FORGIVENESS IN IBERIA

FORGIVENESS IN IBERIA

Ask a fly angler why they fly fish, and you’re likely to hear one of a number of answers. Most of which come off sounding pretty wanky, even if they are truthful, and well intended.

“Oh I just love the artistry of it, it’s so pure”…

“Well you see, I prefer to place myself on a level playing field with the fish, and be closer to nature, rather than using some stinky bait or artificial lure”.

“Well, I watched A River Runs Through It and Brad Pitt made it look so fucking cool”.

“Well, I really like a challenge, so I choose to chase fish the hardest possible way, so I choose fly fishing”.

Above are some of the answers you’re likely to get along with many others and while they can sound pretty arsey, they do in fact each hold some truth to them.

Fly fishing done well can be art ( kinda like anything done well) and at its base level it is both pure and beautiful. And Brad Pitt did make it look pretty damn cool.. even if it was Jason Borger doing the casting not Mr.Pitt.

But the reason I think most commonly heard, or at least one we like to tell ourselves in some masochistic way, is we enjoy fly fishing for its challenge over other forms of piscatorial pursuit.

Chasing fish on fly over a bait, or a lure on conventional tackle can be made infinitely more difficult by any number of factors, such as any form of wind – both the strength and direction of it, the distance one needs to get your fly to put it in front of a fish (an exceptionally good fly cast is a pretty shit cast on even the most rudimentary conventional gear), and even something as simple as the water you are fishing being surrounded by vegetation which has an uncanny knack of catching or tangling any part of your fly tackle.

So yes, we love to make our lives hard by pursuing fish with a technique that just makes it that much harder most times. The flip side being of course that the the reward when we get it right is all the sweeter. Or so we like to tell ourselves.

|The reward when we get it right is all the sweeter. Or so we like to tell ourselves.”


One step further on this self imposed masochistic path, is our love for difficult fish.. those fish that drive you crazy by either their location, their extreme sensitivity to pursuit, their ridiculous pickiness to what they will eat, or just their general asshole factor that makes them all the more desirable to fly anglers. This can vary hugely of course, from Permit on remote coral flats, to that fucking Koi in the Devils Arm Pit that I’ve been chasing for more than five years and still haven’t caught!

We seem to derive a weird sort of pleasure from difficult fish, and evenly more weirdly we tend to shun “easy fishing”. Fish that are easily found, and easily fooled, seldom garner much appreciation. Forgiving fish aren’t really held in high esteem by any of those who like to pretend we are serious anglers.

Well when you’ve you’ve had a pretty average last two years on the fishing front, that lens starts looking a little different. A forgiving fish starts sounding pretty damn good.

Ok in all honesty, “pretty average” is putting it mildly. “Dismal” would be closer to the mark. I’ve fished less over the last 24 months than I have in the past 20 years. And the wee bit of fishing I have done, hasn’t exactly been fireworks. There have been some good sessions here and there, but one look at my Instagram will show you how rapidly I went from a couple VERY good years, to 2 very slow ones.

So, a couple weeks ago when I jumped on a flight from Heathrow to Gibraltar after a 10-day work trip to London, even though the prospect of a little fishing for Andalusian Barbel ( also known as Gypsy Barbel ) with my buddy Dylan on the Iberian Peninsula was on the cards, I didn’t have my hopes up to high. Rach was flying out to meet me, and we were gonna spend 10 chilled days in the south of Spain with our friends, chilling, eating, getting some sunshine after the long cold Cape winter, and if the chance arose to do a bit of fishing, walking along a river with a rod in hand was plenty enough I told myself.

Back in April 2023 I had the fortune of fishing this area with Dylan for the Barbs, and had an incredible few sessions on a totally new species for me. That was at the end of the “wet season” in an area that has basically been in a mild to severe drought for the last 20 years. This time we were there at the end of the dry season, of what is basically a perennial dry season area. The parts of the rivers we fished back in April 2023 were virtually dry. Dry as in zero/zip/nada water in them.. or where there was water, it was a trickle less than a metre wide, and scarcely an inch deep.. not exactly fishable. So, like I said, I didn’t have my hopes held very high.

After a couple days catching up, drinking, eating and what not, Dylan and I figured well there is water in the estuary at the mouth of the river, lets see if we can do some exploring and find access somehow to the top of the estuary where the now dry river would normally flow in. All those Barbs we caught back in April must have to go somewhere right? Access to these waters down in southern Spain isn’t easy, so with some heavy Googlemaps searching, and numerous roads driven down, turned around, try another one, and another one, we finally managed to get down to a section of the estuary a couple kilometres upstream from the ocean.

