From the archives: A day on a Mayo lough
By Tom Gillespie
IN March 1937 The Connaught Telegraph published an article entitled ‘A day on a Mayo lough’, which was written by a Captain J.B. Drough.
It read as follows: “What was the best day’s sport you ever had?” We were cruising Lough Mask with indifferent success, and the small boy who put the question set me thinking.
For had he asked “What was your biggest catch?” - well, my fishing diary could have made an unequivocal reply. But most youngsters, asking the first question, expect the answer to the second. Whereas the biggest days are not necessarily the best days.
The man who tells you that he fishes only for the pleasure of being out of doors, and is just as well content to come in empty-handed as with a well-filled basket, is at best a self-deceiver, at worst a liar unashamed.
Sport is not measured solely by its victim. The least imaginative cannot be quite indifferent to their surroundings, and it is simple truth that many an angler finds ample compensation from a meagre bag in Nature’s handiwork.
The little unfrequented lough, cupped in the purple glory of the hills, where one’s only companions are the mountain sheep and the only sounds to break the silence are the calls of birds, may, for all its uncertainty yield, be more worthwhile than the well-stocked reservoir on the uninspiring outskirts of some great city.
And so, to my old-fashioned mind, the best days are those on which, perhaps, a slice of luck assists one to achieve the unexpected.
As on a day of June in Kerry, when the Caragh River, like Kishon of old, was running down in spate, and we had tramped four weary miles over a rough mountain tack to the head waters.
No river ever looked less like fishing well, for the mountain rills were still pouring like Niagara in miniature, and reason whispered that we were a full 20 hours too soon. Yet I started by losing a big salmon on the fly and killing a small one on a prawn.
We went on to kill two more salmon that afternoon, and I count that a red letter day if only because I seldom fished under less promising conditions of weather and of water.
And then there was a dapping day on Corrib with my 10-year-old niece, inseparable from a well-loved setter, which was insisted on inclusion in the party.
Considering the shameful overloading of the boat we were lucky to get through the day without mishap, and luckier still to account for 16 trout of well over 1-lb. average, before a sudden squall came just as the monster of the day elected to attach itself. It was, from the first glimpse I caught, a good four-pounder, and when a fish of that size made sudden a dive underneath the keel, and the boatman as suddenly tries to counter the manoeuvre, it is not good to have a crowd on board.
In the excitement of the moment the crew met amidships; the setter and a oar went overboard, the youngster lifted up her voice in piercing lamentation, and the boatman, who was a dressy man, and newly wed, plaintively deplored the ruin of a ‘bowler hat herself had a great wish for’.
The trout was the only participant in that historic encounter that got any kick out of it; for all that it was a memorable occasion, for a two-pound trout was the child’s first contribution to a fishing basket.
And here is a last picture. A little lough a thousand feet up in the Mayo hills. It is a place of mists and shadows, lonely past belief, yet the solitude is never depressing.
The sounds of birds always in the air, a cock grouse flinging his challenge across the heather, the drumming of snipe, the weird call of the wandering curlew.
And when the sun pierces the mists that shroud the mountains one sometimes catches a glimpse of a pair of merlins on the hunt or a hill fox sneaking homewards with the daily rations.
Here the trout run to no great size, though once in a way one might strike a cannibal descendant of the rainbows which stocked the little lake many year ago. But that would be pure luck, and the most we could expect, according to the ghillie, was an occasional half-pounder .
“They does be mostly little fellows, but grand at pullin’, the way they’d be leppin’ round ye, and ye in the boat,” was his way of putting it. And he was not far wrong, when after half an hour of fruitless casting, the first quarter-pounder gave me a few right merry moments before he flapped into the net. Five minutes more, and a second fish, and then with a slightly rising breeze, fast and furious became the fun.
By lunchtime we had nearly 40 trout, one or two attaining to half a pound. Then the wind again dropped and the lough was calm and still and shimmering in almost a summer haze. So we fixed up minnow tackle and trolled in the generous warmth of the afternoon.
First a thick-set trout committed suicide, and then a small pike, which haunted the edge of a weedy bay, where, doubtless, he had done many a deed of piracy, fell victim to his greed, and rested in the bottom of the boat.
And so it went on until, when we came to reckon up the spoils, we had as many fish as we could comfortably carry down the mountain side. And that, to my mind, was another of the ‘best’ days.
Yet none of these catches is anything to make a song about. Somewhere in Eire some one does the like and better every day throughout the angling season. Then why should I dwell on all that? Simply because they conjure up visions of the everlasting hills, the mists rising from the heathers, the lights and shadows on the bogs, the scrape of a fiddle and a soft ‘God save ye’ from a cottage door at twilight.
And these are the things which long after mark the days which are abiding in every sportsman’s memory.