Well of course I ain’t never caught a rabbit, they don’t swim. (Must ask Colin or Brian for some marks for them!) Anyway, Leg 2 of the species tournament finished at midnight and my plans to go out on the water and then be straight into leg 3 were scuppered by a last minute plea to cover a night shift…after I’d just had a large coffee. You can imagine me trying to get to sleep can’t you? Best not, it wasn’t pretty. Oh, it was also 25 degrees at the time and there were two parties going on at my end of the street. Still, my little angels were mostly well behaved and all were tucked away by 4am…so Leg 3 was merely postponed.
I’d also blanked when I’d taken Abigail with me to try a farm pond (about an acre). However, without a single bite she soon got bored so we had ice cream and came home via the river where I couldn’t even tempt a roach from the bank in the 26 degrees.
08:20 “Right sod you then, I’m off. Bye”
08:30 Post Office #1. Closed
08:40 Home
08:50 Car
09:00 Post Office – closed and long queues already
09:15 Car Park
09:30 on the sea.
09:40 First bait down, unwashed loligo squid, whole on a 4/0 pennel. Well, I say whole, it sort of was and wasn’t. I pull the head and guts out of the mantel, run the bottom hook down through the mantel, nick the top hook through the top, the bottom hook then passes through both eyes and the tentacles lie one side, guts the other and loads of scent comes out. I was being posh today though, so many pups about the other day that I used some elastic to whip it all on. Two rods, two baits, two casts and wait…
Hmm. A bit like the south coast here today. Warm, bright, hardly any tidal flow…easy-peasy. Well, conditions-wise. Still have that murky brown soup to fish in and about half a dozen species to pick from. Today’s choice were, in order of likelihood, desire and hope: Smoothound, Dogfish, Thornback Ray, Whiting. I didn’t really want the latter but I knew that there were one or two pin whiting showing now and a point and a livebait would be handy. I was also hopeful of a Common Smoothound, not only the Starry Smoothounds we see make up almost all of the catch here. Likely were the first two, ray? Well, slim chance though I picked one up a couple of days ago while catching hounds. We’d see.
Nothing at first. Probably down to the lack of flow. Then some tiny taps. Tiny they were. Nothing connecting on the strike. Not crabs, maybe small flatties or something? The lack of flow wasn’t holding the leads tight though so the strikes weren’t really all that firm. Could do with maybe shortening the running link on the trace too. But no, eventually old greedy guts bit off way more than he could chew
I had another couple that I managed to connect with eventually…and then the rod arched over a lot more dramatically and…
Only around 3lb but a decent pull all the same. It went back strongly with only some of my forearm scraped off. Next up was my darling little pancakes, a sweet doggy pup!
Back it went.
Then another Three-pound-hound…a few decent doggies with big fat bellies, lots more missed nibbles and then onto slack and only one dog managed…the tide took around an hour to turn, the wind was chilling me (it was around 15-20mph) and the sun was shining brightly behind the grey clouds. But I stuck it out, perhaps the start of the flood would see me pick some more fish up?
It did. A couple of dogs and another small smoothound. By the time the bites dropped right off and the flow picked right up I’d made the decision to call ti a day; Two points to be going on with, must try harder!
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