There’s No Place I’d Rather Be Than Rural Ireland, Especially When the Trout Are Rising

This story, “The Fly Is Up,” appeared in the June 1973 issue of Outdoor Life.

The Irish aren’t like other Northern Europeans. Their way of doing things is easy and indirect, and it takes a while to get the hang of it, especially of their style in fishing.

Tons of fish are pulled from the waters surrounding Ireland, yet the only time you can catch an Irishman eating one is on Friday when he is mortifying himself. Outside his door is some of  the best brown-trout fishing in the world. Browns weighing up to 20 pounds swim in almost every stream and lake in Ireland, fishing for them is free, and there are no limits. So where is Paddy on February 15 when the season opens? Snug in his pub having a pint with the lads and discussing horses and soccer players.

An American accustomed to the stampede of opening day at home wonders what makes these people so sick. Three troutless months pass. Then, abruptly in mid-May, everybody drops everything and rushes to one of eight or nine lakes. Factory production slumps, Dublin newspapers carry frontpage reports of the goings-on, and the airports are suddenly bustling with tweed-coated Englishmen carrying rod cases. The French, the Belgians, the Danes, and the Germans arrive. Word has gone out that “the fly is up.”

During my stay in Ireland, where I had gone to sample the shooting and fishing, I’d heard about the mayfly season and about the “dapping” that goes on then, but the indifference of the natives to the early-season fishing had so put me off that I almost missed it. I would have missed it if I hadn’t taken to dropping in every few weeks at Garnett and Keegan’s, a Dublin sporting-goods store. I go there to have the proprietor, John Hanlon, improve my mind.

About May 11 I walked in and mentioned that I’d heard the mayfly season was opening soon and asked John where he thought I ought to go for it. He peered at me through the lower half of his rimless spectacles as if I were some new, exotic kind of bait.

You don’t have a hotel booked?” he asked. “Ah, God save you, I’d be on my way to Lough Derg today if I were you. I’d be going up and down the lake like Mary and Joseph looking for a room and a boat.”

“You mean it’s that crowded?”

“Tis. You’ll not find a ghillie to take you out, do you understand? When the fly is up the good ones are kept under lock and key, like vestal virgins.”

“Well, say I can find a room. What days shall I reserve for?”

“For the days when the fly is up, of course.”

“Yes, but when is that?”

“That depends on the weather. It may be late this year.”

Seized with fear that I’d blown my chance at the best fishing of the year, I telephoned my friend and fellow woodcock shooter Donal O’Sullivan, who lives in Limerick near Lough Derg.

“Is the fly up, Donal?”

“It’ll be up this weekend,” he said flatly. “Book a room at the Sail Inn in Dromineer. I’ll meet you there Saturday morning.”

When I called the Sail Inn it was obvious that the operator had put me through to Buckingham Palace by mistake. There was no bog music in the voice at the other end, only the clear high tones of a woman of British aristocracy. With no fiddle-faddle she booked me for three nights.

Lough (pronounced lock) Derg is a narrow, shallow, alkaline, 24-mile-long lake on the lower River Shannon. The green slopes of County Tipperary come down to it on the east side and those of County Clare on the west. The mayfly rises first on Lough Derg, usually on May 12, next on Lough Derravaragh, and then on Loughs Sheelin, Owel, Ennell, Corrib, Arrow, and Mask.

To get to Lough Derg I rode a train from Dublin hackney to carry me out to Dromineer on the lough. The driver charged me $1.80 for the six miles, and when I asked him if any fish were being caught in the lough he threw in the following:

“Is it the trout you’re asking? No, not the one killed. I don’t fancy the fish meself. The salmon now, isn’t he grand? Only yesterday in the lough I killed one of ten pounds weight. Oh, a lovely fish, lovely!”

He also informed me that the new owner of the Sail Inn was an eccentric English millionairess.

Dromineer is a small settlement dominated by Dromineer Castle, an ivied wreck at water’s edge that is popular with rooks — large black birds that have grown hoarse from yelling at each other all day. Crouching behind it is the Sail Inn, meek and plain, white, one-storied.

The inn appeared to have been abandoned shortly before my arrival. After a search I flushed a recumbent bartender who disappeared and returned in a few minutes with an imposing woman in blue jeans. Children circled her like satellites.

“I’ve been making my pate,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel. “You are Mr. Riley. Come along, I’ve decided to put you in number eight. And do try not to bruise a child with your rod cases.”

It was the Honorable Mrs. Juliana Roberts, daughter of the Viscount of Scarsdale, interior decorator, flyfisher, moderate (her word) shot, and spirited pursuer of foxes. Marching en masse down the hall we passed several posters proclaiming the Sail Inn’s intention to award prizes for the first trout caught by dapping, the largest caught dapping, and so on. The prizes ran heavily to Irish whisky. So far, there had been no entries.

