Ireland may not be to everybody’s liking but for some it gets under the skin and becomes addictive. We are beginning to feel this way about it long before we went up to Lough Allen where a chance encounter with another boater made us realise just how much Ireland can take a hold of someone’s soul.

The least visited of the Irish Loughs that are accessible from the Shannon Navigation, Lough Allen is a large deep lough that is surrounded by mountains. Other than the town of Drunshanbo at the junction with the canal that connects the lough to the Shannon at Leitrim, there are no easily accessible towns, villages, pubs or shops on its shores. That it lies between two mountains adds the potential for nasty weather to blow in at short notice. All this means that the lock onto it sees less than half the boats that come up the canal go through it - most stop in Acres Lake below Drunshanbo, use the towns amenities and then turn round. When we had spoken about our plans to Irish boaters, we had almost invariably got the reply ‘Why’? Very few of them seemed to have any enthusiasm for it and the general view was that it was a barren windswept water with dangerous winds and little going for it. Searching the IWAI website, I was able to find one article. Written in 2002 by Norbert Eberle, a German visitor who had spent more time on Allen than anybody else in recent history, it enthused about the emptiness and the fishing. Having read it we determined to go.

Entering Allen from the canal, we stopped overnight on the visitor moorings, from which the lough is hidden behind reed beds and a wooded promontory. The following morning, when navigating the narrow channel into the lough we were astonished by the beauty that lay beyond: there is a lot of water in Allen and, unusually for an Irish lake, very few islands and they are close to the shore line and ‘lost’ into the background. The mountains surrounding it are more Yorkshire than Lake District but their brooding presence give the lough a quietly foreboding air. We gently motored along towards Spencer Harbour on the western shore at the far end of the lake.  That there are only two mooring jetties for such a vast expanse of water confirmed the scarcity of visitors and, in an effort to encourage more boats out onto the water, these jetties had only recently been connected to the shore.  There was plenty of room in the harbour as our arrival doubled the number of boats - the other was a Dutch built steel cruiser crewed by a man who came over to talk to us. Thus began our friendship with Norbert Eberle.

It is safe to say that Norbert is in love with the solitude, space and freedom with which Lough Allen abounds and he spends months there. Within minutes of meeting our charts were spread out and he was striking lines through areas marked as shallow and hazardous (our charts are the ones given to us in Tullamore and, being produced by hire companies, are conservative to say the least!). “ There is a good anchor point here” he would say. adding a further comment about the quality of fishing and the best bait to use. At one point, while talking about the quality of the water, he showed us a rope hanging off the jetty with metal plates tied to it. The plates are there to monitor the invasive Zebra mussels that have caused havoc over much of the Irish system. There were none on it and Norbert was confident that there would never be as, unlike the slightly alkaline water of the rest of the Shannon system,  the water in Lough Allen is mildly acidic. Apparently, a few weeks on it would clean all the weed growth and barnacles off Hawthorn and safe a lot of scraping next time we dock. Later on we were to learn that Norbert had been coming to Ireland for three weeks each spring and autumn for his holidays. The crunch had come when he was told that, due to work pressures, he would have to miss his autumn break. His suggestion that he should be allowed to have six weeks in spring had been rejected so he had simply handed in his notice. The plan was that he would be re-employed by the same company when he returned and he even brought his company’s mobile phone but, by the time that the six weeks were up, returning was out of the question. The phone went back to Germany but Norbert didn’t. He now lives to boat and fish and is one of the most contented souls that you could hope to meet.

Norbert told us that Spencer Harbour is so named after the family of the late Princess Di who had invested in iron smelting here. Looking round at the empty fields and woods it was hard to imagine that the shoreline once had a thriving village on it. This village had everything that the workers could need except for pubs as the Spencers had decided that alcohol was not a need - if it was a drink the workers  were after then it was into the boats and a long row down the lough to Drunshanbo although the return could be very hazardous due to the unpredictable weather. It would have been scary enough when sober but often proved  fatal to the very drunk. The lake still has more than a few hazards and local knowledge is a valuable asset as the water levels vary dramatically. This is due to the lough being used as the main feeder for the lower Shannon and the hydro-electric power station at the bottom of Lough Derg over 200 km downstream.  In essence, the water level of Allen is set by a man pushing a button at the other end of the country because he anticipates needing more water in two day’s time. Even the lock onto Allen has gates that work in both directions to accommodate the fluctuating levels. The consequences for the navigator is that a channel and mooring that were perfectly safe one day may prove too shallow the next. We were very happy to have our forward looking depth gauge.

We spent the night at Spencer Harbour and the following day explored the lake including using some of Norbert’s safe areas and visiting one of the islands. From a distance the island had looked densely wooded but, once we ran the dinghy ashore and eased our way through the undergrowth, we found that the wood was only on the perimeter and that the centre was a meadow complete with a copse and monastic ruin. That the island had been inhabited more recently was evidenced by the ruined cottage - its extension was made of concrete blocks. Now, the islands only residents were three sheep

The return run down the canal to the River Shannon took a lot longer than expected due to the canal being full of boats making their way up to Drunshanbo for the music festival the following weekend. The practice here is to move the boat a week ahead of the event in order to get a good mooring  (a good mooring is one that allows safe access for the very drunk in the early hours of the morning) and few of the boats would make it onto the Lough itself. We will return but could not linger as we had promised to do some work 60 miles downstream at Shannonbridge. This did not mean that our holiday was over or that life would change dramatically: our desire to stay in Ireland was only going to be possible if we could get some work. We have since met and heard from Norbert many times but I have yet to catch a fish worthy of the time that he has spent trying to teach me.