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St Brelade's Bay - Pier -1st Aug 2000
GR: 584,483
Drove down to the bay around 1.30pm with Karen, to dig some fresh lugworm for the evenings fishing .. within an hour we had the worms that we needed, and whilst being rather small were sufficient for our needs .....
Returned to the pier via the slipway around 6pm ..... tide was starting to come in, with high water around 8.45pm and a northerly wind of force 2 to 3....
Found a number of juniors already occupying the end, and feathering for garfish and mackerel.... with fruit pastels on some of the lures to catch mullet!!!!! .... who tells such stories to children?????? Interestingly Chris had said the night before he'd been told the same "valuable" advice, by someone whilst he was fishing ..... but I never expected to see it being put into practice!!!!!!!
Things were also made difficult by a group of other youths, who'd decided to pick the location for a party, and pier / rock jumping .... I was a happy bunny :-(
Karen had been delayed and so I decided to plug, and set up a float rod with a thin strip of squid, until she arrived.... whilst I was doing so, four other chaps turned up, and started doing the same thing.....
6.50pm... nice looking bass came swimming after the J13, but as usual turned away at the last minute .... very frustrating... :-(
6.57pm ..... another bass, larger this time, again followed the plug, but failed to attack......
7.00pm... Karen came and joined me, took over the float fishing, and set herself up a second rod to ground fish with...
7.30pm ... guess what ... yup another bass ...... with no result ..... I'm beginning to suspect I'm doing something wrong for Jersey bass ... doesn't seem to make any odds if it's a fast or slow retrieve, with or without additional wiggle with the rod ..... etc etc .... may just be a case that the fish are fed, with the abundance of bait fish around, and are content just to follow, rather than exert energy to strike.....
7.50pm.... Karen lands an 8" wrasse on a cocktail of lug and squid from her ledgering set-up.... only fish I'd seen caught so far.....
Things were very quiet ... kids off the end went, and Karen and myself took up station.... the light was slowly fading into darkness, and we were then the only people on the pier..... Decided to do some more plugging in the half-light whilst the tide was starting to fall....
9.25pm... thud.... I was into a fish ... joy of joys.... not a very big fish, but a fish none the less .... looked like the J13 had done it's stuff ..... but it wasn't the bass I was expecting, rather a small 13" pollack ..... continued to plug for a while longer and then switched over to ground fishing....
10-40pm ..... sitting around for something to happen in the way of bites, was getting rather frustrating ... ie there were none!!!! .... strange as we'd expected to have the pouting and doggies knocking on the door .... suddenly, Karen's rod gave a number of twitches, a yank, and then the line went slack ..... She picked-up the rod, waited .... another couple of twitches, and she struck .... the rod bent to show she was connected ... reeled in .. and up pops a dogfish of around 24 " ..
I managed to get my arm grazed as I unhooked the fish for her, even though I was using a cloth to cover it's sandpaper body, it still managed to wrap it's tail around my lower arm ... took a photo, and put it back .... watched it swim away in the beam of our head lamps.....
11.05pm ... had a super bite... but failed to connect :-(
11.30pm .... Karen pulls up a 10" pouting......
We both start getting combination bites ... small pouting and crab .... Karen almost managed to pull up a decent sized edible crab.....
11.55pm .... Karen has another decent set of bites and slack line ...... another dogfish, but it came off just as she brought it to the pier wall :-(
Stuck it out until around 12.45am, in the hope that we might pick up a bass in the shallow water ... nothing doing, and with the bottom starting to be exposed by the retreating tide, took our que and decided to call it a night...