Back home, a fantastic end to a fantastic couple of weeks out in Ireland

I crawled into bed at about 3am last night after nearly 500 miles of driving and a very calm ferry crossing, and as is bloody typical, my head woke me up at 6.30am. Aside from listening to a bunch of podcasts and some mighty fine black metal on the long way home, I also had a good bit of reflection on the two co-guided trips we had. With the conditions we had I reckon we had some really good bass and pollack fishing, and as ever we had such fun with our anglers. If bass fishing was only about the enjoyment of “big” fish then I would suggest that we would all have given up ages ago, so there’s got to be loads more to it than just that. There simply aren’t loads of what we might call big bass around to catch, and these trips we run have proved to me yet again that the whole fishing thing needs to be such a rounded experience to create those happy memories which lodge in the brain………..

Come fishing with us in Ireland

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Come fishing with us in Ireland //

As ever I have come away with plenty of ideas to apply to my own fishing, and then in turn the work I am doing with Savage Gear and so on. It’s always interesting when you have a group of anglers fishing the same areas, because as sure as I could do with a few more hours sleep, there will be times when somebody is fishing a particular lure a bit differently either to how I would usually fish it, or perhaps more interestingly, a touch differently to how a specific lure and its use was envisaged. If I had known how much this whole lure fishing for bass thing would have engaged my brain so much I’d have got it into it way before I did. Lots more to come on this.

One memory which will never leave me was on the penultimate evening when the lads were drifting the new smaller size Gravity Stick Pintail in a fast run of current (Savage Gear Gravity Stick Mini Kit - 12cm - 13gm, and yep, I was already obsessed with the smaller Pintail rigged on its 4/0 belly-weight hook, but this Kerry trip has increased that obsession to critical levels!). There were a few fish landed that evening, including the fine bass around 6lbs above for Steve, but I was standing next to Adrian and talking him through where a bass might most likely hit his lure within the arc of the drift - and a bass went and hit him. When I say hit him though, I am talking about just about the most violent hit from a bass that I have ever seen.

The smaller size Gravity Stick Pintail in the mouth of a chunky Irish bass

We will never know how big the fish might have been, and our anglers were fishing in current, but I can only recall one other bass which hit anywhere near as hard as Adrian’s fish. His mainline parted literally on the hit as the rod slammed down and to be perfectly honest Adrian did rather well to hold onto the rod and not have it fly out of his hands. Yep, I’m talking about an electric experience which I know is going to haunt Adrian like a few fish I have not landed in my past which continue to haunt me. By the time I crawled into bed earlier this morning, Adrian’s lost bass had grown to a scary size in my head! I have got loads to be getting on with so I will catch you later in the week………………

Adrian with a mullet he caught on the fly. As a photograph it’s the simplest of grip and grins, but it’s the simple joy which fishing gives that lives longest for me.

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