“I was investing more belief and time in the impossibility of getting it done the further I stayed away and avoided the challenge of finding the new fishing. I did this because I began to convince myself, of the many crazy reasons I conjured up, that I didn’t need to stretch myself again, I wasn’t good enough to do it for myself, I was getting lazy. But there was something else too, something deeper that ran differently.
I had thought I was avoiding the complications around trying to understand the fishing, getting there and back, finding accommodation, the costs, weather, tides, the usual challenges and countless, thankless hours of trying something new in a new place far from home, trying to figure it all out, fish, no fish, timings, patterns rhythms if any.
This is a guide learning to do his job, normal stuff.
But that was only the first part – trying to achieve this and then to present it responsibly as a marketable option to the world on a fishing guide’s budget, well that was just another challenge.
The main difficulty was the scope of the learning challenge on a new coast. I had to do this of course for myself.
I had always worked out my own fishing, and always will. I thought – “To hell with it this!”
The simple fact was I was avoiding myself and the truth, and when both were confronted, I realised that I didn’t feel like doing it at all. It took me another incredibly difficult season(2012) to realise I was tired in my fishing soul, my spirit was lagging, energy gone. This was a new and emerging challenge for me. Had I reached an end of something?
And then somehow through the gathering debris and dust of many months of false excuses, diminishing hope, lost patience and confidence, I managed to shake off the building creeping inertia and clear a path to the endgame.
After more and more exploration and fishing and testing and re-testing I got it done. At last for myself and by myself. New fishing finally found.”
What it means to be a fishing guide working in Ireland in order to develop something like THIS and more can be found throughout this site.
