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Rozel Bay 3rd August 2001
GR: 698,544
Karen and myself drove over to pick Chris Ball up to go bait digging along with his two younger daughters at around 2.30pm ….
So we all set off and went to the slipway at Gouray with its extensive lug beds ….
It’s a joy to dig here …. A mixture of course sand and mud, with one, two, or even three worms coming up per fork full, plus the odd bonus such as harbour rag or sandeel ….
Chris and Karen got into a routine where Chris would dig and turn the load, whilst Karen would sift and extract the lugworms choosing only the best that the dig had to offer ….
Whilst yours truly being rather a lazy bugger made sure the bucket was in easy reach for Karen, picking out the odd worm here and there that she’d missed, and took the odd photo…
The kids were further down the beach with a short tinned rake collecting cockles for their evening meal …. And once sufficient lugworms had been collected, Chris and Karen helped the girls with their cockle harvest, before ice-creams on the slipway …..
Joy of joys, the kiosk sold banana ice-cream, I can’t tell you how many times I go into supermarkets these days and religiously look through the ice-cream on sale, only to be disappointed in finding that they have stopped stocking banana flavour…. As it turned out the kids didn’t really seem that interested in having ice-cream (of any flavour) .. but I was one happy bunny :-)
Had a snack of burgers and sausages with Chris and the Kids and then Drove over to Rozel and arrived just before 5.30pm …. The tide was already advancing (HW around 7.15pm), but more worrying was the weather … the forecast was for a westerly wind of force 3 to 4 with showers developing during the evening ….. but the wind was at the top end of 4, resulting in a very lumpy sea, and a noticeable degree of spray from the surf as it hit the eastern rocks .. just where we intended to fish .. we considered our options and decided that if we moved slightly round then cliffs would afford us some protection …. And so we decided to go for it…..
As we’d pontificated for a bit too long before getting the gear out of the car, by the time we were on the beach and ready to go, the tide was sufficiently up to force us to do some extra rock hopping in order to get to the eastern rock plateaux…. But having arrived there found that the conditions were no where near as bad as we had feared, and so we set up to fish….. indeed as the evening progressed the weather generally improved with a slackening of the wind and only once or twice did it threaten to rain…
Both Karen and myself were going to use a single rod each to ground fish using a pulley-rig with 1/0 hooks and a 3oz breakaway… in the hope of cutting down our losses whilst fishing over the reef in front of us, and would also allow me to rove around with the bass rod and do a little bit of plugging….
Chris decided to use two rods (his third for float fishing was too light for the prevailing conditions)… one had a one up one down with a long flowing bottom trace, and the other simply with single long flowing bottom trace….. not sure what sized hooks he was using, looked like 2/0’s or larger ….. we all used lugworm and squid in various combinations, with the dominant choice being lugworm tipped with a strip of squid…
6.00pm …. before I’d set up (having rigged up for Karen), Chris has a smile on his face … and two rather small 6” wrasse on his one up one down rig …. Both fish however were foul hooked .. looked like they’d been diving at the bait and snagged themselves as a result :-(
6.20pm …. Chris was in again .. this time with an orange mottled coloured 12” Pollack, that had taken the bait as Chris was bringing it in on the retrieve to change it!!!! It was obviously going to be Chris’s night!!!!
Decided that I’d give a weighted redgilll a go, in the hope of Pollack (as they seemed to be about) or may be (ever hopeful) a bass ….
6.40pm …. Tried to go that little bit too deep with the redgill and got snagged.. what a surprise!!!! … and lost it!!!! So I switched over to a J13 and played around with that over the course of the evening….
6.55pm … Karen managed to get snagged up on the reef, and we lost her pulley-rig …. Put a new leader and rig together for her, this time a short flowing 1/0 wishbone….
By 7pm the tide had started to kick in and the amount of weed being picked up on the rigs also increased…..
7.15pm …. Chris had a very strong bite on one of his rods…. The fish ran with the bait, but then dropped it…. Chris said he thought it was possibly a black bream but wasn’t sure…..
Over the next half an hour or so the same thing happened at least half a dozen times, resulting in a rather stern frown by a rather frustrated Chris….
I decided to give up on the pulley-rig and go for the bottom flowing wishbone like Karen, as the majority of bites that Chris had experienced so far were from the bottom flowing trace rig he was using…
7.50pm…. at last Chris managed to hook into on of the mystery fish …. Turned out to be a nice red mullet of around 12” …..
8.20pm …. Karen gave a shout that I had a bite on my rod (whilst I was on the otherside plugging and trying to bring in a float that someone had lost) … went back to the rod, but the bites were small, and I failed to connect to the culprit.
8.25pm … Chris had a rattling bite on both his rods, one after the other, but failed to connect on either :-( He felt the problem could possibly be that the rigs he had were fixed rather than his usual style of running ledger, so the fish were dropping the baited hook the minute they felt the resistance… I think he’d have changed rigs but for the fact that the tide was dropping and was now starting to cause him problems with hooking up on the reef area he was fishing over….
9.05pm … Karen was not having a good time … no bites, and her misery completed by losing another rig :-(
9.25pm …. Having put another leader on for Karen, and just finishing off the final touches to her new rig, Karen shouted that I had a bite …. I turned around to see she wasn’t kidding… my rod tip was bouncing around and being pulled seawards by something that was none too pleased with it’s evening supper!!!!!
Grabbed the rod and straight away felt the fish .. not big, but it felt powerful …… after a short while I managed to bring it up over the rock lip …. And there in the dying embers of dusk, was a 12” black bream… YEEESSSS… at last a fish …. The run of blanks was over .. Thank God!!!!
After that things went very quiet with no bites for any of us, and with the falling tide making the retrieval of the terminal tackle extremely difficult we started to pack up around 9.50pm, and made our way back to the car very carefully over the weed and rocks….