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In times when fish were more plentiful, bass formed very obvious mixed shoals with mullet in the estuaries of our southern rivers. Suddenly, in 1957, one of these inshore congregations assumed economic significance.
Spalugh Rock is a reef close inshore south east of Greenore Point at Rosslare, Co Wexford. The late spring spawning concentration of bass there was one of the finest wildlife spectaculars Ireland had to offer. Described later by the journalist George Burrows
"The hungry bass,swimming in uncountable thousands, go after the brit or sprat, driving them to the surface. The gulls know where their meal is coming from and when the sprat are splashing on the top the gulls are over them in vast colonies...."
An angler observed that if you cast a bait in these circumstances you were as likely to hook a bird as a fish.
T K Whitakers First Programme for Economic Expansion would be published in 1958 and there was a new entrepreneurial spirit abroad. In 1957, E P Kearney, promotions manager for Bord Failte, identified angling as "a tourist feature which had never been exploited". Splaugh Rock was the place to begin and bass, a species which has remained high in the list of recreational and tourism attractions ever since, would be the target. Local politicians Brendan Corish (Labour Party) and Sir Anthony Esmonde (Fine Gael) added their support. Bord Failte provided an angling trophy and the following June, 1958, almost 70 entries were registered for the Splaugh Rock angling competition. Later that year Erskine Childers (Fianna Fail), then Minister for Lands, met 24 journalists from leading French sporting magazines along with representatives of the French Federation of sea anglers to extol the virtues of Irish sea angling, among which the best was to be had at Rosslare.
Its habit of concentrating into small inshore areas proved the undoing of sea bass. When competitive fishing commenced, an angler would boat an average of fifty fish during a single tide and they were large bass. Ten years later the catches had collapsed and Rosslare Angling Club, which had been established on the back of the bass fishery, discontinued the competitions altogether.
Des Brennan - (1926-2000) by Clive Gammon
Remembering Des is about the easiest job I'm ever likely to get; he was an unforgettable man and my oldest friend. The first time I met him was alongside the pier at Kilmore Quay. He'd been given the job by the then Inland Fisheries Trust of acting as my guide and mentor on a six-week-long trip I was making to research a book on saltwater fishing in Ireland which I'd been commissioned to write.
Within the hour, the pair of us were out over the Splaugh reef, hurling German Sprats in all directions out of John Ferguson's boat. This was in the glory days of the Splaugh. We caught, well, a very large number of bass and kept them all, as everyone did then. After that we racketed about the country together in Des's old Commer van, inured, after a while, to breathing in the effluvia from what had become a Mackerel Mausoleum, the scent of which had long ago blended in with that generations of lugworm that had lived and died in the back of it.
I remember some big scores we set up boatwise - at Ballycotton, we challenged Mikeen Lynch to lead us to a specimen pollack, a specimen blue shark and a specimen skate all in one day. He failed: the skate and the pollack specimens we got right enough, but the blue we caught came in 10lbs under the specimen weight.
After that, Des and I fished, what, maybe three or four trips together each year through the '60's and early '70's (Somewhere along the way we recruited a young fellow name of Linnane who we trained up to, you know, carry stuff and dig worms). Sometimes we boat fished, but our real love was bass in the surf.
Can you imagine what it was like on the Dingle beaches in the early '60's? I'd cross on the Swansea/Cork ferry, Des would meet me when she got in around 7.00 a.m. and then the Commer would break all records to get us to Benner's Hotel where Miss Maloney would greet us with a half tumbler of whisky each, inform us that we were the only guests (this was long before Dingle made it tourism-wise) and told us that if we came back in the middle of the night, then we could go into the kitchen ourselves and fix our own fry-ups.
I remember well also the day on Brandon Bay we'd fished our favourite spot between the streams at Kilcummin and at the end of the day, we were loading up the Commer with bass, one or two of which come a whisker below the magic 10lbs. And at that point, we looked at one another with a single thought. What the hell were we doing killing all these beautiful fish?
