This time last year, if the man next door had started building a big boat in his back yard you may well have sighed with relief.
“Fair play to you Noah,” you may even have shouted encouragingly over the fence.
You certainly wouldn’t have been racing to telephone the local council to complain about the noise from all that hammering and sawing keeping you awake at night and disturbing your much-needed beauty sleep.
Obviously you would have been alarmed at all those dangerous wild animals filing into Noah’s garden, two by two, but would have wisely bitten your lip and said nothing about your neighbour’s growing menagerie.
Your uncharacteristic self-restraint and tolerance would have been due, not so much to the season of goodwill to all men, but your basic instinct to survive, because this time last year we were engulfed in a flood of Biblical proportions.
The neighbour’s big boat could have proved your life-line.
Such was the scale of the flooding that even the fish seemed to have sought sanctuary on Noah’s Ark. When the salmon angling season opened on the River Drowes on New Year’s Day there wasn’t one to be seen. It was a wash out.
A roaring torrent that ripped wooden catwalks from the river bank and almost swept away the 200-year-old Four Master’s Bridge put paid to any hope of a salmon being caught on the opening day.
January had come and almost gone before the Drowes gave up its first salmon of 2016. With the waters finally beginning to recede, Ballybofey angler Eddie Roulston kick-started the season on January 26, with a fish weighing eight pounds.
Fishery owner Shane Gallagher suspects the late arrival of the first salmon may be part of growing trend, possibly linked to changes in the weather, and that the fish may be running the river a month behind schedule.
“The last two years have been pretty late,” he says, pointing out that the first salmon of 2015 was caught by Enniskillen angler Brian McClintock on January 27.
In fact you have to go back to 2013 to find a fish being caught on New Year’s Day. Yet for many years prior to that the Drowes consistently produced Ireland’s first salmon of the season on January 1.
Given that the present river and weather conditions are so different to what they were this time last year, is Shane hopeful of a return to form in 2017?
“I would say definitely, because you don’t have the extreme flood levels,” he explains. “The water levels have been lower, probably below average. It’s a completely different situation.
“I would be optimistic. I would be hopeful,” he adds.
The latest catch analysis published by Inland Fisheries Ireland shows that in 2015 a total of 872 salmon were caught on the Drowes, of which 284 were spring fish and 588 were summer grilse.
Anglers practising catch-and-release returned 77 of those spring salmon and 153 grilse alive to the river.
The figures are taken from the log books that anglers are required to keep and return at the end of each season.
The analysis also shows that spinning was the most successful method of fishing, accounting for 37 per cent of the total catch, followed by fly-fishing with 30 per cent, prawn and shrimp with 15 per cent and worm with 9 per cent. The remaining 9 per cent of salmon were caught using unspecified methods.
Shane is urging those anglers who have not already returned their log books for 2016 to do so. He believes they will show that spring salmon fishing was on a par with 2015 but that summer grilse fishing was “far, far better”.
He expects the log books to show that the total number of salmon caught in 2016 was well up on the 870 landed in 2015.
“I would expect that figure to be around 1,000 fish or more,” says Shane.
That sounds like a lot of salmon but is in fact just a fraction of the total run. Most resist the angler’s lure and since the end of November have been busy preparing to spawn in the Drowes and the tributaries of Lough Melvin. Their mission accomplished, the surviving kelts will soon head back down to the sea, perhaps crossing paths with the earliest arrivals of the run of 2017. It is one of these spring salmon, fresh from the Atlantic, that every angler hopes to catch on New Year’s Day.
If you want to try your luck the cost of a day’s fishing on the Drowes remains unchanged at 25 euro. A season ticket also remains unchanged at 300 euro.
Anglers also require a state licence. A district licence covering the Drowes and the rivers of Donegal is 56 euro. An all-Ireland licence is 100 euro.
Licences and permits are available from the tackle shop at Lareen Park, open daily from
Wednesday, December 28, and from 6am on January 1, 2017.
Fishing starts at 8.30am.
Tight lines.