• On coastal waters flyfishing for bass

    ‘I had my existence. I was there.
    Me in my place and the place in me.’

    Seamus Heaney

  • Uncoding ALL LANDSCAPES

    The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass, Came dazzling around, into the rocks, Came glinting, sifting from the Americas. – S.Heaney

  • From the reef to the kelp forest

    I thought the earth
    remembered me, she
    took me back so tenderly, arranging
    her dark skirts, her pockets
    full of lichens and seeds. I slept
    as never before, a stone
    on the riverbed, – M.Oliver

  • ACTIVELY PATIENT

    It don’t do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing. – T.McGuane

  • TIME INVESTED

    A man is never lost at sea. – E.Hemingway

  • THE LONG REACH OF THE FLY

    The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. – E.Hemingway

  • With principles of least time

    Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
    Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
    Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
    Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
    Claspest the limits of mortality! – PB.Shelley

  • WHERE WHEN

    But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. – S.Beckett

  • From Autumn Transition

    Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising. – R.Carver

  • Through to Summer Threshold

    I know I’m a long way from greatness, but I am beginning to come at it in my own way. I can go through the basic motions pretty well, don’t rely quite as religiously on specific fly patterns as I once did, have worked out ways of compensating for some of my most egregious weaknesses and have come to count heavily on timing because it’s a hell of a lot easier to catch fish when the fish are biting. – J.Grierach

A little bit of fishing in your day – Jim

I have had to change my angling life again, not a problem! 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. The ‘valid’ number of bass have simply disappeared from the Wexford coast.  Ten years of freedom to build something personally worthwhile were given to me by two people at the centre of my life. This … Read More

A little bit of fishing in your day – Jim

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… Read More

A little bit of fishing in your day – Jim

Thirtyards is a personal project. Its still largely a work in progress, a vehicle, a place, a companion. I anticipate it coming slowly into existence over the seasons of 2014 and 2015 and on-wards. Its basis is largely as an accompaniment to a plan for a book. A book based in the bass fishing that I have encountered on the coast of Ireland, both fly and lure. The Thirtyards layout  has just… Read More

A little bit of fishing in your day – Jim

Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. Norman Mcclean

//player.vimeo.com/video/111149704?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff A little bit of fishing in your day – Jim