A blast with our second group of anglers out here in Ireland, so good to see so many signs of life
Later this morning I am starting my journey home back to Cornwall. I can’t wait to go fishing myself of course, but this couple of weeks in Kerry has been a blast. Our second group has left and I can now start to really analyse how it all went. To see so much life out here is fantastic - loads of bass albeit mostly pretty small, plenty of birds working on bait, lots of small sandeels around, salmon moving around in the estuary etc.
For some unknown reason, the bay in which we do a good chunk of our fishing was almost devoid of sandeels last year. I have talked about it a lot with John Quinlan, but the intricacies of the natural world and how things work is beyond what we think we know when stuff doesn’t happen as you have almost come to expect it to. The signs have been much better this year, and although most of the bass our anglers caught were not big, there were good numbers of fish around and even the pollack stocks seemed healthier than last year. We had a day on the boat with our anglers in the second group and at one point John and I could hardly keep up with the numbers of pollack being hooked.
If I am lucky enough to get to 78, I want to be like this bloke here. Amazing.
What has been very noticeable is how the bass we have been catching have for the most part been showing a marked preference for the smaller lures - which I guess is down to them being preoccupied with the small sandeels which are around here at the moment. The little Savage Gear Sandeel Pencil 90 has once again been catching a lot of bass, as has the smaller 11cm Slender Scoop Shad rigged on the 4/0 belly-weight weedless hook we made for the smaller 120mm size Gravity Sticks. I also got one of our lads to clip on the deadly little Berkley Dex Strider 90 surface lure the other evening and it was almost silly how eager the bass were to launch into it. I know how well this little missile of a surface lure has done on big bass for a friend of mine who is abroad at the moment guiding for salmon. Good hooks as well which I like to see, and it was the larger 120 version of the Berkley Dex Strider which caught me so many striped bass out in Canada last summer.
The last day with our second group was spent doing something very different. We headed for the hills to go fishing for wild brown trout on a truly spectacular lake nestled far away from any main roads. What a truly glorious day. Is there a prettier fish than a wild brown trout? As always I am going to miss this glorious part of the world, but I am back here in October to do some more guiding work with John. Very interested to see how the season develops out here. I will be getting back to a quiet home because my two girls have gone to the Isle of Wight to teach dinghy sailing for a month, and my wife is leading a school trip to France. Just me and Storm then for a few days. Fishing, running, dog walking and work, preferably in that order! Catch up soon, I need to pack my Epic Berlingo up and hit the road………….
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