Guiding & Workshops Closed - Website now at THIRTYARDS

I believe that bass fishing is about coastal experiences. So much of the fish is about the places where we find them. The things we see hear and smell on the way, there and back. The moments, the company, the fun, the challenges we face, the learning, the environments within which we find ourselves trying and reaching further, creating the memories and some of the understanding we now have that the fish and the fishing has given us.

Transforming us.

Bass fishing in Ireland has given me many moments, some of unforgettable shared miraculous grace, others that are both very personal remote and at times inexplicable.

My name is Jim Hendrick, I have been lucky to have fished for bass  since childhood, somehow the fish have moved in and out of my life in mysterious ways over the past forty years or so! Recently after working for the past 12 years as a bass fishing guide I have had to change my life a little, again, and I no longer guide for bass!   Some of those 12 years are archived on this website from Probassfisher.

I prefer now after all these years to fly fish for bass and I can be found at www.jimhendrick.com

This change in my life was borne of circumstances beyond my control and beyond the parameters of how I felt I could run my bass angling guiding business. I will no longer continue to guide for bass and seatrout fishing for many reasons but I am happy now to mostly spend my time on the coast with personal saltwater fly fishing in mind. This decision has not been easy, but at this time there are simply too many circumstances and aspects that currently exist in Irish bass fishing that make the change one that I am very happy to have made. This change has also allowed me time for considerable reflection.

After more than twelve years of freedom to personally build and evolve through something worthwhile as a bass fishing guide was given to me by two people at the center of my life. This  freedom was way beyond any normal sense ‘value’.  I was free to contemplate the rise of a tide over a location, free to rise from a warm bed at 02:00 hrs to bring people from around the world onto the coast to fish for bass, free to watch a breeze arrive across a mirrored sea. Free from the constraints of 9 to 5 ‘time’, mostly had no consequence unless it was connected to a tide or arrival of weather fronts or departure of customer or season. I have time now to contemplate the consequences and meaning of such generosity.

Today I don’t have that same freedom but my anticipation of being on the coast to fish when I can is even more heightened, more valuable, more significant. Time cannot be wasted and I am more eager, more interested more challenged by my personal fishing than I have been in a long time. I don’t regret not having that same freedom, I have been lucky beyond belief, worked hard, created luck,struggled, laughed, cried, failed, lost, learned, understood, witnessed and grew. I bring this with me now to my life, my family, my new work and more than anything to my new found re-discovered personal bass fishing. The coast, bass and bass fishing will always remain a large part of what I do and who I am.

The experiences have taught me to be aware that the fishing will always be there, waiting, for any time that I might choose to use it again. Whenever I am ready, whenever the coast is right again!  I am waiting too…