4th July - Holiday update

What has happened to our summer? I feeling pretty cheated now and getting really fed up of constant strong SW winds and endless rain!

I'm into the 2nd week of my holiday now, and with the weather being so poor its put a bit of a dampner on the fishing side of things but I've made it out a couple of times and found the odd fish, nothing to shout about though and it continues to be hard going.

Off to Cornwall on Friday for the Cornish Lure Festival, the forecast is OKish at the moment so hopefully it'll be a nice weekend with plenty of good fish caught (not least by me!).

Update 6th June...hard going

I’ve had three trips out in the last week and I have to say it’s been pretty tough going, last weekend I fished the west side of Portland for the first time. Access to this area is not for the faint hearted (or unfit) and once down on the rocks the sheer size of the boulders makes moving around and finding decent fishing platforms pretty tricky. This is certainly an area I will be revisiting though, as I’m sure it has good potential, particularly as a HW mark but I wont be going back until I have some rubber soled boots as the hike down is pretty hairy in felt soles!

On the day though fishing was slow, there were a few fish around as I had a few follows and plucks but they seemed quite tentative. I eventually hooked a small fish that came off in close and I gave up at sundown as I didn’t fancy negotiating the path back up in the dark.

This weekend and bank holiday I took advantage of the time off to get a couple of trips in to my more regular haunt, Friday was bassless but I had a few Pollack and wrasse to show then on Monday I fished for 5 hours and into darkness before eventually snagging a small bass on a Sammy. So that’s my first fish off the top for the year and my first on a Sammy which is already my favourite topwater lure now.

I’ve not just been fishing though, I’ve also spent a bit of money in the last week on a few bits and bobs, including:

Costa Del Mar glasses - £150 is A LOT of money to spend on a pair of fishing shades so are they worth it? I’m not sure really, the lenses are great (I bought amber ones), colours contrast amazingly and they make fish spotting easier, but given I am not really sight fishing the overall benefit is limited so in short, I’m glad I have them, I like them but if I lost them tomorrow I’d probably revert back to normal cheaper polarized shades (like my Sainsbury’s ones I was wearing before).

Snowbee sling bag – Brilliant, why did I not get one sooner?

Scierra C4 waders – Comfy and don’t leak, that’s a good start but lets see how long they last before I pass judgement!

So the overall “bass to cash” ratio of the last week puts me definitely back in the category of all the gear no idea but with two weeks off looming at the end of the month culminating in the Cornish Lure Festival I’m looking forward to putting that right!

Dorset 18th May

Has it really been two months since my last post? Well work and weather had pretty much put pay to all my efforts to get out over the last couple of months, except one aborted trip which turned into a “recce” of a new area rather than a serious trip. To be honest though I don’t think I missed much as the reports from all areas suggested the fishing has been slow to get going so far this spring.

Still, over the last week or so, the weather, the fishing appear to have dramatically improved, so with a well earned day off I packed my gear and headed down to Dorset.  Conditions on arrival looked good, with just the faintest of tinges to the water clarity. The tides were less promising however as I would be fishing over high and the first couple of hours down, never the best state of tide for this mark but nevertheless I started off full on confidence and pleased to be out fishing. 

After half an hour of no interest though, my mind started to wander so I switched from the hard’s to an xlayer with a view to bagging a wrasse and at least avoiding a blank. I had a couple of casts with a few tentative plucks before a decent take which I stuck into and the rod hooped over. I always have the drag tightened right up when HRF’ing but this fish took a good 10 yards against this drag in its’ first run and I soon realised it was no wrasse but nice bass. A couple of minutes later and this was on the shore coming in at 59cm and around 5lb….great result and that was me well pleased. 

No more fish showed to this method though so back on the hard’s (a mullet feed shallow to be precise) and in a flurry of activity I landed two small fish, lost another and missed a couple of takes before it went quiet again. Then an hour so later just as I was thinking of packing up I tried a few casts with a Savagear Sandeel and quickly had two more fish to around 2.5lbs. 

So overall a cracking session and one that gets my season underway properly…. I’m really looking forward to the next few months now with work easing off and the house chores done I should be able to get out much more often than of late!

24th March - Dorset blank

Just a quick update on progress, I've finished the rebuild of my Tenryu so I took for a test drive down to Dorset on Saturday afternoon. It was an absolutely beautiful day, more June like than mid March but no bass wanted to play ball.

Still it was nice to give the rod a workout, or more truthfully the rod gave me a workout, its an absolute beast! It shows hows lure tackle has progressed over the last few years, when this rod came became available in the UK it was being touted as the best lure rod around, but now after a couple of years of using 8ft fairy wands, this felt really long and heavy. Still it will chuck a lure a long way so useful for those days when conditions are really bad (or good, if you're a bass!).

I'm pretty happy with the build though, it was interesting to do and although far from perfect I learnt a lot and reckon I could do a really top job next time so I think I'll buy myself another "project" at some point. There's a few pics of the finished job below.

No fishing for a couple of weeks due to kids birthdays etc, so by the time I get our again water temp should be back up to 10 degrees and the bass should back properly so hopefully no more blanks to report!

10th March - The season starts here!

