Cod and conger plus fun and games

[ChrisE]

Went out yesterday to everyone's favourite cod spot, The Needles plus a bit south. Even on a Wednesday we counted over 30 boats within a mile of each other.

 

For a change the weather was calm and the swell small, was out my mate Jim who has been commercial fishing and boat building forever. He directed me to a new mark, to me anyway, where we anchored for the ebb.

 

First chuck, rod nearly dragged out of holder by powerful fish, I'd not slackened the drag so it took a while to get the rod out of the holder and into my mitts. After 5 minutes of speculation as to the identity of the leviathan up popped a conger of 30+ lbs. Not the target species but a nice start to the day.

 

Then it was dog feeding for the next 2 hours until we noticed a mooring buoy skipping past the stern. We both remarked that this was unusual and I casually said that it looked a bit like mine except that it's attached to the rode. Oh no it wasn't.... So we were really looking forward to manually dragging up 100m of rode back into the boat when Jim hit upon the idea of using another buff on a piece of rope instead of the original. In short it worked a treat, retrieved anchor and then zoomed off 1/2 mile to pick up rogue buff and we're back in action.

 

All this excitement got us up for a move, so we moved a bit further south to a mark that I have on the plotter under the name of 2Cod, 'cos I caught 4 cod there last year in a sitting (don't ask...).

 

Anyway the mark lived up to its name and with first chuck out on dead on slack up popped a 17 1/2lber followed by a 10 about an hour later. My mate Jim was a bit disappointed with his tally of dogs and pout but we had a good laugh, especially when the third 'cod' pumped up from the deep by yours truly turned out to be a mega pout plus 2 other lines and leads.....

 

Looks like the last weather window for me for a while, I hope others get out there.

Edited November 24, 2011 by ChrisE

[great white]

Well done Chris

 

You certainly did better than we did on Sunday

 

Charlie

[niggle]

A successful day Chris

Nige

[Stuie]

Spot on Chris - great result.

I gave you a shout on Ch 6 but I suspect you were over the horizon for reception.

 

[ChrisE]

Spot on Chris - great result.

I gave you a shout on Ch 6 but I suspect you were over the horizon for reception.

Apologies, I did hear the shout but was a bit busy at the time and by the time I wasn't busy, I'd forgotten (yes, I was 60 a couple of weeks ago.....).