A long day

One advantage of my former career as an Interim Manager was that I got to meet a huge number of people. Some I had only minimal interaction with, but many others became friends who I am still in contact with. My last assignment in Clara, Co. Offaly was supposed to last three months but I ended up working there for two very happy years. During that time I was fortunate to work with a lovely group of people, some of whom became good mates. This Thursday I planned to meet up with some of them and chew the fat about the good old days and while in the midlands I would do a bit of fishing.

I had checked the weather forecast for Thursday all week, and it promised a dry day. That was until Wednesday when the boffins changed their minds and decided it would rain in the afternoon. I know predicting the weather here in Ireland is a tough job, but this year it seems like the forecast is totally unreliable. Indeed, when I awoke on Thursday morning it was raining heavily outside, yet the forecast for the day was completely dry until after lunchtime, even on the live website of Met Eireann.

Initially, my idea was to do a bit of fly fishing but with a half full tub of maggots in the bait fridge to be used up I decided on a couple of hours coarse fishing instead. The canal south of Longford has become one of my favourite venues of late. This year there have been good stocks of rudd and tench plus the odd bonus roach and hybrid in the western stretches of the canal and I have had some great fishing there. So I figured I’d fish one of those spots in the morning then drive down to Offaly and meet up with a couple of the guys for a catch up in Tullamore in the evening.

I was hoping to catch tench and perch, but was willing to accept anything fishy that came along. The change in the weather from hot and dry to cooler wet days was probably going to affect the fishing and there was a real possibility the tench would not be feeding so hard while the perch might be freer biting. Bait was the afore mentioned maggots and on this occasion I decided to just go with them and not bother with any other baits. As for tackle, I plumped for the Korum float rod and the old Leeder 12 foot feeder rods, both strung with 6 pound mono. I will be dropping breaking strain on the float rod soon, once the tench have slowed down and the weeds begin to die back. Six pound feels like a hawser to me on a float rod but I needed the heavy line to cope with big tench diving into the weeds. Roach in open water over the autumn and winter will require an altogether more subtle approach.

Luckily, I had loaded the majority of my gear in the old Yaris the night before, saving me getting wet before I had even started out for the day. I can’t say I was looking forward to a soggy drive to the midlands but the heavy shower in Castlebar eased off after a few miles to be replaced by sunshine. That would be the theme for the day, pleasant sunny spells with increasingly heavy, thundery showers from time to time. The journey was broken when, on reaching Tarmonbarry, the lift bridge was raised to allow boat traffic to move along the Shannon. I switched of the engine and watched as the road slowly raised and some small craft sailed through the gap. There are a few of these bridges in Ireland and they make for interesting viewing when you are not in a hurry or an infuriating delay when you are in a rush.

The stretch I would fish is by a lock and there were some boats tied up where I wanted to set up, meaning I had to alter my plans a bit and cross over the canal to fish from the other side. Ground bait was my usual Sensas 3000, oats, brown crumb and hemp. The hemp this time was some I had cooked myself and I used the water from the pan to increase the flavour a bit. An open ended cage feeder and a size 12 spade end on a 4 inch hook length on a twizzled boom was cast out to my left while I fed the swim and put the float rod together. By the time I had the Korum rod rigged the feeder tip was twitching and a nice rudd kicked the day off for me. The float was set to fish over depth and a short shank size 14 tied on as I settled back in the chair and took in my surroundings. There is a different feel in the air now and you can sense the change in the season. People on the boats opposite were busy having breakfast of titivating their craft as I slurped coffee from my mug and generally relaxed. I love this aspect of coarse fishing, the unhurried nature of the sport and how it allows me to physically and mentally detach from everyday life. I’m not sure it would have suited me as a young man when I had to be on the go all the time. If it wasn’t exciting/demanding/edgy, I was not interested. Advancing years have changed all that!

