We are back to scraping ice from the car windows in the mornings now, and with that drop in temperature the fishing has become a bit harder. I had hoped to do a bit of pike fishing on Sunday but ended up retrieving and moving a boat for a friend instead. Monday was clear of any chores though, so I mulled over possible venues for a spot of fishing. I didn’t fancy a long drive on icy roads, so I looked around for something a bit closer to home and settled on the Boyle river at Knockvicar. A new spot for me, I was hoping to find a few roach willing to feed around the weir, but would happily accept anything that was willing to bite.
As a young man I loved the cold weather, climbing ice girt crags in the Scottish highlands or sea fishing for cod on the forbidding North Sea. Sub-zero temperatures were just part and parcel of being outdoors and in general it didn’t bother me too much. A lot has changed since those far off, carefree days and now I dread the wintertime. Finger joints ache and stiffen, the wind seems to find every opening in my clothes and chills be horribly. Of course I dress up in layer after layer of clothes, but it is my extremities which bear the brunt of the frost. Yes I know, I should wear gloves but I find they get in the way of my fishing so I suffer on, the occasional thaw from electric handwarmers in my pocket being the only source of comfort.
I think I have discussed the Boyle river before in this blog, but in a quick summary, the Boyle flows from lough Gara, which itself is fed by the Breedoge and Lung rivers. From lough Gara it flows east through the town of Boyle and then into Lough Key. It then flows through Oakport lough before joining the Shannon at Drumharlow lough. There are some faster stretches which hold a few trout, but a lot of the Boyle is deep and slow, making it a good home to coarse species such as roach, rudd and bream. Knockvicar is a collection of a few houses beside a bridge over the river, and just upstream lies the Clarendon lock, where a weir holds back the water as it exits Lough Key.
I delayed starting out as I could see little point in being all macho and driving on slippery roads. I have found that cold nights mean the fish are slow to wake up and so rushing along dangerous roads for no bites didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me. I ate a bit of breakfast, lit the fire in Helen’s studio, fed the cats and sorted out the tackle for the day. I was a bit stiff after all my pulling and dragging with the boat and trailer yesterday, another reason to take it a bit easy today.
The journey was unadventurous if you discount the idiot in a black Merc who overtook me on a blind bend and nearly hit someone coming the other way. You can’t park at the weir, so instead I left the car a couple of hundred yards downstream and walked along the tarred path through the trees. A floating pontoon for the boaters to tie up to as they wait for their turn in the lock was of course deserted, so I set up on it with the 13 foot match rod. Plumbing the depth showed an uneven bottom which was slightly deeper at my side but was roughly 10 feet of medium paced water. Trotting with a stick float is not really my forte, but I fed the swim a couple of rod lengths out and kept a steady trickle of maggots going in while at the same time making small adjustments to depth to try and keep as close to the bottom as I could without constantly snagging on the rocks. Brilliant sunshine broke through almost as soon as I started to fish, making seeing the float a tough job, even with my sunglasses on.
After 30 minutes without an offer I decided to try above the weir instead, so I upped sticks and plodded further up the path to the lock where I found a lovely swim below a string of navigation buoys. Here the depth was about 5 feet and it shallowed up considerably about 40 yards below where I set up. More feeding the swim, more lovely runs through very inviting water but alas, no so much as a nibble. It is nearing the end of October so I knew when I set out this was a bit of a stretch hoping the roach shoals would still be here but it was still disappointing to blank in such a gorgeous spot. What to do now though? I needed a plan B.
I was only a few miles from the town of Boyle and the small marina there has always been good to me so I headed over there. By now I had only about one hour of fishing time left and I have only ever fished this marina in the depths of winter. Would the roach be in there this early? The usual suspects were to be found when I arrived. Joggers in garish spandex, elderly couples out for a walk, dog walkers (of course) and three fellas working on the two boats moored up for the winter. Hastily setting up, I trickled in a few maggots and looked around. The water was both high and very dirty. Bits reeds, clumps of dead weeds and assorted detritus littered the surface and a horrible brown scum of dead algae had build up around the edge of the floating pontoon I was on. Despite this none too imposing façade, the odd small fish was topping and that alone gave me a faint hope of success. I changed the stick float and put on a waggler, set the depth at 8 feet and settled down to see what would happen. Exactly nothing happened.
Well, nothing happened for about 20 minutes. No bites, no fiddly little twitches on the float, no sudden disappearances of the bright red tip. Grimly hunched on the seat box I stuck to the plan and chucked in a pinch of red maggots with every cast trying to lure something (anything!) into the swim. Finally, a wee knock at the float produced a tiny perch which saved a blank but was hardly a roaring success. A few casts later a better bite turned up a roach which to be honest had seen better days. Most of its scales had gone and the poor thing looked like it was not long for this world (see below). I popped it back in and wished it better fortune.
All my loose feeding now began to pay off as a steady stream of smallish roach came to hand. I missed as many bites as I landed but it was all good fun. Some roach were only a couple of ounces but the best of them would have been only a little under a pound in weight. For about thirty minutes it as all go and then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the shoal was gone. I fished on for a while but without a single bite so I called it a day and headed back to the car. That short spell of action I had landed a total of 23 roach and two tiny perch. While far from an exceptional session I was happy to have bent the rod into a few fish after a poor start to the day.
Lessons from the day were many. That stretch of the Boyle river at Knockvicar is lovely and I will be back there next spring. My trotting is coming on and while I have along way to go my control of the float is improving. I wish I had taken my centrepin reel with me to get more used to using that, but I could not lay my hand on it when packing in the morning (it had got mixed up with some fly reels and I found it when I got home). Finding some roach in the marina this early was a bonus and it could mean I have some fairly accessible fishing from now right through until February or so. I would have brought my whip with me if I had thought I would end up at the marina so I will make sure I take it with me each time I go fishing this winter as a back up if nothing else.
All in all, I had spent a lovely day even if the fishing had been below par. With horrible stormy weather set to hit us over the coming weekend I will try to get out with the rods once more this week while it is still calm. Watch this space as they say.