Our platoon pulled up m front of the door marked No. 8.

“The bath and the other thing are down the hall someplace,” said the Honorable Julie. “I just bought the bloody place, and it’s great fun. We’re terribly busy.”

I was, as far as I could make out, the only guest.

No trout had been caught, the fly was not up, it was midafternoon, and Donal wasn’t due until the next morning. I decided to fish the Nenagh River, which empties into Lough Derg a few hundred yards from the hotel. Since the pub, or bar, is the womb of Irish culture, I dropped into the hotel’s and there found a ghillie in repose — a short, round-faced man wearing a suit and a hat. Ah yes, trout were to be had only an ass’s roar from where we stood, but only those of a length greater than 10 inches could be kept. He recommended the wet fly and told me where to fish.

I set off across the lobby in my hip boots and came upon a tall, elegant young man stretched out on a sofa. He regarded me over the London Times. It was David Read, who is the Honorable Julie’s partner and a member of the Fly Fishers Club of Pall Mall.

I told him where I was going.

“That won’t do at all,” he said. “Much too sluggish. The best spot is a bit too far to walk. I’ll run you down.”

Five miles away, amid the lush farmland of Tipperary, Read set me down atop an old lichen-covered stone bridge. “I’ll pick you at half-six,” he said. “Tight lines.”

In all this world there is no place I’d rather be left with rod or gun than rural Ireland. It has beauty, silence, serenity, and treasures of fish and fowl and foxes. Another angler is seldom met. There are no snakes and no mosquitoes. I can’t understand why there aren’t any mosquitoes, for Ireland is damp enough to be their Miami Beach. St. Patrick, of course, banished snakes, but he didn’t mention leaning on mosquitoes, which are a lot bigger deal.

The Nenagh River here was 20 feet wide, clear, and bent through little green pastures, every one of them fenced. Ireland strangles in fences. One hundred-forty years ago, when there were more than 8-million Irishmen instead of the present 4-million, the land was divided up into midget farms, some of less than a half-acre; all were fenced. Farms are larger now, but the fences remain, and stream fishing is best done by high-hurdlers; the earthbound must cope with stiles and burrows.

When I had climbed over the first fence I came upon a young Irishman romping in the meadow with his daughter. He was home on leave from the British army. Naturally, we had to have a conversation.

“The Englishman brought you here? You’ll kill nothing in this part of the river. Now isn’t it a pity he didn’t have the brain to take you to the Flats? I killed six pounds of trout there only last night.”

“Where are the Flats?”

“You’d be a dead man walking the distance.”

Two-hundred yards and another fence farther on I paused and dropped two small wet flies — an Olive and a Hare’s Ear — upstream and watched them sail by me. Downstream, just as the slack went out of my line, a trout struck. He fought boldly for a fish only half a foot long. I smiled upon him, patted his head (he was my first Irish trout), and returned him to his mother.

Using the same two flies (the Irish always use two or three flies on a leader, calling the setup a cast), I sauntered along the stream, casting. In the next two hours I caught a dozen brown trout between six and nine inches long. I flushed a hen pheasant and several ducks, saw a fox, and had an encounter with an emotional cow.

The amiability of Irish domestic animals kills me. I’ve spent much of my life in farm country, but I’ve never met cattle, sheep, and horses like these. In North Dakota when I entered a pasture everything took to its heels; in Ireland the animals advance on me like a herd of Swiss hotel managers.

One cow, a soft-eyed Friesian, followed me along the bank. When I stopped to fish, she stopped right behind me, lousing up my backcast, which is the most brilliant part of my attack. Now and then she gave me a shove with her wet nose. Finally, overwhelmed with sentiment, she waded into the river, splashed along it until she stood squarely in front of me, and from there gave me that big dumb look. Then, being a cow, she went potty. It ended our romance. Adoration I can endure; pollution, no.

I dined in solitary splendor at the Sail Inn that night. My waiter despised trout and suggested that I give them up and go off with him to Killaloe at the far end of the lake to try for pike. The menu was in French, the wine list long. The Honorable Julie popped her head through the service opening to the kitchen.

“You didn’t like my paté,” she said.

“It was great,” I said, “but you gave me a clod big enough for McNamara’s Band, and I still have your canard a l’orange to go. Has anyone around here seen any mayflies?”

“The gardener observed two this afternoon,” said the Honorable Julie. “We’re quite hopeful.”

Two mayflies. Two mayflies, 12 infant trout, one cow, and an empty hotel. After downing a jar of the Paddy’s to keep me from crying, I went to bed. About 9 p.m. my door was rapped. It was the Honorable Julie with a hot water bottle. It didn’t help.

