Fishing around Dublin is getting worse!

Harmo

Me and 2 friends headed out to bulloch harbour yesterday trying for anything realy, we were out on the boat for 2 hours and there wasnt a single bite i couldnt believe i mean ive had my fare share of bad days but this was terrible not a single bite o and for the record i was using 4 hooks 3 of which had rag on the them and the other 1 had sand eel. Any1 else notice how bad the irish sea is getting? i think the cause of this is polution and over fishing.

jd

Originally posted by Harmo
Me and 2 friends headed out to bulloch harbour yesterday trying for anything realy, we were out on the boat for 2 hours and there wasnt a single bite i couldnt believe i mean ive had my fare share of bad days but this was terrible not a single bite o and for the record i was using 4 hooks 3 of which had rag on the them and the other 1 had sand eel. Any1 else notice how bad the irish sea is getting? i think the cause of this is polution and over fishing.

Sure things are not as good as they were 20-30 years ago (God I just realised first went fishing abt 30 years ago..)
I managed to do ok out of bulloch a night or 2 beforeyou..(see thread below abt trips..)

westerly

Years ago I had a friend who was big into scuba diving - he said that the work on the new sewerage (?) outflow pipeline from Dun Laoghaire had totally destroyed key grounds on which they had regularly seen lots of fish and that even after the work was completed, it never recovered. Pollution and overfishing - true.

I now live in Mayo and can not believe how many fish there are in the sea, especially off a boat in Clew Bay. The shore is good too -we took big pollack up to 6 lbs on hokeye from Cloghmore pier on Achill Island recently, and that was two hours into the ebb!

If you have a capable boat and calm conditions (and an auxiliary engine), try the "nose" of Howth, down the coast from the harbour. You can launch most small boats off the slipway in Howthe Harbour (middle of the harbour near the yacht club) and then motor out past Balscadden bay. You will get very big wrasse under the rock stacks under the bird colony (tricky but possible on the float or botton rigs), with small to medium sized pollack and coalfish a bit further out on the reef marks, mackerel (honest!), with strap conger and doggies on the bottom, usually at low tide. It is very foul ground but there are sandy patches - we have had dabs there in the distant past. There is a strong current sweeping you around the headland so you have to motor back regularly - the starting point should be on the Howth side of a big rock with a massive cleft running through it top to bottom, known as the "split rock" - local story about the devil and a book!

FWIW...

Kieran (you can also fish off the split rock from land but the path
down is deadly dangerous and should not be attempted alone or in wet weather. The rock also stays isolated on a flooding tide).

TacT

I don't suppose that 4 massive sea lions that are regularly swimming around there have anything to do with it?