Ireland (5): day 5&6

 

We started our day on a private property, in ‘the garden’ of this house (very friendly people as well). It was an absolutely beautiful estate of meadows, forest and three magnificent lakes.

If I had a place like this, well, you would probably never hear from me again. I’d be vanished (with pleasure) in this beautiful Irish oblivion.

Each lake was connected to another one with a canal like this (are you starting to get my point?).

 

Here’s Lieven, trying his luck in one of them.

But I don’t have an estate like this, so I’d better stop dreaming. Besides, the fishing was poor anyway.

We split up in two groups again to try separate lakes, and the other guys didn’t even have a single bite.

 

But Lieven, Koen and I managed to catch a couple each.

Here’s Koen with one of his jacks (and that smile is definitely getting better).

 

This is one of mine on a pike imitation.

 

And here’s another one.

In the afternoon we did another lake, where we all caught several small ones, but I don’t even have a single picture of that afternoon, so it can’t have been very spectacular.

 

So we called it a day early. Besides, we still had Koen’s birthday to celebrate.

And as you can see in the picture, we still had to convince Lieven to put his jerkbait rod aside and try it on the fly.

On our last day (unbelievable how fast a week can pass), we got a little later out of bed than usual (due to certain pub events, the night before).

 

We’ve had our eyes on this water close at home for an entire week now, and it was finally deserted. It holds the Irish record bream, so there were always several guys out there trying to catch it.

But we weren’t interested in bream at all, and it’s a perfect bellyboat water, so we were happy to give it a try.

 

My pike imitation still did the trick (I only regret that I didn’t start using it earlier that week).

The other ones caught best on olive/green flies as well from that moment on.

 

No big ones, but this is already a very nice pike to catch on a fly rod.

 

On our ultimate last afternoon together on a lake, we chose the lake where I caught my personal best on the first day. And although we had a very hard wind, which made it very difficult to manoeuvre properly with our bellyboats, we all had a fantastic afternoon.

 

Here’s Gino with one of his final catches.

 

And we finally convinced Lieven to use a fly rod,… which he didn’t regret!

This is actually the only picture I have from Lieven holding a pike in his hands (so it feels kind of good that he caught it on a fly).

 

His cousin, Steven also tried something else. He decided to get away from the reeds and fish with one of my bigger streamers (which he didn’t regret either).

 

And this is my final catch. I really wouldn’t know how to end a fishing trip better than this. The fight this lady have me, is something I’ll remember for a long time. I actually missed her twice before I hooked her, but as they say,… third time lucky.

 

But all good things come to an end, so we came dripping out of the water one by one.

Here’s Phillipe after an Olympic effort to get to the shore with a very strong wind (blowing from the wrong side).

 

Gino just didn’t give up catching fish until he was on dry land (that’s a kind of stubbornness I like a lot in people).

 

This picture gives you a good idea on how we all felt, exhausted but very satisfied!

I won’t post our journey back, the day after, because it was pretty much the same as the way we got there (except we looked even more like zombies).

But I do would like to thank all the other guys (Koen, Phillipe, Gino, Steven and Lieven), for a very memorable fishing trip. We really had to work hard for our fish, and although we didn’t catch as much as some of the others did the previous years, the company made me forget all about that. Besides, I caught a lot more pike than I’ll ever catch in one week of fishing over here in Belgium!

A second thanks (to the same guys) is for using everyone’s photographs. I wish, it was this easy to compose posts like this every day,… but now I’m dreaming again.

Either way, I liked it a lot (and I hope I can do it over again soon).

Hope you liked it too…