Jim Clohessy reports on a great small boat fishing trip out from Cork Harbour…
Saturday was a great run out by any standards. While most other places were basking in glorious sunshine Cork was largely grey with a low cloud bordering to fog at times.
Shark were the first target of the mission. Of course fresh bait had to be caught first. Great to see that the mackerel have arrived in the harbour in numbers. There is a lot of very small fish but we did manage to search out some regular sized.
The change to the harbour area is incredible. Birds working, fish breaking some dolphins and reports of tuna offshore. Outside the harbour was no different but the gloomy sky and poor visibility made spotting activity tricky.
We set ourselves on our shark drift by deploying our usual chum block and settled in fishing the bottom while we waited. We didn’t have long to wait. It was a great initiation to the world of shark fishing for Paul– pure chaos ensues as we had a very quick double take.
Fighting two sharks at the one time is not the best thing when there are only two of us on board. Worse again Paul’s shark managed to part the mainline while at the side of the boat (more on that later).
We had a steady stream of sharks caught and it was great to see lots of sharks swimming around the boat – Shark fishing as it should be really. No sign of anything other than blues.
It was all going along swimmingly until I had a shark at the side of the boat only to see that it had two traces but only one hooked. The shark was the first shark we had hooked of that session and the hook of my trace had caught the snap swivel of the trace that the shark had swam off with. Unbelievable!
I had to bring this shark on board as it managed to tangle up rightly while at the side of the boat. While I was working on getting the shark free and released, I suddenly realised we had been robbed! Our chum bag had a big hole and the remainder of the chum block was gone! It was almost welcome after the hectic two hours we had put down.
We drifted for whiting at that stage. It was steady but not hectic fishing so I decided to check out a wreck. I had fished it recently enough but there wasn’t so much ling action so I decided to drift the edges for big whiting. I had a tussle with a shark here too. It could well be a blue but I’d like to hope it was a small porgie.
We didn’t get to see though.
On the first drift I had a decent whiting followed by a small ling. The ling coughed up a small mackerel. I decided to put down a mackerel bait on a wrecking trace (Hard To Bait It ….. The Perfect Wreck Fishing Trace!). It was explosive. Non stop ling!
It was like “silly season” had fired, you know that time when predators seem to click that the winter is coming and they better bulk up. We had lots of ling to mid-teens and our biggest touched 20lb. Best ling I’ve had in a few years. We were running out of time and tide.
It was choppy enough for the spin back to base but we were travelling across the swell so could maintain a comfortable 20 knots, the big Suzuki humming away on the back. We spent a good hour filleting…
