Changes they are a comin’

After what feels like an eternity, I am finally back driving again. By happy coincidence this dovetails neatly with the much delayed start to the trout fishing in these parts. The prolonged wet spell which has stretched from last October until now has pushed back the usual angling calendar by about a month or so. While it has been yet another wet week in Mayo the forecast is finally looking goo for some dry weather and with that I fully expect the fishing to take off in style. Before then, I had one last push to tie a few flies, some for clients and others for my own box.

Straggle Dabblers are very popular flies with lough style anglers. Just your normal dabbler tyings but with the fur or tinsel bodies replaced with 4 or 6 mm straggle. This material is available in a bewildering range of colours, including UV. I got busy making fiery brown, golden olive, silver and UV olive dabblers. I’ve caught trout on all of these but the UV olive one seems to be the best of the bunch.

Start the olive tying silk at the neck of the hook and catch in the butt of a medium olive cock hackle. Now run the tying silk towards the bend, catching in 6 or so cock pheasant tail fibres, a length of fine gold wire and a piece of UV olive straggle. Return the tying silk to just behind the eye. Touching turns of the straggle are next, but be sure to keep stroking the fibres of tinsel back as you wind it up the shank. Tie in the straggle and cut off the waste. Taking the cock hackle in your hackle pliers, wind it down the hook in open turns to the tail where you catch it in with the wire. Counter wind the wire, tie it in and helicopter off the waste end. Form a cloak of bronze mallard and secure it with a pinch and loop before forming a neat head and whip finishing as usual. As you can see, this style of fly is very easy and you can whip them up in no time. If you feel the need you can add a tag of silk under the tail or cheeks made from goose biots on each side.

I will get my first look at lough Conn tomorrow, but I won’t be fishing myself. I am boating for the national competition which is out of Gortnore. Outside the wind is howling now here in Castlebar, but we are promised a good fishing day on Saturday, so fingers crossed the fish are responsive the lads and lasses have a great day. After that, I plan on getting stuck into a lot of fishing, mainly trout but some coarse outings too. It will make a very nice change from that lean couple of months during February and March.

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For those of you interested in my recent car related trials and tribulations, please see below. Writing all of this sordid tale down may have been some sort of cathartic healing process for me.

I hate driving. While I understand a fair bit about cars I have no love for them. For me they are expensive money pits cloaked in advertising scams. They sell you a dream of wafting along winding roads, the wind in your hair and a gorgeous woman by your side, the car gliding through the bends at your slightest command. In truth, you will be stuck in a mile long queue at roadworks in the rain, listening to the latest horrible knocking sound emanating from the engine, just knowing it will cost you a fortune.

Much as I dislike everything to do with driving it is for me a necessary evil as public transport is woefully inadequate where I live. Almost a month ago I was forced into using buses and trains as my old Toyota entered a death spiral. The 2005 Yaris had served me well and I harboured high hopes it would go on giving me trouble free driving for years to come. The milage was low for the car’s age, there were no major issues with it and it was a great little runaround. Then one evening I pulled up on the driveway, and the brake pedal gave a harsh buzzing as I pressed it down. I knew right away what this was, the ABS system had a fault. In my heart I knew this was a death knell for the faithful old car but I had to try to get it repaired. What followed was a salutary lesson on why you should not run a banger. It is only economically viable when you can source cheap second hand spares for major parts and these days scrap yards don’t bother holding on to the very old stuff, it just goes into the crusher instead. What started out as a hunt for a stub axel grew into a long, long list of parts, some of which were easy to but others were not. Four weeks on and I could not find all the parts I needed on the second-hand market and buying new parts would total €1100. That was too much to throw at a 21 year old motor, so I had to go and buy another car.

With the Toyota in bits and not fit to be rebuilt for use on the road I was left walking or catching buses. On a day to day basis this was not too awful, the main problem for me was it virtually stopped me from fishing. Other than that, it was inconvenient but not impossible to live without the car. We even discussed not bothering to replace the Yaris but both of us decided we liked the freedom a car gives us too much for me to end my motoring for good.

Of all the elements of motoring, the thing I detest the most is actually buying a used car. I regard it as a cruel torture, a horrid waste of time and effort which almost inevitably ends in disappointment. This time around I set myself a very low budget of a maximum of €1500. As a pensioner my funds are limited and spending any more on a car seemed foolish. That said, wading through the mire of used cars in Ireland at that price point takes a special kind of self-depredation.

At least these days a lot of the hard slog can be done online. I spent what felt like endless hours at this virtual tyre kicking, haunting the car websites, clicking on likely candidates only to leave in disgust and move on to the next one. Most of what was there was clearly rubbish, but a few looked promising. One such ad was for a Seat Altea up in county Sligo. Not too familiar with this car I did some research on them and found it was basically an MPV build around the mark 5 Golf platform. This actual one was a 1.6 petrol engined model (remember that, it will be pertinent later in this tale). 2010 plated, 100k on the clock and in ‘good’ condition. The photos were taken in the dark (suspicious already), so it was hard to tell too much but at €1100 it was certainly worth a look. I made contact with the seller, asked the usual questions and based on the answers I decided to go and take a look at the car. That is when the problems started.

The seller lived in a village in north county Sligo, about one and a half hour’s drive from home for me. Of course, I was not driving and there was no direct way of getting there. After poring over timetables for ages I figured out how to get there and back by bus. On paper this didn’t seem to bad, especially since I have free travel to avail of. A meeting time and place was agreed, but I’ll admit it all felt decidedly sketchy.

