Travelling over to Ireland today for a couple of weeks of guiding work, managed to get some fishing in last week

I got back from Canada a week ago but already I am off again. I am doing my long drive over to Kerry in SW Ireland today for a couple of weeks of co-guiding work. Our first group of anglers arrive on Tuesday afternoon, ready to start fishing on Wednesday morning. I will do my best to keep you updated on here………….

I managed to get out fishing a few times this week, and a couple of nice bass I caught successfully got themselves either out of a net or off a rock before I could take any photos of them! It felt a bit strange to hook into our bass again after the striped bass fishing we found on the east coast of Canada, indeed early on Friday morning I connected to one of “our” bass which gave me one of those classic sort of tap, tap, bang hits. I was trying out an HTO Slim Snax soft plastic “stick” which I really like the look of - casts great, looks fantastic in the water when you make it come to life, and bass obviously like them because I got hit almost straight away. To be honest I went to my lure box to put a Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail on because it just felt like those sort of conditions where a soft plastic twitchbait style lure might work. I found out that I had forgotten to bring any Pintails but I had remembered an HTO Slim Snax which I had recently got hold of to see what they were like.

I said to my mate Andy that it was a rather small bass when I hooked up to it, but he told me to stop being a twat because my lure rod was hooped right over and I ended up lifting a fish around 5lbs up onto a rock - but the bass managed to shake the hook and get itself back into the sea before I could grab a shot or two. Give me a bit longer and I will have worked all those harder-fighting Canadian striped bass out of my system and I’ll be back on our bass in a proper way! I was also trying out one of the new HTO Tempest Bay Area 8'8'' 6-30g lure rods - talk about an easy rod to fish with (various rods in the new HTO Tempest range here). As smooth as you like and completely effortless. Anyway, onwards to Ireland and some more co-guiding work, will be in touch soon………………..

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