House on the Sheep's Head
We dropped Sylvi off at the trekking centre then headed to a north coast rock mark to fish the first half of the tide up for mullet.
It proved to be a slow session with just a few bites for me and none at all for Steve. Mine yielded a mackerel then a small coalfish ...
... and after a couple of hours I struck into a much better fish which it quickly became apparent was a good mullet.
The fish powered off parallel to the rocks to our right, over all manner of reefs and kelp. I gave it as much as I dared to keep its head up, and after some hair-raising moments it swam back out into open water.
Then it dived deep against the edge of the rock platform immediately to our right. We had been standing on it earlier but now it was being washed by occasional bigger waves. Still ... I jumped back down onto it so I could get my rod tip out over the edge and managed to keep the line clear of the rock as the mullet banged away deep beneath. After a minute or so, the mullet tired and swam out, I returned to the next rock ledge up with only slightly wet feet, and Steve netted the mullet ... exactly 4lbs as it turned out.
Another run of bites a few minutes later turned out to be a bread-thief wrasse and soon after we had to evacuate the rocks as the tide came up further. We had a look at several shallow marks on the south side of the peninsula but couldn't locate any mullet bigger than fingerlings. I left Steve at a spot near Durrus Pier while I went to collect Sylvi. It's not an area I've fished yet but I've seen mullet around and it looked a great swim, so I was disappointed to find Steve still mulletless when I returned a couple of hours later.
He'd had such a dour day I suggested a fun session after mackerel on the ebb tide this evening.
After home and a cuppa, we headed out again for a nearby pier. I set up with a shrimp rig, Steve a sliding float rig, baiting up with strips of the mackerel I caught this morning.
The mackerel were a bit patchy but I had a dozen or so and, as the light began to fade, the shrimp rig started to pick up scad. We used to get these from Hayling beach too when mackerel fishing, but it was several years since I'd seen one so they had a certain novelty value as well as pulling nearly as hard as the mackerel
Meanwhile Steve was getting plenty of bites on the float, mostly small pollack but occasionally he would latch into a mackerel too. His were noticeably bigger on average than the ones I was getting on the shrimps.
Included in Steve's mackerel was this one with what looked a very recent wound on both flanks. Amazing the mackerel escaped the predator and amazing it still felt up to feeding while presumably bleeding to death! Judging by the tooth slashes around the major wounds, probably a tope or other small shark was responsible.
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