Right so today's LRF practise went so much better than I could have imagined on one hand but on the other not so much, I had a blinding day as far as sport is concerned but was having so much fun i forgot what the session was meant to be about. As you guys may know from reading my last post I am very new to this LRF or light rock fishing as it stands for, my last post covered my first ever practise session and this one will be covering my second. Now the first one was all about total length and catching as many total centimetres as I could and I gave myself a hour to do so. This mornings trip however was supposed to be a species hunt, I gave myself 3 hours to catch as many different species as i possibly could from the harbor wall. I also decided that I would make this a early morning session and the next one will be late evening just to see the differences if there are any. With that I set my alarm for 5.30am got all my kit ready and by the door ready for a quick getaway as soon as I was ready, that was it then alarm was sounding, I leaped out of bed as fresh as a daisy, kind of, got my self dressed and ran off like a child heading to the fair. Nice short 15 minute or so bus ride followed by a 10 minute early morning stroll down the high street and I was there, the only problem being that as a complete sea fishing novice I had over looked the tide. I felt though that this presented me with the perfect opportunity of having a look so what the bottom was like, in the areas I could see of course.
To be perfectly honest I have never really taken the time to sit back and admire the quay as I did this morning, I guess living so close and growing up by it I kind of took it for granted really. I had no idea that there was so much going on on the bottom with all the crabs, big and small I could see roaming around as the water slowly rose, also as it was rising the shoals of smaller fish began to move closer and closer to the edge, I had literally no idea there was so much going on down there all the time I was just walking by before. For someone like me who has never thought about doing salt water fishing before I have always looked at it as pot luck fishing, cast out a trace and some ragworm and wait type of thing. This was mainly due to the fact of I could never look past the idea of needing to cast to features and things. Everything changed for me though once I heard about this light rock and light lure style of sea fishing, it brought a element of what I kind of know from fishing for pike and perch on rivers, lakes and reservoirs. Of course as I have mentioned a few times on this blog lately I have had quite a lot of help from some great guys, if you go back through my posts you will see links to all the ways I use to contact them and ask questions. So onto the bit I guess you came to read the fishing side of things and how I got on. The picture above is of a area on the far side of the harbor so would in turn be the last area to fill back up, so to speak. With that I decided to head to to the entrance to the quay and the water here was already around six feet deep and the wall just drops vertically there and doesn't slop away like it does in this picture. I started of at a small slacker piece of water created by a small jetty type thing used by police and life boat staff to get aboard their boats, I decided to stick to what had worked for my on my first session at the beginning of the week and drop shot fish. I kept the set up exactly the same as I had done the other end of the harbor by the moorings, unfortunately I almost instantly found I was pretty much plunging into weed ever single put in, I was only set at about three inches off bottom and this clearly was not enough. I reeled in and headed to the nearest bench to tie on a new leader and set myself up at around a foot off bottom this time, things worked out great as in front of the bench I had sat on to tie my drop shot rig were 4 great big harbor tour boats moored up, this ti me looked like the perfect place to get myself back in the water so I hooked on a small pink Ecogear grass minnow and got straight to it. I think around ten minutes had past by and one of the tour guides from the company came to ask me how I was getting, after explaining to him that my level of knowledge of salt water fishing was as low as the tide and he had laughed at me for a second or two he gave me a few tips that work well for him. He told me that roughly have a hour later I would start to see all the small bait fish rising to the surface followed by lots of bubbles, he informed me this would be the Bass and sure enough thirty minutes passed by and there they were I could see the small fish and I could see the Bass chasing them. At this point though my mind was still on task I had to catch as many species of fish as I could in the next few hours, it was maybe twenty minutes later by now and another guy had came by and asked me how I was getting on and what I was fishing for, so once again I explained to him my plan for the day and he gave me some more tips by this time I felt like a expert, or something along those lines. After he had left I changed from the grass minnow to the Isome in the red color, with in around 5 minutes of making the change I was into a fish, after a short battle with the hardest fighting fish for its size I finally swung in my first ever Wrasse.
After having landed species number one and returned it to the water safely I decided to have a go for some of the Bass next I took off the Isome and put on a small eel/worm shaped Fladen LRF lure in a white color to try and imitate the small bait fish they were chasing, I waited until the shoal grouped up again as they had been doing the whole time I had been standing there, and then flicked my drop shot between them. I don't think the lure could have fallen more than two feet through the water before I felt a knock and was into a fish, Once again although hopefully not the biggest Bass I will ever catch it put up a very good scrap for its size and tried taking me around the steps next to me and under the boat in front of me. This time I decided instead of risking loosing the fish lifting it out I would net the fish as I wasn't sure what my hook hold was like as I didn't feel I had set the hook as best as I could have done.
By this point I really was on cloud nine and could not have been happier with how my session was going. I decided because of how quickly I had gotten my bite on this lure to stick with it for a few more cast however nothing else was to show any interest, I then changed over to one of my Fladen LRF creature baits, I gave this around five minutes but again not even a nibble, at this point I decided to see if there was anyone at home at all in this swim and went back to using some Isome but in the the light sandy looking color this time. Again I gave this around five minute but once again not even a sniff of action. I'm not sure weather playing the two fish in the tight area of water had spooked all the other fish away or weather I was doing something wrong at this point so I decided to move down a bit. There was a small blue building around ten to fifteenth yards down, just behind the hut was a small ledge and a wooden beam that extended down into the water, I decided to check it for snags by running my 4 meter landing net handle down it. After determining it was clear other than the odd lump of sea weed clinging to it I felt that a cast or two here would be a good idea because if I was a fish that was planning a ambush this was the kind of place I would be sitting. After having two more Wrasse in three put ins I was more than happy that it was the right call to move and that it wasn't necessarily something I was doing wrong in the last swim. This however turned out to be the point the 'practise' ended and the Wrasse fishing began, I was having so much fun catching these small hard fighting fish, especially on such light gear that I forgot what I was there to do.
In all honesty I could not call today's session anything other than a success! I went there having caught nothing but a lot of Blenny before today, I have in total spent four and a half hours sea fishing and have already managed nineteen fish, ok granted I have only caught three different species and even though today's trip was supposed to be about catching as many species as possible and I only managed two, in the grand scheme of things I personally think I am doing quite well and am heading back down tomorrow morning for another species hunt, this time I am going to start at the far side and work my was in with the tide, One thing I didn't think about doing was heading to where I know I could have gotten a quick species in the form of a Blenny, which was a huge mistake, on the plus side though that is what practise is about and I'm very glad I made the mistake today and not when it counted. I feel a lot more confident in my drop shot fishing now and am sure that confidence can only grow with time. One quick last thing to add, I was stopped today by some other guys that were about to start fishing as I was leaving, they asked me what my brand my hat was as they really liked it, I was more than happy to share the information on how and where to get one and some of the many other awesome products made by Fin and Tide. This is not a plug by a team member or a sponsored one of they're anglers because both of these I am not, I just like to share things with people that I think are good and could maybe benefit them. I have seen a lot of clothing products made by fishing brands that are awful, so when I found these on twitter and noticed the quality you get for the price myself nor you can loose! Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed, for the guys that I know have told me they like my blog because its short and sweet I'm sorry this one is longer but I really did genuinely have a lot of fun today and wanted to share it all. Oh and by the way todays total was eight Wrasse and a Bass.
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