May 2005

Fishing Report - May 2005

This year's summer fishing has finally kicked off!! At the moment the Plaice seem to be a little sparse but luckily the wrecks have started to fish and there are pollack and bass showing. As usual, just as the fish start to show up so does the May-weed and of course the strong winds restricting days fishing. As well as the bass turning up, so do the French boats to catch them! Quite often on the best wrecks you will find yourself shoulder to shoulder with 2 or 3 other boats contending for the best position.

With spending the early part of spring mainly chasing Skate, Spurr-dogs and the odd codling, a few of the charter boats went further offshore and further afield to find better quantities of cod and bass. Unfortunately these fish often happen to be in foreign waters. On a couple of occasions there have been incidents of boats being fined and escorted back to Britain by the friendly French patrol boats - mind you, I don't think this will deter us!

On a brighter note we have longer days and hopefully a few warmer ones(!) and with other species of fish starting to appear around our shores things are looking up. It's been a long winter and now Summer is starting to look quite hopeful...

This week we had a phone call from Dave Barham, Editor of Total Sea-Fishing magazine, saying that they were doing an article on bass fishing and asking us if there was any chance of a trip out on Wednesday to catch some Bass. Me, being confident (or a bit stupid) said, "No Problem!" and duly arranged to meet at 8a.m on Wednesday 11th May on the pontoon at Dover. Dave turned up with Barney and numerous bags of cameras and fishing equipment and unfortunately brought the rain as well! Undeterred by this our party of 6 set off and by 8.30a.m it had stopped raining and the sun came out. We headed off to the Varne on the chance of catching some live sand-eels - to be quite honest I wasn't hopeful that we would achieve this due to the tide running quite hard at 3 knots. After 20 minutes with no luck we decided to head back and try a couple of wrecks using artificial lures. Barney managed to connect with one small bass although fishing conditions were becoming harder due to the wind picking up and with the wind came clouds of May-weed in the water. The only good thing was that the tide was easing off and it was time to try once again for sand-eels - back to the Varne we go!

Eureka! The sand-eels were biting and within an hour we had enough eels to last us a while over the wrecks. Whilst the tide was slack we decided to punch the waves that were now becoming quite big and head off towards Ramsgate to escape from the May weed. Once the tide started to pick up we were in the situation of wind against tide which in this instance helped us - although it made the water rough it slowed down our drift to just the right speed. Within half an hour I'd decided how I was going to drift the wreck, did a few practice runs to see where the fish were and looking over my shoulder there was a trawler! He then proceeded to spend the next hour trawling up and down each side of the wreck we wanted to fish. He eventually filled his boots and disappeared...

By now the tide was running nicely and I set Fire Fox up for her first proper drift over the wreck with Peter pulling in a Bass straight away. By now it was about 2.30p.m and it had been a long hard day up until this point. After this it got better and better with fish coming to Dave, Barney, Tara, Gary and myself - although I spent most of my time netting fish - at one point we had 5 fish at the side of the boat together and I was running around like a headless chicken trying to net them all! We kept going until about 4.30p.m hoping to get a double figure fish and then all of a sudden, out of the depths of the water I saw a fish coming to the surface and said, "We've got one!"

We did a few more drifts and then decided that we'd had enough and that it was time to go home.

What started off as looking to be a bum day turned out to be spot on with everyone enjoying themselves. Keep your eyes peeled for the full story in a future edition of Total Sea Fishing magazine coming soon...

Skipper Mike Williams, Dave Barham & Tara Williams Barney Wright & Dave Barham - Double Trouble!