The forecast for the morning was fairly promising – 10mph southerlies - and a quick visual check following the school run showed a lovely, calm sea. Mind you, I couldn’t launch just yet as my dad was coming around for breakfast via the smokehouse and brought with him a bag of four traditionally smoked fresh Lowestoft kippers. Fantastic they were, plump and tasty and they kept me going all day.
Low water was around 3pm at Hopton so I figured a launch around 12:30 would be ideal giving me the two hours up to low water and the time after before it turned – say four hours on the water. This is usually the best time for us here. I’d recently removed the Side Imaging unit from my Scupper Pro but with the news coming this week that the Down Imaging software update had been released it seemed the perfect time to trial it so I wired it all in with my Heath Robinson Multi-Function Survival Toolbox and so, with an overcast afternoon and the wind now up to 15mph (a tad choppier now and with a little bit of swell) I launched my trusty Prowler 15 and paddled out for Steve’s mark.
Down went my 2.5kg anchor and I settled down and waited fro it to pull me tight in the perfect position to fish his mark. Not a hope! As usual when getting positioned perfectly the anchor dragged. Deciding that it wasn’t too fast I left it down and started to fish. I had a 1/0 15lb wishbone on one rod in the hope of picking up some dabs and a 4/0 20lb pennel on the other in the hope of getting a cod. The former had a small single frozen black lugworm on each hook tipped with a small strip of squid while the latter had two worms and a squid head initially. Going by these the last batch of worms I’d received were not of the size I’m used to so I was a bit pissed off to be quite honest. Anyway, they might bring a fish in...
Did they hell.
I kept drifting slowly past some of my stored marks without so much as a nibble. One of these is of a reasonable size and features a spectacular hump a few hundred yards out that I keep meaning to fish. As it turned out I passed straight over the bow this time:
After maybe an hour of this I decided to up-anchor and head north towards the wreckage that had swallowed my rod and reel the other week (a charted wreck with little to show for it). The reason for my drift became apparent – the cable tie had snapped in the current. I put another on and dropped down when nearing my mark. This time it held but put me slightly short of where I wanted to be. Oh well, it’d do.
After a while I got my first little nibble. And I mean little. Nothing developed so I reeled in and replaced the whole squid body that had been neatly stolen off the bottom hook! That was about it and after a while I got bored again so decided to head for the wreck of the White Swan again, give it a couple of passes with the side/down imager and then fish it.
As I got near I could see the ribs and boiler sticking up out of the water. I haven’t seen it so exposed in a long time; it was a big tide today mind you. The swell here was at least a couple of feet, the waves fairly close together and the water quite fast.
It really wasn’t ideal for scanning but I was curious and ran the gauntlet, heading down the starboard side of the wreck before coming back along the port side and anchoring off around 50 metres uptide of the stern (a few pics of this because I know Dizzyfish will enjoy them!).
I rebaited, putting a whole squid and nothing else on the pennel and cast both lines as far as I could towards the wreck. Both were in the vicinity but not quite on the wreck itself as I didn’t fancy being snagged and wasn’t in the mood for belting the baits out in the bouncy water I was now in. I sat and waited. There were a few guys on the beach here who clearly hadn’t heard how poor the fishing was right now (or were as foolishly optimistic as I). It took abut half an hour before finally I got a bite on m y pennel...I grabbed the rod and waited for the bite to develop...I felt the fish then began to wind and hit into it...COD!
As I brought it up I knew it was a cod but either the tide was easing off and it was coming my way a bit or it wasn’t very big...the latter was the case as I brought in my first cod of the year. Between 1.5 and 2lb, beautifully marked and proportioned and my first fish off this wreck I took some photographs and let it swim off home. It was sizeable but not of the size to which I’ve become accustomed so I decided to let it live for another day.
I carried on a bit longer and then decided to head home as the sun was setting.
I had a mile and a half to go but the tide was still refusing to turn so it was with only a little enthusiasm that I set off for Hopton. It took a while as I did some more scanning of marks on the way back (this is the same wreckage as seen earlier).
I had wind, swell and current against me but with only a slight wrist-ache and only moderately sweaty I paddled in through the shore dump and up to my van. My last ‘day off’ used up effectively with the target species in the bag...and to round off my day I got another Charter Special off eBay for less than £50 ;D
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