I have had to change my life again. This change was borne of circumstances beyond my control and beyond the parameters of how I felt I could run my bass angling guiding business. Ten years of freedom to build something personally worthwhile were given to me by two people at the centre of my life. This  freedom was beyond value. Now I have time to contemplate the consequences of such a vast treasure. I was free to contemplate the rise of a tide over a location, to rise from a warm bed at 02:00 hrs to catch a tide, free to bring people from around the world onto the coast to fish for bass, free to watch a breeze arrive across a mirrored sea. Free from the constraints of 9 to 5, time, mostly had no consequence unless it was connected to tide or arrival or departure or season.

Now that I don’t have that same freedom at the cost of a greater security mind, my anticipation of being on the coast to fish when I can, is even more heightened, more valuable, more significant. Never to be wasted. This is why I don’t regret not having the same freedom, I have been lucky beyond belief, challenged beyond any comfort zone, worked hard, created luck,struggled, laughed, cried, failed, lost, won, learned, understood, witnessed and grew. I bring this with me now to my life, my family, my work and more than anything to my personal bass fishing. The experience of having worked within that freedom has made me aware that it is always there ready at any time that I might choose it again.

I wonder sometimes that maybe as a result of my new found stability perhaps the words above or indeed similar thoughts are written too easily, without significance and perhaps not that important now. Are they too casually constructed in the new found comfort of a more stable lifestyle?  Do not be fooled into thinking that ten years was not valid, not worthwhile, because believe me, no matter how I feel right now there is no time and no where I would rather be other than arriving to my home of an autumn evening with my customers having spent a rewarding day attempting to catch bass on the Wexford coast,

Whenever I am ready again, someday, whenever the coast and the fishing is right again, I am waiting, I know the meaning of patience.