Ireland April ’13 part I

Finally I found the time to select pictures and write down our adventure (well part of it to start with). And an adventure it was, so here we go…

It started early on Sunday morning (1 am) when my fishing friend Koen and I rode to Calais (France) to meet the other two members of our team, Sven and Steve (so far so good) for an early check in with the four legged friend who would join us, Jimmy (officially Gypsy but Jimmy just sounds better, right Sven?). And that’s when the trouble started…

 

The veterinarian responsible for Jimmy’s vaccines didn’t fill in the papers correctly so he was not allowed to enter the UK. Luckily Sven lives at a 45 min drive from Calais, so we went back to wake the vet at 4 am to fix the problem and drove back to find out that we missed the train we booked to take us under the Channel to England.

 

On top of that, Koen and I were able to take the next train but the other guys were scheduled for the one after us. Believe me that’s not the way you want to start a fishing trip, especially because we were going to get into timetrouble to catch our ferry to Ireland on the other side of England (which we still had to cross).

Luckily some ‘Higher Power’ felt sorry for us and intervened. Apparently there was still one place left on our train and the first in line (yes our friends!) were able to join us.

That was the first time someone’s guardian angel watched over us and it wouldn’t be the last.

 

Here I took a picture of our friends on the highway trough England but it appeared that I wasn’t the only one. Some policeman in an anonymous car was following us and filmed every move we made. Which he didn’t like very much so he pulled our friends van and trailer over to confront them with a list of traffic offences.

But after a lot of convincing that the traffic laws in Belgium are very different than those in the UK, he let them go with just a warning.

 

Lucky again, but we lost even more of our precious time to catch our ferry. But guess what? When we arrived in Holyhead, we had exactly 6 min to check in and drive on to our ferry to give us our well deserved break.

 

But it seems that with ‘Higher Power Interventions’ you have to pay a price, because once the ferry hit the sea it was immediately obvious that it wasn’t going to be a pleasant boat trip. Stormy weather at sea was our price for luck so relaxing was out of the question!

 

But it all turned out ok and after a good night sleep we were anxious to get on the water. Here are Sven and Steve preparing their boat for a first attempt.

 

We wanted to try out our small ‘private lake’ first so they put the boat in the little canal in front of our house to get to the lake. Getting the boat in was no problem (out was a different story), so we were finally ready to catch some fish.

We had been in touch with some Irish guys for a couple of weeks and they all had horrible stories. It had been too cold for too long and they had seven weeks straight without rain (normally it rains one in two days in Ireland) which made the water level of the lakes drop over a meter.

 But the week before we arrived it rained so hard that the water level came back to normal but made the water very muddy. On top of that, our landlord Brian told us that one week before us five French guys rented the house to go fishing and they caught 3 pike in total in an entire week. So all that wasn’t very promising.

 

I was also curious who would handle the conditions best. Koen and I were the only fly fishermen of the group. Sven and Steve fish more conventional with lures and dead bait.

 

And they caught the first fish. Here’s Steve with his first, yes I know, it's not a very pretty way to appear on someone’s blog for the first time (but it gets better and he actually caught three in those first two hours).

Followed by Sven. Not the big ones but certainly not as horrible as predicted…

 

Especially when I caught two jacks myself.

 

Yes I posted both of them because not many will follow.

 

This is the amount Koen landed on the first lake (zero), a picture we found funny at first but was going to be a lot more contagious that we hoped for.

 

And like I mentioned before, getting into the water with the boat was a lot easier than getting out. Here’s Ken (our landlords son) pulling the van and trailer out of the mud.

 

So in the afternoon we searched for a lake that was easier to access with the boat. Normally we would have skipped this lake because there was way to much wind to fish with a belly boat.

 

But we just held on to the side of the boat so they could pull us into a part of the lake that was out of the wind (very handy if you ask me).

 

That way I was able to land another small one. Koen caught his first two fish as well but since he’s an expert in dropping his fish when you pull out your camera, I have no pictures of them.

 

And Steve caught his fourth as well.

That brings us up to 10 pike with four guys on the water, which was the largest number of pike within a day of fishing for the rest of the week (sad but true). Although they were not the biggest…