Dogger and Hopton, 27/11/09

It tends to start a few days before with us. The emails and PM’s start to zoom about stating who’s free when and up for what, who isn’t but might be on such and such, whose wife needs to be put in her place and who’s slacking and really should show more commitment ;D We take our codding very seriously around here!

...and so it came to pass that I was stuffed for Friday night but Tim and Jason were on...maybe I’d get out around 9 though with luck...but life always has twists like Friday becoming available for me last minute through illness and Jason having to pull out. Either way Tim had a pass!

Tim and I hatched a plan that he arrive at mine around 7 to give me an excuse to leave earlier and this he duly did – it would have worked if I hadn’t forgot his cup of tea so it was twenty past when we finally left mine for Hopton. Passing Dogger I decided to just divert and show him where it was for future reference. The wind seemed slight so he suggested giving it a try and I agreed. Down we went, unloaded, launched and paddled out for the middle hole. Anchors down, bang on the mark and we set to fishing.

Neaps...but the current was streaming through, passing England’s most easterly point half a mile south of us and the wind was pretty fresh, exposed as we were. We sat there for maybe an hour and with some stronger gusts coming through I made the decision to up-anchor and abort. I’d had a couple of good whiting but not really felt them...but a heavier than normal rod revealed a hermit crab – my first ever! Really a beautiful creature and it reminded me of the children’s story ‘Sharing a Shell’ as it was indeed sharing a shell – with a ragworm. This I knew as I bust the crab out for bait, evil bastard that I am.



Yaks back on the vehicles and all the gear loaded into my van we drove the three miles north to Hopton, kitted up again and launched. It was like a different evening! The current had slowed and the wind seemed a fraction of what we’d had at Dogger. We settled down to fish.

The first whiting came in shortly after and then, reaching around for my dive bag, my newly bought gaff went overboard. I unclipped and set off in hot pursuit but didn’t see it again. I then decided to bring my lines up and paddle back to where I hoped I’d find my anchor reel (it was dark) and pulled up my PB dab. Thank you! I carried on paddling towards Tim and slightly inshore and bugger me if the anchor reel didn’t appear a foot from my right hand! Perfect.

Tim drew first blood on the cod front with a plump 3lb’er as I got stuck into the whiting. We were on some rough ground I’d marked from the side imaging the week before and the fishing was constant. It took another half an hour but then I got a gentle bite, started to reel and down went the tip – first codling of the night for me! A heavy fish, it was pulling, nodding and scrapping valiantly – the tide had eased off quite a bit so I could feel the fish nicely on my braid and 12-20lb rod. Up she came and bugger me! It was a beauty! I didn’t want her twisting off the hook like the double the other week so rammed my thumb in here gob and hauled her in! Gentle, like. Tim weighed her on the beach at 7lb – a new PB by 4 ounces

We carried on and then another gentle tap...cod on again! About 5lb. And again, 4lb, and again, 4lb. these were probably 20-30 minutes apart and some whiting came in between them. The dive bag that kept being brought forward and then put back in the tankwell was getting bloody heavy and as the fourth went in (nearly losing the third, the bag three-quarters full by now) I put it into the tankwell, taking up all the spare space and figured that was it, the tankwell was full and the bag was full...



...any more fish would have to go in the footwells. This I did with whiting eight and nine (ten going back). Then, another gentle tap, the tide hardly running and battle was joined as another 5lb’er came up and in. it’s quite funny paddling a Scupper Pro in with a cod under your leg!



That was enough and so we decided to head in. With 5 codling between 4 and 7lb, ten whiting (one returned) and a dab caught I was over the moon- m y biggest bag ever, it must have gone 25-30lb in total.



I passed Tim my camera and he did the honours:



There are five in that pic but they were too big to all be visible. And the biggest, my new Personal Best cod:



An absolutely top evening with really good fishing in the last two and a half hours. By the time I’d finished gutting them at home it had gone 2am and so filleting was left for morning, fish then being either frozen or distributed to friends and the dab laying forgotten in the fridge until I arrived at my parents to give it to my dad ;D Amazingly though a better prediction for Saturday night resulted in worse conditions, a snotty sea, a blank and a ditched anchor and reel. You never can tell...

I went out again in the morning, meeting onmas on the beach and failed to find my bloody anchor - the sea is rather a large place it would seem. Quite a large swell and the shore dump was interesting too but a nice paddle about, good for the old fitness and practice. So quite a costly bunch of fish this weekend - one dive reel, one anchor, one float (need a bigger one) and a baiting needle.