Driving between polo fields and horse paddocks alongside the river, we got glimpses through the trees of a low, slow and wide river, slightly off colour snaking its way to the ocean.

We spotted a path through the very dense brush, and hopped out to see if it would lead us to an accessible and fishable part of the river.

It did.

When we got down to the water we were greeted with huge numbers of moving fish. It was late afternoon, the late summer Spanish sun low in the sky, so we couldn’t quite make out what the fish were. Stepping closer and wading slowly, our hearts dropped a little as the fish we’d seen moving turned out to be huge schools of mullet pushing over the mud, gravel and sand bars. Not the Barbs we were hoping for, but hey ho, they fish.

I’d brought just my trusty Epic 370 3 weight Glass rod along, so strung up with 5X and attempted to fool one of the 1000’s of mullet swimming past. What did I say about difficult fish? After 30 minutes of this shit, with nary a sniff, and probably a dozen fly changes, Dylan spotted something different.

The tide had been pushing in even this far upriver, probably due to the unusually high spring tides that had happened that week and a small dry bay river left under some trees had slowly started filling up. This is where Dylan spotted a tailing Barb. We crept in slowly, and watched for a while. I’d rigged a small nymph under a black foam beetle to act as an indicator, with very short drop of about a foot as the fish were in the skinny stuff.

The fish was tailing and moving around quite a lot in a small area, but the tough glare made it tricky to see where I should be putting the fly. A few attempts with soft delicate casts resulted in nothing, and then no sign of the fish tailing again. I thought I’d duffed the only shot we would get. We were stoked to have even found even one barbel, considering the drought conditions, but I was bleak that maybe I’d screwed the pooch. Of course when you fishing with a best mate who you’ve fished with for 25 years, there is also that wee bit of pressure, and you know they are thinking, “Fuck I would have made that shot and got the eat.”

A couple minutes of quiet wading and gentle needling from Dylan later, I spotted in a window of shadow down the bank a good sized Barb cruising towards us. It was just under the surface in the dark water. Over-eager, I shot a quick cast and brained it. I mean it, my beetle and nymph landed hard with a SMACK pretty much on its head. About the worst possible cast one can make to a normally very sensitive cyprinid. But to my surprise, and of course joy, instead of spooking like any normal decent fish, that barb spun on a dime and smashed the beetle off the top and shot off upstream. My atrocious cast was forgiven, I was forgiven, and I was into my backing with a bucking 3-weight in hand, and smile on my face.

10 minutes later, pics taken, barb admired and released, fist bumps dished out, fresh beers cracked out the back pack, and Dylan was crawling on his knees towards a pod of 4 of 5 new barbs tailing on a gravel point. Half a dozen calm gentle pin point casts later and nada.. “Fuck it bru, smack it on their heads”

Next cast ended with that beetle and nymph hitting the water hard about a foot from the closest tailing barb, and within a split second the fish spun and inhaled the beetle and we were off to the races again.

More pics, more admiration, another beer, few more fist bumps and a big smile on the faces on the drive home through the windy backroads and villages.

Forgiveness – I’d found just what I needed, at just the right time.. a fish that wanted to play, that wasn’t exactly easy, because your cast needed to be fast, and accurate, but you could get away with slapping the fly down hard and get the eat. In fact, over the next few sessions where we explored new areas with even more fish, getting them on dries, nymphs, Platon’s Lalu Bug, and streamers, we found that a long perfect gentle drift garnered very little interest. But hit the buggers on the head, and you’re in with a chance. We even hooked numerous fish that had very obviously spooked from our presence, and were high tailing it up or down stream, but spun on a beetle slapped on their heads it was almost like they couldn’t help it. Turns out the similar experiences we’d had in April last year with fish reacting to heavy presentations weren’t just a one off, or due to the season. These fish wanted it slapped on their heads.

Forgiveness – it’s not only an incredibly admirable and desirable trait in people, it’s pretty fucking nice in fish too sometimes. My very bang average last 24 months of fishing seemed to fade away, and I was stuck with a very warm fuzzy feeling inside me again, and struck all over again by just how much I fucking love fly fishing.

Gracias to the Gypsey Barbel of Andalusia and the Iberian Peninsula for your gift of forgiveness.

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