Lough Sheelin angling report May 19th to May 25th 2025
“On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it”
Jules Renard
It has been another difficult fishing week on Lough Sheelin. Daytime temperatures stubbornly remained in the early twenties with bright sunshine and cloudless skies posing an impossible successful fishing scenario for most days this week. Water temperatures stuck at 18 degrees at 0.5 metres with a drop to 12 degrees in the deep. Hot bright conditions and high surface temperatures are simply not conducive to trout rising so there was predictably a chunk in the middle of the day when the sun was high in the sky which was simply rubbish for fishing and only good for a sun tan. A few anglers ventured out in the early hours of the morning reporting trout coming up to surface feed particularly around the Crover area of the lake but little or no plucks at the artificial.
Weather patterns started to change on Friday, and the weekend was a mixture of fresh south westerlies accompanied by frequent heavy downpours. The fishing improved mainly for wet fly fishing with the dry fly anglers struggling to find falls of spent in the evenings because of the remaining mayfly sticking to the bushes due to the blustery wet weather. Some good catches were recorded by anglers who worked the waves using patterns like Bumbles (Golden Olive), Gosling variants and Green Dabblers. Waves can be challenging which reminds me of Kingsmill Moore’s excellent book “A Man May Fish” where he refers to an angler having to have an eye like a “Travelling Rat” and maybe that is what is needed when scanning the waves for the movement of fish. Wet fly fishing requires continual casting with preferably a light, well-balanced fly rod. Covering a drift in front of the boat in a fan shape as you move along the waves can yield great results, this is so different from the slow, static, sluggish retrieve necessary for nymph fishing, a method that since now, has taken precedence here for the past number of weeks.
Lough Sheelin did not fish well over the past seven days, one angler equating it to being similar to “watching paint dry”. A great deal of the poor fishing was down to the weather. Trout behaviour changes in warm and sunny conditions, they move to the deeper, cooler areas to escape the heat, they also become less active in warm water, making them less likely to surface. Warm water contains less oxygen so it makes sense that the fish move to the deeper cooler more oxygenated layers. Lough Sheelin has an abundance of trout food sub surface – shrimp, snails, leeches, sticklebacks, fish fry, microscopic crustaceans like daphnia as well as the varies lifecycles of buzzer and mayfly so it would take something very special to attract our trout up to the top. The best fishing times for this week were early morning and late evening when the sun wasn’t beating down on the water. Some anglers think that fish don’t come up because they have no eyelids and therefore have no protection from the sun’s rays, but this isn’t quite correct, trout do have eyelids, but they are quite different from human ones. Trout have a third eyelid called the nictitating membrane or nicitant which shields the eyes from debris, sediment or during feeding. While this ‘third eyelid’ does provide some protection, it is not specifically adapted for blocking sunlight which is why the trout often seek shade or deeper waters to avoid intense sunlight another reason for us not to see them at the top in sunny bright weather.
Nymph fishing with it’s essential slow retrieve gradually moving down a drift, featured mostly during the hot weather, patterns like Mayfly, Pheasant Tail, Hare’s Ear, Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear, Cahill, Prince and Stonefly were used.
The Hughes Cup, a Spent Gnat competition was held on Friday evening May 23rd, 5pm to 10pm, twenty anglers took part with Peadar McAvinney winning with a 5lb 13oz trout.
The Tara Mines anglers held a small competition on Sheelin on Saturday May 24th from 10am to 9pm, ten anglers participated with one fish being caught by a Cork angler on a spent gnat pattern and returned. Conditions were far from ideal but everyone enjoyed themselves, citing “there’s just something about Sheelin”.
Lough Sheelin experienced phenomenal numbers of Mayfly this year so much so that some anglers joked that there wasn’t enough space for the greens to get off the water with the spent dropping. Fishing or no fishing we were blessed here with the exceptional and incredible numbers of this magical little insect with its Tchaikovsky’s “dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and eventual creation of a mesmerizing, glistening expanse of crumpled wings prostrate in the last throes of life stretched in a shinning carpet across the lake’s surface.
Ephemera dancia – a poignant reminder of the fleeting nature of life, as the mayflies brief, shimmering existence comes to an end.
Flies that worked best were the nymph patterns (Damsel, Prince, Mayfly, Sparkle and Hare’s Ear ) Stimulator, Gosling, Golden Olive Bumble, Dabblers in Green, Silver, Peter Ross and Claret, the Wulffs in Green, Gray and Royal, the Raymond, the Mosley Mayfly, the F fly, the Bibio Hopper (on the top dropper) Greenwells Glory, Buzzer, Humpys, Pheasants Tail, Klinkhammer and the Stimulator. The most popular wet flies used were the Sooty olive, Green Dabbler, Claret Dabbler and Peter Ross Dabbler.
Sheelin Fishing Guides:
John Mulvany johnmulvanyfishing@gmail.com 086 2490076
Please remember anglers to abide by BYE-LAW 949 which strictly prohibits from
June 14th, 2017 onwards:
- The taking of any brown trout of less than 36 centimeters.
- For a person to fish with more than 2 rods at any one time.
- To fish with more than 4 rods at any one time when there is more than one person on board the boat concerned.
- For a person to take more than 2 trout per day.
- All trolling on the lake from March 1st to June 16th (inclusive).
- To fish or to attempt to take or to fish for, fish of any kind other than during the period from March 1st to October 12th in any year.
Heaviest trout: An 8.5lb trout caught by Ciaran Flynn on a Spent Gnat pattern
Number of trout recorded: 27
Selection of catches:
Diarmuid O’Donovan guided by Denis Goulding – 1 trout at over 6lbs on nymphs.
Brendan Moran, kells – 1 trout at 5lbs.
Larry Moley – 1 at 7lbs on a Spent Gnat.
Vincent Mathews, Dublin
Brendan Rice, Louth – 2 trout at 3.5lbs and 5lbs on Claret Dabbler and Spent Gnat patterns.
Stephen O’Neill, Newry – 3 trout, heaviest at 3.5lbs wet fly fishing using Bumble and Olive patterns, May 24th.
Brian Malone, Wexford – 1 trout at 4lbs on a Murrough fishing in Goreport.
