Cornwall - 30th July 2011

I just spent a lovely weekend down in Cornwall but with great weather family duties were the order of the day although I did manage to sneak out early Saturday morning to a mark on the Lizard for a couple of hours.

I arrived just as it was getting light, clipped on my new patchinko (see below post) and chucked it out. This plug really flies for such a light lure, I was useing my ESG 3-23g rod, not the best for casting hard plastic but with a light NW behind me it went a surprisingly good distance. Second cast, and just started working the lure when the rod bent round and soon had this schooly on the beach....(sorry about these early morning photos, my camera's flash has broken, time for new camera soon I think).

Its always nice to get off the mark quickly on a session (and on a new lure) and the next cast got some interest but no firm takes. Then for some unfathomable reason, I decided to move on from the beach and onto the rocks a few hundred yards to right (lesson learnt, dont move away from the fish!!). Anyway onto the rocks and no further activity for an hour or so before I hooked into what I thought was a decent fish (on a sardine Tide Minnow) but turned out to be another schooly foul hooked in the tail, they really go when they are hooked like that! This one made a cunning escape though, I popped it into a small rock pool while I dug out the camera and comtemplated an artistic "in water" shot, when a wave surged in and flooded the pool and off he went... Then a couple of casts later lost another small fish and that was it, and too soon it was time to pack up a resume family life.

Still, as ever it was great to fish the stunning Cornish coastline and with a nice forecast this week, may try and sneak out Tuesday evening for a quick sess somewhere....

New shineys part II

My other lures on order turned up today, a zonk getaride in hot shad and patchinko 100 in silver lemon.

Great looking lures both of them. There are quite a lot of lures appearing in my boxes with this chartruse colour in them now, I've done pretty well on lures with this color in the past and although i've never got on with the larger patchinko I have really high hopes for this little fella!

I've also reached my self inposed limit of around 50 plugs now, I try not to keep any more than that at any one time as I feel I really should be able to cover all bases with four boxes full (in reality I could quite happily survive with around 10!), so its time to sell off a few and make some more room.

I'm looking forward to the weekend, there's a good weather forecast and I'm heading down to cornwall to see the folks so hopefully there'll be a nice catch report to file next week......

New shineys!

I have to admit to being a bit of magpie when it comes to lures (I'm not alone in this!) so each pay day sees more stuff being added! I've got a bit of a thing for smaller lures at the moment, so I'm stocking up on these and my latest purchases arrived today, from top to bottom we have:

Daiwa Saltiga Minnow - 12cm in Blue/Black/Gold
Daiwa Saltiga Minnow - 12cm in Red/Gold
IMA Komomo II in Bora

I love the Saltiga minnows in 14cm but this is the first time i've bought the smaller ones. I've no doubt however these will prove to be just as effective and hopefull cast just as well as their bigger brothers. They're really good value to at around £12 each and nice to see such a good finish on sub £20 lures.

The Komomo II is already a classic lure, these run really shallow (on the surface with the tip up) and work with a dead slow retrive so they give a few different options and add something different to an anglers armoury than most sub surface lures... I've not tried this colour before but as ever with IMA the finish looks amazing...more stuff in the post to come!

Five'fer - 23rd July 2011

Planned an early start to Dorset this morning, left the house at 2:45 and arived at my mark with light just beginning to break. I started off with a feed shallow and had fish bump it on my first three casts but no solid takes. There was quite a bit of surface activity going on though so I clipped on a "Z Claw" in  blue mackerel and chucked it out.
First cast and a couple of spashes at it before a solid take and quickly had bass number one on the rocks....15 minutes later and a repeat performance, and then a third on the next cast. It was still only just getting light now as the pic below shows

Carried on for another half an hour but by now the tide had picked up, it does this over low on this mark and for an hour either side it really belts through, and i've noticed the fish go off at this point. So I moved on 100 yards or so, where the rip is a little further out working on the theory the fish may be in slack water inside. First cast here and in again, with the best fish of the day, around 2.5lb.

By now the sun was up and with 4 fish I chilled out for half an hour, watching the gannets diving a few hundred yards off and smoking a fag or two.

Time for change now so I started with the SP's, flicking an unweighted "Do Live Stick" into the tide and letting it swing around before twitching it back. These things are amazing, they flutter as they sink slowly then really dart around with the slightest twitch. I missed a couple of hits on this before landing another fish around 1.5lbs.

With the tide starting to flood and with the sun getting higher the fish switched off and that was that for the session...not exactly a red letter day but maybe a slight shade of pink by my standards..even if the fish were on the small side.

Time & tide......

This year I've been keeping a record of every bass I catch, including the time of day, state of tide and the day of cycle within the moon phase, whilst it's early days and I hardly have extensive catch data, some early patterns are beginning to emerge....

Now if I were to ask you to picture your perfect mark, with perfect conditions and perfect tides, I'd guess there is a good chance that you'd be picturing a shallow rock mark, with a flooding tides starting to creep in and fill the gullys, with the bass following in close behind. I know that's what I'd think of.
However, for me a least the truth is starting to look a little different. The graph below shows the state of tide when I have caught all my lure caught fish.

This shows, that my bass are all coming over the HW period, and on the ebb tides down to low. I think this is statistically significant as I spend at least 50% of my time fishing the flood, so I can't just put it down to when I fish.
This is definately food for thought, and showing me the value of keeping the data I do. I know now to try something different (or somewhere different!) on the flood tides.......

A sunday afternoon quickie - 10th July 2011

Went down to Dorset yesterday eve, the plan was to fish Chesil, so I stopped off at Abbottsbury to check out the conditions and found the water full of weed, I thought this may be the case so plan B was the Portland area...45 minutes (at around 6pm) later I arrived at my chosen spot.

It was bright sunny evening with a fresh SW wind. The tide was ebbing away with LW around due around 8pm

I started off with a mackerel (1st cast I think) and then had two small bass pretty quickly, both on Feed Shallows. Over the course of the next hour I then managed to lose another three with one being half decent. This is starting to frustrate me now, over the last year I must have lost nearly 50% of fish that I have hooked, I'm really not sure if my Rod Bar is not a little too stiff and is the cause of some of this (it's obviously not bad angling!) so it's maybe time to consider something just a little softer.