A dry and mild morning in Foxford, it is looking like a nice weekend ahead.We managed to have a few sessions after Pike during the week, P.J had one nice fish while I manage to give myself a very nasty cut on the finger and learned a lesson about Braid!
Time to Discover
As you probably already know we took our foot off the work accelerator last year. We closed the fresh fish side of our little business and chose to concentrate on the angling side. A big part of this decision was influenced by a sudden realisation that we were working a lot more than we were living and while there will always be work, the living part is not guaranteed. Looking back on that decision, it was a good one and it has given us some more free time and less stress. As you also already know, free time is not always for oneself and there are jobs and family commitments but there is also extra fishing time.
Due mainly to poor conditions the salmon fishing was slow for a large part of the season and it was during this time that we started fishing in a few less known locations. The results were interesting and its certainly something we will do more of in the coming years. I’m not going to name the locations that we visited because then they will be well known locations and it would also take some of the fun out of it all for you. A big part of the, thrill, enjoyment, success, failure, joy, learning (lets call it “the experience”) came from finding and exploring these places. Some were on our doorstep and we had just overlooked them, others were a little more inaccessible and difficult to find. A few of them we left and said “its no wonder people don’t fish here”and a few of them delivered the wow factor.
It was at one of these locations that I encountered the “Big Lad”, a wild brown trout that I can honestly say I’ve never seen the like of before. There’s a full article in that fish alone and before the new season begins, I will tell you the story.
How do you find these places
Research is the short answer but you also need time. As I said, some of these locations were literally on our doorstep and very close to some popular spots. You might ask why we did not find them before? well, the answer to this is also simple. We followed the crowd and did not do our research. We are all guilty of it, we hear of a river or Lough where the fishing is good. Our friends or friends of friends have fished there and told us about them. Perhaps we read about them in a magazine or spotted something on line and off we go, along with everyone else. To be honest, if fishing had been better in our normal favourite places we most likely would not have put our thinking hats on. I’m happy we did and would highly recommend it to you. I’m not sharing “The secret Location” but I will share the methodology we employed to find it and if you do something similar I think you will also be rewarded.
It starts with Google maps
Pick an area and I would say to start, pick an area you already know or think you know. Get it up on Google maps and start to study the rivers or Loughs, whatever your preference is. We done this by choosing a species, Brown trout, Sea trout, Salmon. We then looked at what we thought were possible places where these fish would be. A good virtual tour of the area will reveal several possibilities along with very valuable information on access points, distance and terrain.
Google search
Once a few possibilities have been identified its time to start researching them. Google (the poor mans university) will normally throw up some information. It might be the verdict from the inquest into the last man that tried to find their way there but again its all valuable. I spent hours reading old articles and snippets of historical information.
Hard back or Paper back
The next step is to go back to the old reference books. Peter O’Reillys Rivers of Ireland and Loughs of Ireland are very useful and have loads of information. Agreeably, a lot of this information is now dated and must be treated as such. I certainly do not recommend phoning the contacts listed, a lot of these people have moved on to fish in other places.. I have an even older book, going back to the 1800s and this was where we found some very valuable information. In it the author talks about days spent fishing in places that are now forgotten. We did have some interesting treks up mountains full of anticipation only to find a bog hole that not even a frog would occupy. Maybe when the author visited it was different and fish were more plentiful. We also found a couple of gems.
The Recce
This is where the leg work begins and I don’t know how many bog holes I fell into or how many rips I put in my waders but it had to be done. I will admit that after a few long and difficult walks I did cop on and used a bit of grey matter. Yes, I bought a drone, game changer. Drive to the nearest access point and let her up. Its amazing what a birds eye view reveals and the hardship it saves. You don’t realise how valuable that one piece of advice is. Imagine walking for two hours in pouring rain up the side of a mountain through heather up to your knees searching for a lake described as holding a stock of free rising brownies up to 3lbs only to find that the track through a plantation which is the access point is now overgrown by primarily Gorse/whin bushes that a tribe of Yanomami Indians wouldn’t get through. Yeah, I done it….
Learn to control the Drone
I could tell a few funny stories about Drones as well. The first one I bought came directly from China. I don’t know what it was programmed for but by God that thing was lethal. It would all go well to a point then suddenly it would take on a life of its own with no respect for anything in its path. I had it up the river one day, there was a farmer out in a field on the opposite bank. I would swear it targeted him. I was flying it downstream. Suddenly it shot up in the air, completely out of sight, there was nothing for a while then it reappeared. It came like a dive bomber from a completely different direction and almost took his head off. It missed him by millimeters and crash landed about ten meters upstream of me. The farmer stood looking around him in amazement, he didn’t know what had happened and I stood looking as innocently as I could at the river, praying he would not put two and two together and that the beast would not take off again. I flew it again a few days later, the last I saw of it was heading North at about a hundred miles an hour, never to be seen again. I digress.
The learning
Once the armchair and leg research has been done the learning starts. You will be fishing a place, be it a river or lake that is totally new to you and there is a lot to be discovered. For me this was one of the best parts of the past season. We fished in a variety of places, all of which had different characteristics. There was a lot to be learned and mistakes were made. In some cases, we got chances to learn from the mistakes, in a few we didn’t. I’m happy to say that we have not discovered it all and there’s more to come in the coming seasons. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was going to do so experimental fishing during the last spring tide. We messed that up in style and almost lost the car in the process, another learning curve. Perhaps on the next spring tide we will get it right but realistically I think we will have to wait until next summer for a proper try, Ill tell you about it when I figure it out.
