much better than your father, or any of the anglers in other boats nearby.” Apparently not catching more fish than someone else was something to be proud of.

Later on, when I lamented the situation to Rob Sloane, he reminded me that the value of Irish fly fishing lay in its tradition. “You have to remember that your ghillie’s da was probably a Corrib boatman, and his da before that. Blokes like him are desperately trying to preserve a way of life centuries old, to hold on to something unique in an increasingly homogenous world. You’re the same. I mean, you wouldn’t go to Arthurs and spin with soft plastics even if you thought you might catch more fish than you would on the fly.”

In the colonies—Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina and Canada— we also have our traditions. Essentially they revolve around problem solving and innovation, so I guess what happened at Corrib was a classic example of culture shock.

When we got back to our friends’ farm, Tom gave a lively account of the event. And Matt gave him some bad news: the guineapig wasn’t going to happen. “Our kids are mortified by the prospect. But don’t worry, I’ve got something else in mind for your birthday treat.”

Next day at the dinner table, while the rest of us watched on in fascination, Tom was ceremoniously presented with an unidentifiable lump of God-knows-what.

“Quite good,” Tom conceded magnanimously as he took the first tentative bite.

“Remember that crippled bull,” said Matt. “You know, the one with the huge set of…’

The penny dropped.