My alternative title was “Couldn’t do worse”, so perhaps not the trip of a lifetime! Trevor and I raided a remote spot on the west coast and failed rather badly 🙁
We started with high hopes, as we’ve fished here from my boat before, and very successfully. The old forestry pier we planned to try was close to the same spots and I knew it had produced fish for other anglers in years gone by.
We had a window of a maybe 30-36 hours before the weather turned nasty again, so it was a relief to find light winds and calm seas waiting for us.
Casting mackerel baits towards the horizon (a gross exaggeration!), we settled down to wait.
And wait a bit more… Excitement arrived in the form of a short but violent squall that blew over our rods and soaked us with icy rain. Still the fish ignored us.
As morale sank faster than the Moskva, Trevor finally got a bite. Reeling in a dogfish, he had at least avoided a complete blank whilst I was still staring into that particular abyss.
He followed up a little while later with an edible crab. Not a biggie, and safe from becoming dinner, it explained some of the half-hearted bites we’d been getting.
Hunger and Desperation…
By now I also needed to find somewhere to put up the tent for the night. Everywhere around us was pretty much rock or water, so I explored a few hundred yards along the shoreline. Eventually desperation found me pitching on some boggy grass a few centimetres higher than the surrounding swamp. It would have to do!
Back at the pier it was time to get some dinner on the go and feed a pair of starving anglers. Steak and baked potatoes are hardly original, but they are pretty easy to do and certainly went down well on a cold, fishless, January night.
Trevor followed up with another doggie, whilst I just twiddled frozen thumbs 🙁 We must have fished on until about 10 (past my bedtime these days!) before calling it quits and accepting my first blank of 2023.
Amazingly enough, we did manage to stumble into the tent without flattening it in the dark. With a couple of sleeping mats under us and good sleeping bags it was a pretty decent night, really. A good slug of malt whisky probably helped!
We awoke next morning to rain battering the tent with a bit of wind behind it. We looked at the solid grey skies, and then at each other, and decided that 12 hours of catching nothing was more than enough! Packing up, we squelched back to my car and scuttled off with our tails between our legs. Could do better, indeed! You simply can’t win ’em all, although I will definitely have my vengeance!
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“Must try harder” ? It sounds very familiar, like most of my NE coast forays off the rocks over the years. Still nice to be out though, well done.
Win some, lose some I guess. I was a bit disappointed, given we’ve had very good boat fishing a couple of hundred yards further out. I think one lesson to be learnt is to improve my casting distance, as distance gives depth from this mark! I wouldn’t write this spot off just yet 🙂