(An edited version of this piece appears in “Salmon of the River Lee”, a recently published ode to the river by Dan O’ Donovan. It’s a lovely book, with countless hours of research between the covers, and is available online
from www.anglebooks.com and www.rareandrecent.com.)
I’m a fair to middling (some might say mediocre) salmon angler. I tie my own flies to a reasonable standard, and can cast a decent line with a single-handed rod, or a fairly poor one with the double-hander. My father, Ger Mulcahy, known to friends and acquaintances in Cork as Gerald, was (I have been told) by contrast, an excellent fly-fisher of salmon. My first salmon on the fly on the River Lee in Cork was on a stretch of water he knew well and fished often, and I felt he was there on the Graveyard stretch that day.
