Start here

What this is.

Forty years of attention to one stretch of coast, put down as it happened — the photographs, the writing, the fishing. What the place gives me is security, joy and comfort, and I have been a long time trying to say why.

Some of what is here is loss. The fish, the sandeel, the shoreline itself. Loss is not the end of the account. It shows you what was there, and it opens things you would have walked past.

Thirty yards is the length of a fly line. You can catch a bass from the shore in Ireland inside that — it is difficult, and it does not happen often, but it happens, and that is where the name comes from. What I mean by it now is a range close to home, small enough to know well: the fishing, the life, the few things you need, all of it within reach. Thinking that way asks very little of the coast. I have not found the important things any further out.

This is not a guide to Wexford. If it works at all, you will find yourself thinking about your own place, not mine.

1. The place

Wexford

Start with what the coast actually is: four kinds of ground, and the two variables — tide and weather — that govern everything that happens on them.

2. The writing

The coast

A curated selection — the pieces made from this ground that I’d stand over, out of a much larger archive.

3. The photographs

Seeing

This coast at close range, made over a long while. A small, curated set — not an archive dump.

4. On the water

Workshops

If you’d rather learn it on the water than read it. One day, two anglers, on the tides that are worth taking.

5. Who’s behind it

About Jim Hendrick

Forty years on this coast, twelve of them guiding, and what this site holds itself to.