A couple of poor trips out of Dunbar at the end of August/early September – next to nothing apart from a few decent pollack and a small sprinkling of ling and codling (but mackerel in plague proportions).
First trip since early July was very poor – a handful of decent pollack, best over 7lbs, but nothing on the cod front. The drift was almost non-existent most of the day which didn’t help any. Dunbar can be pretty hard at times, but there was a complete lack of codling which was very disappointing. Most of the fish came from well to the east, around the Sicar Point area.
Next trip I spent a couple of hours inshore and on the River Garry wreck but had nothing but mackerel 
Decent drift and water clarity so no excuses other than a lack of fish on the ground.
Given it was looking like a repeat of the previous Thursday I thought I’d push offshore a few miles to a series of large ridges in deep water – think a collection of Sicar sized ridges fairly close together. I’ve tried here a few times over the years with mixed (mainly poor) results, but it didn’t look like there was much to lose.
The drift out here was fairly fast, at 1.5-1.8 mph and I’d to use 12oz of lead to get through wall to wall mackerel and actually reach the bottom about half the time. Apart from mackerel there was very little – a few small codling and ling, plus a couple of whiting when I anchored up for while. I’d hoped for a larger ling (or something more exotic) on a large fish bait, but nothing doing.
This is one of the areas I fancy for porbeagle, given the size and extent of the ridges and huge numbers of mackerel. I hadn’t planned to fish out here so I didn’t have any heavy gear with me, but I reckon it’s worth a shot on a smaller tide. The pic below gives a flavour of the area, courtesy of DrDepth – most of the ridges have a steady slope on their south side, with a vertical drop on the north. For comparison you can see a large wreck (the Halland) lying NNE/SSW at the SE corner of the image.
