|
Boulay Bay / L'Islet 15th Aug 2001
Map Ref: 672,546
Tide: HW 3.45pm (8.5m)
Weather Forecast: Wind WNW F2to3 Sunshine with Thundery showers later
Drove over with Karen, and picked Chris up, and then went off to Gorey to dig some lugworm to supplement the ragworm I’d purchased earlier that morning at the Motor Works…..
Got ourselves over to Boulay Bay, and walked down to the Islets ….. by the time we’d scrambled over to the far side, set-up, and were organised to fish, it was about 1.30pm…
I intended to focus mainly on trying to fish for mullet, and thus went to the inshore bay side, and left Karen and Chris to ground / float fish on the other side….
Karen had decided she wanted to catch some wrasse down the side, and so had set up one of the bass rods with a bomb weight, a short snood with a 1/0 hook, baited with ragworm, whilst Chris was using 2 rods, one to float fish, and the other on the bottom….
Karen was in straight away, and pulled up a nice wrasse of about 2lb, which I photographed for her, but didn’t have time to weigh or measure it, before she’d popped it back…..
Being over on the other side of the rock made life very difficult to keep tabs on how they were doing at any given time, and let them keep tally …. Unfortunately their not as fastidious as me, and so all I can report with the odd picture is their mutually agreed tallies for the day!!!!
Karen … 20 fish, with a mixture of wrasse and small Pollack….
Chris About a dozen or so fish made up of wrasse, Pollack, a mackerel, and a shanny
What I can report is that there were an awful lot of baitfish again in the water, and generally little surface activity….
My attempts at mullet fishing were not being very fruitful ….. and I was getting a little despondent at not even being able to see any fish in the vicinity …..
3.30pm …. Suddenly my float went zooming under at a strange angle … I struck home immediately, and was rewarded by the resistance of a fighting fish on the other end … but this was no mullet …. Suddenly the fish broke surface .. a garfish.. that then proceeded to tail walk , and loop in a frenzy of activity, and put up a most commendable fight, helped by the very light weight tackle I was using…. Brilliant fun, and surely the way to fish for these small but powerful predators ….. I’d avoided putting fish into the groundbait for fear of attracting garfish rather than mullet, but now sort of regretted not doing so….. anyway, landed the fish, but for some reason forgot to measure or more likely record its size, if memory serves me well as a result of being called over by Karen to disgorge a small Pollack that she was having difficulties with .. anyway took a picture, and dispatched it … garfish makes a great hook bait for float fishing…..
Around 5.30pm, a large shoal of cruising mullet suddenly turned up …. But they seemed most disinterested in any groundbait or indeed the bread flake on my hook … they formed a seething, writhing, tight massed ball, comprising of about 20 odd fish of varying sizes up to I would guess 6lb plus, which were continually turning over, and over on top of each other …. This behaviour continued for some 30 minutes or more, but when I called Chris over, they suddenly disappeared before he could get over…..
About fifteen minutes later Chris gave a shout from his side of the Islet .. the mullet “ball” was now in front of him, and I went over and watched them again for about 20 minutes of so, before they moved off …..
I spoke to Eddie in JFS Sport the next day, about this behaviour … he said he’d only seen it on a couple of occasions when he’d been fishing on Alderney, late in the session….. maybe some sort of mating behaviour or similar .. anyone know???
By about 7pm and with no more mullet about .. and not really convinced they’d be interested in feeding even if they were, I decided to switch over, and fish by Karen for wrasse and Pollack …. Over the next hour, I managed to pick up 3 small wrasse including a corkwing, and a couple of 6” Pollack!!!!
By 8.30pm, it was starting to get dark, and we decided to call it a day, and made our way very carefully off the Islet in the half gloom, and then back to the car……