Monday 22 July 2013

Big cod and pollack still about!

Only had time for a quick trip to the back o' the Brigg after my hols and conditions proved tough.  After all that hot weather, you would have thought the water would have cleared nicely.  But to our dismay, not only were we to be paddling under clear blue skies, we soon discovered that the water was bright green and full algal growth, not too dissimilar to the May bloom of a month back.

And to add to our distress, we timed it terribly.  We got there bang on low tide.  Long walk out to the sea followed by paddling out to the end of the Brigg only to find that the tide was slack.  That meant basically a two hour wait before the tide would pick up speed and we could expect to see some fish.  In the meantime we paddled about, hoping for the odd early mackerel but surprisingly nothing could be found.  It seemed everywhere we looked it was the same story: people were trying half an hour here and there but not finding any fish.  It was very hot out there under the sun in a dry suit I can tell you!

Eventually the tide did pick up, the water cleared up a bit and we started to get a few small codling showing.  My mate was first to the cod with a nice fish to his bottom shad:
I followed this with another thumping pollack, not far off the beauty I'd had here a few weeks before.  Again this fell to the jellyworm fished just above a big bottom shad.  Pollack rarely tackle the big shads, not sure why.  If you know how big the Stealth Pro Fisha 575 hatch is, you can get an idea of the length of that pollack.
Shortly after this I was into a decent cod myself and finished the day like that:
All in all it wasn't a bad session, given our rotten timing, the ridiculously hot weather and the horrible green water when we first arrived!

Not long now before I move onto the bass.  Still hoping for one or two decent mackerel sessions and a few late cod.  You can never have too many cod in the freezer!

Tight lines to all those fishing.

3 comments:

  1. Wow,Nice Pollack! What size shad did you use? Did you have any hokkais or similar above the shad?

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  2. They're six inch shads on lead heads I cast myself (there's post somewhere on here about how to do it if you're interested).

    The thing is with pollack is that they never go for the bottom shad, it's almost always the first hokkai (or jellyworm in this case) above the shad. In general the rule is that the big cod hit the bottom shad, the pollack hit anything above it. They attracted by the shad, but they're more interested in what it's chasing!

    Tight lines.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good fishing :) For the biggest cods, you should visit the Lofoten Islands

    ReplyDelete

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