The front door is a couple of inches ajar and the pale blue welcome mat carries the slogan A Fisherman and A Normal Person Live Here. This is Jack Charlton's house alright.

Actually, it is and it isn't. Around 30 years or so ago . . . as ever with Charlton, dates, names and places are a make-do-and-mend jumble of estimation and bluff . . . he was at a football match in Barnsley and got talking with the chap sitting beside him. Ray Bailey was the chairman of Shrewsbury Town at the time, Charlton the manager at Middlesborough. Bailey was well into his fishing and his shooting and he sensed a kindred spirit flickering behind the big smiley face in the next seat. By the end of the game, they'd resolved to go looking for salmon on the Tyne sometime and there and then began an odd-couple friendship that lasts to this day. In the mid-1980s, he and Bailey bought this house together so that a few times a year, they could come over on fishing trips.

Bailey is sitting at the kitchen table in a blue and white striped dressing gown. This does not bode well. It's Thursday morning and we're supposed to be heading out fishing for the day. Beside Bailey at the table is Judd Ruane . . . former publican, lifetime jazz musician and the man to call if you're after a boat to go out looking for sea trout in the Moy estuary. The three of them have been friends for as long as Charlton and Bailey have been coming to Ballina.

The plan was to head out into the estuary for the morning, spend three or four hours fishing and then take whatever was caught out onto Bartra . . . the island owned by Nick Faldo in Killala Bay . . . and barbeque up some lunch before heading out again in the afternoon. But Judd's face says we're going nowhere today. It's the rain. And the 70mph gales. And the guarantee of more for the rest of the day.

"This is as much a part of fishing as holding the rod or tying the fly, " says a sanguine Charlton after an offer of coffee. "Sitting around, waiting on the weather. Why don't you come back on Monday and we'll try it again then?"

No problem at all. It's the story of his life as a fisherman. It can easily wait the weekend.

'I 've always liked it when people come up to me and say, 'You're Jack Charlton the fisherman, aren't you?' Not the football man but the fisherman. I always liked that. I always say to people that fishing is the only sport in the world that you don't need another person to take part in it to be able to enjoy it. Now, I don't know if that's true or not but I always like saying it. I like that about it."

We start in Bothal, a tiny afterthought of a village near the Ashington homeplace of the Charltons and Jackie Milburn and, latterly, England cricketer Steve Harmison. Behind the vicarage and around the corner from one of the entrances to Ashington Colliery runs the river Wansbeck. It's around 1945 or '46, the war's not long over at any rate . . . and you can't see them, but hidden in the undergrowth are little Jackie Charlton and a cohort named Jimmy Goldsworthy.

They're no more than 10 or 11 and although they're armed with enough mischief to seek out a poacher's spot on the river, adventure alone didn't find it for them. Their guide for the expedition has been Jackie's uncle Buck and he's doubled as their tutor along the way as well. He is, in Charlton's words, "one of the members of the family you weren't supposed to talk to because he was a bit of a villain . . . you know, a bit of a rogue". Precisely the stuff favourite uncles are made of.

Up to now they've not done much more than lower little jam jars down into the river hoping something would swim into them. But now Buck is teaching Jackie and Jimmy how to fish. You get a bit of nylon, you wrap it round a pin and then attach a piece of cork as your float. You add a couple of weights just above the hook where you put your worm on. You throw it in the water and you wait.

Or at least they wait. We move on, four or five years or so. Jackie has become Jack, tall and thin and hardy and headstrong. The little hideaway on the Wansbeck is kids' stuff by now and he's moving on to bigger things. He's caught a few mackerel in his time but he wants more and better and decides to buy himself a salmon rod. It costs �5 but his various money-making schemes . . . a paper round, a grocery delivery service and the unused colliery timber he gets hold of to chop up and sell for firewood . . . take care of that.

He's stubborn too. After he buys it, he decides it's too big for him. It's about 15 or 16 feet long and he's having trouble casting with it. So he takes a saw to it. Chops off about two feet. "Ah, I didn't know a thing about rods or anything. But that was it. The older you get the more complicated it all gets.

Because you buy a rod and start spending money on it and you're in it for life then."

Life gets in the way for a while, though, as we move on again. He becomes a footballer, plays his first match for Leeds in 1953, makes his England debut in '65 at the age of 30. The classic knees-andelbows centre-back, he wins the World Cup in '66, is voted the Football Writers' Player of the Year in '67 and finally wins a league with Leeds in '69.

