For Fog's Sake…19/02/2013

For Fog's Sake…19/02/2013 Wilmy was bugging me, we needed points, he was free all week and the weather was nice…was I coming out to play? I was on my last shift, I would have to sleep after work but yeah, I could come but I’d miss the tide…that night the fog rolled in and I figured I was safe, especially with the frost that came with it. But oh no, it wasn’t going to be that easy! Nope, I woke up after a couple of hours and it was bright and mild and practically windless. Damn. No excuses…coffee and then I’d be there. We decided on Pakefield for no other reason than that being where we decided upon. I pitched up with him and Andy just about ready, whipped the yak off the roof, the gear out of the car and the drysuit on and we trolleyed down to the beach. It was flat. I put Whippersnapper’s hat on to enrage Cam. The sea was pretty clear and only the gentlest of ripples broke on the shore…the surface was almost like oil as we paddled out and north looking for the hole I remembered from a few years back. The depth increased and then as we came to the bank shallowed off again. We carried on, looking for the drop off into the hole. It’s not there anymore and a mile offshore we still only had 8-10ft of water; keep going, it’ll deepen the closer we get to the buoys. Yep, there are banks and here they change all the time and there was no hole. Yeah. A mile and a half out, 2 miles from the launch, across and uptide, it headed down to 20ft, 22ft, 25ft and then finally 30ft. Time to get on then. I got Andy anchored up then paddled back uptide, dropped my own down and released warp until I was level, 50 yards offshore from his position, Wilmy going the same distance inshore of him and down went the baits. I have a new toy, a little 5m waterproof HD camcorder reduced from eighty quid to twenty at Asda the other day. Best of all it came with a handlebar clamp that tightened down enough to fit a rod butt…I’ll show that bugger Cam I thought ; It went on and was lined up on my Fladen reel just for him ;D Well, maybe partly, I just figured it was a new and different angle that might be worth trying out; so what if it made fishing a bit more difficult…shown on my baitcaster rod because I planned to use those the next day. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHCtoiUB5qk[/youtube] Paddling out I heard a familiar voice answer the radio…then I called in, got moved to 67 and those dulcet tones rang out with officialise followed by ‘how are you mark?’ Yep, finally the proof that Mario occasionally does some work – had plague hit the coastguard?!! A quick chat and I was fishing again. Ten minutes later and the penneled black and squid rod tapped once. It took a while because the fish have run away for a while. A few more minutes passed and another tap. Nothing developed and I struck the third tap a short while after and reeled up without a fish. I checked the baits, changed for smaller pieces of squid to tip with and sent it back down to the bottom. I wound in the other rod, the one with the camera attached, rebaited and cast my spreader wishbone back down. Another ten minutes or so passed and finally my patience was rewarded with a small whiting. Just about sizeable but I wasn’t in a killing mood today and it went back alive. We were 300 metres or so inshore of the South Holm buoy, 300 or so the other side were a couple of boats, one that looked very familiar, the upturned bow and stern, blue hull and white gunwhales of Lead Us trying another mark. I wasn’t certain but figured it was Colin and sent him a text…no cod but 50-60 whiting aboard. Maybe we’d get some action ourselves then…the others were biteless. I guess we’d been anchored a couple of hours or so, I was 2 whiting in, when I looked around and saw another bank. This one was moving. It went up quite high, was wide and looked pretty thick. It rolled in swiftly, the temperature dropped and the sea picked up, the flow with it. A fog bank, 100 yards visibility at best. Andy relayed over from Wilmy, what do we do, are we going? No, sit tight, wait and see if it goes through, besides I’ve just started getting bites. Big bites. Good bites. Cod bites. I missed them all, one after another…allowing time to develop, three bites and a strike, felt the weight and then it was gone, same again five minutes later. Two decent rod-benders, either good whiting or codling, missed. We stay there half an hour, listened in as the boats decided what to do; one was going in, Colin was staying a bit longer. We sat there a bit longer, the rods weren’t twitching, the wind was constant and cold and the tide seemed stronger...and this fog was clearly staying. I called Wilmy, said to get ready to go and informed him of the plan. With no cleat on Andy’s yak I’d locked it off further back so would need to up-anchor him myself and with the fog as it was we’d need to be sticking together so… 1. I swing around and haul anchor, staying in sight and, if losing site, calling myself back into them. I did have my position logged on gps so it wasn’t too dreadful. 