Adam F

Thanks for posting up the report and pics Ian - I don’t seem to be able to find much time anymore to be on here! Anyway it’s good to be back, good to be back fishing after a year off and exciting to have a new toy to play with. JV was great and suited our needs at the time but a floating caravan / fishing boat isn’t needed anymore and the Cheetah is a pure hardcore fast offshore fishing weapon. I really need to learn that when I think ‘ that needs a few weekends work’ it’s usually 6 months! See you all out on the water soon. Adam

Great to be back out for our regular Tues eve trips!

Thanks Gents. Even managed a few hours working on the re-fit on my birthday. Yes, as Rob said, the classic 'only needs a few jobs' has turned into 4 months of every spare leisure hour. Still she will be Franklin standard when finished - hope to launch mid April. I'll see if I can get around to a mini write up on here... but keen to get back fishing after a year off.

Garmin GPSMap 7015 x 2 and GSD24 Black box Transciever. £900 each for the 15” touch screens and £200 for the GSD24 or near offer. All in as new condition.

Wishing you well Trev - best of luck with the new one!

Well done chaps - enjoy the next few days and keep the reports coming. Nice Brill Steve!

Have a great time gents - bloody gutted I'm not able to come - it's been 4 years since my last trip. I get my 2nd jab tomorrow - so too late. I look forward to hearing the daily catch updates....

JV has a 400L tank so enough to get over fish and get back for a 2/3 day trip. Add in a few Jerry cans for good measure. Id only took to do it this way on an exceptional forecast I might add!

We’ve been down today on a 1.2m tide and had up to 2.6 knots tide so pretty much ideal. I wouldn’t want more than that. We we’re chatting onboard today about the possibility of going to Alderney and no going ashore just staying onboard and being self sufficient for a couple of days?

Yes Weymouth is a great plan B - less of a window needed, stay onboard and still some great fishing options. That will be the plan for JV

Might be worth looking at accommodation now - you can imagine their being quite an influx after lock-down easing?....

Sunset over the bay

The Blue Boys are back....

I'll need to book time off work so are we saying 3rd July onward for a trip? I'll book the week off and go when / if a 3 day window allows? It's been years since we did a proper PBSBAC convoy over to Alderney so would be good to get a few boats together - it's the furthest most of us will get this year for a holiday!

Team JV are keen to come over, we’ve not been for 3 years. As weekends start to book up would it be an idea to look at dates and tides?

Tigerfish - Steve, TBA Fisheagle subject to weather. Crew TBA. Flat White, Dan +? Madness - Dean - Martin Serenity -Tony + 1 ( any volunteers?) JV - Adam - Ian - Rob - Alun tbc

With a warm and settled evening forecast On Tues, I took Rob and a friend Pete done to Barton to fish all night for sole. Conditions were perfect - good sized tide, calm, slightly overcast and warm. We settled in at 8pm for the last 2 hours of the flood as it got dark. We had some cracking worm baits.... Pete struck early with a decent 35cm sole, and I was quickly into a little Smoothound. But that was pretty much it. The slack arrived for an hour and we swung around into the ebb. With hope raised again as Pete added another 28cm sole to the bag and another smoothound. After that it was hours on end of nothing at all. We called it a night at 1am and turned in for a few hours kip at anchor. We tried for an hour at first light on the start of the flood but nothing. Steamed back to Poole and we’re tied up ready for a day at work by 7am. A lot of effort for meagre returns. I think I’ll give Southbourne a try next time.

I’ll take the Bruce 7.5kg anchor please. I’m away at the moment but will sort collection when I’m back.

Re. Bleeding. I watched this on several charter boats and used to adopt it as standard. I always used to carry some poultry shears to deal with tough gills on big fish. But - I no longer do (commercials don’t either?) and I still get pristine white, clear fillets. The concept that the blood taints the flesh doesn’t seem to be the case? Not saying I’m right, just my findings.

