snatcher
Well-known member
The weather gods had again conspired to spoil the annual Solway Sharkatag Competition with the Saturday and Sunday fishing being cancelled for safety reasons. My mate Tom said that if we launched at the crack of dawn on the Friday we should get a few hours fishing before being forced to come back in.
I arrived at Toms caravan on the Sands of Luce Park and we launched off the beach in front of the boat ramp at about 05.30am. Tope were to be be the main quarry for this tagging competition so fresh mackerel bait had to be caught first. We tried a couple of marks off Sandhead with no luck so headed a bit deeper out towards Ardwell bouy. Here we started picking up mackerel using small lures. Once we had about 40 fish we mashed up a few into the rubby-dubby bag and tied this onto the anchor chain.
I was just using the one rod for the tope but Tom decided to use a second rod. He drifted out the second bait to about 50/60 yds off the boat using a biodegradable balloon which was tied to his 4oz lead with a short length of 2lb breaking strain mono. A sharp tug on the line and the balloon broke free.
Fairly quickly the dogfish turned up and started chewing our whole mackerel baits. Tom got a couple of doggies out and I just managed the one. Most of the time they were not hooked and simply held on till they got to the surface before letting go. During this period we both had a dropped tope run each.
I then managed to hook a small thornback ray which we tagged as part of the Sharkatag programme. You can see the yellow tag in its wing on this photo.
Due to bit of careless handling by myself I managed to get 12 of its spines into my hand !!
The next bit of excitement was me hooking into a decent sized bull huss. Unfortunately it decided to bite through the thick mono trace at the surface. Oh well,thats fishing for you.
By now we had been out for 5 hours and the wind was strengthening all the time. We decided to call it a day at this point. As the fishing went it had been poor but the craic was great as usual.
On bringing up my mackerel bait I found that I had caught myself a new species - a Luce Bay Buckie. Was not too sure how to cook them so back it went.
John
I arrived at Toms caravan on the Sands of Luce Park and we launched off the beach in front of the boat ramp at about 05.30am. Tope were to be be the main quarry for this tagging competition so fresh mackerel bait had to be caught first. We tried a couple of marks off Sandhead with no luck so headed a bit deeper out towards Ardwell bouy. Here we started picking up mackerel using small lures. Once we had about 40 fish we mashed up a few into the rubby-dubby bag and tied this onto the anchor chain.
I was just using the one rod for the tope but Tom decided to use a second rod. He drifted out the second bait to about 50/60 yds off the boat using a biodegradable balloon which was tied to his 4oz lead with a short length of 2lb breaking strain mono. A sharp tug on the line and the balloon broke free.
Fairly quickly the dogfish turned up and started chewing our whole mackerel baits. Tom got a couple of doggies out and I just managed the one. Most of the time they were not hooked and simply held on till they got to the surface before letting go. During this period we both had a dropped tope run each.
I then managed to hook a small thornback ray which we tagged as part of the Sharkatag programme. You can see the yellow tag in its wing on this photo.
Due to bit of careless handling by myself I managed to get 12 of its spines into my hand !!
The next bit of excitement was me hooking into a decent sized bull huss. Unfortunately it decided to bite through the thick mono trace at the surface. Oh well,thats fishing for you.
By now we had been out for 5 hours and the wind was strengthening all the time. We decided to call it a day at this point. As the fishing went it had been poor but the craic was great as usual.
On bringing up my mackerel bait I found that I had caught myself a new species - a Luce Bay Buckie. Was not too sure how to cook them so back it went.
John
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