‘One dream, one soul, one prize, one goal, one golden glance of what should be’
Roger Taylor

For the multitude of those who have enquired recently as to why the Lough Sheelin weekly angling report has seemingly vanished, the answer is that, for the past month the internet connection at the Sheelin office has been giving trouble with the term ‘intermittent’ being bandied around frequently and despite having developed a very close relationship with Vodafone, Eir, IT engineers and technicians the problems are still ongoing and I can now understand  why psychiatrists say that there is a very thin line between sanity and insanity! Up until last week, the words used to describe the internet connection here could also be used to describe the fishing on Sheelin – sporadic/temperamental/spluttering and frustrating.

We are now into the middle of the fishing season where the traditionally unpredictable Irish summer alternated familiarly between scorching heat, drops in temperatures and deluges of rain. The Irish are an optimistic lot because every summer we feel without fail that we are entitled to months of dry sunny weather because, after all, this is the summer and every year spirits take a downward turn when we get what we have been getting since the beginning of time – a mixed bag usually with lots of rain.

Temperatures, however, have been high sometimes reaching the mid twenties and this has an effect on fishing in that water temperatures have also been climbing, registering 21 degrees in the shallows ten days ago. Trout will always head down deep to the cooler water columns where oxygen levels are better and also to avoid the glare of harsh sunlight (our piscatorial friends have no protecting eyelids) so this made day time fishing particularly sluggish and necessitated sinking lines. Another factor was that the trout moved on to the fry early in the month and when they are focused on this food, it can be difficult to distract them off it.

Read the full report here.