It seemed a shame to waste the current unusually mild spell of weather so I decided to go coarse fishing on Thursday. My only problem was figuring out where exactly to fish. The Royal canal had died away weeks ago, so that was out of the question. The rivers are all still swollen and even though there may be roach to be had in quieter backwaters I could not make up my mind if the big river was worth my attention. In the end I asked for advice in the tackle shop when I went to buy some maggots, hoping their local knowledge would trump my ill-informed guess work.
I rose early, stumbled around the house feeding the cats and then myself before loading up the car with my gear. A recent bout of carpal tunnel syndrome which had shot daggers of pain through my right wrist for weeks is easing now. Wearing a support at night in conjunction with liberal applications of an anti-inflammatory gel through the day are working, so at least I’m now able to lift a coffee cup without yelping in pain. The saving grace is it happened when there was not much fishing, as casting a fly rod would have been out of the question when it was at its worst. There are still the occasional twinges but it is sufferable. I hit the damp road amid the misty morning rush hour and wound through the silver grey countryside to Leitrim.
I was stood outside the tackle shop when they opened at 10am and after a chat and the purchase of the maggots I asked for advice on where to try my luck. As in Mayo, water levels are high but on top of that, they are yo-yoing. Up one day, down the next, only to rise again. This is never good for fishing in any form as it seems to unsettle the fish and puts them off their feed. In the end, the most consistent spot over the past few weeks had been Kashcarrigan where the Ballinamore canal enters Lough Scur. I’ve fished there many times before and have yet to blank, so I was happy to head over there once again. The mist had turned to showers which came and went as I drove east, then I turned off for the tiny village of Keshcarrigan. A little past the houses I parked in a muddy carpark on the edge of the water.
Another angler was setting up on the large stand which was about 3 inches under water, his grey van parked as close as he could to the concrete apron. I strolled over and we chatted as he set up a pole and began to fish. I lugged my gear to the next stand along from him, the others further along the duckboard being too hemmed in by shrubs and trees for my liking.
The faint breeze was blowing out of the south, meaning it was behind me for most of the session, turning slightly to the south west after noon. Balls of ground bait two rod lengths out, followed by the feeder rod and finally the 11 foot float rod. I plonked down in the chair and took in the calmness which surrounded me. I took a few casts to get the float set to the proper depth, the snaggy and uneven bottom making this simple task much more complicated than it should have been. On the second cast the float shimmied and dipped but I missed than one. The following cast I swung in a small roach, then another and then another. None of them were more than 6 inches long. Some skimmers appeared, very small ones though and I missed a lot of bites while these fellows were in the swim.
The chap with the pole was pulling in fish to beat the band and some of them seemed to be good fish while all I could catch were tiddlers. I fed more ground bait into the swim and began to loose feed maggots too in an effort to attract better quality fish to me. This was only partially successful as the average size of both the roach and skimmers did improve over the session but there were no big fish to bend the rod. I fretted about the depth again, so moved the float closer to the hook to lift it (hopefully) to just tripping along the bottom. There was steady movement of water from the lough away to my left and into the canal proper to my right. This made it feel more like I was fishing a slow flowing river than a canal. I surmised that the high water was running off somewhere down in the the direction of Ballinamore. Irish canals are constructed with overflows for just this kind of conditions.
More showers passed through, not heavy, but enough to soak all my gear. A nice perch was swiftly followed by a second of similar proportions, both thankfully lip hooked and safely returned. The sandwiches I had so lovingly prepared in the kitchen earlier that morning were languishing in the boot of the car where I had forgotten to bring them. I toyed with the idea of popping back to get them but I was not that hungry and kept on fishing. More roach and hybrids as well as the inevitable skimmers came to hand but nothing big enough to require the use of my rather lonely looking net.
What had started off as a nice quiet day was rudely interrupted by a gang of workman who were laying a new driveway outside a house across the road. The team of three had a range of machines and communicated either by shouting at the top of their voices or hooting the horns of the tractors, lorries etc. ‘Sean, move the ‘effing trailer ye ‘BEEP’, Ah for ‘BEEP’ sake!!! Fill the ‘effing hole will ya or I’ll boot ye up the hole’, and so it continued. The ability of the Irish to fit as many swear words as possible into any given sentence knows no bounds.
The fish would bite strongly for a few minutes, them slacken off for a while before coming back on again. I kept feeding the swim throughout the session but failed to pull in any better quality fish. Not that I was overly concerned, all I wanted from the day was a bit of fresh air and a few bites. A shower lingered overhead, forcing me to pull my hood up and hunker down as the water pooled on my side tray. It was nearly 2pm, time to think about packing up and heading home before it got dark. I broke down the rods and strolled over to the pole fisher to see how he was doing. ’51’ he said, and some nice hybrids in the net, he gesticulated to a heaving keepnet at his side. I had managed a (for me) quite respectable 43. 22 roach, 19 skimmers and a brace of perch.
Back at the car I wolfed down the sandwiches, drank the now tepid coffee and stowed the wet gear in the car, causing it to smell in that unique way which every angler knows (and their spouses hate). And so it was back to the tarmac and heavy traffic in and around Carrick-on-Shannon before the open road to Mayo. Given the high water levels I was reasonably happy with the session in terms of numbers if not the sizes of the individual fish. Every inch of me and my gear got a thorough coating of slime, meaning a good clean up was required once I got home. Oh the joys of skimmer fishing! If the mild weather holds (and the forecast suggests it should), I’ll try to sneak out for another session soon.
My last few outings have been fairly insipid affairs with just a few small fish to show for my efforts. After a pretty lively summer the fishing has slowed up since the weather became wetter and cooler, even though it has been very mild for the time of year. I’m not getting too stressed about these poorer returns for my efforts. I am well aware that I have hardly been pushing the boundaries of coarse fishing tactics lately, instead settling for a lazy few hours here and there away from the stresses of everyday life. I just want to forget about Trump, the economy, the internet and all the rest of modern life for a short while and concentrate on the tip of a float instead.
For those of you interested in how my fly tying is going, I have been busy at the vice, on and off. I’m already nearly half way to my self imposed target of 1,000 flies by the start of next season. The only issue is that I’ve just been lobbing the finished flies into an old plastic sandwich box for now, meaning I will have to spend time later sorting through them all and allocating them in some vague sense of order.
Claretbumbler 