Lough Corrib Mayfly – Good Friends and an Unexpected Competition

This year’s Lough Corrib mayfly trip wasn’t about me.

It was a proud day as I was finally surpassed in angling success by my ageing angling protégé Alan. There’s no disguising that over the week Alan out fished me. In fact, I caught very little whilst he caught quite a lot – who’d have thought this day would come!

So in recognition of this, quite frankly, shocking development, I thought it only fitting to dedicate the rest of this post to my friend Alan.

As I’ve written before I’m entranced by Corrib’s complexity and fickleness. Seven years ago I enjoyed the angling week of my life on the Lough. A week of gentle, warm, westerly breezes under overcast skies. A constant stream of hatching mayfly being greedily gulped down by hungrily obliging trout.

Significantly, that was the year that became known as 1B.A. (one year before Alan). There’s no denying that Alan’s introduction into the angling world coincided, some would say caused, a catastrophic slump in my own angling fortunes.

He seemed cursed, as trip after trip was blighted with a choice from the smorgasbord of angling disasters – unbroken blue skies, glaring sun, flat calms or howling gales, north winds, east winds, seemingly always cold winds, floods followed by the inevitable drought.

But we persevered, and gradually clambered out of the slump and both got to catch fish – but always the master outfished the apprentice – until last week.

In the days before our trip, I had been consumed with the uncontrollable need to tie even more mayflies to complement my already overflowing fly box. You just can’t have enough. After all, there’s nothing more satisfying than catching a fish on some home crafted creation inspired by a Davie McPhail video.

The ritual pre-trip scanning of the weather apps had not heralded good news, cold northern winds were predicted. Of course, when you get a forecast like this, it always turns out to be deadly accurate, and so it was in this case. The only bit that was wrong was that the Met Office failed to mention the incoming mid-week gale.

Despite the less than balmy thirteen degrees, Monday was quite promising. We had a gentle breeze, albeit from the north, and there was a steady stream of mayfly coming off the water.

We moved fish throughout the day, some of which Alan caught, whilst myself and Maurice, my latest convert to the delights of spending a week in a boat, consistently rose fish without managing to hook any of them.

In the last couple of years Maurice has joined us on what he calls “our angling adventures.”

He is still very much in the foothills of his angling career. Perhaps his most memorable contribution to date hasn’t been any of the fish he’s caught, but rather the christening of the previously uncharted Maurice shallows which he struck with a full throttled propeller. You’d be surprised by just how quickly you can bring a charging eighteen foot boat to a juddering stop by simply running it aground – who’d have thought!

By Tuesday an angry Corrib began to bare its teeth with racing white horses and long running swells. We kept in the shelter of the Barrusheen shore, and finally came across moving fish in the narrows between Roeillaun and Inishdawee.

All the hours spent at the vice eventually paid off, with a nice fish coming to a home tied McPhail’s mayfly. 

Of course it’s not a competition, but after his first day’s triumphs, Alan was now treating it as one.

Not satisfied with continuing to catch the occasional fish, he decided to add a Machiavellian twist by nobbling the opposition. You have to admire the skill and precision it took for Alan to trap Maurice’s rod tip between the hinges of his boat seat, neatly snipping off the top six inches. An “accident” made all the more tragic as the rod died a virgin, having yet to catch a fish.

Wednesday was a write off, we didn’t even make it to the Lough. The sight of the storm tossed treetops behind our cottage was enough to make us retire to the delights of the Connemara Isles Golf Course. A truly quirky gem on the wild Connemara coast – if you’re a visiting golfer – go!

By now Alan had expanded the competition into a triathlon – fishing, golf and evening pool. We’ll draw a veil over the frankly disappointing pool results, but I can say it will take the pair of them some time to recover from the damned good thrashing meted out to them on the golf course!

Thursday, if truth be told, was a pretty miserable day on the Lough, cold and blustery with the added pleasure of vicious squally showers hurling black scurries across the wavetops. Unbelievably, on our first drift, Alan further extended his lead whilst I didn’t move a fish all day.

