Come Fly with me. Sunday Tribune Article on Glenda Powell by Daire Whelan

Most people don't follow their dreams but Glenda Powell did and they carried her to a fly-fishing world title. Daire Whelan hears her story.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and
have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under
what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

There is no play in them, for this comes after work.

But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

From Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

Same shit. Different day. It’s another few hours of slogging it through. Of getting to the final whistle come six pm and clocking out befor starting it all over again the next morning. You don’t mind work really. It’s just that, it only gets you through. You don’t want to think about twenty years hence because if this is all there is….

If you’re buying a house, moving house, having a baby, looking after a baby, changing jobs or stuck in your job, chances are you would give anything to just get away from it all. If only for even a few hours.

For some it’s the football. Fall deeply for a team’s fortunes and your own life’s ups and downs can be substituted for the teams. It hurts less if it’s only the Champions League results riding on how you feel today. For others it’s about escaping into the bottom of a glass of wine or beer. Or for others it’s finding the good times with white powder up your nose. Crouched over a toilet cistern snorting cocaine up your nostrils, and you don’t think you’re finding peace but at least you’re not concerned with the worries of it all.

So. This day is like any other. Ups and downs. People annoying you, wanting to get angry, wanting to be free of it all. But I have one thing to help me get through it all. I’ve tasted and tried other vices and thankfully come out the other side seeing a world that could go awry for me. They are not worlds I would want to revisit but there is one world that I want to fall into completely and let it smother me whole. I smile to myself and let the day’s stresses subside. This evening I will be fly fishing again. Back out on the river wading through its waters on the hunt for fish. Just me, the river, some fish if I’m lucky, and all that nature has to offer me for those precious few hours. More often than not I’ll come home empty handed but that is not the point. Standing there in blissful serenity immersed by what nature has to offer has now become my little piece of heaven I can escape to. If only for a few hours. But it is time that will get me through the rest of the days to come.

“True happiness, is when it doesn’t matter what day of the week it is.”

Glenda Powell is 33 and lives out many of our dreams. For her job is her passion and her passion is what she gets to do every day. Glenda Powell is 33 and a fly fishing casting instructor who along with her husband Ian runs the successful and popular Blackwater Lodge in Ballyduff, straddling the Cork-Waterford border 15km from Fermoy.

Glenda says fishing has given her her life, her family, her kids. Glenda is a World Champion Overhead Distance Caster.

Derval O’Rourke and Katie Taylor might get the publicity and plaudits for their achievements in their respective sports but Glenda Powell’s achievements are no less noteworthy. Aside from being an Irish World Champion (how few and far between are they?) she was also the first female in the world to achieve the standard of APGAI-Irl Salmon (Association of Professional Game Angling Instructors Association certificate) in 2004 and followed that up two years later by becoming the first female in the world to achieve both the salmon and trout APGAI-Irl qualifications.

If this was boxing or athletics, Glenda Powell would be a celebrity appearing on TV ads and getting commercial sponsorship. But it’s fly-fishing. A sport this country likes to promote and sell as part of Ireland’s unique offering to visitors. For the majority of the population however (and remarkably for a small island nation) fishing is something someone else does.

I discovered coarse fishing when I was a kid and then rediscovered my love of being on rivers and lakes in my twenties. Fly-fishing is my new pursuit for which I read books, buy equipment and wish at any time of the day I was out on a river casting a fly. I’m only learning but like a kid, it’s the joy of discovery that has held me in rapture.

I am only one of hundreds each year who comes to learn from Glenda at the Blackwater Lodge. How often can you say you are being by taught by a world champion? From her ‘office’ - a specially made casting platform on the Kilmurry beat on the Blackwater River - Glenda takes me through the chinks in my casting technique. Watching you from the river bank she can spot a fix that will set you on your way and leave you with a confidence and belief in yourself that yes, you now are a fly fisherman.

As she demonstrates the more complicated intricacies of snake roll casts and loop casts you realise you are watching a master at work. With the deftest of touches she lifts the line out of the water casting it behind her and in one fluid forward momentum flicks the rod tip forward, effortlessly casting out eighty yards of line onto the river before us. As the last few yards of line uncoil themselves and almost give themselves up before her touch, you can only watch breathless at the timing and skill required to be able to perfect such technique.

Such skill is a work of art to behold and she is a world champion at the peak of her powers. Standing here on the Blackwater hers has been a long road but one that never wavered from its path and what her heart wanted to do. It is a salutary lesson in never giving up.

“My uncle died when I was nine,” she explains. “He was a keen fisherman and he must have noticed my interest in fishing because he left me his rods and flies.”

From then on, Glenda was literally hooked. “It’s just something I loved to do and had to do. I would get up first thing in the morning before school and go down to the river to fish. After school I would come home, change out of my uniform and head back to the river fishing until it was late. I just loved it so much.”

While her father loved shooting and her family life growing up was an outdoors one – “we would have ducks, geese, ferrets around the place” – she was the one who pursued fishing with a passion and obsession that she knew wasn’t going to go away.

At 18 when college or working life beckoned Glenda was faced with the first of the major decisions in one’s life: to take the easy route and become the nine-to-fiver or try and eke out a living working at your passion. The latter was the only choice for her and she went away to Scotland hoping to somehow fish and work in fishing.

Ask any would-be writer, actor, artist, and they will all tell you how hard it is to try and live at what it is you want to do. Trying to earn enough to pay the bills and put food on the table whilst not sacrificing your passion is one of life’s lessons that so many have failed at and given up.

“I drove from Northern Ireland to Scotland,” she says. “I had £1,000 in my pocket not knowing what I was going to do. I was told there were jobs in Aberdeen so I drove there and realised this was actually a really big city! I left it quickly and came across quite by accident the famous and beautiful River Dee. All I could think of was how can I get to fish on that river?”

