Michael recalls landing a 28.5lb Boyne trout

Drogheda Independent - March 14th 2003

I WAS taken out of school at eleven and a half years of age to help my brother with the fishing on the River Boyne. The fishing started on the 12th of February and continued up until the 12th of August each year.

There were eleven in my family and due to the fact that my father was suffering with TB I had to help with the fishing to put food on the table.

Fishing on the Boyne was the main source of employment for the people in the town in those days, also TB was quite a serious illness too.

MV father and his father and so on down the years were fishermen and so too was my mother's father and his father before him.

When the fishing season ended I used to go ferreting with my father and my father's friend. The late Larry Winters, a farmer, used to come in on his tractor and trailer to bring us to ferret the rabbits on his land. We used to get half a dollar a pair, people used to call at the door with plates for their pair of rabbits and we would then sell the hides at three pence a go to McNally's.

When the ferreting season was over it was back to a new season of fishing. I remember, in 1962 we had two boats fishing. My brother, my father and Shammie McPhilips were fishing at the South Point, Mornington when we caught a twenty eight and a half pound trout.

The salmon came in their thousands that week. We don't know if it was a coincidence that the salmon followed the trout in.

Scientists at that time said the trout was around from King Billy's day so it was christened King Billy.

The Dublin Museum gave a loan of the trout to the Belfast Museum for a year and he is now back in the Dublin Museum. I often think to myself thai King Billy should be in the Drogheda Museum as he was caught in the River Boyne.

I remember how beautiful the river used to look. There used to be eight men hired to work along the river, if there was a stone missing out of the walls on the beach it would be put back up.

There were four men working on either side of the river, winter and summer.

There used to be steps made into the wall for the fishermen to climb up and down. I remember my mother with a scrubbing board in the back garden, scrubbing our clothes with lanolin soap. There was no such thing as washing powder or machines in those days.

As a child I used to lie on the bough of the boat watching the flander and fiat fish on the bed of the river swimming. As time went on you couldn't see your hand in the water as the sewerage kept building up deeper and deeper every year because the population of the town kept growing.

I remember the time we decided to blockade the river with our fishing boats, we borrowed our fishing banner, which is hundreds of years old.

I remember we had a band. We were carrying the banner behind the band with people behind us going under Laurence's Gate heading for Tom Roe's Point, when a gust of wind tore our banner and we had to let it down.

We carried on behind the band and blockaded the River Boyne on our fishing boats. We would not let ships up nor down as we were protesting to get a treatment plant.

© Drogheda Independent