Irish Angling Guide & Casting Instructor

I was born on a small farm in the west of Ireland on June 12th 1963. In those days there were hardly any cars and most houses had no televisions or phones. My friends and I may have lacked a lot of today's comforts, but fishing was our passion and the lakes, rivers and streams of the west was our playground.
A visiting journalist once wrote ''Every household has at least one fishing rod and never have I seen angling so interwoven into the fabric of a community as in the west of Ireland''.
We fished every day of the season, on the way to school, on the way home from school, and at every opportunity at weekends and holidays.

I feel privileged to have been born in county Mayo, a game anglers paradise with a long and rich tradition of fly fishing for wild brown trout and salmon.

This wealth of hard earned knowledge and technique was passed on to me at an early age from some of the older master anglers who lived locally.

Some of the fly fishing styles we were taught as children are rarely seen or practiced anymore.

Styles such as the traditional upstream wetfly which are just as effective today as they ever  were.

As I grew older and started to meet the many visiting anglers who come annually to fish our famous rivers and lakes I was exposed to and learned many other valuable techniques.

This process of importing information from other knowledgeable anglers is crucial to ones progress as a fly fisher.

Life is too short to learn all there is to know about fishing totally by oneself, so why not benefit from the experience of others.

During my twenties I fished on the English reservoirs for over five years.

The English are among the best Stillwater rainbow trout anglers in the world in my opinion and some of the tactics used for English rainbows work very well for wild Irish brown trout.

Fishing in England kindled an interest in competition trout fly fishing, and even though I don't enter many competitions now I have had the honor of representing the West of Ireland with my provincial team Connaught on numerous occasions and my country at International level.

I have caught many salmon, trout and pike down through the years and guided many others to do the same.

I would like to think that my mentors ( some now sadly passed on ) are proud of their pupil - I owe them a lot.

Sometimes clients ask me which type of fishing I personally enjoy the most.

I think about a trout head and tailing on my top dropper on Lough Conn, a salmon making a bow wave towards my riffle hitch fly on the Moy, or maybe a pike exploding on a popper on Lough Corrib or Mask.

I cannot decide, I suppose I will just have to suffer on.

Fly fishing has always been a major part of my life, this is why I became a guide.

This is what I do.