Well with a lovely spring day forecast, I decided to forego the plaice fishing and as normal, went for the lures instead, so a trip down to Dorset was in order. It really was a gorgeous day, I love the first trip of spring and feeling the suns warmth again after winter. Summers on its way and its all good from here on in! Anyway I went for my usual spot to start the season as timing of the big spring tide was perfect for here. I arrived about three hours before low, just as the flow was picking up.

Three hours later I got my first of the season, not a monster but that's me off and running. Last year I really struggled early season so it was nice to get the first one under my belt. Taken on one of last years favorites...the komomo II in Joker FP.

The rod build is coming on, I've nearly finished varnishing the blank now. This has been a bit of a faff as I've tried a couple of techniques. I think a rod turner would really help but without one of these its been tricky to get a decent finish, but after a couple of experiments I think I've got there. A few evenings on the rings this week and it should be finished for next weekend...hopefully I'll get out to give it a bash.

W'gwan....rod building!

Well it’s been a while…but my two month winter break is coming towards its end and I think the first lure trip of the “season” is just around the corner. Water temps are on the way up and I’ve seen reports of bass being caught pretty much all the way through the winter so it definitely worth a try now.

 Not many new additions have been added to the lure box over the winter as I’m sticking with my principles of keeping the numbers of lures I own to manageable levels (a deliberately vague description to still allow for those impulse buys though!).

One nice new one however, which I’m looking forward to using is this Feed Shallow 128 in a white/pearl colour. I love pearl lures and don’t own many so this was a welcome addition to the armoury.

There has been 1 major addition as well, a Tenryu Red Dragon Express, I swapped this for my old 8ft Rod Bar which had been usurped by an 8ft Branzino and so was unlikely to get much use.

I was after a longer rod for those days when casting distance is a bit more important and I think the RDE (which was one of the first Tenryu’s available over here and helped spark the “red rod” boom), will be just the ticket. The rod was pretty well used when I got, with the blank being touched up here and there with red paint. My original plan was to have the rod professionally rebuilt, however with my preferred builder being a bit snowed under it was going to be a three month wait. That’s just too long for a man of my impatience so I have decided to embark upon a bit of project and rebuilt it myself. I’ve replaced a couple of rings in the past but rebuilding a complete rod is a first for me so it could be a bit of challenge.

I’ve made a start, the first job is to remove the rings and strip away the red paint and give the rod a new identity! It’s slow going but coming away fairly easily and so far I have not trashed the blank! I did think about using a paint stripper to do this but was unsure if this would damage the blank so I decided to err on the side of caution and am using a sharp modelling knife.

At this stage I am not going to replace the reel fitting or foam grips. I really like the look of the Matagi range of fittings and would love to kit it out with those but mainly because I can’t quite figure out their website and am again because I am too impatient to wait for delivery from Japan I’m leaving this for now…I can always go back to it later.

I’ve ordered rings, whippings and varnishes though. Varnishing the blank neatly could be tricky but I’ve read a few tips on line and have a plan. I’ll take some photos of the build process as I go through it but for now, this is progress to date.

Hopefully the blog will see some more frequent action again now, I never did make it out for those winter cod and the fishing in the Bristol Channel has died right off so that’s that until next autumn. There’s always talk of a spring run but unless you can be bothered to get hold of peelers (which I can’t!) it never amounts to much. There are reports of plenty of plaice from Chesil though so I might just sneak one of those out before getting the lures wet again…we’ll see.

Happy New Year and off to a good start! - 8th January

I had planned to go cod fishing today, I had bought the bait, sorted out the gear and re-spooled my multipliers, tide looked good and the local fishing has been brilliant, with lots of cod in the 5-8lb range coming out, game on.

But with the first break in the weather and an easing wind for what feels like weeks, at the last minuite I decided I couldn't resist the opportunity for some clean water and a spot of winter plugging, so the bait stayed in the freezer and I headed to Dorset instead.

The water temperature is still at 10 degrees and I'd seen reports of quite a few fish recently, so I was quietly optimistic. On the downside I was heading to a mark that fished better on the ebb and I was going to arrive around low water.

Anyway, onto the mark and conditions looked good, the water had just a hint of colour and a little movement. Confidence wains quickly in January though and after 20 minutes or so I was just starting to think about those cod when bang...fish on. A short fight and this one safely landed, taken on a Daiwa Shoreline in Chart/rainbow (a great little lure this, runs really shallow like a feed shallow but casts a little better).

Now I've fished this area a lot in summer, and over the low water period there is normally a lot of weed around which limits the areas you can effectively fish, but whether it was the recent storms or just a winter thing I don't know but most of the kelp had gone which really opened up where you could cast here and about an hour after low I was working the lure across a boulder reef that would previously been "out of bounds" when this fish hit, taken on a mullet feed shallow.

Confidence was sky high now and two more fish followed, both really wanting the feed shallow, the last one putting up a really good fight for it's size.

So I packed up around 3pm, all in all a great session, firstly because any lure caught bass in January is to be welcomed but also because it was nice to catch 4 fish on the flood on a mark I had previously put down as an ebb tide only venue.

The only downside was the presence of a small boat gillnetting, I watched it set one about 50 yards uptide from me and another further down and on the walk back to my car I watched checking another couple. A couple of weeks of this sort of activity could have a real negative effect on the local stocks :-(