Ireland's shore-fishing guide

Irish shore fishing changes a great deal from one coast to the next. The east coast, from Dublin Bay down through Wicklow, is mostly long sand and shingle beaches broken by harbour walls and a handful of rocky headlands. It faces the Irish Sea, so it is sheltered from Atlantic swell and fishes best when an easterly puts colour in the water. Flatfish, whiting, codling, bass and smoothhound are its staples.

The south and west are a different proposition: deeper water close in, more rock, open exposure to the Atlantic and a wider spread of species, from wrasse and pollack off the ledges to rays and tope over the sand. The same tide and wind that make an east-coast beach fish can make a west-coast platform dangerous, which is why advice written for one coast does not travel well to the other.

That is the reason this site goes county by county instead of publishing a national list. A mark is only useful if the advice on it is right for that stretch of coast: which state of tide it fishes, which wind kills it, how you get down to it and what is likely to be there this month.

A county joins the decision engine only when every mark in it has what a session needs: its access and parking, its ground type and hazards, the tide states it fishes, the wind directions that shut it down, and the species it holds through the year. Each mark then gets its own profile, so the daily call rates it against its own ground rather than a generic rule.

Wicklow was built first and walked on the shore. Dublin Bay marks are researched from published sources and labelled with how confident that research is, so you can tell a field-checked mark from one that is still being filled in. Counties still in research are listed above so you can see what is coming, but they do not produce a daily call until they meet the same bar. How the calls are made, and how often they turn out right, is set out openly on how our calls work and forecast accuracy.