It was Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois who depended on the kindness of strangers, and that’s how I felt when I moved to Ireland to be with the woman who’s now my wife. I packed some flies, a reel, and a 9-foot, four-piece fly rod, but the only trout stream near her house in Dublin is the Dodder River, a pretty little tributary of the Liffey. It’s difficult to fish, partly because the wild browns it holds are spooky, but also because it flows through an urban park where the dog walkers let their mutts go splashing.
So I was excited to be invited to try my hand on Lough Arrow, a beautiful limestone lake in County Sligo famous for its mayfly hatches. It came through the offices of a friend, who put me in touch with Barrie Cooke, one of Ireland’s finest painters and a fly fisher par excellence. Cooke lived on a remote two-acre spread above the lough, not far from the tiny village of Kilmactranny, which consists entirely of a pub and a gas pump. Outside the pub stands a cast-iron statue of an angler, his rod bowed as he plays a fish.
Cooke had just turned 70. He was a robust, friendly, bearded man, whose round bifocals lent his eyes a quizzical look. His house was strewn with fishing books and magazines, and a taxidermied brown trout in a trophy case held pride of place. The Earl of Kensington had caught it on a dry fly in 1915, and it weighed seven pounds, four ounces. (One of Barrie’s most celebrated paintings is “Lough Derg Pike,” a lifesize portrait of the five-foot-long monster in question. Like the earl’s trout, he found the pike displayed in a pub.) Even the studio where he painted showed his devotion to angling, with several rods rigged up and at the ready and a pair of binoculars handy to keep an eye out for any hatches. He could be on the lough in less than five minutes.
Over a lunch of homemade carrot soup, cheese, bread, and white wine, Cooke told me about himself. He’d been born in England, spent his teens in Bermuda, and enrolled at Harvard to study marine biology, but he couldn’t handle all the science involved, and after a course in art history, he decided to paint instead, eventually studying with Oscar Kokoschka in Austria. In his early twenties, he took a ferry to Ireland and never looked back. He found a derelict shack to rent in County Clare in the Burren, a rocky, isolated region of the West, where he could fish for trout, salmon, and pike. There he lived, as his friend Seamus Heaney put it, “like Huck Finn,” snaring rabbits and shooting birds to stock his larder.
Barrie described himself as a romantic. He meant that in the sense of J. M. W. Turner, who was also a keen angler and believed in empathy. For Cooke, empathy meant “living in something till your Self is forgotten,” or the ability to be totally immersed in a painting (or a river) to the exclusion of everything else. Throughout his adult life, he’d honored that idea. He’d done nothing but paint and fish — no jobs, no teaching, and plenty of poverty until his work began to sell. He showed me some recent canvases. The paintings were abstract, although the forms were vaguely recognizable and brilliantly colored. Water figured as a primary element, and they all evidenced a deep bond with the natural world.
I returned the next day to go fishing. I brought along an assortment of standard California mayfly imitations, such as the Parachute Adams and the March Brown, and Barrie gave me a few Lough Arrow Greens in sizes 16 to 20. It was early May, and he warned me that it was still a couple of weeks before the peak season. The fishing hadn’t been great for the last two or three years, he added, because the Forestry Department had put down some rock phosphate fertilizer in wet weather. The phosphate had washed into the lough and caused an algae bloom. Cooke had lately done some paintings of the bloom, finding it perversely engaging. His dealer wasn’t happy. It’s tough to market a painting called, “Algae Bloom, Lough Arrow.”
He kept a rowboat in a cove below the house, fitted with an electric motor. The morning was very still and the weather perfect, with a gray sky and a light drizzle of rain. I saw signs of the algae bloom and understood Barrie’s fascination. As viewed through a painter’s eye, the colors were striking, often quite stunning. In the shallows of the lough, where coots were nosing about, reeds grew in profusion. Farther out, swans glided around, a trail of feathers in their wake. The trees were leafing out in a dozen shades of green, and we could hear the distant, skittery cry of grebes. Four small islands dotted the horizon, with low-lying hills beyond them.
Cooke started up the motor, and off we went. As someone accustomed to crowded lakes and streams, I couldn’t believe that we were the only boat on the water. True, it was a weekday, but still. I felt lucky to be there. Barrie guided us to a sort of inlet, then anchored. Nothing much was going on in terms of a hatch, although a few spent flies drifted by. I wished we’d packed some of the paperback mysteries that Cooke liked to read in the studio while waiting for inspiration. But after twiddling our thumbs for a half hour, a mayfly finally took wing.
Soon the air was filled with insects, including some lovely little Lake Olives, with their long, wispy tails. It wasn’t what Barrie would call a prolific hatch compared with the old days, but I was impressed. The only problem was that the trout, all wild browns, weren’t actively feeding. Rises happened so infrequently that I was casting blind, in effect, and the lack of a breeze to ruffle the water meant each presentation had to be nearly perfect. That didn’t bother Cooke. Every fly he cast landed as lightly as a speck of dust. He was an utter master.
When you know a lake or stream well, you tend to read it instinctively, and so it was with Barrie. He anticipated rises before they occurred, while I had to scan the water for dimples or other telltale signs. He hooked his first trout long before noon, a brown of about 14 inches, broad and chunky. The average Lough Arrow brown weighs a pound or so, and this fish fit the bill. Cooke released it and quickly picked up another, again the same size. Envy was getting the best of me, and I rushed my casts and made a hash of things. Only when I took a deep breath, relaxed, and concentrated did I put a Lough Arrow Green into the ring of a rise and catch a fish.
Obviously, I had much to learn about Irish lough angling, so I was delighted when my host suggested we try the Unshin River the next morning. It’s a limestone stream, deep and slow moving, that flows out of Lough Arrow and weeds up in the summer. But in early May it was in fine shape and reminded me of the meadow stretches of Hat Creek. I’m far better on a stream than I am with still water, and I caught a handful of small browns on both dries and a Hare’s Ear nymph. Even so, I spent half the time marveling at Barrie. At 70, he still waded like a reckless teenager and could lay out 50 feet of line with pinpoint accuracy.
That night, we dropped in at the Bow and Arrow, the village pub. It was just a single large room in a house that was centuries old. A turf fire roared against the chill of every evening, and we sat by it with glasses of Jameson. Barrie reminisced about Tommy Flynn, who’d lived in a cottage by the lough and was a demon fiddler. Tommy once made a rod of greenheart wood from Guyana for the Queen Mother and delivered it to Buckingham Palace himself. Then Barrie told me a story about an old codger he met in Kilmactranny, who was idly moving rocks from one spot to another. When asked why, the codger replied, “To keep the archaeologists busy.”
That was the only time I fished with Barrie, although we swapped letters — no e-mail for Cooke — and angling info, and I met him frequently in Dublin at galleries and museums. Shortly after our outing, he started traveling to New Zealand where, he assured me, the best trout and salmon fishing in the world could be had, and to Borneo. The lush jungle greens of the rain forests began to infuse his painting, and his late canvases glow with a subtropical warmth. Sadly, Barrie died in 2015 at the age of 84, a year after his great friend Heaney, who wrote so admiringly of his work. I’ll always be grateful to the kindness he showed to this wandering Californian.
