You may not be an angler, but you can't help coming across articles by anglers at this time of year in newspapers and magazines. Well, why not? Agreed, but one lack in even the best of the writers is that they never tell you how the fish tasted. Was the flesh of the trout firm and pink? Did the catch from this river have more flavour than that from the other rivers or lakes? This is written by someone who believed, in his fishing days, that the whole object of the exercise was to bring back a few lovely brown trout for the evening meal. Fresher than that you cannot get. One writer on angling, Tom Fort of the Financial Times, doesn't give us the culinary details, but he makes of his expeditions a travelogue-cum-commentary on all around him. The people he met, the state of the landscape, with just a little advice for any who might be working the rivers he mentions. He has often been in this country.
His latest article is headed "Lovable Battles near the Boyne". He starts off with a conversation with a boy of flaming carroty-red hair, freckles and clear blue eyes. He asked Fort if he had caught anything. One or two, was the answer. Could the lad see them? "I said I had put them back. He looked at me long and hard and I asked if he thought I was mad. He replied maybe I was." Fort has something to say about drainage: rivers violated, their beds ripped out and dumped on the banks. But, while many stretches now resemble flooded railway cuttings, "down below, the streams have repaired themselves, the weed has come back and trout have been making the best of things." As Gerry Farrell of Moynalty has often said, "Let the river heal itself. Don't try to restock with foreign imports." Tom Fort and his companion Stevie found the river Deel provided "an afternoon of the purest delight. The streams, shut in between alders, willows and white-blossomed hawthorn was as clear as crystal, thick with waving green weed, and stuffed with dazzlingly spotted, buttery-flanked wild brown trout." They each went their own way and when they came together "to talk about the modest hatful we had caught, our smiles were as wide as the Deel itself."
Fort gives the name and phone number of the Boyne Fisheries manager at Navan, mentions Peter O'Reilly's new Flyfishing in Ireland and warns: "Wear chest waders, for the apparently Lilliputian waterways belie the quantity of water they carry. This is trout-fishing of the wild and woolly variety, a million miles removed from the spick and span chalk-streams of southern England. I love it." Bord Failte must bless him.