On Saturday morning, 28th May at 3am Peter Driver from Kilkenny and David O’Donovan from Shanballymore headed into the unknown.

Our venture was to fish 100 rivers catching one trout each in each river – that’s a total of 200 trout.

To make the challenge even more intriguing it had to be done inside 7 days. Each fish had to be photographed, measured and released. The challenge had never been attempted before, so there were no guidelines or benchmarks to gauge how we were doing.

After months of planning and preparation we set off for the first river – the river Shanoween in Castleisland, Co Kerry.

This river proved to be tricky as it was an acidic river, meaning mainly a spawning river and trout didn’t grow to the required minimum length for the challenge, of 20cm. It took over an hour to catch our 2 trout but we were off the mark.

From there we headed towards Killorglin catching fish on the Brown Flesk and the Castlemain River en route. We fished tributary streams on the Laune and Flesk river catchment, before heading to Kanturk to fish the Allow and Dallow.

See this week’s Print & Digital Edition for the rest of Part 1