Monday morning. I am up early, eat some breakfast, feed the cats and head off for the bus stop in good time. The lady bus driver was a cheerful soul and we departed on time heading for Ballina when I would have a short 30 minute wait for my next bus to Sligo. We had not gone more than half a mile before the bus ground to a halt behind a huge queue of traffic. It was a fuel protest, tractors and lorries had choked the streets and made all movement next to impossible. After some frankly illegal moves, the driver extricated the bus and we were heading north again, only losing a few minutes. Greatly relieved, I enjoyed the scenery out the window as we sped along the winding road under a cornflower blue sky.

About 4 miles from Ballina we ground to a halt once more. Another fuel protest! For the next 40 minutes we were trapped in a line of traffic moving at less than walking speed. Of course I missed the Sligo bus and the next one was two hours later. Nothing to do but try to rearrange the meeting time/place with the seller. She could not meet me at a later time as she was working then, but her cousin would meet me and show me the car. Annoyingly, just an hour later the protesters packed in their actions and traffic quickly returned to normal around the town. Finally boarding the later bus, the weather had turned nasty and heavy rain splattered on the windscreen as we cruised along the coast road, turning into the small bus station in Sligo town a little after two in the afternoon.

My original plan had seen me catching the Donegal bus which passes through my destination, but that machine had long departed the hard standing. Instead, I found a local bus, one of those little TFI (Transport for Ireland) ones that service the back roads and hamlets of Ireland. It filled with school kids and shoppers who were returning home after a day in Sligo town. Off we went, through the city, past the hospital and the college, then off down a boreen and into the townlands of north west Sligo. Pretty countryside floated past, the bus noisy with chatter and gossip and I sat back and enjoyed the ride. Hopping off in the village some 40 minutes later, I called the sellers cousin and she picked me up and drove down yet another twisty wee road. if nothing else, I was getting to see parts of Ireland I had never heard of.

First sight of the car was not too promising. The grey car had patently seen a tough life and bore the scars to prove it. Prowling around it I noted the damage, while none of it was terminal the poor car was decidedly shabby. A key was produced and I opened the door to find just as much squalor inside. Ripped seats, broken plastic trim and filthy carpet just confirmed my suspicions this was a car that had not been looked after. We jumped in to go for a test drive. OK, so most of the important stuff worked, the engine pulled away fine and the clutch/gearbox were working as they should. Returning to house I tried all the buttons and switches. The fan didn’t work, nor did two of the electric windows, plus a few other bits. I popped the bonnet to listen to the engine. A rattle came from the top end, but it was actually OK, with one rather worrying exception. This car was supposed to be powered by the VW 1.6 petrol engine, but there in the engine bay was a cheeky little 1.4 litre power plant. Why the car had a different engine was a question I chose not to ask, having already made up my mind I was not going to buy it. The sum total of all these faults and the terrible condition of both interior and exterior made my decision not to buy very easy. The cousin graciously gave me a lift back to the village bus stop where I could begin the long, long journey back to Mayo. I will spare you the gory details, suffice to say three more buses and four and a half hours later I crossed the threshold back at home. Tired, disappointed and frustrated, I returned to the keyboard and resumed the search.

The next morning, I spotted an ad for a 2008 Ford Focus down in county Galway. The description was brief, the mileage was high, but the photos looked good, so I reached out to the mobile number. Armed with more information I made arrangements to view this car. Wednesday saw me back on a busy bus from Castlebar, this time down to Galway city. From the cathedral I walked across the bustling city centre to the newish bus station where a really helpful staff member directed me to another bus which brought me out the Clifden road. A bit of a wait in a pleasant coffee shop was followed meeting the seller and seeing the Ford. This was a totally different experience; the car was in good condition and drove well. The noisy rear brake shoes were worm out and would have to be replace, but other than that this was a good car. So, I bought it. Paperwork was signed and dated, cash changed hands and I was now the owner of an elderly Ford. I basked in a deep sense of relief all the way back to Mayo, thanking God I was not on a bus this time.

This is another old car, there will be issues to deal with over the coming months (and hopefully years). From the above, you can see both the good and the bad side of buying a used car in Ireland. I have a discerning eye, but still I wasted a whole day last Monday chasing around north west Ireland only to find a pile of junk. It highlighted the difficulties of both finding a good car and the issues of travel without a motor. For me, it was a week I’d like to forget. Travel on public transport is tiring and frequently frustrating, so it took me a day or two to recover. The whole process was also very stressful, not knowing exactly where I was going, the anxiety of missing connections, dealing with the disappointment and the pressure of making the right decision all added up to a fair bit of strain on me. All of this is of course just a small part of my previous life decisions where I have left well paid jobs to do the things I wanted instead of being a good boy and working hard all my life to become wealthy. I’m financially poor, but that’s OK and the times when my lack of money mean I endure such problems as buying old cars instead of trouble free shiny new ones is part of the price I willingly paid.

So what about my new ride? It seems grand, feels HUGE after driving the tiny Yaris, and it noticeably heavier on fuel. I would have much preferred to buy a hatchback or estate model, but beggars can’t be choosers and this one is a sedan. On the plus side, the boot is cavernous and will easily swallow any amount of fishing gear. Mechanically sound (apart from those brakes which will be fixed next week), it is very dirty inside, having obviously been used to transport mucky tools or the like in the boot and on the back seats. Nothing I can’t clean with a bit of elbow grease, so all in all I’m happy so far. One final plus point, the colour – it is claret!