Post by dean on Aug 26, 2014 17:37:01 GMT 1
Oystercat fishing trip 24 August 2014
Tope fishing - Oxwich
Skipper: Dean Gifford (07817035735)
Crew: John Elvins
Anglers booked in:
1. Craig Barnes
2. John Bevan
With medium sized tides, and a very changeable forecast saw me leaving it till the last minute to decided what - if any trip I'd be doing this weekend. With the tides building Saturday's morning tide would be the smallest so I decided to have a go for some Tope. With four of us on board at 7am, after collecting a load of frozen mackerel from Swansea Tackle and Bait Ltd, to make chum bags for attaching to the anchor.
As we rounded Mumbles headland a porpoise jumped straight out of the water, near vertically. I've seen porpoises on hundreds of occasions but never seen one jump like that. By hugging the coast the run down to Oxwich was fine, but we could see a messy chop outside of us.
I'm a firm believer in fresh live white fish for tope, so we spent the first few hours fishing for bait fish. First off we drifted around for some mackerel which have been fairly sparse recently. A couple of drifts produced nothing and not a lot was showing on the sounder.
This wasn't too much of a problem as I had a Plan B for bait which was to anchor over a inshore wreck and get some pouting and pollack, pollack being my favourite bait. We had a reasonable breeze, and I'm really fussy about where on the wreck to fish, so it took 3 attempts before I was happy that we were where I wanted to be.
Fishing was steady here with lots and lots of ballen wrasse, sand smelt, some pollack and pouting. As wrasse were being so quick to the baits I shorten up 20ft or so to put us just in front of the lump of wreckage we were sitting over and we soon started picking up more bait sized pouting.
With the live wells reasonably well filled, I took us out back onto the mud to have a drift with baited feathers in the hope of picking up whiting - my second favourite tope bait. But, we only managed half a dozen or so mackerel on this drift. While drifting I made up the chum-bag with our frozen mackerel and attached it to the anchor.
When we arrived at the mark the sea was a tad lumpy, but nothing too bad. During the last of the ebb we were all over the shop with wind and tide competing for the boat's position. This saw us beam on for a long time which was kind-a-nice, the fresh flood saw us sitting pretty, and the bull huss came on the feed. We had them to 9lb before the wind got up and livened up the sea state.
We moved over to Langland reef where we did more general fishing. We had a good few hours here catching more bull huss on bigger baits, 8 or so reasonable black bream, a few very pretty red gurnard and 4 codling of around 40cm. We often get codling on the reef but they've been quiet recently so they were really nice to see.
We got back in around 6pm - nice day out and plenty of fish, even though we didn't get the target species TOPE.
Craig Barnes with ballen wrasse and red gurnard
John Bevan (left) and John Elvins caught these bream among others
Skipper Dean Gifford
Tope fishing - Oxwich
Skipper: Dean Gifford (07817035735)
Crew: John Elvins
Anglers booked in:
1. Craig Barnes
2. John Bevan
With medium sized tides, and a very changeable forecast saw me leaving it till the last minute to decided what - if any trip I'd be doing this weekend. With the tides building Saturday's morning tide would be the smallest so I decided to have a go for some Tope. With four of us on board at 7am, after collecting a load of frozen mackerel from Swansea Tackle and Bait Ltd, to make chum bags for attaching to the anchor.
As we rounded Mumbles headland a porpoise jumped straight out of the water, near vertically. I've seen porpoises on hundreds of occasions but never seen one jump like that. By hugging the coast the run down to Oxwich was fine, but we could see a messy chop outside of us.
I'm a firm believer in fresh live white fish for tope, so we spent the first few hours fishing for bait fish. First off we drifted around for some mackerel which have been fairly sparse recently. A couple of drifts produced nothing and not a lot was showing on the sounder.
This wasn't too much of a problem as I had a Plan B for bait which was to anchor over a inshore wreck and get some pouting and pollack, pollack being my favourite bait. We had a reasonable breeze, and I'm really fussy about where on the wreck to fish, so it took 3 attempts before I was happy that we were where I wanted to be.
Fishing was steady here with lots and lots of ballen wrasse, sand smelt, some pollack and pouting. As wrasse were being so quick to the baits I shorten up 20ft or so to put us just in front of the lump of wreckage we were sitting over and we soon started picking up more bait sized pouting.
With the live wells reasonably well filled, I took us out back onto the mud to have a drift with baited feathers in the hope of picking up whiting - my second favourite tope bait. But, we only managed half a dozen or so mackerel on this drift. While drifting I made up the chum-bag with our frozen mackerel and attached it to the anchor.
When we arrived at the mark the sea was a tad lumpy, but nothing too bad. During the last of the ebb we were all over the shop with wind and tide competing for the boat's position. This saw us beam on for a long time which was kind-a-nice, the fresh flood saw us sitting pretty, and the bull huss came on the feed. We had them to 9lb before the wind got up and livened up the sea state.
We moved over to Langland reef where we did more general fishing. We had a good few hours here catching more bull huss on bigger baits, 8 or so reasonable black bream, a few very pretty red gurnard and 4 codling of around 40cm. We often get codling on the reef but they've been quiet recently so they were really nice to see.
We got back in around 6pm - nice day out and plenty of fish, even though we didn't get the target species TOPE.
Craig Barnes with ballen wrasse and red gurnard
John Bevan (left) and John Elvins caught these bream among others
Skipper Dean Gifford