Messyschitt 109. 21.11.09

An appropriate name - my 109th launch of 2009 was in the midst of some right messy sh!t ;D

High winds, rough seas, gales, big swells, chop...is there no end to this crap weather we’re getting? Searching for and finding a window to get out on the yak is hard work; but we spotted one this weekend. In the early hours of Saturday morning the wind was going to drop down to a force 4 - this was doable but it was also going to turn south south east so I wasn’t sure how it was going to affect things at Hopton. It would be up to force 6 by late morning so we had to get in and out early and so I set my alarm for ‘oh my god it’s early o clock’ and went to bed at ten on Friday night.

This was the time that the weekly party began opposite my house and the constant banging of the front door, shouting in the street and loud music had me completely unable to get to the point of dozing before waking me up again. I was, to put it mildly, f**kING IRATE by the time my wife got home at around 11:30. Woken up by yet more shouting at 12:30 I went across to the window and watched two girls having a set to – an excuse for some sleep now ;) I called the police...Four of Lowestoft’s finest came along and things settled down a bit by one. The next wake-up was at 02:30 when they started to go home, noisily. Imagine how I felt when my alarm went at 03:30 having had perhaps one complete hour’s unbroken sleep. I felt like banging on their door to wake them all up but figured it’d delay my launch and they’d possibly still be awake. As it was, my neighbour woke the bastards at 8 ;D

Suited and booted, coffee in a travel cup I got down to Hopton to meet Onmas just after 4. We could hear the waves hitting the beach but they weren’t going to be problematic so I got the Scupper off the roof and went down with Jason in his Trident 13. I was also keen to try my new customised Scupper-sized coolbox (it worked really well, photo taken afterwards though).



Jason launched first while I returned to look for something and then I paddled out shortly afterwards to a mark I’d identified on the Humminbird Side Imaging unit last time out. Jason was at the usual mark and I was crossing my fingers that the technology would not fail against the trial and error approach of the previous year!

I downed anchor and dropped down my 4/0 Viking pennel rigs baited with black lug and 1cm wide rings of squid tipping them off. It didn’t take long before the first whiting was aboard – and a good size too. This carried on for a while until the tide started to ease. We’d missed the faster run of the tide when the cod usually bite but I’d had non-stop action and most of the dozen whiting I’d brought aboard had been keepers. Jason called me up on the VHF and asked me to stick some lights on so he could locate me as he’d packed up and we were going for a paddle. The plan was that once the bites had slowed we’d head north on the slack and anchor up by the wreck of the White Swan at Gorleston to try and get some of the fish I’d picked up on the finder the other week. As he started getting closer I up-anchored and we set off together, me recording the track and going via some of the waypoints from last week. I got a better image of the debris field from one of the wrecks having gone a lot closer and this was filed away as definite hot spot for future use.

It was quite a pleasant paddle really, it was getting light as we paddled along and finally we spotted the buoy that marks the wreck itself and headed in for a few scanning passes before dropping anchor to fish.

Bugger. There were only 3 anglers fishing the stretch between Hopton and Gorleston and they were all 200 yards apart and casting at the wreck! It would have been impolite to continue with our plan of fishing it and so reluctantly I resigned myself to scanning only and then, having no doubt annoyed them by our constant passes (sorry) we headed south again.

Scans of the Swan:

What you see on the screen at the time:















Processed snapshots in Yellowfin






Here there’s a bit of study going on – the top left screen shows a conventional 2d sonar recording with the bottom left showing a 2d side scan, this done in Humviewer:















Top left is the standard 2D downlooking sonar (this is on the 200khz narrow beam equivalent to a third of my depth for the sample). The bottom left window is the transducer data shooting out to the sides as per a quadrabeam unit and the blue is of course the Side Imaging, the central darker area being the water column and bottom contour (ie the ship rising upwards from the ground) and then the bottom spreading out from the edges ie the plan view, port and starboard of my position above it. On the top left you're seeing bow - superstructure - rudder from left to right. Bottom left it's bow-rudder from top to bottom - left and right of your position.


