Travelling to Ireland is nowadays much easier than it has been courtesy of Luxair's increased-capacity service to Dublin which it now serves 6 days/week.
While every individual/family has a different reason to visit a specific destination - business, family, friends, holiday, etc. - some choose their destination based on activities available; my passion is angling, fly-fishing for wild brown trout, to be exact.
Flying to Dublin via Luxair takes around 2 hours in the Bombardier Q400 turbo-props, so time for a read, a sandwich and a couple of drinks - all complimentary - and a nap before touching down in Dublin. Unfortunately there was thick cloud cover for almost the entire flight, so no chance to visually scan the topography to make out landmarks along the way, over Luxembourg, Belgium, across the Channel, over England and Wales, across the Irish sea and then over north Dublin.
With a hire car organised at the time of booking, it just took a few minutes for the paperwork to be finalised, for both a car and a MiFi (portable wifi router which allows a passenger to connect any mobile device and use it as a SatNav) which is less expensive than a stand-alone SatNav.
With the car loaded up with equipment, rods, tackle and appropriate clothing (to protect against the elements, not only rain but also wind), off we set, first to Lough Sheelin in the midlands. We managed to collect some natural mayflies around a slipway so we were able to "dap" natural mayflies as well as fish wet flies (through the water) and also dry flies (sitting on top of the water. So, everything we could do to tempt a hungry trout. Not a sausage though! In their defence, the mayfly was not yet "up" on the lake, the temperatures were too low and the wind was almost too strong. If we had come across a fish there, though, it would have been a decent size, with the average around 3 lbs, quite a bit larger than in other lakes, although volumes are significantly lower.
Over to the west, with Ireland's motorway infrastructure enabling quick access to almost all the country. We were aimed for Oughterard, to the west of Galway and at the edge of Connemara. A couple of days on Lough Corrib and deploying all three methods, we started to have some luck. by the end, we had fish every day - no blanks! And one day I actually managed a hat-trick - one fish on wet-fly, one on dry-fly and one on the dap...
Like at Lough Sheelin, the Mayfly were not "up" properly on Loughs Corrib and Mask; however, there were regular small hatches and even smaller windows when the fish were feeding. Also, while the winds were conductive to a good wave across the lakes, and really neither too weak nor too strong (averaging Force 3-5, with Force 4 the best), the temperatures were consistently below average. We had a few showers but even more periods of sunshine; the interesting thing was that the reactions of the wild brown trout in Ireland's western lakes are completely different to those in lakes in England, Scotland and Wales regarding changes in weather and feeding patterns.
Our guesthouse near Oughterard on the shore of Lough Corrib was full, with the family owners explaining "up to now 95% of guests are anglers and now that the Mayfly season is effectively over, 95% of our guests from now on will be non-anglers". With a full Irish breakfast in the mornings and a snug turf and wood open fire in the evenings, it was way more than comfortable. Like at home in Luxembourg, many languages were spoken as guests made up many nationalities - from Dutch, German, Swiss and Italian as well as Irish, Welsh and English. And the town of Oughterard has undergone a mini-revival. Gone are the days of another shop or restaurant having closed down since our last visit - now most building had received a lick of paint, new shops had opened, the hotel had re-opened (again) and a couple more restaurants were open for business. Choice, at last, and quality too. And the hotel was offering a special "Fisherman's Catch" menu whereby anglers could bring their catch to be cooked for them as a main course!
Back to the fishing; we would normally move a couple of trout late morning, then a quiet spell until lunch when they went on the feed again, then the "4 o'clock rise" and another just before we headed back to the mini pier-cum-boatyard. But with the wind changing direction and intensity, it meant that drifts over shallows were nearly always changing from the time/day before. But that spiced things up and meant that we had variation. there was plenty of other life on the water too, with numerous varieties of duck, house martins and swans all present in numbers. A couple of canoeists were paddling away and a couple of pleasure craft were motoring up and down the lake. A number of sheep, rams and cattle were on the islands, with the farmers able to transport them to/from the mainland on pontoons pulled by boats. You should have seen the horns!
This was no holiday, we were up before 07:30, to get into the town for the young merchants to sell us their wares - schoolchildren in this neck of the woods are given time off school to collect natural mayflies for dapping, with visiting anglers congregating before 08:00 with their wooden boxes, another example of how the region has adapted to servicing the angling industry.
On the day we went to Lough Mask, we drove through Connemara and parts of the Gaeltacht (Irish/Gaelic speaking area), with clear skies affording us magnificent landscape scenery and wonderful views over Lough Corrib. After going through Maam Cross and Maam, before we arrived in Ballinrobe we stopped off in Cong to walk the grounds of the Anglo-Norman Ashford castle where US President Ronald Reagan stayed and where, in 1951, film director John Ford filmed scenes for A Quiet Man starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara - a life-size statue stands in the town close to the ruins of an abbey and church, which is also worth a hour or two.
We waited until the last 15 minutes on the last day to get the largest fish in the boat. A fish took my fly like an express train, dived under the boat, then screamed line off the reel not once, but twice, before I got it in the net. A glorious fish with golden brown colouring on his underbelly with a myriad of sport - some bright red - along his flanks, just tipping the scales at 2.5 lbs. Frankly it looked much bigger that the 2-pounder caught a couple of days previously. Just as an example of how we did overall, the day out on Lough Mask resulted in 8 fish for the day, but just 2 were over the 13 inches regulation size, with all the others over 12 inches... those we kept are in the freezer, ready for the pot!
On the way back we stopped off in Galway with the intention of watching salmon anglers at work at Galway Weir (the outflow from Lough Corrib) but sadly the water was too high. We also stopped off in Kilbeggan on the Dublin side of Athlone, to visit the world's oldest licenced distillery, before catching the Sunday evening flight back to Luxembourg.
Plans for next year's Mayfly trip are already underway...
For fly-drive holidays to Ireland, see www.luxair.lu.
Photos by Geoff Thompson
