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.







 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.




 

 

 


 

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.

 




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.