The Irish, being saints and scholars and singularly enlightened, refuse to get up in the morning for anything. Work, which they regard as contemptible and undoubtedly of English origin, they approach warily at 9 or 9: 30. The things that give life goodness — shooting and fishing and chasing foxes — they start at about 10 or 11 a.m.

Donal O’Sullivan and his son Frank, a tall jovial man of 27, arrived at 10:30, accompanied by a small outboard motor and two 14-foot poles.

“Forget it,” I told them. “We’ve jumped the gun. The fly isn’t up.”

Donal, who is a building contractor in Limerick and as nice a man as you could ever meet, smiled and led me behind the boathouse to a tall hedge. He carried a small wooden box with a cork in it. He studied the hedge a moment. Then he reached out and with his thumb and forefinger plucked a two-inch, greenish-yellow, long-legged, uncommonly docile insect from a twig. He pulled the cork from the box, bunged in the bug, and restored the cork.

“Mayfly,” he said.

I gave the hedge a close look and saw that it was dense with mayflies. We seized 30 or 40 for dapping bait. By 11 a.m. we had crawled into our boat and fitted ourselves around the cargo of lunch that the Honorable Julie had provided us and were on our way.

Dapping is a simple, shrewd, lazy, cheap, exciting way to catch trout. It is purely Irish, but it is the sort of thing Huck Finn would have come up with if there had been a mayfly hatch in Missouri.

Dapping is a simple, shrewd, lazy, cheap, exciting way to catch trout. It is purely Irish, but it is the sort of thing Huck Finn would have come up with if there had been a mayfly hatch in Missouri. It is dry-fly fishing without exercise. All you need are a pole more than 13 feet long, 20 yards of floss-silk “blowline,” a round-bend longshank hook, live mayflies, and a breeze. Reels are used but are a refinement.

Frank extracted a mayfly from the box and held it up by the wings.

“Do you make out the brown spot there beneath the wings?” he asked. “You run the hook through that and push the fly around and up the shank to this bit of yellow silk wrapping. Then you must be sure to turn the barb so that it is down in the water and the fly rides high and dry on the surface.”

“Why are you putting four mayflies on one hook?” I asked.

“Because today we are blessed with a four-mayfly breeze. There are two-mayfly breezes and three-mayfly breezes too.”

We began to pass hatches of mayflies on the water. Donal studied them, the wind direction, and the flocks of gulls feeding on the hatches here and there on the lake. About two miles out of Dromineer he turned off the motor. We were starting our first drift-a long float through mayfly hatches.

The boat swung broadside to the breeze, and we lifted our long poles. The wind grabbed the blowline, billowing it out in front of us, and the four mayflies riding tandem on the hook lit daintily upon the water about 15 feet from the boat. They rode the waves in a lively, light-hearted manner and would keep doing so for hours.

Donal said that good dapping began two or three days after the first mayfly rise, because it took trout that long to realize the surface was covered with the tender morsels. But not all the trout. The clever ones were already feasting. We could hear them slurping. Frank and Donal could also see them, but I couldn’t. And it was then I began to understand that mayfly fishing involves more than the sense of touch. Sound and sight-especially sight-are a vital part of it. Veteran dappers and mayfly fishermen can spot a feeding brown trout in rough water at preposterous distances.

It was 20 minutes before I saw a trout — a thick-backed, dark two-footer — and he was only yards from the boat.

“How big do these things run, anyway?” I asked Donal, giving my flies a nervous twitch. (In California I catch hatchery trout so uniformly 10 inches in length that a longer one gets the hatchery manager a public flogging.) “Any size,” said Donal. “They average two pounds, but they run as high as fourteen pounds. I killed a four-and-a- half pounder last year.

“The only trick to dapping,” Donal continued, “is waiting to strike. Count to five, and set the hook.”

We saw fish and we heard fish, but by 2 p.m. we hadn’t caught anything. Donal piloted us to one of Lough Derg’s small wooded islands, where, toiling like longshoremen, we unloaded the Honorable Julie’s lunch: three boxes of salads, Limerick ham, chickens, sandwiches, tomatoes, breads, fruits, desserts, four kinds of beverage, table linen, and china. On a patch of green, where empty eggshell halves showed that a duck had raised her family, we lunched and watched a mayfly dance going on above some hawthorns.

After two years in the silt at the bottoms of Irish lakes,- the mayfly nymphs rise to the surface, shake off their cases, and after a bit of fumbling fly off to the shore. There, above hawthorn and alder bushes, the males go into their dance. It is something to see, this towering cloud of amorous bugs dashing about trying to catch the eyes of the females hanging around on the bushes below. After mating, the females fly back out over the lake, dipping every so often to the surface to deposit their eggs — ovipositing. And when they can’t oviposit any more, they die. Meanwhile the males, having done their part, collapse, turn dark, and fall off the bushes into the lake.