There's little or no time along the way to get out onto the river, although he, Norman Hunter and Terry Cooper do manage a bit of coarse fishing here and there. There's no salmon to be caught around Leeds, see. Bream is about the best they can do in Yorkshire. For salmon and trout, they'd have to head away up to Newcastle or Carlisle.

"You find different places then once you're involved in fishing. You talk to people about different places and they want to talk to you about it. I used to go on the Coquet, a very famous sea trout river about 10 miles up the A1 from Ashington. I used to go there quite a lot. That's always been the way of it. You just go. When people tell you about a place that's got good fishing, you just go. That's what I've always liked about it.

"I've always liked river fishing. I don't really like trout fishing in lakes and that. I prefer it on a nice river. It's not so much for the fish that you do it, actually. If you like outside, that's more what it's about."

It wends its way back into his life when he retires from playing in 1973 after 20 years and 773 appearances for Leeds. When he takes up a job as manager of Middlesborough, it brings him back to England's north-east coast and the trout and salmon fishing he so enjoys. One of the football reporters with the Newcastle papers is a man called Ivor Broadis, a former international player who has heard of Jack's repute with a rod. He sidles up to him one afternoon after Charlton has finished with his press duties.

"I hear you like to fish, Jack, " he says.

"Aye, well I used to, " says Charlton. "I haven't had much of a chance in a while."

"Did you ever fish for salmon?" Ivor asks.

"Oh, years ago, " says Charlton. "When I was a kid.

Never caught one, though."

"How about I fix you up?" says Ivor.

And he does. We'll let the fisherman tell his story.

"It was out on the Tynef no, hang on, what's the river in Carlisle? The Tyne's Newcastle. Ah, f**k it, I fished on it for yearsf hang onf [disappears to ask Bailey] fthe Eden, that's it. Ivor brought me to the Eden and I took my son, our Peter, up with me.

I gave him a little trout rod and let him fish away and I fished down below him and I got into a fish. I didn't know what was happening because my line was going back up the river. I was casting up the river and letting the fly swing round and straighten but all of a sudden, it was going in a big loop and it was moving back up the river. And I watched it and thought, 'What the hell's that?' Turned out I'd caught a salmon, me first one. It weighed 15lb and it was bar of silver, one of the nicest fish I've ever caught in my life.

"The ghillie, when he came back, had a smile on his face and he goes, 'Got anything Jack?' Because it was in the middle of the summer and it was red hot. I said, 'Aye, we got one.' And he went and took a look in the back of the car and he opened it up and went, 'Bloody Hell, Jack!' That was my first one. A beautiful fish. That would have been the mid-'70s.

And I got back involved in it then because I was up in the north east again. I've been fishing ever since."

Monday morning, 8.30. A phonecall with Judd yesterday afternoon told us to hope for the best but to expect the worst. The forecast wasn't great but they sometimes get these things wrong, so you never knowf They know this time. With this wretched summer, everybody knows. It's grey again and wet again and windy again and there's more on the way again.

Mark (the photographer) and I pull into the carpark of Judd's boatyard down on the quay outside Ballina and park up beside the only other vehicle in the place, the navy blue Range Rover. We roll down our window. Bailey rolls down his. Charlton is sat in the passenger seat.

"It's beat us again, lads. Can't go out in it. Washed out again."

"Yeah, we figured. So what now?"

"Well, that's the chances of going out on the boat gone now. The problem is that the tide isn't getting away out into the sea because of all the extra rainwater. It's making the water very coloured. Judd took a party out yesterday and they got one little fish all day. The last time we were here and the weather wasn't like it is now, we had 30 or 40 caught by the end of the day. But look, we're going to go out on the Ridge Pool tomorrow morning. You know where that is?"

"It's right down in the middle of the town there, isn't it?"

"That's the one. We'll be there from around nine tomorrow morning and we'll see how we get on."

"Right you are, Jack."

"See you tomorrow, lads."

As much a part of fishing, eh?

They started coming to Ballina sometime in the '80s. They'd originally spent four or five years coming over to Donegal and fishing there. Charlton had gotten to know Brian McEniff and he and Bailey and their wives would come over and stay in McEniff 's hotel, share some pleasant meals and some nights on the beer with them and head off on the river during the day. The spring salmon they'd come looking for only poked their heads up for a peek every once in a while, though, and after a couple of trips, the pair were growing tired of it.

"We were sitting there one day, just another day on the river not catching anything and one of the lads who was along with us started going on about this place called Ballina and this river called the Moy that he'd heard some good reports about. So there was about four or five of us there and we agreed to miss a day and head down to Ballina. We jumped in a car early the next morning and went straight down to the top of the Ridge Pool.