The White Swan itself is an old Swan Line Ltd collier completed in April 1903 by the Blyth SB Company Ltd (Yard No.113) and owned by J. A. Dixon and T. N. Sample of Newcastle, the single screw White Swan was en-route from West Hartlepool to Liverpool when she went down on 17th November 1916…93 years ago. Measuring 287.3ft long with a 43.2ft beam and weighing 2,173 gross tons, she dragged her anchor (it’s not just me!) and ran aground. It took 13 hours to get the twenty-strong crew off by Breeched Buoy. Their only steamer, the loss of the White Swan put Swan Line out of business. The morning after she ran aground:



Measuring the wreck in the software it's still the same length.

Andy: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230382057437&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

Here's a 10x speed video of the scan.

[URL=http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c24/609photos/Humminbird/?action=view¤t=SwanCrissCross.flv][/URL]


The first wreck area didn’t show much worth bothering with so we continued on after I’d pinpointed it and finally came to the general area of the debris field. I started to scout around for it and bingo! It was pretty extensive, there was plenty of structure and we’d be in a good position for heading in too. We finalised things and got ready to drop. I had some trouble with cable ties so had to keep stopping and paddling and then finally got in position, dropped anchor and waited for things to settle down.

It was a bit tasty to be fair. The wind had picked up by now and was in the opposite direction to the tide. I got my lines down then started to swing as the flow wasn’t too great as yet so brought them up again after ten minutes…a decent whiting on the end of one of them…result! I decided to stick to one rod for the time being instead.


Things didn’t seem to improve as far as the current was concerned and the waves were getting a bit annoying to be honest, compounded as they were by being over some wreckage of course! Therefore we decided ‘f**k it, lets go have a cuppa at mine’ and up-anchored, me having to break out my weak link. Then we started to move.

Brilliant! Head on into the waves which were in the 2-3ft high head-on, close together range and I was loving it – exciting but not unstable it was! The Scupper Pro cut through nicely, riding up and over each of them and I even started to laugh, sing and cackle! It was great. Then back onto dry land and we watched as a couple of teenagers came running down in swimming costumes and went for a dip. Rather them than me, although Jason also had a go…



Well, that was it. We returned up to the top, had a natter and then went our merry ways, getting home at a diplomatically early time to boot.

Abigail was down quickly when I got home, asking if I’d caught some fish which she had to look at, of course, and which she had to watch being gutted, of course, and whose stomach contents she had to study, of course and so we got the paper and knives out and set to dissecting…Abigail spotting the first worm. There were a fair few too. The stomach cavity on these whiting were teeming with round ammonite-looking hard objects as well which turned out to be the same – the Anisakis worm, but in a different stage – smaller and curled up but not moving. The livers were covered in them, embedded on the surface of them but not actually ‘in’ them if that makes sense. I took a photo and stuffed all the bits into a tub ready to take down to the pier later with Abigail. Later on it occurred to me that I might be better to just dispose of them in a different way though rather than spreading the worms further and so I left them in the fridge for the time being. Having decided that worms are just additional protein I then froze the majority and filleted four for our lunch which were served up with the fried roe I’d also put to one side.



I remembering about the bits again when my friendly neighbourhood CEFAS scientist was sitting having coffee and cake at ours the following day! So, with knife, lupe and paper we proceeded to have a good look at them and managed to uncurl one. Which was nice!

Hopton...07/11/09

Blimey, there’s no end to my dedication. Saturday morning’s session was looking like a lot of fun – inshore forecast had force 7 southerly building up Friday evening to drop down to a force 4 westerly by morning…Amos may or may not be coming up at some point or other either that evening or early morning and Jason was planning to be on the beach about 4-4:30am and Paul and Tim would both be along at some point. Oh well, what the hell, I set my alarm for 4:30. I figured that it was really only 5:30 because the clocks changed the other week ;) I needed an early night anyway so read about cod until I nodded off.

Up I got, drank a coffee, grabbed my bait and donned my old drysuit and headed off to Hopton. I arrived about 5am as Jason was about to launch and wandered down to say hi.

With Jason anchored in the usual spot I prepared myself for launch. I’d borrowed some shiny toys from work as I wanted to see what the bottom was like here and got it duly rigged up before heading out through the shore dump. I had a full cockpit on the way out – not uncommon there – but with both scupper holes blocked with transducers it took a while to drain.

