CELEBRITY FANS - Dr TK WHITAKER, 93, Fly fishing

How did you start fishing?

Fishing has always been a great interest. I never excelled at anything else.

Even from my earliest days as a child in Drogheda in the 1920s, my mother would bring me cycling up the Boyne to the Boyne-Navan canal and I would be trying my hand, to see if I could get a perch out of the canal. Or, with my very, very crude equipment, I’d try to hook a salmon from the weir on the Boyne. But I was never there long enough or never lucky enough to catch anything. I think I got a perch.

Can you explain the attraction of fishing to the uninitiated, who might say it’s boring?

A lot of people say that until they have some experience of it, and then they find they don’t know what has been happening for the last two or three hours; it has gone away unnoticed because of their focus.

Every tiny, little sign that appears engages your interest. It’s not dull or that there’s nothing happening.

To the perceptive eye – and the fisherman’s eye should always be perceptive – there is always something happening, some evidence of movement, something showing, and that keys you up all the time.

You don’t say, ‘Ah, to hell with it – I’m here for the last three-quarters of an hour and nothing has happened’. There’s a constant alerting of your faculties, a susurrus of excitement.

What do you remember of the first salmon you caught?

It was on one of the last days of a fishing holiday on Donegal’s Glen River. Within a quarter of an hour of fishing on the same run, a little higher up where I had lost a salmon the morning before, I hooked a salmon, or rather a salmon had hooked himself. I was using a number eight salmon fly and I was determined to play it cool.

After a couple of jumps and zig-zag runs the fish decided to dig himself in, so firmly that I could not budge him and began to fear I was caught in a rock. I had to pull dangerously hard to get him moving.

Only at the end of 20 minutes of play did I draw him to shore, where Raymond, a local 16-year-old boy who was acting as ghillie, netted him skilfully and ran him up the bank to safety.

The moment I stood to have my photograph taken holding the fish was a sweet one.

So too was the moment when the cooked fish was set before me to serve all the family. By common consent, I awarded myself the curadh mhír, or hero’s portion.

Why are we so enamoured with the salmon?

I suppose the lure of the salmon is that it’s a magnificent fish. It’s big and gleaming and active and cute. But I don’t by any means despise trout.

Where are your favourite rivers to fish?

I started with a love of the Boyne, but mainly the Slaney on the east coast, and in the west it would be the Moy and the Owenmore, which runs through Banger Erris, and the Glenamoy, which is a little bit north of that.

The Owenmore has a fairly good run of fish, which is its most important asset, and it’s picturesque and it’s near to where I have a holiday home, an old deserted schoolhouse, which looks out on Carrowmore Lake, halfway between the Owenmore and the Glenamoy.

I paid my €200 recently.

You can fish there contentedly.

What’s the most frustrating thing about fishing?

I suppose you can be irritated by flash floods, which can muck up the whole river on you.

There’s no point in fishing if the water is brown. That has happened several times.

In fact, it happened this year and last year in Mayo. I went down for the last few days of the season, the last few days of September, and the last day of all, September 30th, was a total washout in both years. I didn’t get anything this year.

But I’ve cut it down because last year I was too energetic on the bank and I got angina and I had to have a month in hospital, so I’m supposed to be very careful.

How do you operate out on the river these days?

First of all, I don’t go on my own anymore.

I would have my son or my grandson with me. More recently, this year, they would come out and stand with me in the middle of the river, holding me by the arm while I fish, which is very useful.

It’s reassuring, because the last way I want to disappear from this world is going down river in a flood.