For the first half-an-hour the feeder out-fished the float by a wide margin and between them I was catching rudd and some lovely roach. Many of the roach had hybridised, this being very common on the canal these days. Strangely, the rudd went off the feed early on without me landing any monsters. Some takes to the float set up boosted bites, my suspicion that over depth was a mistake led me to lift the hook slightly and that seemed to do the trick. The float itself was an interesting one. Early on in my coarse fishing apprenticeship I bought various lots of second-hand floats on eBay, my rational being I didn’t know much about the different designs and how to use them so buying lots of different ones very cheaply would allow me to experiment and educated myself. Of course, when you buy old stuff some of it will be damaged or broken and sure enough, I had a few duds which I put to one side and fished with the good ones. I had a crystal waggler which was busted on the bottom and a straight Middy waggler with a crushed top, so I cut off the broken parts and glued to two end together to make a perfectly serviceable float, and that was the one I was using today.

Some bream showed up, solid little lads of between one and two pounds. YouTube is full of videos of lads catch canal bream in England and even very large bream there just seem to be a dead weight which is easily hauled into the net. Not these feisty Irish bream, oh no, they put up a fair bit of rod bending when hooked. While slimy to a degree, they were nothing like as coated in gunk as some other bream I have caught.

The towpath was busy and the session was interspersed with conversations with random people., yet another facet of canal fishing which I have come to enjoy. During this session alone I was talking to boaters, dog walkers and members of Waterways Ireland staff, fairly typical for a day on the towpath of the Royal canal. I get that chatting to other people when you are fishing is not everyone’s cup of tea and that solitude is a huge part of the attraction for many of us anglers, but I’ve come to enjoy these unscripted conversations with total strangers. Many of them are also anglers to some degree and useful advice can be exchanged in both directions.

These thunder clouds off to the north west were moving rapidly in my direction by noon and still the roach were biting. While there were no monsters they were of a good average size, mostly ranging between 8 and 12 ounces. A solid dip by the float saw me bend into what was immediately obvious was a tench, and a good tench at that. After a really great scrap I slid the glorious olive fish into the meshes, a fitting end to a wonderful session. The fish was hooked far back and I was relieved to get the hook out at the first attempt with the cheap plastic disgorger. With that the first of the big, fat raindrops began fall and it was time to call it a day. Hastily vacating the peg, I made two trips back to the car (first with all the gear then with the seat) and I was pretty wet by the time I had disrobed and got into the driver seat. With plenty of time to kill I ate some sandwiches and looked out on the now sodden landscape. A girl with a large dog was sheltering under the bridge, an older fella, seemingly oblivious to the rain, kept working on the fo’c’sle of his tidy white cruiser. A huge brown dragonfly perched on the bonnet of the car and the last of the summer’s swallow performed their acrobatics against the slate blue clouds. I might be a bit wet and smelling of maggots and ground bait, but life was good, very good indeed.

Although I fished with it most of day, I was not too happy with that short shank hook on the float rod. I seemed to lose a fair few fish, more than I would normally expect too. There could be a hundred reasons for this of course, my ineptitude being by far the most likely cause. The hook in question was one of those short shank, strong ones (I can’t recall the make or model) which looked great but I am now having doubts about. Near the end of the session I changed and took off that hook and put on a new 4 pound double strength hook length to a size 18 and fished a single maggot. I’d like to say this made a huge improvement but I doubt if it did. I seemed to hook less offers, but land a higher percentage of those I did hook. In the end, my tally for the session was 18 roach/roach hybrids, 5 rudd, 6 nice bream, a couple of very small perch and one tench.

I toddled off down the road to Tullamore, taking a winding route through parts of the country which used to be my home and are now memories. The lads from work met me in a lively pub on the main drag in Tullamore that evening and we shot the breeze as ex colleagues do, them swigging pints while I behaved myself on the sparking water. Later, I drove the long miles home to Mayo along deserted roads, glistening wet from the rain, my head full of thoughts about the past and the future. At twenty past midnight I swung into the driveway at home, tired out and in need of a cuppa before bed. It had been a very long, but absolutely wonderful day.