‘There’s something very special’ about Lough Sheelin

JOY Angling cup presented after 50-year gap

A prestigious fly fishing trophy, once feared lost, was presented for the first time in more than 50 years to a Mayo angler who landed a 10lbs 6oz Lough Sheelin brown trout.

Shane Gainley from Crossmolina was awarded the prize based off his “incredible” record fishing the local lake with friends over a two-week period in June, catching and releasing more than 50 trout himself including the mammoth one that earned him the trophy.

It was the biggest believed caught on Sheelin in close to 20 years, and Declan McCabe of Sheelin Boats presented the cup to Gainley, who reeled in 16 brown trout on his first day’s fishing alone.

Declan’s father Michael, who built the Sheelin Shamrock Hotel in 1961, first bestowed the trophy to the person with the biggest registered catch during the traditional Mayfly season on the lake, May 15 to June 15.

The cup made its first appearance in 1971 when awarded to Jackie Smyth from Newry, who landed a trout weighing 6lbs 5.5oz.

The following year it was won by Willie Strissnick from Innsbruck, who landed a 5lbs 9oz specimen.

After 1972, however, the competition went into hiatus “after the Mayfly began to disappear off Sheelin,” explains Declan.

This coincided with a troublesome and embarrassing period for the region, which lasted several decades and garnered national headlines.

Sheelin, a lake of 4,600 acres bordered by the counties of Cavan, Meath and Westmeath, and an internationally renowned brown trout fishery, had become blighted by pollution.

In the late 1960s, it became evident water quality was deteriorating and this became acute with the first severe algal bloom in 1971.

Investigations showed the bloom, which turned the water “pea soup green” according to reports, was caused by excessive enrichment linked to seepage from uncontrolled intensive pig production units.

Estimates equated the annual slurry output with the amount of sewerage generated by a population equivalent to that of Cork City.

By 1972 main angling characteristics such as mayfly and sedge fly patches had all but died out, destroyed by the blooms. The water continued to deteriorate and, by 1979, reached crisis point, prompting forward thinking officials in the Inland Fisheries Trust to publish a damning report, which bleakly set out the future prospects for Sheelin as a game fishery if the problems went ignored.

‘The indications are that Lough Sheelin will also cease to be a viable trout fishery within a few years unless positive measures are introduced to halt the ingress of excessive nutrients in the lake,’ stated the report.

Declan, though young, still remembers the concern etched across his father’s face.

“That year it all stopped, and the cup wasn’t presented to anyone. What was the point?” recalls Declan.

Instead of being held aloft, with the holder celebrated, the trophy remained in the Sheelin Hotel to be used by Michael to hold the many business cards he’d receive from visitors.

Bit by bit though the lake did recover “with a lot of work by a lot of local people, my father included. There was a couple of other people like Jim McNally from Cavan and Sean Young. They were very prominent,” says Declan.

“My father took the first case against Meath County Council to hold them to account for polluting the lake. He was very anti-pollution and a big campaigner and, for that, he was boycotted by a lot of locals for his stand.

"There were a lot of programmes, like Today Tonight, with him on it talking about the problems on Sheelin and what needed to be done to fix it, and the story of having a hotel but nobody in it.”

The McCabes’ hotel business was sold to another local businessman Colm Reilly around 1991, who ran the hotel as a going concern for several years before transforming it into the nursing home it is today.

The cup was left in the hotel when it changed hands and, somewhere along the line, got “misplaced”.

Declan expressed a keen interest in getting it back, and in 2017, Mr Reilly approached him to say: “I think I have what you’re looking for.”

All told, the prize had been missing for more than two decades, and had gone without presentation to anyone for 51 years.

Declan’s father Michael sadly passed away in 2019, but he was aware of the cup’s return and was all the happier for it. “He was delighted to see the cup obviously, because there is a lot of history to it.”

Declan believes his father would have been proud to see it presented once again, and saw 2023 as the “perfect opportunity” for that as it has been “an exceptional year for fishing on Sheelin”.

“The fish was over 10 pounds, but over that period of time, two weeks, [Shane] caught so many fish I decided he was the man for the cup. He was a brilliant fisherman, and he caught the biggest fish I knew of, and certainly in the last 20 years or more on the lake.”

Declan now has to get Gainley’s name engraved, and hopes awarding the cup can become an annual event going forward.

The “draw of Sheelin”, says Declan, is unlike any other.

“This year, it’s amazing the amount of people that came back from all over the country to fish the lake.

“It’s rated one of the best brown trout lakes in Europe, because the fish are wild, and for the quality and size of the fish. We had international visitors from all over, especially from England. It’s definitely been the busiest since before the pandemic,” said Declan.

He says that Sheelin brown trout are “difficult to catch”, but there is an added sense of achievement when one is eventually reeled in.

“There’s no other lake in the country like it, fishermen will tell you that themselves. It’s great to see young people coming to it now. Fly fishing is very different, and there’s something very special about Sheelin.”