day and my arse was sore at the end of it. But I was used to cycling then and at the far end we cycled a whole lot more. Rods over handlebars we pounded the Ring of Kerry tarmac from Waterville to Sneem and back again, and though we fished more or less every day, for a long time that first summer we caught absolutely nothing – though our enthusiasm was undimmed. Days rock-hopping Lamb’s Head, evenings at the disco in Casey’s Cove: all this added up to an idyllic summer in my book, fish or no fish. But I remember the very first finned creature – a flounder – hooked off Derrynane. Simon reeled it in, jumped up and down with joy, lit a cigarette, made a victory sign and hit it on the head. We ate it and it didn’t taste of much, other than success, but after that fishing seemed easy.
We got better at our sport and soon pollack and wrasse were caught. Simon was never happier than when he was sitting on a rock, fag in gob, doing his best to look like Terry Hall, waiting for one of those marine beasties to pull his string. Something else pulled me, though, down the road to a stream that drained Eagles Hill, the valley ending in rock and cloud out of which spilled a mercurial, frothy torrent. It fell quickly down the steep hill, past an ancient hill-fort to Castlecove, where, for the last few hundred yards before it hit the sea, the stream slowed enough to allow a bit of weed to grow on the engine blocks that made a riffle under the bridge of the N70. The river turned a long corner around the back of some kind of junk yard or bus depot, and a few of the old lumps of iron no longer needed or able to power western Kerry’s wheezy old buses had rolled down that bank into the Castlecove river. In those last few lazy pools, which no one else ever fished and no one ever stopped me from fishing, were enormous brown trout. Some went to 8 oz. I didn’t know how to cast a fly then and wouldn’t have been able to anyway – the place was a thicket of gorse and overgrown trees that turned the deepest pools into blackened caves of possibility. I had a short, green spinning rod that I’d built in the school hobby-room and a croaky old Invicta fixed-spool reel. I used a worm – no floats or lead – flicked upstream and drifted back towards me. I watched the line for takes. They came thick and fast. The river, like most Irish rivers I have since fished, was full of trout. Sometimes several small fish would grapple with the same outsized lob-worm. And sometimes a whopper would slide out from the drowned roots of the streamside trees or from behind a crank-case, to engulf it whole. I still remember the first. It jumped clear of the water and danced like crazy on the end of the line and was just so damn pretty. I fell in love with trout then and, locked inside ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, I’ve been fishing for them ever since.
I wonder then if the best way of describing the how is to start at the beginning with the why: if at the beginning of the how there is a passion – encompassing all the associated meanings of that word: desire, compulsion, infatuation – once found it will guide the rest of the discovery. With passion in your tackle bag the how will ultimately take care of itself. Which is not to say, of course, that it is impossible to light the way, or that there aren’t simple directions worth taking.
So why catch a trout? Fishers love to play that onefish-ever-after game: which fish – you’ve only got one – would you chase for the rest of your days to the exclusion of all others? I’ve thought about it often enough now to know there’s nothing to think about any more. The answer is the brown trout. The indigenous British and Irish trout, the same fish no matter where you find it, though it can look so different from one river to the next, the Victorians, who were a little incontinent with their taxonomic classifications, named a zillion different species. They’re all crammed into one now: Salmo trutta. But in appearance the brown trout can vary so vastly you can understand why the stovepipehatters got so lyrical.
From Loch Leven brown trout are silver, small-headed with a peppering of black spots, the slightest iridescence of a purple haze along each flank. From the River Itchen they are deep, short, heavy-shouldered, the silver has blended with butter, the black spots have swelled and along each flank, like a series of holes peeping through to a furnace within, is a strafing of the brightest vermilion. From Lough Corrib I’ve seen trout with sides like coal dropped in sand; from peaty Scottish lochs trout like slabs of dark chocolate. And there’s a river I know in Dorset where every fish you catch will have an orange adipose fin – like a candle flame alight underwater. These limitless, painterly riffs around the theme of trout are one reason behind my obsession. They are so bloody pretty, and no two trout look exactly the same: this fact is well known to anglers, who’ll recognise fish across the years from the spot patterns on their gill covers. There are ancient brownies in my local stream down the road that I must have caught and photographed two, three times. But in that variety the trout is only responding to its environment, to whether the water is dark or clear, the bed of the stream sandy or rocky. We can see this across these cruder dimensions, though the trout kaleidoscopes well beyond our ability to understand why. In some chimerical way the narrative of the landscape itself is refined and condensed and accreted in trouty hieroglyphics. Limestone, chalk, slate, shale, sandstone, machair, granite, clay: the surface of these islands grades like a thick slab of plywood tilted on a plane, sanded, chopped and buckled and the language of these rocks is printed on the skins of trout. Would that not be reason enough for a lifelong of chasing?
Those Castlecove fish – I sketched many of them before I ate them for breakfast – had butter bellies, green sides, black backs. They looked like the hillside that grew them. I couldn’t imagine how fishing could get much better than it was then, crawling through the snags of gorse and overgrown trees, slipping over boulders, pulling those pretty fish from dark pools that ran like Smithwicks bitter, and cycling home at the end of it all with the best half-dozen in a satchel. In many ways it hasn’t. More than that, though, fishing for trout with a worm in the Castlecove stream taught me some of the big things I needed to learn about catching trout. Most of all, how to get close to them and where they lay. Two intertwined ideas I would have done best never to forget, though forgotten they were and often are once the angler demands space for his fly-casting and derives too much satisfaction from how well it is going. Trout, I found out then and remember again from time to time, are best caught or tried for under your feet, even with a fly rod. And if you go at it slowly enough that’s often where you’ll find them.
You can’t cast far with a free-running lob-worm. All you have, to pull the line off the reel, is the weight of the worm. And you must cast it with a gentle pendulum swing or it will fall off the hook. You’ll struggle to get it more than twelve feet up the river, and an unweighted worm sinks only slowly through the water. If the stream is fast and you hold the worm in the rush of water it will be back past you in seconds, skimming on the surface at the end of a taught line and no trout on earth will take it. So try again, only just to the side of the faster current this time, using the worm and the thin thread that attaches you to it to search for the back eddies and the slips of current between the downstream flow and its upstream counterpart, or the sometimes motionless tongues of water, or the small vortices that will pull the worm down to where the fish are. Only a worm at the mercy of the currents – like a kite in the breeze – can teach you quite so quickly how to feel and read those currents. You must keep the line taut enough that you will see a bite, but not so taut that you’re dragging the worm around unnaturally. Soon enough your rod top is tracing every nuance in the flow, you’re feeling the river as if you’re part of it, and then . . . tap, tap, tap. A trout is knocking on the door. Where was it? You’ll have noticed without noticing. Each time a trout takes, and all the times one doesn’t, you’ll learn a little bit more about where they lie and where they don’t lie. You’ll start to read the water, to see the way a river flows across its crests and hollows, weeds and stones, along the corrugated edges, the riffles and undercuts, and you’ll start to translate what you see into an idea of where the fish are. The river becomes a language, and that language – admittedly with strange local dialects – is the same for every river: for the moorland stream, for a chalk stream, for a lowland brook in a vale of clay; and once you start to look at them as very big pools on a river, the language is not unfamiliar on a loch or a lough too.
Most universally? The trout are in the seams: not in the rip, nor in the dead water to the side of it. The trout lie between the two. This seam between the tongue of flow into a pool and the dead water to the side of it is the most obvious of all. But think about the margins
