I’ve not clambered down the harbour wall at St Andrews for ages, and was looking forward to a bit of coddie bashing on what was quite a reasonable forecast. Perhaps I should’ve paid more attention to Cassandra, in the form of skipper Ian, when he pointed out that there had been a couple of days of north-easterly winds and the water still had some colour. And the tides were too small. Basically, the fishing was doomed…
Three hours later, with a combined catch of sod-all, things were not looking very good, and Ian’s power of prediction was looking vindicated. I was also running out of lead rapidly as I kissed goodbye to weight after weight, much to Ian’s amusement.
The flood tide saw an improvement and we picked up small codling, coalies and Pollack on several drifts, with a single mackerel for Ian. The best codling also went to Ian with a decent fish of around 4.5lbs, but most were far smaller. In terms of numbers we probably didn’t disgrace ourselves too much (I’m guessing around 40 fish between us, maybe half of which were codling) but it did feel rather slow by comparison to the usual standard for this time of year.
Overall this must rank as one of the few days when I’ve left St Andrews carrying less weight than when I arrived – the ratio of leads lost to fillets gained was pretty poor (doubly so when most of the fillets weren’t even caught by me in the first place).
Share this:
