It was the great American outdoor writer Henry Thoreau who once wrote: ‘Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after’. And that may well be the case, but there is no doubt that my first trips to Ireland were exclusively about catching fish. To be more precise, catching as many fish in the time available as possible! Unlike Thoreau, rather than immerse myself in the simple delight of just being there and enjoying the wonderful place, the people and the whole experience of fishing in a different country, I was blinkered by the opportunity of catching the sort of numbers of fish that then and now are rarely, if ever seen at home. Over the years, thankfully, this single-minded attitude changed.
Increasingly I became more appreciative of the pristine environment in which I was privileged to visit and fish, until eventually I arrived at the point where the actual