“I found a house I could rent a few miles down the road and soon I was working in a nearby nursing home so I could earn enough to be living and fishing. I still couldn’t afford to fish on the Dee though!”

It was while she was working in the nursing home that Glenda met a woman called Mrs. Chidsey who was a resident in the home and who would have lasting impact on her life. “She looked at me one day and asked me what was I doing working there? I told her to pay for a living. But she asked me what was it I really wanted? And I told her: to be fishing. Every day then Mrs. Chidsey would keep at me and keep asking, what are you doing today to make your dream happen?”

“So, soon afterwards I entered a competition to be on the Scottish Ladies International Fly Fishing team and I came second and qualified to be on the team – the youngest to qualify.” “I was starting to get somewhere now and through competitions I was getting known. I then applied for and got my instructing qualifications in trout and salmon fishing from the Scottish Anglers National Association and it looked as if things were starting to come together for me in Scotland.”

However, her father took sick and she returned to Northern Ireland leaving Scotland behind her just as it seemed things had finally been on an upward curve.

“I was back to square one,” she says. “I started working in nursing homes again as a care assistant to earn a living. My father got better and I was branching out and getting involved in different areas of fishing.” “I set up my own fly fishing instructing company called To Cast a Fly, became a rep for a tackle company, was managing the Irish Ladies fly fishing teams, and was writing some fishing articles for the Irish Equestrian Life and Country Times magazine. I was doing about five different things but you had to you see. No one aspect of it would earn you a living on its own. You had to juggle loads of balls at once to put it all together to earn enough.”

“But I was loving it. I was getting to travel around the country, I was fishing, and I was involved in fishing. That was all that mattered to me.”

Blackwater Lodge is the old Ballyduff railway station which finally closed its gates in 1967.
Hard to imagine a time when little country villages with populations barely in the hundreds would each have railway stations serving them every day. The lines across the country lie derelict and disused now
but Ballyduff’s old station was destined for other things. It soon became a fishing lodge so close was it to the Blackwater River but by the 1980s was again in danger of dying out.

Ian Powell is a Welsh man who just loved to fish and who had a fishing dream. His job was as an industrial chemist in Strasbourg but he dreamed of one day owning and running a fishing lodge.
In 1985 Blackwater Lodge came on the market. Powell, who had never been to Ireland before, flew over to see the lodge and knew this was the one. He bought it and soon began to transform the lodge into a premier location for fishing and accommodation. And it was here that Glenda arrived to write an article in 1997. The rest as they say is fishing history.
‘Maybe one day you’ll be an asset to me my dear’ was Ian’s line to her that she laughingly recounts and over ten years later, married and with two kids his words proven to be more than prophetic.

Ian looks after the business of running the lodge while Glenda can now concentrate fully on her love of teaching fly-fishing. She has finally arrived at a place where every day she eats, sleeps and breathes fishing. “It has come full circle for me,” she admits. “I’m not fighting for it to happen anymore. I am doing what I want to do. I am now thirty three and have lived a full life but I want to give back what I got from fishing.”

Many would think the pinnacle of her achievements came in 2006 when she became World Champion for overhead distance casting but for her the real pleasure is teaching not competing and in seeing more women and children getting involved in fishing.

The pink ribbons that hang from the trees on the river bank stand testament to her involvement in raising money for breast cancer awareness through fishing days on the river. While next year a US established programme called Casting for Recovery which uses fly fishing as a means for survivors of breast cancer to be in peaceful surroundings and in the outdoors will be coming to Ireland which Glenda will be involved in.

Teaching is now the next stage of her fishing life and the one she gets most enjoyment from. She is involved in a scheme with the Waterford Sports Partnership in conjunction with the Irish Sports Council where she teaches local schoolkids about fishing, fly life, water safety – all to get them interested and involved. “They are the future of fishing,” she says.

Recently she was asked to put down her thoughts on why she fishes and for days she struggled to pin down just what it is that drives you to pursue something no matter what. From that day as a nine year old when she was handed her uncle’s rods to becoming world champion at just thirty-one, how could she explain that inner passion, that feeling we all wish we could nurture and cherish.

“It is the hope, the wonder, the childlike excitement and the never-ending learning that drives me,” she finally wrote. “It is the Peter Pan syndrome, the waders, the puddles, the sausages on the camp-fire, the kettle brewing and the fishing in the rain. It is the flowing river, like life itself, it keeps on moving over obstacles, turning and twisting on its way to the sea.”

We grow up as kids dreaming of being our own heroes and stars. Then somewhere along the way we lose track and lose sight of who we are and before you know it you’re in a job that you know won’t keep you happy forever. Life catches up on you, there’s a mortgage to pay, kids to feed and soon you’re thirty, forty, fifty…

A potted history of misery? Perhaps. But maybe it truly is the life of quiet desperation as penned by Thoreau. Some say the answer is as simple as looking back to when we were children and rediscovering what it was that lit up our worlds and hearts. Was it writing stories, building things, or drawing pictures? Witness the full lists for nightclasses throughout the year. See how many people want to rediscover ‘something’ that they know lies within. It might not be the panacea and key to happiness but at least it gives us hope and belief. In something beyond the daily grind.

The only faith that matters is in what you are doing every day. In belief and happiness that what you are doing is truly part of who you are and what you are here to do. Most of us gave up that dream somewhere between our teens and our twenties.

It is to the bravest, the most determined, to the few like Glenda Powell, to those who would not give up, that we must salute.
They are the 10%. The survivors. The rest of us are lost in our jungles struggling each day to get out.

But there’s a river down the road from me and tonight as I fish, I get to to be free and dream once again.
If only for a few hours.