The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.4
THE SEARCHER: Seaside in Ireland
Words: Tom Darling. Photos and Captions: Ben Etridge 2024-06-17 09:58:41
In many ways, the coastline of County Cork, Ireland, is perfect for fishing. Warm Gulf Stream currents, numerous headlands and a diversity of sandy bays and rocky gullies provide structure and food for sea bass. Rupert Harvey, Shane O’Reilly, James Barry and Myles Kelly (pictured L to R) know access can be tricky, with a whole lot of slipping and sliding down to rocky ledges before clambering back up again in the dark.
“Oh no.”
Rupert and I look at each other. It takes a moment, but then we realize the same thing Ben has.
“Oh shit,” Rupert says.
It’s 5 a.m. in Youghal, County Cork. The Irish dawn is breaking overhead. We’re tired; this is the third and last day of our trip, and we’re up early. We were late to bed too. Rupert was up past midnight tying flies for the morning session. Ben was busy downloading the day’s photographs. In the rush to pack up and leave our Airbnb, none of us have remembered the key fob that we need to open the main gate. It’s sitting on the kitchen table, in the apartment we can no longer access.
We’re both locked in and locked out.
We hassle the keypad, trying to fluke the code. When that doesn’t work, we pace back and forth, hoping to see a light on. But no one else is up—these are holiday apartments and it seems we’re the only ones anxious to catch the tide.
“Better tell the other guys we’re going to be late,” Ben says, his shoulders dropping a little.
The pedestrian gate is wide open. As I text the others—Myles Kelly and Shane O’Reilly who have come from Dublin, and fish scientist James Barry, who’s acting as our guide—I wander sleepily through it. A sound makes me look up. The little harbor, with its collection of small boats, looks different somehow. Is it raining? Has the storm that’s forecast for later arrived early?
Suddenly, I’m wide awake. That isn’t rain—it’s fish.
“Check it out,” says Ben, who’s followed me out, “it’s a bust-up!”
We stand and watch. Sprat are breaking the surface everywhere, emerging in silvery showers as they try to evade the mackerel that have herded them into the harbor and are now hunting them from below. There are countless millions of them; they wash in and out on the boat ramp, the water thick and black like an oil slick. In places they’re piled atop one another in writhing balls of silver. A heron standing by the ramp feeds at its leisure. Without warning, it strikes with sudden intent. The next moment a mackerel is held aloft. It’s still wriggling as the bird carefully maneuvers it down its gullet.
We hear voices coming from behind us, back inside the apartment complex. A second later my phone buzzes. It’s a message from Rupert.
Back to the car, it says.
Rupert Harvey has been tying flies since he was 10 years old. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to an English father and an Irish mother, both of whom were brought up in what was then Rhodesia. When he was 2 years old, the family moved to a ranch in the middle of the Amazon. Despite photographs he has of his mother with local tribespeople, and of him and his brothers lying in hammocks in the jungle, he doesn’t remember that part of his life. The truth is, he hardly remembers his mother, either. It was while they were in the Amazon that she became ill. Her cancer diagnosis prompted a move to Pittsburgh so that she could receive treatment; when she died six months later, his father took his three sons—all of them under 10 years old—to England, where he found a job working on a dairy farm. Three years later, the family moved back to South Africa.
When you meet Rupert today and hear his story, it’s tempting to think you can detect the aftereffects of this early life. There’s a quietness about him, a sensitivity. He’s intensely camera shy, yet in conversation he’s strikingly open. His willingness to connect—and particularly to laugh—with others makes him good company. (“There’s a name in South Africa for guys like me,” he says. “I’ve got one foot in England and one in South Africa, and the bit in between dangles in the sea, so that makes me a soutpiel. It translates as ‘salty dick.’”) He gives the impression of not taking anything too seriously except for his role as husband and father. And then, of course, there’s his tying. Perhaps as a 10-year-old who’d only recently moved back to the country of his birth, he was bound to latch onto something. So it was when he saw another boy at school tying flies. He sat down beside him and watched, fascinated. A few weeks later he asked his father to buy him a starter kit.
