Ever caught pollock on the fly? Johannes has and tells us what he thinks.
Fly fishing for me is, and always will be, a source of endless learning. At certain times it can even frustrate me and it would seem much more sensible to sit back and enjoy what I already know. Why keep pushing the borders out to new horizons?
The simple answer for me is that I see something different and I think "That looks like fun. I want to try it". It was with this notion that in late April I headed back to Ireland to try some saltwater fly fishing for pollack off the rugged cliffs of Ireland's west coast.
When you are used to fishing streams and gently flowing rivers for trout, the surging waves of the Atlantic Ocean can be terrifying! Foaming white water boiling all around you .The water's surface rising and falling drastically with the swells. However these are the favoured haunts of the pollack and if you want to catch them this is where you must venture.
In order to heighten the excitement even further; we fished floating lines. This meant that every strike, miss and take were totally visible in the crystal clear waters as a bolt of golden lightning would shoot up from the depths, seize the fly and buckle the rod with frightening ferocity.
Fly fishing might not generally be considered a sport for an adrenaline junkie. But when you are fishing off a cliff that literally reverberates as a massive swell shakes the ground you are standing on, or a wall of spray drenches you even though you are 60 feet up off the sea's surface, at moments like that you think "This is fishing at a different intensity!". At this point I should emphasize that we wore life jackets at all times and my friend and guide knows the areas very well, one of us would fish and the other would watch the sea for any large incoming swells. Even with these precautions, that others would laugh off as being excessive, I still felt very small.
However if you want a form of fly fishing that makes you feel like you're just glad to be alive, then pollack might be worth a try! The terrain is rugged and tough but the rewards are also beautiful and incredibly satisfying.
The main trigger with pollack seemed to be speed. The fly is cast out and allowed to sink down towards the kelp beds. With rapid side to side swishes of the fly rod the fly is shot back up to the surface where a pollack may dart up from the depths. If he doesn´t grab it immediately then quickly strip the fly away from the fish and don't allow him time to study the fly. It's heart stopping stuff being able to see the fish in the crystal clear waters.
But if you just want some interesting conversations with bemused people you should walk along the cliffs with a fly rod, just hang around and see what happens!
For instance an angler with a massive beach caster and a bag full of mackerel approached my friend and declared in a thick west of Ireland brogue; "Look it lad, you´ve got the wrong rod. This what you want!", whilst brandish his beach caster like a jousting pole.
Or when someone asks what you caught the pollack on, just say;
- "Flies"
- "Wha'??, do they eat flies?"
At this point I realised there was a misunderstanding between my definition of "flies" and his. But being tired and not inclined to go into an in-depth explanation of how a "fly" in this case actually refers to a representation of a sandeel or baitfish……
- "Oh they do yeah, sometimes you can see them cruising around sipping flies down off the top of the waves, actually you don´t even need to let the fly land on the water because they'll leap out of the water after it as you're casting."
- "God Almighty! That's amazing, I never knew that now…. Never knew that!"
- "Learn something new every day".
I left the bewildered man to digest this new nugget of profound wisdom.
Either way fly fishing for pollack is an awful lot of fun.
To read more from Johannes please visit his excellent blog - Road to Water