OUTDOOR LIVING: Hooked on trout fishing in Mayo

THE best fish I ever met was the trout. Not the trout of the fishmongers slab; that is a slug in comparison. Likely of North American origin, the shop trout is a mass-produced, fast-growing, artificially fed thing called a rainbow.
It looks pretty, being silver skinned with orange flesh. It is sold as sea trout. Certainly it has lived in the sea, crammed in a cage with many more. But the proper sea trout is a far superior creature.
Farmed trout are sold carefully refrigerated, for when cold they have no distinct aroma. The vendor hopes you will cook it from cold as well, to avoid the smell of liver that arises when your fillet gets to room temperature. This odour comes from an unnatural diet and is perhaps enhanced by the toxic brew of chemicals, antibiotics and other adulterants needed to keep your dinner alive until it reaches an edible size.
Farmed fish are second rate. So where will we get our trout?
Almost every river and stream that flows through this land once held them, and many still do. The best trout – that is, the largest and the fattest of them – commonly come from rich limestone waters, where a diet of freshwater shrimp packs on the pounds and colours their flesh a delicate pink.
That said, there is nothing wrong with a half pounder taken from one of those little streams that drain the vast expanse of bog in Connemara or north Mayo. There is something delightful about pulling a sparkling gem of a trout, yellow-bellied, orange finned, with blue spangled sides, from such a dour environment.
In some ways these are the best trout of all, filled with colour and life, and it is these that well reflect the Irish spirit, where gifts of laughter and love dispel the gloom of spring that never comes, of too-short summers and an early autumn.
The Romans called Ireland Hibernia, the Land of Winter, and went home to their pilchards. But we, who know the Irish trout, find light in grey skies and pleasure in the looming dark of June.
The best way to catch our trout is with the floating fly, an act more simple than you imagine, on some occasions at least. Arm yourself with a fly rod with matching reel and line. Go to the river and practise. Sooner or later that magical moment will occur, when your unsuspecting fish rises sharply to swallow your offering. Before long you will bring one sputtering to the bank and you, too, will be hooked.
Your life will be enriched and undone in equal measure, in one timeless moment. A trout! On the Dry Fly! How well your name sits alongside the historical elite: Skues, Halford, Ivens. You.
Supposing your trout be big enough, he should go into your bag. Don’t worry, he is not the world’s last. Many, many more could be taken for the table before the population’s sustainability became affected.
To illustrate this point, let us travel to Lough Mask, a great limestone lough of 22,000 acres. If such water could not produce one surplus pound of trout per acre each year it would be a poor job, and we could rightly complain. That would give us a sustainable annual harvest of 20,000 wild brown trout averaging a pound in weight. As it is, barely a fraction of that are taken.
An oft-used phrase is that fish are ‘sportingly returned’ alive. Is it somehow more sporting to catch a fish for mere amusement, than to do the same with the goal of feeding ones family? Perhaps those who catch and release eat farmed fish instead.
The floating fly is by no means the only way that trout can be caught, for these greedy creatures are eager to slaughter even their own offspring, as well as anything else they encounter. The least rise in the river will have every trout within nosing greedily at the current, on the watch for your spinner or worm.
In low water they are contrary, but never impossible. You think they are beyond your ability; they give themselves up by the score. You think you have the problem solved, that never again will you leave the river with an empty creel. That is the sign for every trout to close its mouth and seal its lips, to sink to the bottom and lie like a rock.
But if you put your mind to your work you cannot fail to catch a trout. You may not get the biggest, oldest, best or most wise, but you will learn as you go, and find satisfaction in learning the quiet patience only anglers know.