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Saturday
9 February 2013 –Skipper Dean Gifford's Oystercat Wreck Fishing
Trip Report. |
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The
weather subsided enough to make a weekend trip possible. Our small
party, Dean Gifford, Wayne Keepins, Luke Haywood, Carl Haywood and
John Fennel headed, headed out through the pier heads onto a grey but
flat sea. I was keen to fish a small bit of wreckage I'd passed on
the last trip for the remainder of the ebb tide. After 5mins of
charting the area we put the anchor down well up-tide of the bulk of
the wreck structure hoping to pull any fish lurking nearby out of the
iron work.
The first
fish to come aboard was a little thornback ray of 5lb. Due to the run of
the tide the ray gave a good account of its self by holding
against the run of the tide.
We
had a few dogs, whiting and pouting before a spur dog took a liking
to my live whiting bait. I was lucky to land it, having taken some
time to bring the fish on board using a 30lb fluorocarbon as we were
not expecting spurs in 45ft of water.
Soon
afterwards Carl lost another spur dog due to a dodgy clip swivel...
my fault for trying to use the last of my cheap ones. We put the bait
catching rod back out looking for some more live baits and Luke
pulled in this 2lb whiting - a bit big for bait but good to still see
there were a few bigger whiting still around.
 As
low water approached everyone switched to either live or bigger
mackerel/squid baits - Carl managed the one and only conger of the
day.
After low water, we move back inside to try and have a bash
for some dabs, but my usual dab mark had about 12 boats surrounding
it. I tried to find a bit of ground close by but after 20mins I
couldn't take fishing in amongst all them boats so got the anchor up
and headed towards another inshore wreck. We only had 4m of water on
top of the wreck so again anchored well up-tide and stuck it out here
for a couple of hours, found few good whiting and lots of pouting.
On
the way to the wreck we passed a big bull seal, I was asked what I
thought it would be feeding on, so I gave this massive lecture on how
they'd most likely be feeding on small fish and shellfish as they are
easier to digest than big fish,- less big bones you see. No sooner
had I finished my lecture when a flock of about 40 gulls ,following
the big bull, appear 40 or so yards off the port side. I got the
bin's out to see what the commotion was about, the seal had a cod
into double figures in its gob!! Every now and then the seal would
thrash the cod around in attempt to get a lump of cod. This continued
for 20mins before the tide carried them down towards the piers with
the gulls following.
Being so distracted we never found the
dabs, so I decided to move Oystercat slightly further east to a
large-steep sided hole. It was very slow here with only a few
whiting rattling the tips so we called it a day at 3:10pm. |
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