Double visit - sea and coarse.

We had a forced break from coarse fishing to include a week’s holiday in St. Ives, Cornwall, England. With a promise of Wil and I not fishing every day, to make it into a true family holiday Wil and I decided that a mackerel fishing trip would be enough and it would also keep his sister and grandmother happy.

We booked, paid, and turned up the next day to what looked like a fairly calm sea where we boarded Yellow Fin, which surprisingly maybe is a blue boat. With plenty of room and what looked like fairly new gear of boat rods, multiplier reels, a hefty lead weight, and feathers we set off around the point to what, in the family, we call stormy beach, where we were told we would then drift back in the direction of the harbour and would make a number of drifts.

With the engine cut and rods lowered, a number of things became apparent. One, we were told that rather than jigging, we should raise the rod and wind in as it descended, much like playing a large fish, and that way we would find the fish at the depth that they were shoaling. Two, The effort of doing this for over an hour was tiring when you added it to the constant moving of legs because, we were told that there was a storm around ten miles out and we were on the fringes of it. Three, things have changed in mackerel fishing with regards to conservancy of stocks. We were asked, early on, how many fish we wanted to take home, we answered four and others gave their answers, the answers were totted up and a few added just in case, and all others were returned to grow bigger.

Wil and I started a competition between ourselves but soon lost count so just kept an overall total which was fifteen mackerel and one scad, or horse mackerel. Neither of us was unhappy about returning to the harbour pier as we were both shattered with arm and leg ache, because it had been like an hour’s gym workout.

When we reached the first available shop, I handed Wil my wallet while I sat on a bench. I told him to get two bottles of water, no matter the cost, which he did and we both downed them before finding the family, back on the beach.

By the time we got back to the holiday-let, Gramma had cleaned and filleted the four fish, all aches and pains had gone as Wil and I tucked into mackerel cooked in butter, and we agreed that those fish could not have been any fresher.

Arriving home on a Friday night, it gave us three days to prepare for fishing-Tuesday, on whichever pond we chose. I’d sent off for a couple of items of fishing equipment that started to trickle through the letterbox.

First to arrive were two lugworm threading needles, not used now for lugworm but handy for punched bread etc and our originals had both been lost. Next was a pot of wafters, to be used as a total experiment. Made by Haldorado, these were mixed size, 8-10 mm, Sweet Sin wafters and the colour of each wafter was both pink and yellow and reminiscent of boiled sweets called rhubarb and custard. The smell was extremely sweet and I couldn’t wait to try them out. A maybe unique feature of each wafter was that they were grooved, some of the bigger ones were grooved three times, and the idea was that the hook-band would disappear into the central groove.

Also ordered were some Scopex items. Sonubaits Band’Um power scopex 8mm wafters, Sonubaits bait booster power scopex 800ml, and Sonubaits haze liquid power scopex. Whether I could get Wil to change from his pink wafter and pink haze, to try these new things out or not, would remain to be seen. My dilemma was that should the power scopex items arrive before Tuesday, would I use them. Or would I use the new pink and yellow wafters, or would I carry on using the five dry bags that were still in the dry box. Maybe it would depend on the venue, maybe we could try all three.

Tuesday arrived and it was wet with a forecast for heavy cloud and drizzle throughout the day, maybe keeping angling numbers down. The Scopex products arrived a half an hour before I left to pick Wil up, and when I arrived at his house, he was deep into posing models for a new stop motion and taking the occasional break from that to paint a head-sculp using an illuminated magnifying glass. He clearly didn’t want to be interrupted, asked if we could go fishing on Thursday instead, I said yes, and wandered back out to the car that I’d spent an hour loading with fishing gear.

I arrived on my own at Hazel Court to present Debbie with a large tin of chocolates in appreciation of her wading out into Jim’s Pond to rescue the ends of my pole. The pole wasn’t with me today. I figured that nestling under the brolly would be a good idea, rods on alarmed rod pods and just in case, I took the modified 5m whip with the 18-20 elastic through it.

It felt weird being on my own. Griff the border collie, jumped his front paws onto my lap through the open car door, looking for Wil, and later on Debbie told me that as I drove down to the pleasure pond to my fishing spot, Griff ran after the car looking for Wil.

