Heading home this morning, still can’t work out where time goes when I’m in Ireland

It feels like only yesterday that I arrived here in Kerry, yet this morning I need to pack my Epic Berlingo up, make the trek across Ireland, drop in on a friend on the way, catch the evening StenaLine ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard and catch up with another friend onboard who was fishing in a different part of Ireland, make the trek from Fishguard to home, crawl into bed around 3am, get up at 6.30am for a dog walk with my wife and youngest girl, catch up on a lot of correspondence, wash the guiding gear down, start the photo processing work to put the photo galleries for our clients that I always do after these trips, head over to Plymouth tomorrow evening to sit in my car and read my Kindle while the youngest girl does a savage endurance training session, crawl into bed, and then by Friday morning I reckon I should be just about thinking straight and getting some of my own fishing in………..

We are lucky on these trips because we get some really good people coming along, and even when the bass fishing got a bit tough with the calm and bright conditions we had such a blast either fishing hard for them or moving off to find a load of pollack and some really chunky wrasse from a spot I bet you hasn’t been fished since John was last there a few years ago. How about a trigger fish as well? We saw a few of them and one of our lads managed to land one on his wrassing gear. There is SO much fishing out there to be explored and enjoyed and as much as I can’t get enough of doing these trips that John and I do together, a big part of me would also love the time to get out there and try some stuff which the guiding side of things doesn’t really allow for us to do. Any chance of running a parallel life?

I had better get on with packing up and saying goodbye to our second group, but I will try and catch up on Friday and break down a few thoughts on how these trips went and so on. Hope you are all finding a few fish wherever you may be, if you see an Epic Berlingo heading south on the M4 or M5 late tonight then give me a wave! At least a long drive is a good chance to catch up on a few podcasts I never got the time to listen to while we were running these trips. Getting back to Ireland after far too long has felt so incredibly good and I am back out here in a couple of weeks for another trip………...