2. I paddle over to Andy, remove his anchor and he stays alongside while I haul. 3. Wilmy spins around and up anchors at the same time. That’s the plan…I spin around, mid-tide and start hauling, I have to be quick because I don’t want to drift out of sight and I can’t trail the warp because I need to go alongside Andy – it goes into the footwell. The anchor reaches the top and I’ve got warp crossing beneath the hull. Not great so, with me and Andy rafted I drop the anchor back down (closed) and haul it back up, winding it on this time and it goes into Andy’s hatch. I pull my Scupper along his to the end and grab the dive reel which is up against the carabiner at the rear. The weight of two yaks, the water pressure and Andy being a bit heavier have the stern down lower than desired but a quick fiddle and he’s free and paddling; I flick the warp over my forward cleat and haul the anchor up. Andy stays around, a couple of boats pass us close by, slowly (they knew we were around) and it becomes clear that Wilmy has a problem. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s6H2HEE9cg[/youtube][/ Over I go. It seems that the yak is swinging alarmingly as soon as he tries to shuttle forward – too much slack in the trolley as it has stretched and is in need of shortening. I paddle up to his stern, grab the reel and scoot backwards freeing line – I pass him the reel and tell him to release it as I pull the trolley forward and we spin. It was going so well until it went under the side cleat! So he’s concentrating on that, I’m banging on about cleats, it’s not coming forward, things are hectic, I’m not making sense and Wilmy draws his knife. A bit dramatic I thought, I wasn’t shouting that loud! Anyway, I make it clear that we don’t need to cut it and that it’s jammed and he gets the message, frees it off, we spin around and I go free and he hauls it up. The disconcerting part of course is that once you get two yaks next to each other you channel water between them and everything appears stronger, faster and more frightening than it actually is. So, here we are, three tiny little men in a big patch of water under a large blanket of fog. We’ve got a possibility here of going one way, getting a smoke and a blow, but it’s a hundred miles or so to Holland. The other is to go home which is somewhere over there. Ish. Roughly. Good points are that we are inside the shipping channel so no danger from that quarter, the two boats in visual range beforehand have now gone past and in so it’s unlikely we’ll see any more, especially as we’ll be mostly over shallow banks where most couldn’t go and that we can see or hear any that do pitch up before it becomes critical because no-one goes fast in this. The bad points are that there are two jet-skiers in the area who may still be out, and blind, all our vehicles are in the same place and the tide is going at around two knots. So, collision danger is minimal and as long as we go west we’ll hit land. Piece of cake. Which way is west? The flow and swell (what little there is) is going north to south. So we stay across it from the starboard side. The sun is to our south so we keep the lighter part of the sky to our port (occasionally we can see the sun as a disc). The fog horn is off our starboard quarter; if that changes position so must we. They’re the indicators we have…and of course once we get close we start to smell chip fat from the sea front but by then it’s less of an issue. I have my VHF and the coastguard know our start point so as long as we stay together we’re fine; batteries are full. I have my PLB so if things go bad we can get people right onto us even through fog. I have a pocket GPS with our co-ordinates too but can’t use it to find home because I didn’t mark the launch and it’s set for course to the top and has no chart loaded. So it’s back to compass and dead reckoning. 2 miles to launch point, say half an hour. West to hit land. Offset to the north to reduce tidal flow effects, add ten minutes or so to counter drop in forward speed…forty minutes or so. Off we go. It’s disconcerting because you have no idea of progress and in fact we didn’t see the shoreline or any groynes until we were almost on the beach…what we did have was memory of the depths between us and home and once we crossed the banks and got the deeper water again we knew we were inshore again…and there we were, about forty minutes later, near the shore…a bit closer and we could make out the cliffs and then the buildings. There’s the millennium beacon, the pub and to our left the church. We landed 200m north of our launch point. Sweet.