Everything came out of the back of the car except Wil’s two rods and his chair. I set up and sat under the brolly and witnessed a rain shower around once an hour until the sun broke through cloud in the afternoon. I was in the corner peg, where Wil had been so successful in the winter with his nine carp, beating both me and two other anglers, and the wind was in my face bringing surface food, and hopefully carp, towards me.

Both of my rods had dry PVA bags cast near the reeds that dominate the corner, and the left-hand rod soon produced a six-pound common. I thought I’d seen fizzing around where the bags were landing but when I went to drop in the new left-hand rod’s bag, into the margin, I could see that as the bag sank and the PVA disintegrated, the hemp in the groundbait floated, and the fizzing was actually small fry eating the hemp on the surface.

The right-hand rod was next to go and produced, after a fight, an eight-and-a-half pound common. This fish showed me how hard it was to play a fish and net it. The smaller landing net had a handle that was too small, after it had snapped some weeks ago, and the larger net that I tried to use on this fish had a handle that was far too long. Oh, where was Wil with his netting skills? Maybe as a result of trying to do both jobs (and the fact that we were still using cheap rods) the top section of the rod broke in half leaving me one rod and a whip that had a float and pink/yellow wafter placed in the right-hand margin.

Remembering that Wil’s rods were in the car, everything came in, clearly out of the water, and I retrieved Wil’s lucky, red rod that was already set up with a method feeder, but the hook length had gone curly so I cut it off and added a Drennan size ten hook on a four-inch hook length. This, I thought, was my chance to try out the scopex items. The scopex wafters had been soaking in the bait booster in their pot since shortly after arriving in the post that morning. A red one was surrounded by sticky pellets, then the scopex haze was added over the top.

A walk to the very corner saw me drop the method feeder in the margin, walk back to the peg letting out line, placing the rod on the alarmed rod-pod, sitting down and immediately standing again as the alarm went off. This scopex stuff seemed to be powerful stuff as a seven-and-a-half-pound common fell to it within seconds of it landing on the pond bottom.

The obvious thing to do, in my head, was to rebait that rod in the same way, place it back in that margin, pull my remaining rod in, cut off the PVA bag end and re-configure it with a method feeder with the scopex bits. This I did, and with Wil’s rod back in the very corner and my rod cast further up the left-hand side of the pond but still in a margin covered by reeds where no pegs existed, I sat back and waited.

My rod then produced a two-pound common, and both rods were changed to the yellow scopex wafter for it to stand out against the brown micro pellets on the method feeders and as an experiment. This produced a bit of a lull so I concentrated on the whip for a bit, changed the wafter to an 8mm pellet, saw lots of missed bites which I guessed were from small silvers that could get at some of the pellet but not the hook behind it, and finally netted a twelve-ounce roach that had managed the task.

During the lull I heard common buzzard calls and looked up to see a family of five. It was probably this year’s successful hatch and maybe mum, dad, or both were teaching the newbies how to find warm air over the pond that I was fishing, how to utilise the thermal, and how to call to each other to keep in touch.

Others around the pond were still catching although most of what I saw seemed to be bream, silvers, and the occasional carp I decided to make a change, brought the two rods in one at a time, and changed the scopex wafters to red to be more ‘match-the-hatch’ with the brown sticky pellets. Wil’s rod in the margin saw no more action, so maybe the area had been disturbed too much, but my rod up the side and against the reeds caught, a five-pound common, a four-pound bream, a three-pound bream, a five-pound cross between a koi and a mirror, and finally another five pound common. So, all in all a good day’s angling and a day that proved the scopex to be successful.

The koi and mirror cross made the alarm scream while I was talking to Debbie on one of her rounds. She found the fish so attractive that she took a photo and commented that I looked slightly sad without Wil being there. Maybe she was right. The hybrid then jumped the cradle and made his way back to the water and neither of us could stop him.

On the way home I rang Wil who announced that he’d missed fishing and could we go on Thursday. I agreed, left all the fishing gear in the car, hoped the car wouldn’t stink too much after three days, and ordered a new rod that would maybe arrive after Thursday, maybe before.