Daire Coyle from Lough Gara Angling Club was pike fishing with David Shannon on Lough Key yesterday, when they had something a little unexpected. Daire takes up the story..

Myself and David set off on the short journey to the Boyle River  at 7:00. The weather was dry and overcast. There was a cool easterly which veered to a north easterly for a time. The wind was light.  The water temperature was 9 degrees.

We fished 4 different baits between the two of us. This consisted of herring, mackerel, trout and roach. The roach and herring were popped up with the others fished on the bottom.

The morning proved to be quiet. We did see a pike spawning at a shallow reed shore close to us. We tried a few different area’s when eventually I got a run. After a short fight I landed a pike of around 5lb.

We decided to have lunch an relocate for the afternoon.

In the afternoon we spent some time on the lake with the fish finder. We found a spot which showed up plenty of shoal fish and some interesting features. We marked it with a marker float and then attempted to set anchor, but found our lead mud weight could not penetrate the lake bed which was obviously a hard bed of stone as shown on the fish finder. We had to move about a bit to find a break in the stone and eventually got anchored.

Again we set up four rods with same baits and fished them towards the marker float area. After 3/4 of an hour I had a slow run on one of my rods. I probably struck too soon and it felt like I pulled the bait out of the fish’s mouth. I examined mackerele bait and as it was only alittle damaged, I cast the bait in the same spot again. One the baitrunner was set I reeled in my second rod. I had decided that mackerel was the bait of choice and I was going to fish all mackerel.

trout
This huge trout was an unexpected fish for pike angler Daire Coyle and wins Catch of the Week #CPRsavesfish

As I put my hand into the bait bag to get a bait, my first rod started to run. It was a more powerful run than the previous. I reeled in the slack and struck into something considerable. We were over about 20ft of water but the fish seemed to instantly surface. When it leapt clean of the water I got my first look at the fish. I then realised it was a trout. It gave a good battle but it was no match for a 3lb test curve rod loaded with 20lb Suffolks line. Within 5 minutes we had the fish landed. Luckily as it only had on barb of the two trebles caught in its upper lip. The fish weighed in at just under 10lb. It was revived and returned.

We continued in this spot for another hour before moving again.

That was it for the day we had no more fish. I didn’t mind as i had just caught my personal best trout. We will be heading to the Corrib in May, for the Mayfly it would be nice to catch something similar on the fly. Then you would have a battle.

#CPRsavesfish