West coast lure fishing guide Vinny Corrigan is, alas, moving to Australia in a few months. He is still fishing away, however, and sent in this report from a trip with a client over the weekend.
Fishing aConnemara rock mark from 7-11am with a 4.8m high tide at 9am and a gentle NW wind. Finally some flat seas after a few rough weeks of weather and just before another huge swell heading our way. My client Bernard from Chicago and I headed across some very water logged fields to a deep water mark..
With nothing at the first ledge after 30 minutes we moved a stone’s throw away to the next mark. Within a few minutes a few bites and we had a decent pollock on a 4” Gulp Swimming Mullet on a 21g Shad Head for Bernard… bouncing slowly along the bottom with a steady retrieve.

The bite seemed to go dead until some large rafts of weeds came in with the approaching high tide.. what we first thought was raindrops (without a cloud in sight) turned out to be thousands of sandeels about 5” long with a few greater sandeels / lance of 12” mixed in. We could also see pollock coming up and attacking but we weren’t hooking up with the Gulp of metal lures.
We quickly changed to an Irish made EvoBass Lures Sabre 130 in Goblin Colour.. a nice green and silver soft plastic and rigged it up on a 4/0 7g weedless twistlock hook. Essentially matching the hatch. With the slower presentation and Bernard was soon into a slightly smaller but harder fighting fish.

Not long after was the best hit of the morning with this cracking 5lb pollock..

All fish returned to fight another day.
My bookings are wrapping up with just a few dates left for May and June before the family makes the big move to Melbourne.
It’s been a true joy moving here 19 years ago and experiencing this amazing fishery off the South Connemara rocks. I am still discovering new marks and learning to my very last day.
We’re going to miss Vinny and his great reports, and I’m certainly going to miss his expertise, advice and friendship! Hopefully before he makes the big move we’ll hear from him a few more times on these pages.
Go Fishing – Wild Atlantic Lure Fishing
Vincent will be offering one on one guided rock fishing from summer, mainly for wrasse and pollack, and all within 1 hour of Galway city. I have fished with him myself, and can vouch for his knowledge of tackle, tactics and species.
Contact www.lurefishing.ie to book or for more info.
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