Silver Strand, Galway 9 March 2005

Hi

Called into Corrib tackle (nice shop) on the way home and bought some sandeels with a view to using them somewhere but got the tide wrong by about 1 hour. I ended up fishing the mouth of the lagoon on the far side of the hillock / cliff with a range of lures and whatnot for about an hour, just after the tide had turned. Current there makes the back strand at tramore look like a doddle - very narrow channel was turning to white water in minutes. Gave up and went to watch the footie! on the way back walked along the cliff edge and saw heavily discoloured water (milky white) extending from the base of the cliffs out and around several hundred metres, looks suspiciously like sewage discharge. Seaweed is noticeably heavier in the area. Incredibly shallow spot, you could wade out a very long way...

Technically a blank I suppose although I was told in advance not to expect anything. Not sure I would want to fish there given the pollution...

FWIW

Not sure I would want to fish there given the pollution...

FWIW

Fishing is one thing, eating your catch a whole different proposition... :(

did you/are you going to report the discharge?

Hi Keo

Not sure if it is a discharge, but would happily report it if I knew where to go and was confident something would actually be done about it. Any ideas?

Kieran,
First port of call would be the county council. They have reponsibility for all public sewage works and they should also have monitoring data freely available. If it's a private company then by law they will have a discharge licence, if they don't then they are breaking the law. Again your county council issues these licences and will hold copies too. Put simply if you are a private company and you are discharging anything to freshwater or seawater then you need a discharge licence - Section 4's is what they call them. If the company is discharging to the sewer then they need a licence also, known as Section 16. On that licence limits are set for each parameter which the company is not allowed to exceed. The county council is obliged to monitor these discharges also. If the county council refuses to supply this info to you then you can request it under the Freedom of Information Act, in which they have a month to give it to you. Bit of a last resort as most councils are happy to give you the info, as long as you talk nice to them!

If its some chancer dumping stuff into a stream or drain then get on to the regional fishery board or in turn the EPA. Better still ring the whole damn lot. I could start ranting now about the impact that shoddy septic tanks have on water quality but i wont....Hope this helps.

Pete

yeah i know the area very well, nothing to panic about though.

in the lagoon is very silty (upto 3 meters deep in places), some of the silt washes in and out all the time, the base of the cliff is like clay in areas (especially fairy point, (the cliff across the channel)) when it mixes up with the silt it does look very suspect indeed, but believe me when i say this, this area is where bass are regularly caught (even i caught one) and i don't think bass like water that is polluted in any way. the water in the area is tested fairly regularly especially through the summer for any trace of anything that isn't good, and so far to date is has passed all tests.

if you fish the area in the summer you can see exactly what is happening especially on a spring tide...

the best bait in the area is lugworm, squid and mackerel in that order of preference, plenty of flatties been caught at the moment, was a fair few whiting caught at the start of the year and coalfish are farily common at the moment. hopefully the change in wind direction will improve things a bit more.