"We’ve been coming to Ireland on fishing holidays for years, and there’s few places we haven’t tried. Brackley Lake is a favourite – it’s got good bream, good size pike, plenty of roach, perch and hybrids, and we’ve always caught fish.

The last time we were there we noticed a new luxury B&B being built, and decided we’d book a ten day stay there the next time we were over. We weren’t disappointed. The rooms, food and angling facilities were good, and John and Jan were great hosts. The location was fantastic, because we could be on the water within minutes, or into the local pub later almost as quickly!

Because the ferry had been an early one we’d arrived by ten, so we decided to go to the local maggot farm to get our own bait, though we could have asked John to get it before we came.

Usually we would have fished off the Point, and could have booked John to pre-bait it for us, but because we had the free use of his boat, outboard and fish finder our plan was to spend the rest of the day having a good look at the lie of the lake first. By the time we were back he had all ready to go from his jetty beside the car park.

John had told us there was a 40ft deep basin in the middle of the bay holding bream, and sure enough the beeps were continuous and the screen black with fish as we passed over the western ledge!
The problem was, you wouldn’t be able to cast out to it from the pegs along the Point, but we figured there was one spot where a long cast from shore could reach that ledge. It turned out that this was a secluded part of John’s private west shore at Scrabby* but we could reach it easily by boat. We marked the ledge and began baiting up!

Next day we loaded up the boat and headed across in a straight line from the jetty over to the end of the bay at Scrabby, and apart from the swans and some grebe had the place to ourselves. Set up our bivvies in the wood that morning and never had to worry about taking them down every night – they stayed up until the holiday was over! Some mornings we took one of Jan’s fries (she did forget our fried tomato on Wednesday, but we got two eggs on Sunday- Ha Ha!) other mornings we brought over breakfast butties she made up for us.

The baiting up really paid off, and in the end we spent the entire holiday fishing that one spot on the one lake – not part of our original plan at all – but our mates who did fish off the Point and on Bunnerky thought they had had good fishing till they heard what we were catching! (We did get out the pike rods on our last afternoon and managed three pike to 8lb before we had to start packing up.)"