We sought shelter in Creeve Bay, and as we drifted onto its island we encountered a huge number of gulls circling and plummeting into the grey water below. Drifting closer, we could see a tumult of rising trout, it was almost as if the gulls and the trout were frantically competing for the same mayfly. This feeding frenzy lasted for only for a brief few minutes, and embarrassingly we failed to touch a fish amongst what should have been easy pickings.

On Friday the mercury was still stuck at a stubborn thirteen, or being generous possibly fourteen degrees. Most importantly, the wind had calmed and we were blessed with gentle rolling waves for much of the day.

We spent the morning around Illaundabreack before drifting onto the Doe. There was plenty of fly and rising fish with a fair few coming to the net. Frustratingly, we just couldn’t locate anything of any size.

It was the same story all week, I think the biggest fish we caught was a pound and a half. Other anglers we talked to had the same experience. Strange, as one of the great joys of Corrib is the unpredictability of what you might hook next.

We lunched on Inchagoill, pulling the boat into a small inlet on the western shore of Kineavys Bay. A tranquil spot with the calm water dotted with a myriad of mayfly, clouds of them high above the treetops. This is how it’s meant to be!

As we lunched, we were joined by a flotilla of mallard ducklings sipping and slurping their way through the banquet of helpless mayflies carpeting the water around our beached boat. If you spend time in nature it always delights you with some special treat.

In the afternoon Alan discovered the joys of the dap. I nearly always have a dapping rod in the boat, whether it’s on Corrib or on the sea trout lochs of South Uist – but to be honest I rarely use it, I’m too wedded to my fly rod.

I’ve often relayed the joys of the art of dapping, but never convinced Alan to have a proper go. Up to now he’s almost viewed it as a form of cheating, but no longer.

After an hour, catching one fish and moving many more, he was suddenly a convert and perhaps expressed the essence of fishing the dap in the simple phrase “This is fun!”

We finished the afternoon fishing Corrib as I like best, drifting around and off the small islands. Short drifts, back to that word fun, fun to fish and fun on the oars keeping the boat on the shallows.

The decent weather didn’t last, and Saturday was back to the worst of the blustery, squally conditions that had blighted our week. We spent a couple of hours drifting around the Snadauns in the company of plenty of other boats, and from what I could see, they were all as equally unsuccessful as ourselves.

Just after lunch, it was time for us to make our last casts before setting off on the road back to Dublin. It was good to see Maurice insist on “three more casts” before taking another dozen. I have high hopes for Maurice – as long as he’s kept away from the engine!

So another year of frustration, with tantalising glimpses of the seemingly ever just out of reach possibilities provided by Corrib – doubtless we’ll be returning next year.

But back to my first protégé. I am genuinely proud of Alan’s progress, he now casts a good line and those days of constant tangles are merely a distant memory. True, it’s slightly frustrating that his development has been based on not listening to a word of instruction that I’ve ever given him, even if he does say he has learnt a lot from watching me. It almost makes me feel like a proud parent!

Perhaps we should all learn from the fact that whilst this year I gave a debut to a much coveted, and undeniably gorgeous Sage R8 (which made a considerable dent in the children’s inheritance), I was outfished by somebody who was largely kitted out by Temu.

Alan’s unsupervised angling related shopping has always been a matter of great concern to me. His fly purchases can be best described as garish rather than imitative, and I find it puzzling that a man with properties spanning three nations should feel the urge to be equipped and even sometimes dressed by a cut price Chinese online retailer.

To be fair, there have been the odd successes, such as his excellent boat seat which he excitedly tracked on its journey westwards through a litany of eastern European dictatorships.

However, I did draw the line at having Temu’s supposedly invisible in water leader being anywhere near the boat. Last year he’d tied up a cast of this shocking rainbow coloured material, and in my disbelief I chucked it over the side and watched it sink luminously into the depths. If truth be told, it looked far more radioactive than invisible.

But I can’t deny it, Alan won May’s angling competition, even though I didn’t know there was to be one. Of course, freak results do happen – after all Scotland have just qualified for a World Cup!

Battle will be resumed in South Uist in August when all the pundits are betting on a very different result.