This report from Jim Clohessy of Topfisher.eu who had a run out at the weekend:
Suppose all trips are exploratory by nature. Yesterday was a bit like that.
We had a great forecast and decided to head offshore, albeit with an eye on the forecast as we got caught last week by windy offshore fog!
We headed for some ground that has served me well over the years but was hammered by seine netters last year. The eternal optimist in me felt we just had to check out the ground as we had a good range of fish last week further west so we felt was worth a look-see. The plan was to deploy the dubby and begin our drift over the decent ground. Sad to say the ground was largely devoid of any fish other than a solitary decent ling that was out in clean ground where you wouldn’t expect it to be. We continued on with our shark drift. Soon enough the first shark appeared in the trail but appeared disinterested. Eventually we hooked up and a decent scrap insured for what was a small shark. We drifted for about three hours and had three shark. Not a great return but at least we had some craic.
After our shark drift we hit on a local wreck and were rewarded with a steady stream of ling to 14lbs. This wasn’t bad considering we were using a hodge-podge of bait, even resorting to pollack before we left the area. You’d have to wonder what plenty of fresh bait would have yielded.
Single hook paternoster.
The run out was superb. Cruising at 25knts @ 4,500 rpm, the 140BG doesn’t fail to make me smile! The run home was fine until we hit the onshore breeze about 8 miles out leaving a bouncy run for the last run in.
A note on mackerel: we can only hope that there is somewhat of a delay in the arrival of mackerel this year. I have never seen mackerel so scarce. You are doing well to catch a few stragglers. It’s serious at this stage as stocks of frozen are just about depleted. We had no mackerel yesterday.
The weather is a bit blowy today but there looks to be opportunity in the days to come…
