The day had to come I suppose. My last outing was a short session after work, broiling under a ferocious sun and wafting a rod at some trout who declined to rise. I fished on lazily, not bothering to change tactics or flies. Work had been tough that day so I was simply unwinding a […]
Read More LC bluesRegular readers will no doubt be fed up of my recent whinging about missing my trout and salmon angling this year due to work commitments. There is a positive to this though, I am getting to know the canals around me in the middle of Ireland a whole lot better. Even on those evenings when […]
Read More PerseveranceBack home. It is Friday evening and I have driven back to Mayo after another week away in the midlands. The days are flying by and it is hard to figure where this year is going. It was just the other day when I was scraping frost of the windows of the car each morning. […]
Read More Typical sessionsI needed a break from all the coarse fishing I had been doing of late. I love my sessions with the float but a change to freshen things up felt right so I decided to try Pallas Lake near the village of Blue Ball in county Offaly yesterday evening. I will confess that laziness was […]
Read More Lil’ rainbowsI wrote last time about some keel hooks I had acquired and now I want to discuss another oddity, the sedge hook. I first became aware of these in the 1980’s when they were marketed as ‘Yorkshire sedge hooks’ and they appeared in a number of patterns tied by the foremost reservoir fly fishers of […]
Read More Sedge hooksA while back I bought some partly used packets and small boxes of fly hooks from a well know online purveyor of pre-loved goods. The photos accompanying said lot of hooks were none too, clear but for a small layout I thought it was worth the risk as I wanted to top up a few […]
Read More Keel hooksIt has been a tough week. The first few days back in the reality of my job after a holiday were never the best but work was unremittingly stark and even when I went fishing for a couple of hours things did not work out as I had planned. Such is life and the minor […]
Read More Of diggers and nippersMost of the visiting anglers I meet on the western lakes are accomplished fly fishers with a vast array of tackle and tactics at their fingertips. Until quite recently they were much more adaptable than the locals who often stuck rigidly to short line wet fly. Switching to lures on HD lines, fishing tiny dries […]
Read More Lift offAs you regular readers know, I am forever buying old fishing tat. Gear or materials that nobody else wants finds its way to me and I spend hours messing around trying make whatever it is of some use. One purchase from last year was a wooden box full of fly tying materials and a fly […]
Read More Under the knifeHigh winds and heavy rain are keeping me from the fishing this week so I will put up some fly tying posts. I’ll start off with this moan! Like the rest of you, I used to sometimes watch the plethora of fly tying videos out there on the different social media platforms. Being an old […]
Read More Counting turns
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