It was, I believe, the start of something big in our sport. Following this, Des and Kevin, with myself joining them when I could, began to work on a bass tagging programme that would end up with something that Ireland could be proud of - the first legislation in Europe that protected what could be argued was the most desirable of our sport fish. If it was just for this, Desmond Brennan deserves to be remembered.
For years, until the mid '70's, when I went to live and work in the U.S.A., Des, Kevin and I fished Ireland's beaches together and our favourite week of all was around the last in October when the bass, fat from summer feeding but wanting to feed up even more for the winter ahead, hit freely on Inch and Brandon, the great surf beaches to which anglers still flock.
Even when I'd gone to the States, we tried to keep up our autumn session when we could. Des came over and fished stripers with me on Nantucket Island and, another year, for red drum (channel bass) in the Carolinas. I flew over to Shannon and we fished Kerry again (a great catch at St. Finians on the Ring I remember well).
Meanwhile, Des combined this with office work for the Trust (later the Central Fisheries Board) in Dublin (and, oh boy, did he ever grudge the time he had to spend at a desk). And, of course, for almost 30 years - from 1958 to 1987 - he was Secretary of the Specimen Fish Committee and, I believe, it was Des's own absolute integrity of character that gave the yearly List of Specimen Fish its reputation for strict probity, surpassing that, I am very willing to say, other similar national organisations. The mere breath of an irregularity and a claim went out through the door, even if it was merely the honest overlooking of a regulatory detail or two. It meant a lot to Des, his work on the Committee, even though every now and then his wife, Noreen, would be the appalled recipient at her front door of a parcel containing the long-dead remains of a pollack that an angler 200 miles away had hoped would bring him glory. When deep freezing came in, it meant the hell of a lot to the Brennan family.
Des and I weren't always our after bass. He was fine fly fisherman as well, as you'd know if you'd watched him, as I did many times, casting a Spent Gnat to a cruising trout on his favourite Lough Ennell. He used to come over sometimes to share my sewin (white trout) fishing in Wales and he was just as good on the Towy as he was on a sea trout stream in May.
And now Des has gone and I won't look upon his like again. I lost a great close friend. Ireland, I believe, has lost much more - a man who served her fisheries as no one else in his generation.
In times when fish were more plentiful, bass formed very obvious mixed shoals with mullet in the estuaries of our southern rivers. Suddenly, in 1957, one of these inshore congregations assumed economic significance.
Spalugh Rock is a reef close inshore south east of Greenore Point at Rosslare, Co Wexford. The late spring spawning concentration of bass there was one of the finest wildlife spectaculars Ireland had to offer. Described later by the journalist George Burrows
"The hungry bass,swimming in uncountable thousands, go after the brit or sprat, driving them to the surface. The gulls know where their meal is coming from and when the sprat are splashing on the top the gulls are over them in vast colonies...."
An angler observed that if you cast a bait in these circumstances you were as likely to hook a bird as a fish.
T K Whitakers First Programme for Economic Expansion would be published in 1958 and there was a new entrepreneurial spirit abroad. In 1957, E P Kearney, promotions manager for Bord Failte, identified angling as "a tourist feature which had never been exploited". Splaugh Rock was the place to begin and bass, a species which has remained high in the list of recreational and tourism attractions ever since, would be the target. Local politicians Brendan Corish (Labour Party) and Sir Anthony Esmonde (Fine Gael) added their support. Bord Failte provided an angling trophy and the following June, 1958, almost 70 entries were registered for the Splaugh Rock angling competition. Later that year Erskine Childers (Fianna Fail), then Minister for Lands, met 24 journalists from leading French sporting magazines along with representatives of the French Federation of sea anglers to extol the virtues of Irish sea angling, among which the best was to be had at Rosslare.
Its habit of concentrating into small inshore areas proved the undoing of sea bass. When competitive fishing commenced, an angler would boat an average of fifty fish during a single tide and they were large bass. Ten years later the catches had collapsed and Rosslare Angling Club, which had been established on the back of the bass fishery, discontinued the competitions altogether.
Des Brennan - (1926-2000) by Clive Gammon
Remembering Des is about the easiest job I'm ever likely to get; he was an unforgettable man and my oldest friend. The first time I met him was alongside the pier at Kilmore Quay. He'd been given the job by the then Inland Fisheries Trust of acting as my guide and mentor on a six-week-long trip I was making to research a book on saltwater fishing in Ireland which I'd been commissioned to write.
