Cod in the fog

So, first trip of the year.  Expectations high, weather forecast good, tackle primed and ready to go.  We left our homes at 6am to be on the water for 7.30am and paddled out from Runswick in lovely conditions.  There was a slight haze and the sun was weakly shining through a thin layer of cloud.  For the first hour not much happened.  We drifted. We jigged.  We drifted and jigged some more.  Then my mate radio'd in to say he'd had a whiting.  A little later near Kettleness he reported a small coalie.

Meantime I let the drift take me round the back of Port Mulgrove.  Don't tend to fish this side of the bay much, but there's no reason not too.  Had some good catches there in the past and sure enough, I started getting a few nips at the shads.  Something I noticed last year is that smaller fish love trying to bite soft plastics, and will often follow them along the sea bed nipping at their tails, somethimes biting the tails clean off!

Sure enough, as I held the rod up to lift the jellies off the sea bed, I started to get a few tentative nibbles.  Then a pull, and I struck back into a small codling. One for the pot, so at least the first trip wasn't a blank!  Few minutes later, another series of nibbles.  This time I gently kept increasing the pressure until suddenly a felt a good pull back and up came another little cod.

At this point my fishing buddy radio'd over to ask where I was, as he couldn't even see me... now, there was a little bit of haze around, so that didn't surprise me.  So I radio'd back and started paddling back against the drift to go and meet him half way.

And that's when it happened.  He gradually came into sight, and I noticed the haze was getting thicker.  But on reaching him, I literally turned back round realised the land had completely disappeared!  The fog just seemed to roll in from nowhere in seconds, and it was a total pea souper.  You could barely make out the sun and everything quickly became very disorientating.

Whoa, where'd everything go?  No sky, no land, no pot flags!

Luckily we are both equipped with GPS devices (though mine's on my phone, so not ideal) and we were able to navigate back in towards Runswick.  But the fog was so thick, and the tide so low, that even as we followed Mulgrove point round, we still weren't sure where we were.  In fact even after landing on the sand at Runswick, it was hard to know where abouts on the beach we were, as you couldn't see the start of the grass or any cliffs.  The fog literally gave us a little circle of about 50 metres around which you could make things out.

Looking up the beach, looking out to sea. Runswick Bay vanishes!

I'm not one for paddling in those conditions, GPS or not, it's just too unsettling.  You can hear boats around you but you can't see where they're heading.  So we packed up and headed home.  At least we shook off the winter cobwebs, tested the new weedless rigs and bagged a couple of fish:

Roll on the calm weather, the mackerel and the big cod that come following in behind!