"We pulled up outside the boxes and went across to the office to ask them where the fishing was good and they pointed out the door right behind us. We went outside and they were cleaning out these boxes and they had just some fantastic salmon. I mean, we'd never seen anything like it. We couldn't believe what we were seeing. They were taking boxes and boxes of these beautiful salmon away with them. So we decided there and then that we were definitely coming back here the next time we were over."

The pair of them spent the next four or five years coming to Ballina at least twice a year. They would stay in B&Bs and guesthouses and got to know most of the town and its people. The longer they spent there, the more they wondered how it had been kept such a secret. Charlton was Ireland manager by now, though, and the success his side was beginning to achieve meant that very little of what he liked to do in his spare would be kept secret for much longer.

"I was down in Belmullet one time and I was coming out of a supermarket and a little woman stopped me and went, 'Hello, Mr Charlton, you're doing very well with the football team. Would you like to come up and fish our spot?' I said, 'Aye, I'll fish anybody's place that's any good.' And she gave me this place up near Westport. That was just some woman in a supermarket, found me a place to fish. We got to love it around here."

Buying the house wasn't so much a big step as the next step. The Moy and especially the Ridge Pool provided some of the best salmon fishing in Europe and if it was a bit of variety they were after, they could take themselves off to Lough Conn or the Owenduff. Burrishoole, Delphi, Errif, Newport . . . all well-known fishing spots, all but a short drive from Ballina. They knew the people in the area well enough to be able to trust them to point them in the right direction when they were looking for one to buy and also to look after it for them when they weren't there.

Twice a year now, they'll pack up the Range Rovers, head up to Scotland to get the ferry over from Stranraer to Larne and drive down from there. Sometimes, depending on how much gear they have or don't have to take, they'll fly to Dublin and rent a car. They'll stay for between two and three weeks, fishing and eating and relaxing. The house is a home, decorated with photographs from his Ireland days and his fishing, always his fishing.

"We do it for the sport of it, for the fishing. You like to think you can catch them, like. I mean, 90 per cent of the fish I catch I put back. If I get a nice one of about four or five pounds, I'll keep that for barbequing. Any big ones, I'd always put back. I'm not allowed to keep them anymore anyway. The wife's got a freezer full of fish going back a year-and-a-half at this stage. She doesn't let me bring any big ones home any more."

Football brought Charlton all over the world but it's been fishing that has let him travel. Where football took him to hotels and airports, fishing took him to places and people. Pick a country, any country and he's likely to have cast a line in it. North America, South America, Norway, Sweden, France . . . all of Europe, basically. Up as far as Alaska and down as far as Australia. The Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. He's made television series and had books done on him. There was even a computer game once, way back in the dim and distant.

These days, he's had to slow down a little. He turned 72 in May and although he'll still take himself off on his own in the car sometimes if the mood's on him, he has to take a bit more care now. At Christmas, his wife Pat bought him a whistle to keep in his pocket, just in case a current catches his ankles and he topples over some day. The only time he'll ever really acknowledge the existence of his mobile phone is when he's out fishing, just so she can have some piece of mind if she hasn't heard from him. "I don't have to check in or anything, " he says quickly. "But she knows I'll be out until it's dark. After that, she might ring me to see how long I'll be."

Maybe she's ringing to see if you caught anything for dinner?

"Naw, if I catch a big one, I tend to chop it up into steaks and give it away. There are five families living where I live. We live in a complex that was an old farm before it was renovated and there are five houses around there. So if I catch a nice big rainbow trout, I'll chop it up and bring it round the houses, give them a lump and them a lump and them a lump. It's expected of me now. I'm fisherman Jack."

Tuesday morning, 9.00. It's a better day than the other two but that barely matters at this stage. The damage has been done over the past couple of weeks. The Moy down at the Ridge Pool has been swollen considerably and is too high and too fast-running to consider standing out in.

Jack and Ray and a few others sit around a table by the riverside and flick through the papers and drink tea. They're going to go and hang out a few worms in a while but they know well they won't catch anything worth holding onto.

"Normally, we wouldn't be a bit bothered by the rain, " Jack says. "The rain comes and goes and it's fine . . . you get used to it. But when it's rain like we've had for the past fortnight, the river rises and the water gets coloured and the fish just won't come into it. Normally it would have cleared itself by now and the water would be clearer but when it comes again and again and again, the river doesn't get a chance to clean itself out. You can't see more than a foot into that water out there. It's the worst I've ever seen it. I've been coming to the Ridge Pool for 20 years and this is the first time I've ever seen it that nobody can fish down below the cathedral. It can be quite dangerous with the currents so nobody goes out in it.

