As usual, I'd spent Monday to Friday watching the weekend forecast and decided with a light Easterly wind that Port Logan was to be the venue for Saturday. I'd obtained PIB (Permission In Blood - mine!) from the DRM (Domestic & Revenue Manageress (wife)) to fish Sunday as well, so decided to consider an all nighter into the bargain.
I'd arranged to meet Stuart "cod fluker" Cresswell at 9am at Port Logan, and by a remarkable coincidence, he just happened to arrive 30 seconds after I had got the boat fully prepared and everything loaded up. The cynical amongst us may suggest that he hid round the corner watching me graft, lift, carry, stow, sweat and heave - and then chose to appear as works were complete - but I could not possibly comment on that?
With very big tides forecast, the cunning plan was to have a bit of a species hunt (Plaice in particular) and then head offshore to catch slack water in search of some toothy critters. We started with a few mackerel off Logan Head, but they were fairly hard to come by apart from the one full house that Stuart managed to turn into a bunch of bananas. After that, we looked for a sandy bay in search of the orange spotted ones - and were not dissapointed. I near shat myself when my spinning rod with size 4 sabiki hooks folded over and I landed a treble shot of 2lb coalies over near the rocks. These were saved for skate bait. Stuart landed a ballan wrasse about the same time. Grey gurnards were in abundance along with a single wee tub gurnard. The first of many LSDs also appeared.
Later on we tried a couple of offshore marks. At slack water, 5oz of lead was holding bottom easily. As the tide increases - 2lb of lead just floats away here - some change! Quite a few missed bites to start with and then Stuart landed a nice huss and spurdog. These were both around 7 or 8lbs, but he swears they were each at least ten? As the tide increased, we headed to another inshore mark and got the three down flattie rigs prepared with coloured beads and worm baits. In addition to a few pollack, we added to the plaice total and spiked ourselves silly handling numerous doubles of grey gurnards.
It was soon evening and I dropped Stuart back in at the beach. I headed out again to a favourite mark in the bay and had a few drifts along the hard ground. This rewarded me with codling, haddock, poor cod and some nice plump dabs.
I had planned to fish through the night at anchor, but it was just double shots of doggies every cast, so I reeled up and got a decent kip on the boat. Sundays weather turned a bit nastier and the 2-5mph Notherly forecast was more like 12-15mph North West. The only land North West of Port Logan is Canada, about 3,000 miles away, so this is the worst wind direction here. Again the day was spent looking for shelter and I spent a bit of time pollacking either side of Clanyard Bay. The water was very clear, so darker colours of worm were working better than the pinks or oranges. I had some nice fish up to around 7lb and lost an absolute screamer which had line flying off the reel and eventually bent out the hook on my leadhead. I can only imagine ???
The only additional species to Saturday was a Short Spined Sea Scorpion before I packed up and headed home tired but happy :-) ..............
