Billy Demery heads out sea angling and sends us this report:
After meeting Charlie for breakfast we decided to head down to Coliemore Harbour to fish again for whatever, probably mackerel but anything else would be nice!
So we headed down and did a couple of casts with feathers but after being handed a box of ragworm without even asking I rushed to the car to fetch the bait rig and tied it on to one of the rods and cast out. After not too long at all I got some decent nibbles but nothing sufficiently striking on. I tried striking it a couple of times but no luck, they just scraped little chunks of it off and then swallowed (little brats). When I was on my last rag, I decided to save it for later and use the sand eel (seeing as now a single large sand eel had more bait supply than the remainder of my worms). After a few minutes the rod started to bend. I prayed I would have a solid strike and it would get hooked, whatever the fish was. So I picked the rod up and waited for him to stop playing around and bite solid… AND YES!! he did! Oh the relief ! I didn’t use up all the bait and blank still, but it wasn’t exactly running and jumping, so that ruled out bass (which I wasn’t expecting anyway there) but I was still happy. So anyway as we brought it inside the harbour, we realised it was a lesser spotted dog.
Charlie jumped down onto the sand and unhooked the dog and then I put the rod down and jumped too. Grabbed the phone and took a few pics. Then we released the dog and watched him disappear out of the harbour in the crystal-clear water to return to hunting.
Compliments of Billy Demery
