Published on Wednesday 20th May 2015
Coveney welcomes proposed ban on fishing for sea bass in waters around Ireland
The new regime will extend Ireland’s ban on seabass fishing to all EU vessels
Minister Simon Coveney TD, today strongly welcomed an EU Commission proposal for a comprehensive prohibition on commercial fishing for seabass in the Irish & Celtic Seas which underpins the conservation actions already taken by Ireland with regard to this vulnerable stock.
The Minister said “Ireland has had stringent measures in place for the protection of seabass, a very important angling species, for a long number of years. However, those measures only applied to Irish vessels. I have been very active over the past six months, lobbying the EU Commission and relevant Member States, on this issue. I am delighted that the EU finally recognises the lead taken by Ireland by extending our ban on commercial fishing to all EU vessels operating in the waters around Ireland.”
Minister Coveney added “The scientific advice for seabass is very worrying and we must all do our utmost to protect this stock. Ireland has been to the forefront in being the only EU Member State to afford maximum protection to this stock and today’s proposal will enhance that protection by making the Irish model obligatory for all EU vessels in the Irish & Celtic Seas.”
Once the measures are approved by the Council of Ministers, all commercial fishing for seabass will be prohibited in the waters around Ireland.
Second amendment of the Fishing Opportunities Regulation fixing for 2015 the fishing opportunities in the North Sea and in the Atlantic
(20/05/2015) The European Commission has today announced a further proposal aimed at halting the decline of sea bass in the Celtic Sea, Irish Sea, Channel and North Sea.
The Commission’s proposal is the third of a series of proposals in relation to this stock this year. This proposal is addressed to the Council of Fisheries Ministers and will enable the ministers to decide about catch limits for particular fishing gears in order to protect sea bass. The Commission’s proposal would also allow extending a prohibition, currently applied to Irish fishing vessels, to all Member State vessels in waters adjacent to Ireland.
Sea bass is a high value, iconic species for recreational and commercial fishermen; we need to act to address the declining state of the stock, to protect jobs and livelihoods. If the EU does not act decisively now, the risk for greater and long term losses to this valuable fish stock and to coastal communities will be increasing.
Scientific advice has clearly identified the need to drastically reduce catches of this species, following an increase in the fishing pressure and a reduction in reproduction.
Previously the Commission has implemented a short term ban on pelagic trawling until 30th April, preventing the targeting of this species during spawning aggregations. A previous amendment of the fishing opportunities regulation has already introduced a 3 fish bag limit for recreational fishermen.
This latest proposal envisages a maximum catch per month by gear type, limiting the targeting of the vulnerable stock but allowing for incidental catches.
Ireland in the 1990’s introduced a ban on commercial fishing for its flag vessels. This prohibition is proposed to be extended to other Member States in the Waters adjacent to Ireland outside of the UK 12 nm limit by the latest.
It is now up to the Council of Ministers to decide on the Commission’s proposal.
IF IT DOESNT CHALLENGE YOU IT WONT CHANGE YOU
Wexford Business Awards
Wexford Business Awards – Tourism 2012
I was absolutely delighted to receive the joint winner award in the Tourism category of The Wexford Business Awards during 2012. It was a real honour to share the stage with the other runners-up, Bill and Isobel Kelly of Kelly’s Resort Hotel. Kelly’s Resort Hotel went on to win the overall Wexford Business Award.
The shortlisted finalists in the Wexford tourism award category during 2012 were
Celtic link ferries
Griffin group
Irish national heritage park
Kellys resort hotel
Morriscastle strand holiday park
Talbot hotel Wexford
Wexford festival opera
Whites of Wexford
Whitford house hotel
This category was sponsored by Highwind Films
To have been shortlisted within this group of dynamic Wexford tourism business providers was in itself a privilege. To receive the runner-up award was beyond my greatest expectation. I feel this award has only helped to strengthen the validity and indeed credibility of the bass angling and guiding services available in this country. It was a fantastic opportunity for my small company to be challenged like this. It certainly brought attention to small businesses involved in the bass angling sector that a lot of people did not realise existed in Wexford or indeed in Ireland.
I would highly recommend other companies to enter the award challenge!
Jim Hendrick
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BSc Small enterprise management
Pioneering degree course for tourism entrepreneurs –
I was among the twenty three participants from the tourism sector participating on a degree programme aimed at owners and managers from the industry during September 2011 which completed during late September 2014.
The degree programme emerged from years of collaboration between Fáilte Ireland and the School of Business, including the Fáilte Ireland Tourism Learning Networks (TLN) initiative, which the School managed in the south.
