Swimming Upstream: one Limerick man's mission to save the Atlantic Wild Salmon

We present an extract from Swimming Upstream, the new book by Patsy Peril with Deirdre Nutall.

Swimming Upstream is part memoir, part call-to-action - this is the story of Limerick man Patsy Peril's lifelong mission to save the Atlantic Wild Salmon. An inspiring journey, filled with hope and practical solutions to save a species from extinction and help protect our precious rivers and waters.

Taking to the Water

By the time I was nine or ten, I was getting big enough to dream of being a crew member on board a fishing gandelow, not just a snotty kid trying to go along for the ride. I lived for the days when Dad was not busy at the cement factory and would let me get involved in the fishing. I had caught my first fish out with Dad when I was just eight or nine, but I was still judged too small to participate on a regular basis in the more serious fishing. Generally, Dad and a crew of men, or Dad and my older brothers, would go out, leaving me at home with Mam and the little ones.

Once I was judged to have a modicum of sense, I was allowed to go down to the riverbank to help when they went out, and then again when they came in. This was better than nothing, but I longed for the day when I would be pushing out in the boat as a fully fledged crew member, waving goodbye to the poor aul’ eejits left gawping at us from the riverbank, and heading off for an adventure on the water.

In the meantime, my good pal Gabriel and I made the best of it. Our favourite spot was an area called Jack Liston’s Bridge, where a small bridge spanned a little tributary, the Crompaun River, feeding the Shannon. We loved playing there. In those days, the shallow water of the tributary was filled with smolts, sea trout and croneen, a type of freshwater trout whose name comes from the Irish crón, which means dark yellow or tawny and refers to their distinctive colour.

The Crompaun was a short little river – the name comes from the Irish crompán, meaning a small river or stream – that ran from up near my national school in Meelick to where it entered the Shannon, near Coonagh, right along the border between County Limerick and County Clare. On a fine day, it was tantalising to sit in the classroom, knowing that it was just outside.

Now that we were getting older and bolder, once in a while Gabriel, his brother Junior, our pal Noel and I gave ourselves a day off school and spent it playing in the Crompaun. When one day we found a flattish canoe, apparently abandoned, near the Crompaun, a plan quickly formed. The next day, instead of getting on the bus to school, we stashed our books under a hedge, retrieved the boat and dragged it up to the mouth of the Crompaun. We devised a grand plan to float our boat all the way to Meelick, where we could mount a daring raid. We would rescue some of our friends from the classroom and take them off for a spin on our boat. We were delighted with ourselves, thinking about how impressed all our friends would be when they looked out the windows of the school and saw us boyos floating by.

The water in the Crompaun was very shallow and the tide was out, and even though our canoe was flat-bottomed and shallow, it was very difficult to get it to move upstream. Finally, we settled on the laborious technique of building dams out of mud and stone. These allowed the water to build up enough that we could push our boat forward eight or ten yards at a time. Wading in muddy water up to our thighs, we spent the entire day doing this.

Eventually we had to relinquish our dream of reaching Meelick – even after many hours of work, we had only managed to move the canoe a hundred yards or so. It did not really matter. It had been an absolutely wonderful day. We waded out of the Crompaun and stood on the bank, looking at each other. We were all soaking wet, covered in mud and rosy-cheeked from the physical work. We used our filthy hands to straighten our jumpers and push back our sweaty hair, and told one another that if we spun a convincing yarn about what the teacher had said in school that day, our mammies wouldn’t notice a thing. We headed off to retrieve our books and go home.

When we got home that evening, we all told our mothers that we had been in school. None of them believed us. 'You were in your eye in school,’ Mam said. ‘Look at you – you’re ruined. You’re destroyed.’ Mam made me change my clothes and held me down firmly with one hand while she gave me a good scrubbing with the other. The other lads were subjected to the same indignities by their own mothers.

While actually going fishing with the big lads and the grown men was the dream, doing whatever I could for the fishermen was the second-best thing. Because they would be out for hours, the crew had to bring a packed meal with them. I helped to carry it down – sandwiches of salmon or ham, carefully wrapped in newspaper that transferred its black print onto the soft white bread so clearly you could read the headlines with each bite; a bottle of tea with milk and sugar, stuffed into an old sock to keep it warm, or at least warmish, until they were ready to drink it. Flasks, which kept the tea properly warm, started coming in from the mid-1950s and were very popular among the fishermen, who appreciated a warm drink in a cold boat. Some of the fishermen would sneak in a bottle of stout or two, perhaps when their wives were not looking.

‘A bottle of stout,’ Dad said, ‘can be a great comfort to a man during a long wait on the river, with a cold wind whipping about his face.’

Swimming Upstream is published by The O'Brien Press