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Bertra Strand, Co. Mayo Past the village of Murrisk on the R335 from Westport to Louisburgh, and just past the car park used for the ascent to Craogh Patrick (from which Tim Hoy - big thank you - took this superb picture), you will find a road to the right leading down over a hill and past mushrooming holiday homes to Bertra Strand.

There are effectively four marks here.  The first is the beach itself, usually crowded in the summer and remarkable for the lack of any appreciable surf come hell or high water! You can collect peeler crabs, hardbacks, some small limpets and mussels and shrimps in the rock pools at low water to the left.  The beach is quite shallow and to find the flatfish (mainly flounder and dabs) distance casting is required. Mullet will often be seen late on summer evenings in very calm weather.  There is a rocky spine halfway down the beach and this second mark does throw up the odd Bass to baited hooks and plugs.  It does need a decent surf to fish well however and it is not a fertile mark.  Behind the beach there is a wide lagoon spreading down from the beach to a shale and rocky beach (known locally as the "Cockle Strand") where you can dig lugworm.  No, not ragworm, lugworm!  Often in less than 10 cms of dirt too and close into the shore near the rocks and weed!  This lagoon will host hundreds of Mullet in the summer especially on an incoming tide of an evening.  Getting them to feed is another matter although it is an excellent, quiet spot for try some salt water fly fishing... you might need to kneel down in the sand to not spook them and it does get very oozy once you venture more than 5 metres from the shore.

The final set of marks is at the very end of the penninsula, facing the small island.  This is a very deep channel into which the tide will charge and retreat creating ferocious currents and whirlpools.  Mackerel and the odd small Pollack will fall to spinning techniques, and flatfish can be tempted out on the seaward side, at the point where the sand shelves steeply into the channel.  The channel itself has a rock and weed bottom and 175 grams will not hold bottom outside of slack water.  In the guidebooks you will read about Monkfish and even Common Skate being taken in the slack water pool behind the channel, which incidentally is slightly to the south i.e. inland from the channel itself.  A lovely prospect and total nonsence - both species have long since vacated the mark, or rather been eradicated.  The Skate might return some day as there are plenty of them in the Bay itself thanks to the ban.  Immediately north of here at Rossansubble, there is a very similar feature that routinely produces Bull Huss and Thornback Rays and yet here I have had not a single bite.  A lovely spot mind...

Probabilities: Mackerel, Pollack, Mullet (summer); Coalfish, Flounder (resident, winter)

Possibilities: Dabs, Bass, Lesser Weeverfish (care needed).

Rare Exceptions: Bull Huss, Conger Eel, Dogfish, Thonback Ray.