Sean and I spent a few hours fishing Lough Guitane in County Kerry on our last fishing day together last week. Guitane is about 10 km from Killarney and, at over a mile in length, it is a reasonably big lough, though it will raise few eyebrows in the west of Ireland.
We had decided against some of Sean´s local rivers since the rain had prevented the rivers from dropping to decent levels for our purposes and so we decided to venture a little further afield. We had an additional reason for throwing our lot in with Guitane and that was simply to explore the access and potential for fishing adventures we might plan for the future.
As it happened, the access was pretty good and we found a nice stretch of comfortably wadeable water that allowed us to explore a nice stretch of shoreline. It looked like all of our ducks were lining up in a row when the sun came out and the odd fish showed on the surface. But this is Ireland of course, and ducks, even if they do occasionally align, don´t tend to remain in formation for very long. And so it was for us. After a while the wind picked up and it became chilly. Then came a spot of rain.
We were not alone in fishing there. An otter appeared between the two of us and rolled on the surface before vanishing. Like us, the otter was hoping to get the better of a few trout and, on the whole, prospects were pretty good.
Sean and I did reasonably well ourselves, each catching and returning a salmon smolt and three browns. Sean took his smolt on a little dry but the other fish were taken on wet flies and nymphs. The fish took the flies pretty aggressively and we got the impression that if a fish saw the fly it was unlikely to ask too many questions. Guitane probably has some fine trout, but if you are after monsters you might look elsewhere. Despite their modest size, these are beautiful, wild, spirited fish and we would chase after fish like this forever.
fishydreams 