It was the tying that captivated him—going out and actually fishing the flies he’d created was secondary. It would still be another two years before he even picked up a fly rod. When eventually he did, there was a problem. His father was a lure-and-bait guy. With no one else around to teach him how to cast, he had no option but to teach himself, with the help of LL Bean’s Fly Fishing for Bass by Dave Whitlock. “I was fishing for stocked trout with a lump of an 8-weight, and an old Pflueger Medalist reel,” he says, wincing at the memory. “Then someone loaned me a Hardy 3-weight. It was like a wand. Suddenly everything clicked.”
He caught his first saltwater fish—a garrick fish in Port St. Johns, South Africa—when he was 14. Each year his tying got better. He was still in high school when he received his first commercial order, from the Flyfisherman shop in Pietermaritzburg, for 20 dozen Clousers of all different colors and sizes. As word of mouth spread about the quality of his work, so came more orders. He spent the money he earned on new tying equipment, new fly gear. It soon became clear that saltwater was his thing. With the growth of destination fishing in the 1990s, he found himself tying a special kind of Woolly Bugger for clients chasing milkfish in the Seychelles.
In 2005, curious about the country he remembered from his childhood and in search of a fresh start, he left South Africa and moved to Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He had in his pocket all the money to his name: the equivalent of £3,000 in South African rand. But when he went to the bank to exchange it, he received just £220 in return. As the blood drained from his face, he asked what was going on. The bank teller fixed him with a steady look. “Most of what you gave me were fake notes,” he said flatly. “Welcome to England.”
Things soon improved. It was in Cambridge that he met Aoife, an Irish girl from Cork city near the south coast of Ireland. When the two of them moved to London, Rupert called in at Farlows, the famous fishing shop on Pall Mall. Since tying those milkfish flies, the Seychelles had really blown up as a flyfishing destination. The craze now was for giant trevally. It was while chatting with the staff at Farlows that he made an important discovery, one that would change everything. It seemed no one in Europe was tying commercial flies for GTs. Instead of being able to buy flies before they travelled, fishers had to buy them when they arrived, usually from guides and at inflated prices.
After that the pieces started to fall into place. He began tying saltwater flies for Farlows; he and Aoife got married; and in 2014 they moved to her native Cork. It was as if it was meant to be—a world-class saltwater fly tyer now had world-class saltwater flyfishing on his doorstep. And so—though delayed a little by Covid, when no one was traveling anywhere to fish—it felt inevitable when in 2022 he started tying full-time.
We’re late. The sun is truly up now, staring us dead in the face as we drive east. I glance down at the River Blackwater as we go over it. The water has a glassy calm, its seaward currents stilled by the inland push of high tide. A few seconds later and we’ve crossed into County Waterford.
None of us speak. A collective sense of exhaustion fills the car. For the last two days we’ve been fishing almost constantly. We’ve moved from place to place, fishing different marks, searching for bass, following the tides. We’ve waded for what felt like hours through knee-high water to distant reefs, then turned around and waded back again. We’ve been buffeted by wind and made countless casts, throwing out and stripping in, often working our flies as fast as possible to try to trigger a strike. Then it’s back to the cars and onto the next location, with a sandwich on the way if there’s time. Ben has had the worst of it. Though we’ve taken turns carrying his heavy equipment, especially the waterproof housing he needs for underwater shots, it’s always him who has to drop everything whenever a fish is hooked, scrambling quickly over rocks to be there in time, doing his best not to slip on the patches of kelp. Toward the end of the first day his camera becomes unresponsive, fatally doused by the spray from a breaking wave. Luckily, he has another.
We turn off the main road and onto one of Ireland’s notoriously narrow country lanes. Still, we’re quiet, content to be alone with our thoughts. The sight of the leaping sprat in the harbor has jogged my memory of the previous evening. Sitting alone in the back seat, I replay how it went.
We’d spent the afternoon fishing from an expanse of ledges situated beneath steep cliffs. Everyone caught fish—and it wasn’t just us either. Gannets flew overhead; now and again we saw them dive, their necks extended as they pierced the water like living javelins. Seals passed by at a more leisurely pace, their heads bobbing as they looked at us. Later on, toward dusk, we’d moved into the calmer water of a small bay. In the last of the light, we watched as the water boiled with hunting mackerel. Another type of fish, scad, was along for the ride. The bass were there too, picking off mackerel along the fringes. Wading out into the darkness along submerged shelving rock, James, our scientist-guide, at once rangy and youthful-looking, caught a good one. Taking my life into my hands, I followed him. When eventually we turned on our headlamps to find our way back, the water all around us glittered with fish scales.
