It’s been weeks since I was last out, and it’s been frustrating watching a shedload of wet and windy weather blasting through on any available free time. However a calm sunny day was forecast for the Etive area so I decided to combine that with an over-nighter boat camping well up the loch.
Launching in the dark was no big deal, but ploughing up the loch by chartplotter proved a little more challenging, especially as my Navionics card pre-dates the upper loch being converted to electronic format. Darkness, low cloud and light rain misting up your glasses disorientates you quite easily, so I was glad I know the loch fairly well and had a few waypoints set.
Setting up camp was reasonably slick and I was heading back out onto the loch in well under an hour, setting up stall in one of my favourite deepwater marks. The rain wasn’t heavy but did manage to chill everything down quite well, and action was on the slow side. I gave it a couple of hours with a few small spurs, a ray and dogfish to show for my efforts, before heading back ashore to get some dinner organised.
The fire and little BBQ provided a little relief from the cold, and clouds began to break and reveal the moon. Having checked Alcatraz on her mooring I left her to it and turned in around midnight.
Next morning I awoke in reasonable warmth, thanks to a significant sleeping bag upgrade earlier in the year, and prized open the tent flap to view a cold but clear dawn – the rain had provided quite a good glazing effect where it had frozen overnight and cracked off the tent in impressive style.
Camp struck, I headed out with Alcatraz to do a little survey of a deepish channel I’d come across a while back, and which seemed to be in range of a modest shore cast. You can see the result from Reefmaster below, combined with a Google Earth overlay – although since it’s miles from the nearest car-accessible spot I’m guessing not many shore anglers will be visiting soon. Having completed this little objective I dropped anchor in the trench and waited to see if anything would show.
A few minutes later the answer came in the form of a series of tiny spurdogs in the 6 to 12 inch range. There were a few whiting as well, some of which were bigger than the spurs they came up with.
Although even these little fellows pack a punch, as I found out when I got spiked by one 🙁
Even the bigger fish weren’t too much better…
So it was soon time to head west back along the loch to try another mark.
The sun was up and the loch flat calm as I waited it out at another mark half-way down towards Bonawe, so I sipped a coffee and watched the world pass by – rather slowly in the shape of flotilla of sea kayaks.
A few fish did show up, including this beautifully olive-gold coloured little codling and a decent number of small spurdogs (no absolutely tiny ones here, thankfully).
A final move down below Bonawe produced nothing apart from small dogfish, so I called a halt slightly earlier than planned to allow an early retrieval whilst it was still daylight.
