The month of March

shaman97

Greetings.

My family and I will be on holiday in Ireland 13 March to 26 March of next year. During this time, my son and I would enjoy 1) Fly Fishing on a river or stillwater and 2) Sea angling during that time. That being said, we have no idea what is to be had (if anything) nor where to go.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

Thank you,
Bob

stevoman

what part of the country are you visiting and are you an experienced angler or novice?

stevenmu

A good place to start is the Central Fisheries Board website. This contains general information for fishing in Ireland, and the various regulations. In short, you don't need a general fishing/rod license to fish here. You do need a license if you intend to fish for Salmon or Sea Trout, which can be bought on a daily basis or for short periods if needed (details on the CFB site). For many places, the fishing and access is controlled by a local club or organisation and you may need to pay them for a permit to fish there, but equally there's plenty of completely free places too.

After that the regional fisheries board websites have more detailed and specific information on each of the regions. Their websites are:
Eastern Regional
Southern Regional
South-West Regional
Shannon Regional
Western Regional
Northern Regional

As for recommendations, it's hard to recommend the great western loughs, Lough Mask and Lough Corrib in Mayo and Galway respectively. They're world renowned for their fly fishing with some of the finest brown trout you're ever likely to see. They're popular tourist locations, fishing and general tourism, so the areas around them are well geared up for the fishing tourist, plus you would be in easy range of some good atlantic sea fishing off both Mayo and Galway coasts, there's a few good rivers for Trout and some very good rivers for Salmon too. That would be my preference anyway, I love it over there, but there's plenty of other fantastic places too which I'm sure some others will recommend.

Because you mentioned fly-fishing I'm assuming you're mainly interested in game fishing, which here would be brown trout, salmon and sea trout (with a license required for the latter two). There are also some private stocked fisheries which have rainbow trout too. There's plenty of coarse fishing to be had too and some good sea fishing, the websites above should have plenty of details on those.

coolwings

Coming from the other side of the pond with fly fishing in mind, you will notice a couple of big differences in Irish fishing.
Once you take them into account, the techinques and skills you have already honed at home will do fine here.
* Our summer and winter temperatures are much less extreme than US. So in summer our waters are far cooler. This means that fish don't go deep in Ireland to anything like the way they do in US. During the Month of March, it means: no ice anywhere.
* it also means, no warm water species fishing like (sea) bass until later months.
* Take the wind in ca and double it, that's the average wind here in Ireland. Wind stirs them up which means fish rise in a wave when still flat calm might have stopped such behaviour in ca. This affects your choice of boat if going on large waters. Our boats are more rough water design than ca, in fact the US coastguard designs had to be altered when tried in Ireland and Scotland, due to extrreme weather here. So don't hire any old boat without thinking about that aspect, especially early season like March.
* While rain is always unpredictable, we get more rain, probably double that of ca. So small spatestreams here will have salmon and seatrout runs during the summer, whereas in US they might not enter small streams that size until the fall. During the spring we will have big floods earlier, instant for 3-5 days after rain comes, whereas in US those floods don't arrive until later in season when ice melt happens in high altitude montain ranges.

So I hope you have a nice time, and if you hook up with a guide, the local knowledge about fish location is taken care of.

shaman97

stevoman wrote: »

what part of the country are you visiting and are you an experienced angler or novice?

We will be spending 5 days in Dublin. The rest of the time is open, though I would like to spend some time in the area my mother is from - Roscommon, near Boyle.

As far as skill level, when I was angling regularly, my flycasting would be termed "intermediate". Now, since I've laid off a bit, it's probably "low-intermediate" - I'l be practicing, though.

As far as skill level attracting the fish, well, I guess the fish could answer that a bit better than I could I always thought actually catching the fish as a bonus. The time spent on and near the water was/is the great part of angling.

shaman97

coolwings wrote: »

So I hope you have a nice time, and if you hook up with a guide, the local knowledge about fish location is taken care of.

I fully intend to hire a guide while in Ireland. Is the lough the preferred location at that time of year, or are rivers and streams more appealing? Personally, I prefer smaller streams that can be waded, or walked beside while angling, though if there is no action to be had at these venues, I would be more than happy to look at the loughs.

coolwings

The large loughs take a while to warm up, and fly hatches begin. That would be April.
For March, I'd recommend sticking to smaller lowland lakes and rivers.