According to Dr Anthony Foley, Course Leader, “The participants are local tourism champions and have, through the programme, developed their professional and business management skills. A key outcome of the programme has been the development of distinct network development templates. The programme is also seen as a flagship programme for its pedagogical design, based on a Problem-based Learning (PBL) model, and its blended delivery.”
The programme emphasised the development of skills such as critical thinking and communication, allied to exposure to specialist knowledge in business development. It has also responded to the need for the tourism entrepreneur to be able to thrive in a radically changed landscape with the power and influence of the web, changing tourist profiles, economic downturn and increased competition.
WIT’s school of business head, Dr Thomas O’Toole, said the degree programme was designed to be relevant to the commercial realities of being a tourism entrepreneur, and used a Problem-based Learning (PBL) approach which places an emphasis on addressing and resolving realistic business situations.
“The programme was designed so that its delivery was flexible, with a limited number of structured lectures/seminars and considerable participant and lecturer engagement through an online learning environment, which met the flexible learning needs of tourism entrepreneurs,” he said.
A Contemporary Framework for Program Delivery
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There is a deep satisfaction in acquiring knowledge of a place and the things that live there. You become familiar with the stones that lie along the inner estuary shore and the way they have been laid in patterns by forces, forces and actions that you can’t figure, forces over time that must have shaped those patterns whilst the world went, simply, by.
You become reluctant to walk on those stones to avoid disturbing them. You try to figure the time frame the slow movements.
Spring bass on the Wexford coast
You feel and understand the subtle nuances of a late September light, the stark hardness of a cool April north westerly blowing grey curtains of showers across lilac skies whilst departing overwintering geese V their way home. The sight of the first swallow when fishing for sea trout, the silence after the last tern has gone, the smell of summer rain on dry rocks and sea pinks refreshed like some bejewelled Italian ice-cream nodding their heads in a summer breeze. The song of the invisible skylark high in the sky.
Watching one legged oyster-catchers limping along a mirrored strand take off and land again and the little waders that run quickly in groups backwards and forwards in the shallow waters. Suddenly a curlew makes a startled warning cry, disturbed, as you walk back a late October estuary the sky already quickly darkening, a mist falling, you move faster now to be home.
All these things get under your skin into your person into to what you are over years – north winds, south winds, east winds, sunshine, frost, blue skies, rain, salt and sand. The shape, the colour and the sound of the sea, the waves that break on the shore into white bass water where you know it will happen, you can smell it!
All these things have built in me over many years, have shaped me too – from these countless repeated experiences and messages I have a sense of where I am – I am where I most want to be when fishing for bass.
And into this you have to add the fishing of course. What you know is what you know because it has been learned through tested instinct and long valid experience. You see the gulls struggle against a grey drizzly sky and you get the heavy rod, the ten, and your heart is racing because it’s happening and you can be in the middle of it and you move so quickly you hardly remember getting there and you almost run to the location to get a cast off. This is where I am happy, this is what I understand, have understood for a long time.
The fishing and the fishing and the fishing. You wait for spring to come and you see the way the winter waves have bent the sand and the sandbars, the new entrances the new exits the different flow and where it was once safe is now dangerous or is now a new fish holding spot. Maybe this year the fish move differently into different places at different times, maybe not. Maybe this year its colder and the fish are later, maybe early!
The expectations, the anxiety, the anticipation builds around the arrival of a new season one more time.
Bass fishing Pink White and grey Flatwing
Fly fishing for bass in clear water. Its not always easy and in fact good water clarity and high visibility is at times damned difficult especially when its mid summer sun
- Decrease fly size
- Decrease fly ‘visibility’, fish a more translucent fly
Bass fishing Catch & Release
- Go to a brighter fly, I link pink and white or chartreuse and grey
- Decrease leader diameter
- Increase leader length
- Stay low
- Be prepared to ‘strip into the leader’, learn to deal with follows
The trouble is when I start to approach the writing several flood gates open at the same time I get overwhelmed and jump from topic to topic. Ultimately I end up being unhappy with anything I’ve done, and those of you who know me will have a closer understanding of this! Because of the importance of the subject matter, an added slightly CO personality, volumes of information plus the personal demands of self inflicted high standards and attention to detail – I’m challenged!