“It’s like a massacre,” I said.
“I know. Think of the sheer biomass that’s currently in this bay.”
We passed by a rock pool. It was full of sprat, stranded now by the dropping tide. I reached in and without too much trouble scooped a handful out.
“Which fly did you get it on?” Rupert called over as we reached dry land.
“Do you even have to ask?” By then our headlamps were off, but even in the darkness we could hear James smiling. “The Searcher of course.”
“I’m reluctant to call it a new pattern, exactly,” Rupert said later, sitting at his vise as midnight approached. “Honestly, hardly anything is genuinely new in fly tying these days. It’s more a variation. I took an old platform, the Deceiver, and messed about with it.”
His actions were smooth, the wraps of thread going on with precision and ease. As I watched him, it was impossible not to think of the 10,000-hour rule—the theory of how to master a skill popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. “James and I came up with it together,” he went on. “It’s the color combination more than anything. But if there are bass around, they’ll chase it.”
He wasn’t kidding. Over two days, the Searcher had accounted for over 20 fish. There is a Clouser version too, for fishing that little bit deeper, with a sink-and-draw action. Other flies we used were Sili Cones (for which Rupert 3D prints heads to go under the dressing, making them more durable) and tan and lavender Clousers, with a layer of peacock herl tied along their back to better imitate sprat. Each fly is so perfectly finished that losing one felt like a travesty. But, inevitably, fishing from the shore results in lost flies. The shelving rocks, with their coating of barnacles, are razor sharp. The constant motion of the waves requires equally constant line management; a momentary loss of grip on your line, or—worst of all—having to stop stripping in order to undo a knot, and the fly can get sucked under a rock. After that, all bets are off. You’re hung up and you’re lucky if you get all your line back, let alone the fly.
I come to, suddenly remembering that I need to replace my frayed leader. I unzip my backpack and set to work as overgrown hedges flash past the windows.
By the time we arrive the others are ready to go. Unceremoniously, Rupert distributes the new Searchers—one per person. Taping up our stripping fingers and ignoring the other micro-cuts and abrasions we have over the rest of our hands, we clamber down to the shore.
The rain might not have arrived yet, but there are signs of an approaching storm. The swell heaves in against the rocks, throwing spray in vertical plumes. Flyfishing for sea bass is always a balancing act. The calm conditions that every fly caster dreams of are rarely much use for catching bass from the shore. It’s turbulent water you want; the rougher it is, the more disoriented the baitfish. Stormy weather can produce fabulous fishing. But there are limits.
Collectively we pause, taking a moment to survey the scene. Just nine hours ago, we were casting from ledges that now look positively dangerous to stand on. Nevertheless, we creep as close as we dare to the foaming water and make a start. But our lines are impossible to control and the waves are frankly frightening. I lose the fly Rupert gave me on my second cast. Opting for self-preservation, we walk around to the bay we’d fished the previous evening. There’s no sign of the sprat that flung themselves onto the shore in their own bids for survival, or the ones that were trapped in rock pools. The gulls have done their feasting.
It’s a different day—one of those days you feel you might look back on as when you first sensed the approach of autumn. Though we persevere for a couple more hours, throwing shooting heads into the strengthening southwest wind, only Shane lands a bass. Jackets are zipped up, hats pulled down tighter about our ears. The cloud above us thickens by the minute. Out at sea the gannets are gone. Only the seals remain.
One by one we decide we’ve had enough. Gradually, we all converge on the same flat bit of rock and sit down. I look around and notice that no one else has a Searcher tied on either. I glance nervously at Rupert next to me, knowing how I’d feel if I were him, if an hour’s careful work had been wiped out so easily.
“It’s OK,” he says, as easygoing as ever. He looks out over the roiling waves, under which all six of his flies now reside. I realize I’ve got it wrong. However exceptional his work, he isn’t precious about it. He’s the sort of artist—and to see one of his flies up close is to know that it is art—who has no desire for his creations to last forever. He only wants them to succeed at the purpose for which they are designed.
“That’s why I always try to use only natural materials,” he says. “Soon enough, they’ll be rusted through and gone forever.”
He stands up; the others are on their feet, ready to go. “In any case,” he says quietly, smiling at me, “if no one ever lost any flies, I’d soon be out of business.”
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