Ronan's Report

Now is your chance to have your say regarding the future of Ireland’s wild salmon and sea-trout. Please take a minute to write a submission in favour of a change in legislation which will help protect our wild fish. A sentence is all it takes or more if you desire. Your submission might be the straw that breaks the camels back! The closing date for receipt of submissions is 5.30pm today Irish time. Sincere thanks in advance to all submitters..

I took down my last blog because I was misinformed in my rashness!

Ronan..

http://www.nosalmonfarmsatsea.com/archives/674

This is the resulf of farming salmon in open cages at sea… We must stop this. Please write a submission!

I have very little to report from last weekend. Dunstan was still very coloured from rain a week ago and so are many of the tributaries of the Southern Lakes so my options were limited. I went for a drive to Glenorchy on Sunday and fished all the stream mouths on the way. I did not have a single event! The day was spectacular and I got a few nice photos. I tried out my new Airflo Di8. It seems like it may be better suited to a double hander. The entire line is weighted which does not really make sense to me. The old 40+ line was better because once I had the head aerialised I could then shoot it up to 30m, maybe even more. The 40′ head was plenty to quickly get my fly to depth. I could only manage maybe 20m with the new line mainly because the heavy line was hard to pull from the water I was standing in as the line was shooting out. It may be fine from the deck of a boat though. Time will tell. I only fished with it for about 90 minutes so I wont judge it quite yet. I have no idea what I’ll do next weekend. June is the worst fishing month of the year down here. The river mouths should start to fire soon… Hopefully!

Tight Lines… Ronan..

This week on SLTV, “Dry-fly fishing for sharks”. I fish with Australian politician Bryan Green for trout which appear like “Sharks” in the waves. Paul goes to Melbourne to teach casting. This is our most capped episode!… maybe due to the final scene where Paul and I (mainly me really) are clearly drunk.

Mark and I were about 100m off the shore, drifting parallel to it and toward a heavy weed bed about 150m away. I noticed two anglers on the shore with their boat pulled up. They put in after we passed them by and started trolling down the shore. They were also heading for the weed bed which ran from the shore out into the lake across the line of our drift. My intention was to drift as far as the weeds with the most likely water being close to the weeds. The trollers were moving tight to the shore and as they got to the weeds before us they changed their course to follow them. I wondered when they would pull out to the back of us. They didn’t. They held their course and cut our drift about 10m in front of us. I reeled up. I was going to say something but thought, no, no big deal, they have no idea of lake etiquette, I’ll just leave it at that. We were clearly drifting. My engine was off and pulled up so a boat under power should give way, that is the rule. I let my boat drift close to the weeds before dropping the engine down to shallow drive to back out. Too late as it turned because I got the boat stuck in the weeds! While trying to back out the trollers started roaring back to us saying I cut their lines with my prop! They turned around to come back for a fight or whatever. I was looking forward to the argument because they were so much in the wrong. They came alongside us shouting like fools and I told them they crossed our drift, One of the lads tried to retort but Mark fired up and in no uncertain terms told him where to go. At this he said “I’ll fuckin ram you” and he roared off out in a circle with his 135hp engine and came back to ram us. My engine was ticking over and only for I pulled the bow around he would have hit us. He missed by an inch or 2. Mark was up on the bow (casting platform) at the time and as their boat passed at pace we were left sloshing in the white water behind the engine. Almost immediately after this idiotic act they left the lake. Maybe they had no more spinners. I was pleased to find my tires were not slashed when we decided to leave. We caught half a dozen fish.

Ronan..

This is my personal favourite episode from the SLTV series.. There is drama, broken trucks, broken engines, the world famous Peter Hayes, Hair, Oil, Fish, Mayhem, Wind, Rain, Casting…. It’s all happening in this episode.. Enjoy!