Dave Fitzpatrick of Lurefish Ireland reports:
Last weekends fishing turned out to be a bit of a strange session, started off as a trout session, then turned to flounder and instead of heading home I ended up in a bit of an impromptu species hunt. It got off to an nice early start on Sunday morning when I met up with my friend Sam to target brown and sea trout. We had hoped that the recent heavy rain might have got the trout moving again but unfortunately that didn’t quite pan out, a couple of follows from small trout but no hook ups. Time for a rethink, with the prospects of yet another blank looming we turned our attention to the flounder. We tried and tried but they just didn’t appear to be around in any numbers yet. Then all of a sudden we hit a few fish and both hooked up within minutes, a couple of flounder landed then nothing…. We had some great flounder sessions last year so I’m hoping that it picks up soon.
I was thinking of heading back to Dublin but a quick phone call quickly changed my mind, the rain was torrential in Dublin and bizarrely nice and sunny where I was, so I decided to stay put and do a bit more fishing. I met up with my friends David and Dawid and headed to a spot that might throw up a few mackerel and possibly a few other species too. There was plenty of sandeel in the water and we hoped that the mackerel would be in after them but unfortunately they didn’t seem to be around in any numbers so we quickly turned our attention to other species. So began the impromptu species hunt, I already had a bit of a head start with flounder and mackerel but David was soon racking up the species tally with countless whiting, pouting and poorcod. I had a bit of catching up to do but soon got through the army of small whiting and added whiting, pouting, poorcod and rock goby to my tally.
The small whiting were coming thick and fast but it was making it difficult to catch any other species. Time to move and see if we could find some wrasse, David was first off the mark with a cheeky little goldsinny wrasse, it took a while and a few misses but I soon caught a little goldsinny too. We moved on once more to try around some weed covered rocks for a corkwing or ballan wrasse. It didn’t take David long to tempt one and land a nice little corkwing wrasse, bringing the total number of species caught on the day to eight. They might all have been tiddlers but it was good fun all the same and great to meet up with the lads again.
Compliments of:
Dave Fitzpatrick,
Lurefish Ireland.
