I’ve been too busy with work to be able to fish over the past fortnight, but I spent last week in Ireland working with David Wilson, the Pure Fishing representative for Ireland, covering some of the top tackle shops the company supplies.

Though most of my time in these tackle shops is spent talking the retailer through existing and pending new product launches for the coming autumn I do try to have a walk around and check out what’s on the shelves. You can learn a lot!

It’s interesting too, to see the little differences in product that sells comparing Ireland to the UK.

Currently competition sea angling is far more buoyant than it is here in the UK. In fact, apart from the big open matches, it makes you wonder if club comps in the UK have much of a future at all! This resurgence in Irish match angling, both boat and shore, is evident on the tackle shop shelves with a greater selection of European match based terminal tackle than we see here in UK shops. I picked up some interesting float beads that change colour underwater for example!

Another big growth sector in Ireland is specimen hunting and something I favour myself. The numbers of top anglers now devoting all their fishing time to chasing specimen fish is staggering and growing rapidly. I can see this increasing further here in the UK too over the next few years. Specimen and species hunting, I feel, will be the main drivers of the overall market over the next decade.

The biggest growth though has been in specialist bass tackle. There are so many anglers now buying shorter spinning rods, high quality reels and expensive bass lures that it’s given the sport a real boost. The UK actually seems to be lagging behind the Irish here, maybe because of the recent lack of sizeable bass for many anglers around the UK coast.

What’s really interesting is that the Irish lads will happily use a 3 Euro lure alongside a 30 Euro lure. There seems to be a slight one-upmanship here in the UK where specialist bass anglers tend to quote only the most expensive lures as being the best, yet this is not the case. I couldn’t give a monkey’s what a lure costs if it catches me fish!

Here in the UK we also seem reluctant en masse to spend on the more expensive £20 plus lures, yet we seem quite happy to fork out £15 for lug and rag and a few more quid on crab and squid and tip half of it away when the session is finished. In a recent conversation a bass lure fanatic told me he had a particular £20 TackleHouse plug that had landed over 30 bass. If he lost it tomorrow it’s paid for its self ten times over! It’s all about perspective when comparing cost!

Inevitably I couldn’t resist adding to my own plug collection and brought home a Strike Pro multi sectioned bodied plug with an amazing swimming action, an F-Tec S-Four and a floating plug by Duel that I just know is going to be outstanding. I also acquired some soft lures from Spain that smell of aniseed and will be deadly fished both on a Jig head and as a drop shot.

All I need now is some fair weather, the atrocious amount of floating weed we have here on the North Wales coast to finally disperse and some free time to actually get out fishing.