Welcome onset of another trout angling season in Mayo

COUNTRYFILE

WELL, here we are once more, and the onset of another trout angling season.

With such a mild winter behind us, we should expect to find to find our fish nearly as fine and as fat as they will be by the time the mayfly start to hatch in early summer.

I have yet to wet a line. That’s what getting older does for you. While all the young lads are out exploring waters old and new, I’m tucked up by the fire with a blanket over my knees wondering if I’ve had that glass of hot whisky or if I should still go and get it.

Go and get it, is the answer. “Good for the circulation, my boy!” I can nearly hear my grandfather's booming voice, followed by the chink of bottle neck on glass.

Whether it’s the actual water of life that keeps the blood circulating or all this striding to and from the liquor cabinet that does the trick, I simply cannot say. Whatever, my circulation is fine. In top order, with blood pumping in eager anticipation of the days ahead.

So here I am, sitting home, watching another amber sunset (if you hold the glass at eye level the weather is always better), while my youngers and betters are afloat, chasing those early season trout.

Just occasionally one of these does deign to get caught, but for the most part fly fishing in the month of March is a futile activity.

Twenty years ago I’d have been out there with the best and worst of them, with the full expectation of finding a full hatch of March browns or early pond olives, large water insects that emerge at the least hint of a mild day.

The trout, eager for a meal following a crisp and rather lean winter, would be chasing these at the surface.

Most of these March trout tend to be in poor condition, being not yet recovered from their November spawning. Yet in among them we would find the occasional maiden fish, broad of back and thick of flank and ready for the table.

Things have changed. For one thing, a lot of trout are spawning later in the year, possibly due to higher than normal water temperatures. This gives them less time to recover than would traditionally have been the case.

Secondly, a lot of water life is no longer present in our rivers and lakes. When did we last see our favourite water a carpet of hatching insects?

We get tired of pointing the same fingers in the same ways. At this stage we are fully aware of how our actions and pursuit of profit are affecting the world around us.

TheRe isn’t much that hasn’t been said and it’s just a shame on us that our ears are inclined in a different direction while the things we ought to love are being laid on a sacrificial altar of our own making, and traded out for shillings and pence.

It’s not all doom and gloom. There will (hopefully) be enough warmer days and still evenings, not to mention summer dawns, to keep me interested.

I shall find my way to my favourite stream and find my fish, a descendant of those that were here 10 and 20 or even 100 years before, as wild and elusive as those ever were, and spend a happy hour throwing little dry flies in his or her direction.

If that fish should be as fine and as fat as those I remember, he or she will come home with me, their days of merry slaughter at an end.

The truth is that I can’t wait to get out there. The peace and serenity found waterside in this so-pretty part of the world could never be replaced. If only we’d find a way to preserve it.