David Edwards, skipper of the Silver Dawn at West Cork Charters, reports on a couple of recent outings…
Some days, it’s not always about the biggest fish or even the most fish. Thursday was such a day. Heading out with Nick Ward and his sons Conor and Séan, we decided to try for a few mackerel before heading offshore for Shark.
We soon spotted birds feeding and dropped lines on what looked like mackerel. All seemed good until the lads pulled their lines up to find full strings of small Bass! We moved and struggled to find a handful of Mackerel along with a solitary Pollack. Confident that we would catch plenty of Whiting for bait offshore, we headed South.
Within 5 minutes of starting our drift, we had 2 Blue Sharks onboard. We ended the day with 11 Blues but that’s only half the story. Conor caught a specimen sized Blue Whiting along with many other Whiting to 2lb.
while Nick had a real shock, when a Bluefin Tuna took the Whiting he was dropping. While the line was still in his hand. He was using braid, so he was very lucky that he hadn’t wrapped it around his hand when attaching the float.
This was shortly followed by the sight of huge numbers of Dolphins feeding with many huge Bluefin and hundreds of large Shearwaters diving into the maelstrom.
No monsters hooked but if Carlsberg did fishing trips…
A rare flat calm day offshore on Saturday, very warm and Sharks a little quieter than of late. That said, the guys still managed to get 8 Blues to Silver Dawn and missed another 5 or 6.
A good mix of species on the bottom, including Megrim & Blue Whiting but topped by 2 Stone Bass/Wreck Fish.
Go fishing…
Silver Dawn
