I met Moc Morgan just once, at 9.30 or so one early September morning on a bridge across the Teifi by the old, then still-working Alltcavan Woollen Mills. He was about to fish a private stretch above the mill weir, for salmon; me the same on the club water below. He smiled broadly when he saw me carrying a two-handed salmon fly rod, a rarity on the river back then. He was carrying one, too. We bonded and chatted like mad, like old friends, as a result, both agreeing that river conditions were perfect and that there might be a chance of fish sometime during the day.
There were: I had two on another stretch that afternoon (it was 1988 – they were the last two salmon I ever killed), he the same from the stretch he was starting out on.
Moc lived on the upper Teifi, fishing for its trout it in the era well before Oliver Kite, of Monmouthshire and later Netheravon, Wiltshire, rocked up and made it journalistic and televisual cool and a later “place of pilgrimage to Kite Country” (accent on the often over-subscribed and -dressed “grim”).
Moc Morgan. Fine man, great angler. A former schoolmaster. Beside the book titles for which he later became known, I have one of his published by the Gomer Press of Llandysul (visited and bought on the very morning after the little firm had spent all day and a lot of the night printing the thing) – featuring the trout flies tied with farmyard cockerel feathers and their wife’s sewing-box silk and wool by the canny old local fishers he fished the upper Teifi with as a boy. Every Welsh river had such local patterns; Moc, a trusted member of the very close and clannish, Welsh-speaking old fishy Taffia, tracked them down and recorded them.
I met Moc Morgan just once, at 9.30 or so one early September morning on a bridge across the Teifi by the old, then still-working Alltcavan Woollen Mills. He was about to fish a private stretch above the mill weir, for salmon; me the same on the club water below. He smiled broadly when he saw me carrying a two-handed salmon fly rod, a rarity on the river back then. He was carrying one, too. We bonded and chatted like mad, like old friends, as a result, both agreeing that river conditions were perfect and that there might be a chance of fish sometime during the day.
There were: I had two on another stretch that afternoon (it was 1988 – they were the last two salmon I ever killed), he the same from the stretch he was starting out on.
Moc lived on the upper Teifi, fishing for its trout it in the era well before Oliver Kite, of Monmouthshire and later Netheravon, Wiltshire, rocked up and made it journalistic and televisual cool and a later “place of pilgrimage to Kite Country” (accent on the often over-subscribed and -dressed “grim”).
Moc Morgan. Fine man, great angler. A former schoolmaster. Beside the book titles for which he later became known, I have one of his published by the Gomer Press of Llandysul (visited and bought on the very morning after the little firm had spent all day and a lot of the night printing the thing) – featuring the trout flies tied with farmyard cockerel feathers and their wife’s sewing-box silk and wool by the canny old local fishers he fished the upper Teifi with as a boy. Every Welsh river had such local patterns; Moc, a trusted member of the very close and clannish, Welsh-speaking old fishy Taffia, tracked them down and recorded them.