It’s been a slow start to the year, normally the early season is my favourite time and normally most productive… Sea temps where good early on but took a while to get upto 12 which can happen in a couple weeks with a heatwave. Instead the temps stayed down and it took a month to reach this.
2015 was a funny year, I started slow and focused my time on my work. I didn’t want to put as much time into night sessions as I did the year before as it was just to grueling and planned to get maximum usage out of the boat in the day time instead to hopefully get me my fishing fix.
43 miles of coast line, 8 metres of tide, an angle from any wind, headlands and surf beaches and lots of reefs. Jersey has it all and we couldn’t wait to explore and see what it had to offer. After the Cornish lure festival this year me and Tim where keen to see if we could do another. As we approached the channel islands via the ferry from Poole we couldn’t help but get excited.
I’ve just realised it’s been a while since I did my last blog post! Maybe I just needed to recover after the last… So how important is distance? It’s never really been a question for me. Nearly all the fish I ever caught where close in. Don’t get me wrong the fish may have followed from deep etc.. but I rarely hooked a fish at full casting range. I did try a 9’6 rod once to experiment but I really didn’t get on with it. Now I’m starting to re-think.
The Cornwall Lure festival was something I was really looking forward to this year. I was a bit slow to buying the tickets due to money constraints but finally got it done and it was game on. This year I did go a little mental and me and Tim decided to head down to Cornwall a couple days before to give us some time to try and find some fish before the comp started. Continue reading
Last weekend saw some slight offshore winds and things looked feasible to get out on the SIB. We certainly haven’t seen many days recently where this would be possible but along our part of the coast there is nearly always somewhere you can find the wind off your back and this can certainly give an opportunity to get slightly offshore. The main reason behind getting the SIB was to improve our chances of fishing during the daytime or when the conditions didn’t really take our fancy from the shore and it’s also a huge new learning curve for me and getting any sort of result from these sessions is always pleasing.
Two or three weeks ago the cold of winter seemed like a distant haunt. The sun was beaming down and we hit 24 degrees at the peak of the day! It felt good real good! After spending the winter working outside it gave me a new lease of life. Soon after a my first session on the rocks was due. It was mid April and I often get my first fish of the season around this time. Conditions weren’t ideal but we still managed 5 fish between us and things looked good.
A very delayed report of a great days Piking with Neil on a local water. It was January and it had really started to get cold. On this day we where really feeling it. It was overcast and not a tiny bit of sunshine was shining through to warm us up. Neil mentioned he preferred the overcast days for for Pike just as we would for Bass. To be honest on these waters I haven’t noticed a difference and we normally only ever see a couple fish whether its sunny or cloudy, high or low pressure but it raised our enthusiasm and we felt confident.
Despite having the worst year of my life, on the fishing side it was by far my best! Amongst the winter storms we managed to find some clear water and the target was to hopefully nail a few Wrasse. There certainly wasn’t a lot of fish but I did manage my PB Wrasse at 50cm, I took the fish on a sunny day in the middle of January on an AYU 4inch Xlayer mounted on 10gm Weedless jighead.
lurethatfish 