I remember the bad old days! Stepping off a charter boat with a black bin bag of fillets, or when we pushed the boat out, a builders rubble sack of whole fish. During the day fish went into a fish box on the deck! When I progressed to my own boat, it was a bucket a first.... upgraded later to a square box so the fish werent folded.... and when I really went the extra mile, I finally obtained a proper commercial fish box - I even had a plywood top I cut to fit as a cutting board - the height of sophistication! It wasnt until we started doing the Alderney trips on the bigger boats what we started to learn about looking after your catch - after all, even we knew that a cod would be pretty ropey after 4 days away! I bought some fish during lockdown for the first time in years - and paying £20 for a couple of bream certianly focuses the mind on the value of what we catch! Finally - my shooting and hunting training has helped me understand more - it's simple, once the animal is dead it becomes food - treat it as such! ----- This is how we do it, I'd love to hear what you do? However the following serves us well on JV. A decent coolbox - Igloo / Iceytek etc - certianly are expensive, but my Iceytek is 15 years old and pretty much looks like new, they are bullet proof. Filled with ice they keep fish fresh for a week easily. If you cannot strech to one of these purpose designed units a basic Picnic coolbox will do - they mainly suffer from being the wrong shape (IE not long and thin but tall and narrow) but they will do a job and are ideal for smaller fish like macks and bream. Next up is the ice. Not many of us have access to flaked or chipped ice. When we can get it, it's amazing - BUT the one downside is when it melts, it turns to water - and being ice flakes it has a bigger surface area - meaning it melts quickly. We use 1l fruit juice or milk cartons - filled with water and frozen. They stay frozen easy for a couple of days, and when mixed in the ice box with your fish and a bucket of sea water work very well indeed. ----- Oily fish like mackeral start to degrade very fast indeed. If youve ever left a fresh mack on the cutting board for an hour - you'll know, it turns to mush! White fish like cod and whitting are a little more resiliant - either way, the faster you can chill your catch the better, esp. in the summer. Dont fillet your catch too quickly - filletting exposes the flesh to the air, which in turn speeds up the degredation of the fish. gut it at the end of the day but leave it whole until you need to use it - you'll find kept cold in a fridge at home, most fish are good for 3-6 days easily. It's widely debated on JV with my usual crew but some fish (Bass / Ray / Sole) actually taste better after a few days. The one expection again is Mackeral - eat them same day - next day for the best quality. Please share any of yout thoughts / tips / tricks - I hope some of the above is useful! Adam

Well the weekend weather looks pretty good so as it stands JV will be heading for either a day of wrecking followed by the banks or the other way round. Staying in Portland Marina, and depending on access to pubs may even eat on the boat. Tides are small, aiming to leave circa 7am Sat. I’ll ring a Portland tomorrow to book a berth. Adam

With the Channel Islands looking out of the equation this year, I’m planning at least one trip West to overnight in Portland. Next weekend is shaping up ok at the moment ( although these low pressure systems are so changeable!) Anyone fancy a trip - I’m going anyway but would be nice to have a buddy / catch up with other members after lockdown!

Top Pic was my first ever 'own boat' Cod - back in the days when you could be pretty sure of catching a cod in the winter in the bay without going all the way to the Needles. Caught 2 miles off Christchurch in Tara. Next was my first Conger - caught on a club trip (Christchurch & District Sea Angling Club - remember them?) on one of the Berry Boats from Poole. Fishing what I think would have been the Whitehouse Grounds off Swanage. Next two were Boscombe Pier circa late 80's with my Dad. Last one is another story - but this 32lb cod on Blue Warrior was part of a 5 cod catch off the needles back in 2006....

I’ve found a few pics from days gone by to match some of the text above.....

Thanks for adding in guys, it's always good to take a walk down memory lane.... many of my good friends were made from this club and have helped me out massively over the years, be it advice, labour or rescuing on more than one occasion! Whilst I build up to the next chapter, and find some old pictures for you, I'll fill the space with a story from a few years back: " James had got some intel that a local fisherman had been catching some nice bass off Kimmeridge by trolling live mackeral close to the shore, good numbers and a couple of doubles were enough to persuade us down to try it out. The fishing was amazing - like UK big game fishing - rods out the back on a slow troll and the takes were real screamers where the other crew needed to get the spare lines in whilst the angler played the fish! We had done a few of these trip's so I was feeling pretty confident and decided to take Bob down one weekend, he had Splash-Out an Alaska 500 and I had Blue Warrior my 165. It was a cracking day, hot, sunny, light winds and we caught a load of bass. Mid afternoon a fresh offshore breeze blew up, combined with a big ebbing spring tide really caught us out on return to the slipway - it was pretty scary. Before we knew it we were committed and in the surf line - big breaking rollers all around and it made getting back to the slip impossible. After bailing out several times both boats were full of water and we were panicking big time. We saw a lull in the sets and made for the slip. As we jumped out of the boat another set came through and lifted both boats onto the rocks. We sustained some GRP damage as well as cuts and bruises but nothing more serious that than. Important lessons were learned!"