Good idea at the time

Opportunities to go fishing this month have unfortunately been few and far between. At the last minute I decided to drive down to D&G on Friday night and left home about 9pm. The forecast for Saturday looked ok, the tides weren’t great but I thought I might take a punt on catching a few Bass at dawn and have a look on the reefs for them later in the morning. My alarm was set for 3am and on the back of 2 hours restless sleep in the car I poured myself a coffee and slipped the yak into the water before sun up.

These days I don’t see too many sunsets or sunrises on the coast. There is always something special about this time of the day on the water, today was no different. I soon forgot about the miserable nights kip in the car and I started to pick up a few small Pollack trolling to the area I intended to target two miles along the shore.

 

A true predator’s eye, its body will grow into it at some point….

                           
Being high tide I spent the first hour and half or so casting to the shore and working my way along it with soft plastics and surfaces lures. It was really quite, no signs of fish at all and I felt I should be somewhere else. The gannets were having their breakfast two hundred yards offshore so I hit the pedals and took my lead from them as to where to try next. There was some rough ground in about 20ft of water that was solidly marked with baitfish and some other returns on the finder that looked interesting. Given that the sun was well up and being calm with not much tide I decided that if there were Bass around they might be where the bait was. I ended up targeting these areas of rough ground maybe a bit earlier that I intended to. The action was pretty relentless, small Pollack but good fun. As I worked my way through about 15 fish I was hoping that the next bump would be a Bass. Given the prey that was around by comparison to shoreline area, in these conditions, that’s where I expected them to be. They had different ideas and as the sun got higher and the tide dropped the bait and the fish disappeared altogether. It was time for a troll to cover more ground and find some new reefs.

A surprise Grey Gurnard decided it fancied the J13 trolled about 12ft down.

                   
This was pretty much the story for the rest of my session. If I found some baitfish I would sure enough find some Pollack but the Bass proved elusive. My preferred method was using an xlayer on a 10g head jumping and tapping this along the bottom.

About 1pm I headed back to launch site , the 400 yard portage back to car looked no fun at all. The lack of sleep, heat, sun, miles peddled  and probably dehydration kicked in and I was grateful for some assistance from two lads from Yorkshire as they pitched in to get my rig back to the car. They said I was keen, I said it seemed like a good idea at the time, not so much now….