Home Trout fishing reports No Easter rising for Lough Sheelin anglers

No Easter rising for Lough Sheelin anglers

April 22, 2025

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Lough Sheelin angling report, April 14th – April 20th 2025

‘Every season brings new challenges but we always need to give our best’

Marcelo

Martin Ryan with his impressive 5.5 lb plus trout

It has been another tough week on Sheelin as her anglers battled challenging cold north westerly winds with easterlies taking over for the bank holiday weekend, these coupled with sub zero nightly temperatures, water temperatures barely in the double figures and heavy rain resulted in gruelling trout fishing conditions. The weather here has been miserable and has effectively put a stumbling block in the way of the buzzer fishing. Traditionally buzzer fishing hits in here in late April but as the end of this month is fast approaching, the signs aren’t very encouraging with poor and sporadic hatches.

It has been a disappointing week with a handful of anglers out every day with the predictable surge in numbers for the bank holiday bracket of good Friday, Saturday and Easter Sunday. Small buzzer hatches were reported in the silted areas of Finea, Sailors Garden, Bog Bay, Goreport and down along the western shore. A few fish were moving to the surface but the weather was predominantly keeping them down. Anglers were trying to booster each others morale with hopes that “this (buzzer) fishing will happen very soon”.

Buzzer fishing despite the delay this year is well worth waiting for. An underestimated and sometimes dismissed section of fishing on Sheelin with many anglers looking with tunnel vision towards the Mayfly suspicious of the fact that in reality more trout are caught on Sheelin in late April and early May on the buzzer and nymph patterns than during mayfly mania. Anglers should sit up and take notice of this important little insect, in all its stages and certainly be aware of its lifecycle to perfect imitation and ultimately success. This is a large group of insects with over 5000 described species and 700 in North America alone. Males are easily recognised by their plumose antennae. The various names are enjoyable – ‘Lake Flies’ in parts of Canada, ‘Sand Flies’, ‘Muckleheads’ or ‘Muffleheads’ in various regions of USA and best of all ‘Blind Mosquitoes’ or ‘Chizzywinks’ in Florida. In adult form some midges are large, up to hook size 14 but the majority are size 22 or smaller.

Female buzzers can lay up to 3 batches of eggs which are laid on the water. The egg mass is a small clear jelly-like glob. The eggs hatch into small worm-like larvae known as bloodworms. The bloodworm or midge larvae is red and are found in soft mud or silt and these areas are predictably the best buzzer fishing areas on Sheelin. Bloodworms spend most of their time attached to the bottom or other solid surfaces in a tube that they make. When they get near to hatching, they lose their blood red colour and take on a more sombre appearance. They then make their way from the lake bottom up through the water columns to the surface by a wriggling swimming action and it is this phase that the anglers called buzzers. The favoured patterns for this stage are epoxy buzzers.

Once the pupa reaches the surface it tends to get stuck under the surface film and takes awhile to push through. While they are doing this, they hang in the film like little commas and the trout go mad for them, at this stage CDC Emerger patterns are a good imitation for the angler to use. The actual hatching of the adult takes less than 30 seconds once the buzzer breaks through the film and the cycle starts all over again.

Despite contrary wind conditions and a distinctive lack of warmth some nice trout were recorded this week, with Martin Ryan’s trout of over 5lbs being the pick of the catches. Lure fishing is sliding off the top position, mainly to be replaced by Dabblers with Claret and Silver being the favourite colours. Finally teams of wet flies are featuring albeit not in abundance but Sooty Olives, Invictas, Dunkelds, Connemara Blacks and Black Pennels are coming out of hibernation. Buzzer set ups were being used but with little or no success as the water temperature is still too low, dipping back down to under 10 degrees during the week which has effectively slowed down the action of insects in the depths, we need heat to stir everything up, get all those lifecycles going and ultimately get the fish to look upwards for a change in menu.

The large fly patterns of Black & Gold Humungous, Silver Humungous, Black Minkies with a flash of silver, Snakes, Woolly Buggers and Cats Whiskers using heavy lines are still there as being responsible for some of the catches over the past seven days.

The Dabblers were popular in Claret, Pearly, Silver, Green, Peter Ross and Silver.

The best fishing areas for this week have been along the rocky shores and exposed points – the shallows were the water is warmer and the food – shrimp and hog louse is plentiful and easy to access. The buzzer locations are gradually taking over so it was the silted areas of Bog Bay, Sailors and Goreport that were popular for anglers targeting buzzer feeding trout.

The best areas are Chamber’s bay, Kilnahard shore, Holywell down to Crover, Merry point, Curry point, at the back of Church Island, Bog Bay, Goreport, Gaffneys and Finea. Some trout still hold the depths of water though, so blind casting if you can cast your line where you think the fish might be and retrieve might trigger a take. Daily choices of fishing spots are governed, as always, by wind direction.

Ronan Creane refers to ‘the fishing gods’ in his 2024 article and I think I agree with him in that for good and bad luck, the fishing gods are there. Many of us refer to this elusive god in jest but there is a little belief there too. Although still early in the season here, some anglers have caught terrific fish and those that strike gold like this generally look upwards while thanking something that none of us can see. This or these, are the fishing gods so there would seem to be more than one as it is always plural. As the challenging weather continues here it is time for the Lough Sheelin anglers to send up a silent pray to those ‘fishing gods’ to produce some decent fishing weather.

Cleaning up – an ant carrying off a discarded nut

Please remember anglers to abide by BYE-LAW 949 which strictly prohibits from

June 14^th, 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 1^st to June 16^th (inclusive).
To fish or to attempt to take or to fish for, fish of any kind other than during the period from March 1^st to October 12^th in any year.