First Night. 09/12/09

One of my pleasures in kayak fishing is in introducing ‘further options’ to others, be it getting them on a yak for the first time or trying out different kit but lately, with circumstances dictating darkness constituting a large part of my available fishing time (morning and evening sessions) there is also that option and the latest victims to be persuaded out onto the sea at night were Blunderbust and Norfolkboy, both of whom are already competent yakkers and have the requisite kit but hadn’t yet had the opportunity arise...

...until last night. We arranged to meet up at 7:30pm at Beach Road, Hopton and I looked like I would be there around that time when I left my house...then it started. The bridge was up! Detour, I turned around and set off for the crossing at Oulton Broad, arriving in time for the level crossing barriers to be closed for the trains to come through...and of course this results in being stuck behind somebody slow. Arriving at Beach Road just behind Steve (coming to see us off) I was not overly surprised to see it blocked with vehicles – a 12.5lb’er had been caught from the beach the night before according to the grapevine and so everyone was down to chase a fish that had already been removed ;) So back up to the top and into the layby I went before unloading and getting kitted up, finally getting to the others about half an hour later than planned.

Down we went and launched into a 6 inch dumping surf ;D lovely stuff. The tide was ebbing still, a neap, and so we headed north before dropping anchor reasonably close to each other and set there under a clear, moonlit sky. I drew first blood after ten minutes with a decent whiting and then heard the call from Norfolkboy (Ian) that he had a cod on – and then in! Brilliant stuff! I continued, meanwhile, with the whiting and was gratified to hear Blunderbust (Jimmy) get one too; none of us had blanked.

The sea was calm, the wind slight and the swell small so it was the perfect night to be sitting offshore and a vast improvement over the previous night when I’d sat alone in a 20mph southerly...lumpy and cold! That had earned me a decent pout and nothing else so at least I’d beaten things tonight. Come low water slack the bites died off. It seemed to take an age for the current (and the yaks) to actually swing right around and by the time it started to run again it was getting late and so we up-anchored and headed in to a nice, easy beaching.



Somehow I think Ian and Jimmy will be out again on another evening in the not too distant future! After all, this is normal for Norfolk: