Saturday, August 31, 2013

An ireland fishing adventure

My wife and I spent the past 8 days in Europe for our fifth anniversary.  We spent the first 4 days in Paris doing the tourist thing, then flew into Ireland for some pub crawling and sightseeing.  I was able to slip away for about 5 hours one morning to do a little fly fishing for trout in one of the local trout Irish streams.

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 This has been a dream of mine for a very long time, so this was a rather rewarding fishing trip.  I packed my 4wt with a double taper and a box of buggy nymphs with a couple of small streamers, along with some basic nymphs and dries.

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The stream was small and brushy and casting was going to be tough but it looked like it opened into some good pools in the section I could see from the bridge access.  As I waded into the pool below the bridge I saw 3 wakes move out of the head of the riffle into an undercut bank.  I heard that the fish over there could be tough to catch but that didn't seem to be true on this morning. I caught a lot of trout, mostly around 5-10 inches long and they were all over the place.

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This little creek was beautiful (much like the rest of Ireland), so I was driven to cover ground and quickly took off the prince nymph and tied on a wooly bugger and did my best to roll cast it to every good looking cut, riffle drop, and stripped it in the deepest parts of the pools.  I also stripped a streamer in some of the better pools.   This worked just as good as the smaller nymphs and I hooked two better fish that were in the 12-14 inch range.  It was a hell of a good time, can't wait to do it again someday.

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