Fly fishing in Ireland

Ireland gives you two completely different kinds of fly fishing, and most anglers arrive knowing only one of them.

The western loughs are the famous ones. Corrib and Mask are enormous sheets of water fished from wooden rowing boats, some of them carved with figures where Celtic myth and early Christianity fold into one another. You fish them with a ghillie, and the ghillie is the point: not an improvised job but a tradition that took its modern shape in the early 1900s and has been handed down since. He owns the boat, reads the wind and chooses the drifts. The method is loch-style wet fly on a short line, and on the windiest days the old blow-line dapping rod still comes out. From late April into early June the mayfly hatch turns the whole thing into dry fly fishing, with trout rising across water so wide it seems impossible they could ever find your fly.

The Boyne is the other one, and it surprises everybody. Less than an hour from Dublin, in the fields below Trim Castle, it runs slow and heavy with weed and looks empty in the middle of the afternoon. Then the sun drops, the sedge start coming off, and every riffle and every seam behind a weed bed holds a trout rising steadily into the dark. Long leaders, a light rod, a small sedge. It is chalkstream fishing at its best, and in high summer it runs until eleven at night.

Get used to the weather. In Ireland, bad weather is good weather, and the days that would keep other anglers indoors are the days your guide will want you on the water.