I’m Jim Hendrick. I’ve fished for bass on the Wexford coast since boyhood — more than forty years — and for twelve of them, 2003 to 2014, I guided other people onto it full time. Anglers came from France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Denmark, the UK and the United States. I don’t guide any more. What I do now is fish, write, photograph, and run a small number of workshops, and build this site around a book.

What goes up here has to earn its place. I write and photograph what I’ve actually seen on this stretch of coast, checked against my own experience rather than against what’s easy or popular to say. There’s no publishing schedule — new work appears when there’s something worth saying, not before.

Thirtyards is the practice — the fishing, the writing, the photographs, one stretch of coast attended to over a long time. The book is what that time has produced. I am writing it out of the guiding years and out of what has happened since I stopped.

It is not a guide to this coast. It is what that attention gives you — security, joy, comfort — and what it costs, set down in the hope you recognise some of it in your own place.

Saltwater fly fishing puts you deep in the coastal heart of the places you go looking for fish. Catching them is often a matter of where and when. But it is also everything sensed on the way there and back — the weather, the research, the technique that keeps you reaching further, the company you keep. Bass fishing here has given me moments of shared, miraculous depth, and others personally remote and inexplicable. The pursuit is the prize.

Twelve years of that freedom were given to me by two people at the centre of my life, and I don’t take it lightly. I was free to watch a tide rise over a location, to get out of a warm bed at 2am to bring people from around the world onto the coast, to watch a breeze cross a mirrored sea — answering mostly to tide and weather and season. Circumstances beyond my control, and beyond what I felt I could keep giving the business, brought that to an end. I don’t have that freedom now, and my anticipation of getting to the coast is sharper for it.

There is a gap in this site, and it is easier to name it than to hope nobody counts. From about 2019 until 2026 I put up photographs and other people’s words and very little of my own. That was a decision, not a drift. I was building a career in data and analytics and it needed everything I had, so rather than write thinly around the edges of it I paused until that path was defined. It is defined now. The writing came back last year, and the book is what has come out of it.

The work now is slower. Thirtyards holds a sense of the guiding days, the tourism a service like this can carry, and what I’ve seen and learned along the way. Much of it is built from years of experience, observation, reading and argument, and it is open to disagreement over a pint. I’m not claiming exactitude in the face of the coast’s mysteries.

The writing that is becoming the book is on the Coastal Blog, and the twelve pieces I’d stand over are on The coast. If you’d rather learn it on the water than read it, I run Workshops once a week through September and October.

The photographs are gathered on Seeing — this coast at close range, made over a long while.

Perhaps we’ll meet someday, in the right place at the right time. Keep casting, and drift to the fish.

— Jim Hendrick

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On the record

Guiding, 2003–2014. Operated as SEAi, and before that Probassfisher. Fishing in Ireland reported that more than three hundred anglers from France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, the UK, Denmark and the USA fished with me over that period, many returning year on year.

Saltwater Fly Fishing Primer, Cobh, April 2014. A three-day event I conceived and ran, with Glenda Powell on casting and Brian Healy on fly tying, based at the Bella Vista in Cobh. Fishing in Ireland covered it as an innovative first. My write-up is here.

Workshops. A series of ten saltwater fly fishing workshops offered between May and October 2024 was fully subscribed within days.

Writing on conservation. Bass in Ireland are not an infinite resource, published by Ireland on the Fly, April 2024. A submission to Ireland’s National Nature Restoration Plan, 2026.

Leave No Trace. Trainer. Presented at the Inland Fisheries Ireland AGM, November 2013, on applying the seven principles to guiding and to angling tourism.

Qualification. BSc, Tourism Enterprise Management, Waterford Institute of Technology.

Archive. Bass Fishing Wexford & Ireland, 2003–2018.

Enquiries. I’m glad to hear from anyone with a genuine interest in saltwater fly fishing for bass on this coast — the fishing itself, the workshops, the writing, or bass conservation and the state of the shoreline. Contact.