Within the hour, the pair of us were out over the Splaugh reef, hurling German Sprats in all directions out of John Ferguson's boat. This was in the glory days of the Splaugh. We caught, well, a very large number of bass and kept them all, as everyone did then. After that we racketed about the country together in Des's old Commer van, inured, after a while, to breathing in the effluvia from what had become a Mackerel Mausoleum, the scent of which had long ago blended in with that generations of lugworm that had lived and died in the back of it.
I remember some big scores we set up boatwise - at Ballycotton, we challenged Mikeen Lynch to lead us to a specimen pollack, a specimen blue shark and a specimen skate all in one day. He failed: the skate and the pollack specimens we got right enough, but the blue we caught came in 10lbs under the specimen weight.
After that, Des and I fished, what, maybe three or four trips together each year through the '60's and early '70's (Somewhere along the way we recruited a young fellow name of Linnane who we trained up to, you know, carry stuff and dig worms). Sometimes we boat fished, but our real love was bass in the surf.
Can you imagine what it was like on the Dingle beaches in the early '60's? I'd cross on the Swansea/Cork ferry, Des would meet me when she got in around 7.00 a.m. and then the Commer would break all records to get us to Benner's Hotel where Miss Maloney would greet us with a half tumbler of whisky each, inform us that we were the only guests (this was long before Dingle made it tourism-wise) and told us that if we came back in the middle of the night, then we could go into the kitchen ourselves and fix our own fry-ups.
I remember well also the day on Brandon Bay we'd fished our favourite spot between the streams at Kilcummin and at the end of the day, we were loading up the Commer with bass, one or two of which come a whisker below the magic 10lbs. And at that point, we looked at one another with a single thought. What the hell were we doing killing all these beautiful fish?
It was, I believe, the start of something big in our sport. Following this, Des and Kevin, with myself joining them when I could, began to work on a bass tagging programme that would end up with something that Ireland could be proud of - the first legislation in Europe that protected what could be argued was the most desirable of our sport fish. If it was just for this, Desmond Brennan deserves to be remembered.
For years, until the mid '70's, when I went to live and work in the U.S.A., Des, Kevin and I fished Ireland's beaches together and our favourite week of all was around the last in October when the bass, fat from summer feeding but wanting to feed up even more for the winter ahead, hit freely on Inch and Brandon, the great surf beaches to which anglers still flock.
Even when I'd gone to the States, we tried to keep up our autumn session when we could. Des came over and fished stripers with me on Nantucket Island and, another year, for red drum (channel bass) in the Carolinas. I flew over to Shannon and we fished Kerry again (a great catch at St. Finians on the Ring I remember well).
Meanwhile, Des combined this with office work for the Trust (later the Central Fisheries Board) in Dublin (and, oh boy, did he ever grudge the time he had to spend at a desk). And, of course, for almost 30 years - from 1958 to 1987 - he was Secretary of the Specimen Fish Committee and, I believe, it was Des's own absolute integrity of character that gave the yearly List of Specimen Fish its reputation for strict probity, surpassing that, I am very willing to say, other similar national organisations. The mere breath of an irregularity and a claim went out through the door, even if it was merely the honest overlooking of a regulatory detail or two. It meant a lot to Des, his work on the Committee, even though every now and then his wife, Noreen, would be the appalled recipient at her front door of a parcel containing the long-dead remains of a pollack that an angler 200 miles away had hoped would bring him glory. When deep freezing came in, it meant the hell of a lot to the Brennan family.
Des and I weren't always our after bass. He was fine fly fisherman as well, as you'd know if you'd watched him, as I did many times, casting a Spent Gnat to a cruising trout on his favourite Lough Ennell. He used to come over sometimes to share my sewin (white trout) fishing in Wales and he was just as good on the Towy as he was on a sea trout stream in May.
And now Des has gone and I won't look upon his like again. I lost a great close friend. Ireland, I believe, has lost much more - a man who served her fisheries as no one else in his generation.