I’ve gotten past the Title, just
A fly fishers guide to Bass fishing in Ireland
This allows me to continue the series, if I felt the urge, to also attempt to complete
A lure fishers guide to Bass fishing in Ireland
I also have the chapters constructed –
The option that immediately comes to mind is to combine both into the one book and maybe that’s the way to go. Circumstances regarding certain chapter headings are applicable to both methods after all and don’t need repeating for particular preferences. But there are subtleties with each method that are very important that need to come across through both disciplines. I don’t want to loose this through generalisations.
Lure fishing for bass is simply not like fly fishing for bass and indeed vice versa. Lure fishing is far easier much more effective and considerably less challenging than fly fishing. That doesn’t ‘lessen’ the method of lure fishing but nor should comparisons to fly fishing attempt to enhance its credo in respect of challenge. Lure fishing has its own culture fun and amazing rewards, so too does fly fishing, but they are and remain considerably different. We choose our methods as personal preferences, we are satisfied by what each method presents to us, my preference for fly fishing doesn’t elevate me to a superior angling position, I do it because I feel I have more to learn here about the method and the fish than any other method can present to me at this time. Fly fishing has taught me far more about catching bass than lure fishing ever could, but I learned this through long years of lure fishing!
So my mind is almost fixed on option one as the project I want to complete, ambitious as it is, this is whats forming on the many pages of various constructs I play with.The bones are there in the chapter headings, these are my guiding lights.
Complete each one step by step get a first draft, get done, give it to people to ‘edit’….finalise, easier said than done!
“..and another said she went mad in the autumns, as she had no house and it was warm in the Asylum, and if she didn’t do a fair job of running mad she would freeze to death; but then in the spring she would become sane again because it was good weather and she could go off and tramp in the woods and fish, and as she was part Red Indian she was handy at such things. I would like to do that myself if I knew how, and if not afraid of the bears.”
Margaret Atwood – Alias Grace
I’m getting ready for some early season bass fishing on the fly. It’s still very early for the Wexford coast but it’s always the same at this time of year, you just want to get out there and the seatrout mullet and bass are all running the estuaries more and more regularly now as the days lengthen towards early Spring.
Last weekend William and I saw lots of moving fish and the inevitable follows from trout with no hook ups prompted us to get our licences. We both frequently saw small shoals of mullet and bass just as the tide topped in the pleasant morning/early afternoon sun. Then as is often the case all activity abruptly ceased just as the breeze switched out of the west and into the east.
The Software
The flies are crossover bass and seatrout flies and at other times bugs and nymphs under indicators drifted for early tide mullet.
The hardware
- Echo S3 9’-0” # 7 and #8
- Danielsson L5W 6nine
- Guideline coastal #7’s and #8’s
- Airflo polyleaders intermediates and slow sinking
- Rio fluorflex plus carbon tippet –
The backup
- 20lbs Dacron on both reels bimini twisted to the running line
- Coastal line tray
- Orvis guide sling
- The danielsson reels are without doubt the best I’ve used for SWFF in Ireland – time after time, year after year extremely resistant to sand,
Casting for early season fish
salt and grit, both tough and long lasting, a lifetime investment.
- The danielsson reels are without doubt the best I’ve used for SWFF in Ireland – time after time, year after year extremely resistant to sand,
Coastal Notes
The water is probably at its coldest and the temperature is only slowly moving up at this time of year. When sea trout fishing look for wide shallow areas often at the mouths of estuaries interspersed with weed and sand. But look too along the open shore and not necessarily where a river enters the sea. It may take a lot of looking and a lot of fishing. The coastal fly line that I use has a DC core and can be a bit ‘coily’ when its a little cold like this. I find a good stretch every now and again whilst fishing will quickly get it going as normal. I like this line and the way it casts and I won’t be throwing huge flies nor will I be out on the open windy coast in tough conditions but fishing more towards estuary mouths once the rain stays away! You can easily detect the nips and tugs of shy following trout too !
I like the Airflo polyleaders (steelhead) in intermediate 10′-0″ with perhaps 12″-18″ of tippet tied loop to loop for bass fishing. These poly leaders allows me to fish with a floating line and if I feel I need to change down a simple switch to a slow sinking poly is the solution.. Airflo offer a range of leaders both for fresh and saltwater and Rio provide the versitip solution which i use for seatrout and light bass fishing. This gear is really versatile and provides many solutions not least great turnover and good presentations too!
Use tippet via a loop to loop connection at the end of the poly to preserve its length over a season, get a mesh holder too for a range of solutions and cut down on the gear you need to carry.
All Flies are tied with the non slip loop knot and the decreased diameter for increased BS is a great benefit of the Rio Carbon
Stay warm out there!
THIRTYARDS 
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