The Mayfly is up: Story of landing a whopper from 1947

By Tom Gillespie

THE normally tranquil waters of the west’s top trout lakes are now awash with activity. Businessmen have abandoned their computers and iPads, farmers have left the land, and workers have forsaken the shopfloor and their families, all in pursuit of one goal - the Mayfly and the large feeding fish they attract.

The call has gone out: ‘The Mayfly is up’, and hundreds of anglers have been converging on the loughs of Carra, Mask, Conn, Cullin and the Corrib, where wild brown trout are considered the best in Europe.

But fishing the Mayfly is not for the faint-hearted. It requires skill and an enormous amount of patience, not to mention a bit of luck.

Trout in the western lakes go into a frenzy after the swarms of rising Mayfly.

Traditionally, fishing the Mayfly is called dapping - which involves suspending several Mayfly on a hook attached to a thread-like blow-line coming from a reel on a dapping rod.

The Mayfly is allowed to sit on the water and the anxious angler sits in his/her drifting boat awaiting a rise.

In a copy of The Connaught Telegraph, dated Saturday, May 31, 1947, an article appeared in praise of Mayfly fishing.

It was headed ‘When Novice and Whopper Meet’ and it read as follows:

Scores in Ireland are watching for it. Hundreds more await wires from the watchers. The rise of the Mayfly on the great lakes of Ireland is at hand.

I know, because my husband is a fisherman. The rise of the Mayfly is an event in our lives.

Two words, ‘Fly Up’, on a telegram form change him quickly from a normal citizen into a sort of a Bohemian knight in piscatorial panoply. Then he vanishes for a fortnight.

Out off the blue comes torpedo-shaped packets, heads and tails of enormous trout projecting, to tell of his doings.

Now this fishing is a ‘catching’ business. So partly out of curiosity, partly from a desire to be a real companion to my husband, I once delighted him by accompanying him.

The scene was a lake in the west. It was dotted with boats, all holding fuzzy-hatted lunatics like ourselves. Everywhere long rods pointed at the sky.

Charles (my husband) handed me a rod like a slim Nelson’s Pillar. There were two large flies impaled on the hook - ‘green drakes’, James (the batman) called them.

I was told to ‘dap’ them - make them sit on the water. My husband said there were whoppers in the lake.

It was a pleasant sensation drifting along in the boat, and my flies were riding the dancing waves quite nicely.

Suddenly they disappeared - vanished utterly.

Wondering vaguely about this, I saw James and my husband take a look. Both men seemed to swell swiftly, then burst.

‘Strike’, they roared simultaneously.

I jumped a foot off the seat, clutching the rod, pulled. Something pulled back. My husband said: “You’ve got a whopper.”

But the rod came alive in my hand so I dropped it. This had a surprising effect. Bedlam broke loose in the boat. Husband, boatman, shouting like mad men, both grabbed at the rod.

The boat rocked perilously, so I picked the rod up again. Nelson’s Pillar bent to the water.

“I can’t hold him,” I shouted. “Give him line,” yelled my husband.

Somehow I released the line which my fingers had been gripping. A scream sent me yards into the air. It was the reel. (I thought it was the whopper).

To judge by the line, the fish was now heading for the horizon. Suddenly, tail to nose, he shot from the water - contempt, I suppose. But he really was a whopper.

Several times he did this. I was harnessed to a repeating tornado. Powerless and a little frightened, too.

“Take the rod for the love of Mike, Charles,” I shouted.

“Your fish, woman, play him,” he retorted.

I reeled in a length of line under direction from James, but the fish tore it off again. The reel kept on screaming and my nerves were in ribbons.

“Butt him! Butt him!” yelled my husband.

While I was pondering this James said quietly: “Get a strain on him, ma’am.”

This I understood, so I did my best. I reeled in some more line. But the fish started jigging.

This was most uncomfortable because I was jigging too. The butt of the rod was beating me black and blue. I was dead beat; the whopper had me whopped.

“Look out,” shouted my husband, “he’ll be under the boat.”

Now James came to the rescue. He did something quickly with an oar, nearly spilling me in to the lake; then something quickly with the net.

Finally, with the wrist-flick of a conjurer, he produced miraculously the whopper flapping on the bottom boards of the boat.

I relaxed - that is, I collapsed beside the whopper.

“A grand noble fish,” said James, his eyes full of a fishy light.

“A whopper,” said my husband, eyes ditto.

Neither took the slightest notice of my condition. I let go of Nelson’s Pillar, rubbed by bruises, rearranged my dishevelled duds, cursed all whoppers.

“Never would I go fishing again,” I said.

But my husband has just got his ‘Fly Up’; telegram, and I - I too am going tomorrow again.

So that really was a - WHOPPER - in Irish angling.

To finish what do you call a Mayfly in June - it’s still a Mayfly, of course.