I paddled out just offshore and north of Jason and anchored up on some rough ground. I knew it was rough ground from previous sessions but I confirmed it by looking – and this time I was looking properly…I was looking with Side Imaging. I’d signed out a demo Humminbird 798c SI Combo and had the transducer on a piece of tube through a forward scupper hole. Although drag and tracking were a bit of a pain it was worth the effort. I could see where the rough ground started and how extensive it was, I could see what it looked like and I could see why the fish were so localised. I dropped anchor and started fishing.

First up was a whiting that came off at the surface – bugger. It didn’t take long until the rod nodded again and I reeled in another fish – a doggie. I was well happy as I love them…back it went after a quick cuddle.



More whiting followed, some retained and some returned and then the tide started to ease off onto slack water, daylight also having made an appearance by now.



I’d been waiting for slack water – it was my intention to go for a paddle around looking for places of interest on the Side Imaging. The plan was to get an increased knowledge of the extent of rough ground and also to pinpoint a small wreck nearby. So, anchor in the tankwell I made a move.

Gotcha! Pinkfoot had passed over this the day before and had id’d it (I think) from the chart – it’s a charted wreck and so I moved the cursor and pinpointed it for a closer pass on my return journey.



Closer investigation showed more detail:



It looks to me to have been an old wooden vessel that has been broken up over time into a patch of debris.

I carried on and started tracing the edge of some rough ground. No idea what this was:



There was quite a bit of rough ground to be found, more than I was expecting to be fair.


A small drop off too:



Then, another wreck I think. Not a lot left here as the ground appears to have built up and covered most of it but some debris about. Quite a stark contrast with the surrounding area.



More rough ground and something going on in the water column (no idea what):



Now that is all well and good but these were snapshots taken here and there. To get a real idea of what was going on the best bet is to look at the recording. Now this can be played back on the unit in any screen – ie on the chart, showing Side Imaging or conventional sonar soundings. I’ve rendered this as an SI plot at 10x speed to give an idea of what the ground looks like between Hopton and Gorleston in the particular area I went over. I wasn’t sticking to a particular course as the swell was pushing me a bit and I was aiming for charted features as well but it does give an indication…now, it is worth staying through to the end as the last part is the best and the place I was aiming for…the wreck of the White Swan...if you look closely there are fish to the port side.

[URL=http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c24/609photos/Humminbird/?action=view¤t=HoptontoGorleston.flv][/URL]

This is where I’d first fished in the sea from a yak 3 years ago…I’d swam on the beach there regularly as a kid and decided to have a good look at it. An old Swan Line Ltd collier completed in April 1903 by the Blyth SB Company Ltd (Yard No.113) and owned by J. A. Dixon and T. N. Sample of Newcastle, the single screw White Swan was en-route from West Hartlepool to Liverpool when she went down on 17th November 1916…93 years ago. Measuring 287.3ft long with a 43.2ft beam and weighing 2,173 gross tons, she dragged her anchor (it’s not just me!) and ran aground. It took 13 hours to get the twenty-strong crew off by Breeched Buoy. Their only steamer, the loss of the White Swan put Swan Line out of business.



The morning after she ran aground:



Parts of her are still visible at low tide and I remember seeing what looked like an old boiler at the surface as a child, but that has now disappeared.

I was rocking and rolling a bit from the swell, the sea being a bit confused over the wreck, and it lies at an angle so I had to alter course to get a good look at her as I went over for a second pass on the offshore side to get a still image. I also had to alter the chart speed to suit the boat speed and this took some experimentation so the actual dimensions are compressed.



Paddling back up against the current with the Heath-Robinson designed transducer down was getting taxing so after about my sixth pass so I made a last pass from the inshore side and headed back to Hopton for some fish. I was quite pleased with this pass:



I should have gone up there on the ebb really ;D

I pulled up alongside Jason on arrival and tried to steal his brace of cod before dropping anchor slightly north and drifting down towards him. I managed one after a while, nothing major but a nice size for a meal at around 3lb or so.



Tim was a hundred yards south and brought in a better one and I saw Paul get one too. It went dead for a while then, the current really screaming through, so I decided to use some more energy and paddle against it to re-anchor further north on one of my marks…that was hard graft! I was making between 1 and 1.4 mph and after 15 minutes dropped down and waited. Tim’s Scupper started swing around as it drifted down to mate with my yak so we ended up attaching ourselves to each other and having a good old chinwag. I had the odd whiting during this time – none so odd as this one:



Soon enough it came time to head in. Not so much fishing time devoted to the morning for me but the smoked whiting pate went down a treat and the cod is in the fridge maturing ;D