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Arrived around 4.15pm, having driven down through some heavy rain, and collected the bait...... High tide was due around 8pm, wind around force 4 or so from the south, south west.... Decided to fish on the second half by the gun turrets... it's well illuminated, and I'd forgotten to pick-up the headlight for Karen....
Karen and myself set up with one up, one down rigs, with a 4/0 pennell on the top, and a single 2/0 at the bottom, baited up with two lug, and a squid tip. I used a second rod, with a 4/0 wishbone, baited as before......
People seemed to have caught codling on the front end of the falling tide that morning... with codling in the 2lb range common, most had between 4 to 6 fish... things looked good once more....
4.40pm took my first fish of the day.... 6" of pure pouting...WOW..., ten minutes later and Karen was laughing at an 8" pout..... I managed to pull in a number of others, some of which were foul hooked.... suicidal pout on a Kamasan 4/0.....
Around 5-30, I took my first Codling... all 14" of it... so back it went..... along with a number of pout that then followed it......
Things slackened off around 6 to 6.30pm...... and just before 7pm, the rain came...... this was no shower as was promised by the weather forecasters, this was rain...... it took the fight out of most, and by 7.40pm Karen and myself (as far as I could tell) were the only ones on the pier!!!!!!! Took another small codling, that promptly spat out 3 pieces of velvet swimming crab, as I unhooked it to throw it back...
Just before 8pm I had a great bite, that pulled the rod right down, and then banged away..... lifted the rod, felt the fish kicking, but it dropped off after only 10 turns or so..... told Karen, who refused to believe me, claiming there were no codling out there, and that she'd had enough ( I should point out that she was soaked to the skin because she only had a light shower top and trousers on, rather than full waterproofs), told her not to be so silly, can't repeat what she said, but claimed she'd give it one last cast...... in doing so, and with the rain pouring down, her finger slipped during the cast, and the tackle went straight down the wall, rather than the 30 yard lob she'd intended..... I knew then that it would be her last cast of the night.....
10 minutes later whilst I'm rebaiting, I look up to see Karen starting to reel in..... her line had just gone slack.... the rod bent over.... my first thought was she'd got snagged down the wall, but then the rod kicked.... it was a fish...... grabbed the drop net 'cos Karen had started to lift the fish out the water, and could get no further..... looked down.. a nice sized codling.. got her to backwind gently just to place the fish in the water, and take the 
strain out of the tackle..... lowered the drop net, with the rain and salt spray blowing straight into my face, so that I could hardly see anything..... got Karen to walk towards me, and in so doing bring the fish to the lowered net.... not easy as the very strong tidal run had just started to kick in...... pulled up the net with the fish, only to realize that she had a double shot, and that I'd missed the second smaller fish of about 1 and 1/2 lb..... managed to get both up..... weighed the larger of the two codling.... 3lb... Karen was really happy and I took a few photo's (that I'll slip here when they are developed).... The rain stopped...... we took a few more pouting, and packed up around 8.30pm... the tidal run really was strong... 8oz long wire graps could just have been 1oz plain weights for all the good they were!!!!!..... left by 8.45pm, to drive back the 90 miles to a warm and dry bed......
Rick Ryder told me via e-mail, that he and his wife had much the same experience the night before, with the codling being very close to the wall..... looks like most (myself included) were over casting most of the time, 30yds was probably too much!!!!!!!
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