The dead mayflies are called spent gnats or spinners, and their presence brings on what many experts think is the finest brown-trout fishing of all. It is performed on calm evenings when the big trout cruise along the shore eating spent gnats. Each trout has his own feeding rhythm — one rises every 10 yards, another every 15 yards, and so on. When one of these trout is sighted, his rhythm is diagnosed, his direction is plotted, and the stalking begins. It takes a deft, cunning dry-fly fisherman to drop his artificial spent gnat exactly where the trout will next rise. It is a sport of superior excitement because it combines fishing with hunting.

After lunch we dapped some more, and around 4 o’clock Frank said, “Ah, now!”

I looked and as usual saw nothing.

“It’s yours he’ll be taking,” said Frank to his father.

Donal stiffened. I still couldn’t see a fish, so I watched Donal’s mayflies floating 15 feet away. They vanished. No sound, no swirl, no fish; they simply sank. If they’d been my flies I would have said there had been either an excess of gravity or a drowning.

Donal, a crafty hand at this dapping business, counted to five and then struck. He got his flies back-four drenched, shaken, but still-game insects. The O’Sullivans, who had seen the fish, mourned his loss.

A few minutes later I was using my old split-bamboo rod, which the Irish call a greenheart, for some dry-fly fishing when I saw my artificial Green Drake sink in the same silent, spooky way. It wasn’t a strike; it was burglary. I just couldn’t believe it, and when I did believe it — and struck — I got my fly back too.

“A little delay in the striking, I’m afraid,” said Frank.

“I was counting to five.”

“Dapping you count to five,” he said, wonderfully patient. “With the dry fly the strike is quicker.”

Any fool angler knows that. As a matter of fact, Frank, I wasn’t really counting to five; I was paralyzed.

That was all for the day: two misses.

Back at the boathouse we stood around glowering at Irishmen lifting long, fat trout from their craft. Most were two-pounders, though I saw one of 3½ pounds.

I didn’t need my hot-water bottle that night. The fly was up, dapping had started, and, by gum, the Sail Inn was full.

The next day was Frank’s wedding anniversary, and he had to stay home, but Donal, after Mass in Limerick, showed up around 11, and we went out dapping again. Fewer mayflies were on the water, and by lunchtime we had caught nothing.

We fed heavily on another island where there were swans with their cygnets and big gray cranes in a nest high in a tree. Then we trolled for pike with a lure I’d brought along from California. I hooked a 16-inch trout disguised as a weed. When I got him up to the boat I was so astonished that he wasn’t a weed that I let the line go slack and lost him.

It wasn’t a strike; it was burglary.

Toward evening, on a drift near shore, my three flies (it was that kind of breeze) sank without warning — no fin, no gurgle. This time my incredulity lasted exactly as long as it takes to count to five, and when I reared back it was as though I knew what I was doing. The hook dug into something ponderous and outraged. We fought a while, rested, and fought some more. Donal, holding the heavy net at the ready, bore with me as long as he could stand it.

“Would you do me the kindness of bringing the poor exhausted fish to the boat,” he said finally. “My arms are killing me.”

If I am going to catch only one fish a day, I like to get all the combat I can from him. When I concluded that the trout was all in, I led him around to where Donal crouched wearily with the net. What happened next is not that I lost the trout; what I nearly lost was Donal. My fish wasn’t all in. He was just catching his breath, and Donal had to reach too far for him. Donal didn’t actually go overboard, but he did end up looking like a man trying to drink directly from the lake.

“Oh Holy Mary, that was a close thing!” he cried. “You’ll parade him in a bit closer next time, please God!”

My trout was a dark beautiful fish, and he weighed about 2½ pounds.

Donal had to return to Limerick that evening, and I left for Dublin the next morning after paying the Honorable Julie about $30 for three nights’ lodging and meals.

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It wasn’t the end of the mayfly and the dapping; it was the beginning. A few days later Donal wrote:

“I was up on Saturday and Sunday and yesterday for a total of three fish, very bad, though I had a great encounter with a fish on the spent gnat last evening. I rose him twice but failed to contact him, but I thoroughly enjoyed the hunt. Some of the catches were very good. I saw 12 being weighed in at 17 lb. 6 oz. And there were catches of 14, 13, 12, 10, 8, 7, 5, and 3 trout last Thursday — the biggest fish 4 lb. 9 oz. This, of course, is only at the Sail Inn. Similar bags were taken all around the lake …. “

And two weeks later I was up on Lough Carra in County Mayo with Charlie Hanley, the peerless ghillie, catching silvery brown trout in gin-clear water and pausing to inspect the memorial pillar that Charlie had built on an island to mark the waters where he had fought and lost a 16-pounder.

The post There’s No Place I’d Rather Be Than Rural Ireland, Especially When the Trout Are Rising appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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