"When it's this bad, the weather is everything. We don't like it the way it's been over the past week when it's been rain, rain and more rain and the water's up and it's coloured and basically unfishable.

There's been very few fish caught in Ballina in a long while because of the state the rain has the river in."

They decide to give it a go anyway. Ray's up for it, more noticeably so than Jack. "Hey, we've got big worms here Jack, " he says, teasing. "Where's your can? Have you got it? Ooh, it's like having a two-yearold around. Imagine . . . 30 years of that I've had to put up with."

They hook their worms . . . three fat ones up on a line apiece . . . and as Ray skips off down the bank, Jack sticks his hand in his pocket and casts out a few times. He's almost grumpy about having to do it. "I'm telling you, we'll catch nothing here, " he says.

To watch him though is to see a man at ease and at peace. At some stage fado, fado, fishing hooked him and reeled him in as surely as he's ever done to a trout or a salmon. We spoke football for a while earlier and when he was talking about the Irish team he had, he couldn't for the life of him remember Tony Cascarino's name ("Not Quinny, not Frank Stapleton . . . the big tall fella").

And yet he'll reel off the tributaries of the Tweed or the pubs around the Blackwater as if they were as familiar to him as his own children. Bringing up football felt almost tawdry, like talking about a divorce trial at a wedding.

After a while, he feels a tug on the line. It's nothing huge but it's something, definitely something.

He flicks and he reels and he pulls it towards him.

Up and out of the water comes the hook and dangling of the end of it isf something. "A f**king eel, " he harrumphs. He goes off to get the pliers to take the hook out before placing it in a plastic bag and tipping it back into the Moy.

"Told you we'd catch nothing, " he says.

IT WAS THIS BIG: A FISHERMAN'S FAVOURITE TALE

One of the things Charlton most loves about fishing is the yarnspinning and storytelling that goes along with it. Everyone who's ever picked up a rod, he reckons, has their favourite fishing story at the tip of their tongue. Here, then, is his in his own words

My best fishing story isf the first big fish I ever caught was a 28lb salmon on the Tweed. I was fishing on the Scottish bank . . . one part's in England, one's in Scotland . . . and I was there fishing and felt a pull on the line. And I said, 'Oh, hellof this is a decent one here.'

And a guy just down the bank from me said, 'That's a big fish you've got there', and I said I knew. I played it and I played it and I played it but it was still a good bit away from me.

So the guy took me out in his boat a bit to get at it better because from where I was on the bank, the fish was 200 yards away down below me. We jumped in the boat and got down closer to the fish again and he dropped me over to a space on the bank and went over to get my net. By now, there were 30 or 40 people on the bridge watching me trying to pull in this fish and I kept playing it and playing it and it was about 10 yards away from me now but I couldn't get it any closer because the run of the water was keeping it moving away from me.

And all of a sudden, this guy on the riverbank picked up the net and waded into the river to get the fish.

But he didn't have wellies on or waders on or anything. He was just a guy in his trousers. He took his jacket off but waded in in his trousers and shirt up to his chest.

He netted the fish and we got back out of the river and got a cheer from everyone who was there. It was great, a lovely feeling. But the poor bastard was soaking wet from his shoes to his chest.

FAMOUS CATCHES: OTHER STARS HOOKED ON FISHING
IAN BOTHAM Made a career out of cricket, made a life out of fishing. Has made TV series and contributed articles on fly-fishing to books and magazines. "You feel the life in the water, " he once wrote in the Guardian, "and you watch the line come drifting around, waiting for that magical moment. The marvellous sensation comes when the fish hits the fly. A 20lb silver hen fish gives you the fright of your life, and the line gets ripped out by the salmon running across the water. That's the perfect catch and it's what every fisherman waits for."

JACK NICKLAUS A lifelong fisherman, it takes up a lot of his time since his retirement from golf. "I fish all over the world with a fly rod, whenever I go. A lot of the golf courses that I select to do usually are close to good trout streams or something. So I make sure that they are."

VINNIE JONES Bought a house in Kenmare a few years ago so that he could indulge in his favourite passions of greyhound racing, horse racing and salmon fishing. If possible, always takes his costars fishing during their first week on a movie set, just to make friends with them.

GREG NORMAN Well, he isn't called the Great White Shark for the size of his teeth. Grew up fishing on the Great Barrier Reef and the older he got and the richer he got, the more he indulged himself.

Like Botham, has lent his name to any amount of videos and DVDs on the subject.