feeling a bit duckflyish

I first met Tom Doc six, maybe seven years ago. I was standing on the end of a concrete jetty in a bay at the nothern end of Lough Corrib, on Ireland’s west coast. It was late March. The trout season hadn’t even started back home in East Anglia where trees were still bare and easterlies straffed the flatlands. Tom was wearing a light sweater with more than a few flies hooked through the wool. It might have been his fly box. “They’re taking this thin one at the mo,” he said. “And last week they were on this here, a Connemara Black.” He pulled the fly out of the sweater snagging a loop of grey wool behind it. “I had sixteen in a day a week ago last Wednesday, when I had the lough to myself, though it’s toughened up a bit since then.”

The Connemara is just a skinny black thing, with a black cockerel-feather wound round the head and a touch of blue jay at the throat. It’s a popular fly all over Ireland and will catch trout, salmon and sea trout. But tied small it looks exactly like a hatching duckfly. And the duckfly was why I was there. It’s a black midge – just one of a massive family of flies, the Chironomidae or buzzers as fishermen call them. The type that don’t bite. Every pond and puddle will have its buzzers. But the duckfly – because they populate those balmy west-coast Irish loughs, hatch early in the year, long before anything else really gets going. On a still, warm day they’ll come off in such numbers that the columns they form as they gather to mate in the evening look like plumes of smoke rising over every headland and island on the lough, like so many hundreds of bonfires. Smoke signals to a just-out-of-hibernation fly fisher with a bad case of the shack nasties.

Fishing the duckfly hatch into the fading light of a March evening can be surreal. The light turns blue and the air and water become seemless at the edge of sight. The temperature drops and soon you can see your breath. But out there in that orb of blue the trout just keep on rising. Sometimes one-off concentric rings, when you’ll throw your fly in a hurry to the same spot hoping the fish is still there. Or sometimes the trout will come swimming up on a line of duckfly along the edge of a ripple, the dark nose of the fish slapping down again and again, each rise finished off with a flourishing wiggle of the tail. Then, with more deliberation you’ll lay the cast out ahead of the fish and wait. As often as not they’ll take a natural within inches of your fly and move on. But when they do take – God, it’s addictive. A fat Corrib trout will spin and fire-cracker through that blue universe.

Tom Doc is a fishing guide and he also owns – and farms – an island at that northern end of the lough. An island round which trout rise to duckfly every March. When he’s not fighting a losing battle with the bracken on the island Tom’s on the lough after those fish, with or without clients. He doesn’t need the excuse of a paid day to go fishing. He’s as mad for it as the rest of us. I haven’t seen Tom for a year or two now, but I feel due another appointment with him and the duckfly of March.

First published 14th February 2008