AT species hunt starts again.

So as the title suggests, since I last posted I have recieved my card for the Angling Trust species hunt again. This has seen me off out trying to recatch most of the species I've already caught this year so far and to be honest I've started very strong! Last year I finished on 23 species and so far this year I'm up to 20. Some of these have also been species I hadn't caught yet this year which is helping to drive me closer to my years goal of 35 species. 

This month again I need to give a massive thank you to my cousin Ben and also to George for their help in achieving an incredible personal best Smooth Hound and also helping me catch my first ever Stingray! The Hound was a year goal I had completed last month, I only wanted to set a personal best for the species which I had done at 3lb 11oz, it now stands at 15lb 9oz!

After my first few unsuccessful casts, Ben pointed out to me that I was casting to far for the gulley but not far enough for the sand bar, so effectively I was fishing away from the two most prominent features. I wasn't going to be able to hit the sand bar so he suggested shortening my cast to hit the gulley instead, after he pointed out to me what I was looking for on the surface to have a rough idea of the bottom I gave it my best shot at getting the bait in the right place. I was using a pulley pennel rig with two 2/0 Sakuma manta extra hooks, baited with 5 big Ragworm. As I put the rod in the tripod George shouted to me to make sure I had the drag loose, I slackened it off and turned away to bait a spare rig ready to change the bait on the other rod, with in a few seconds of turning away, I literally hadn't even got the other rig off the winder, I heard a noise behind me, I turned to see my rod sliding up the tripod! I did my best to trap the line against the blank and strike, as I did so the fish took a load of line and cut my thumb at the same time. After a pretty decent start to the fight it was obvious to me that this wasn't the same sort of size Hound I had played before so shouted to Grorge to tell him I had a fish on, he came over just in time to see the fish and he ran in up to his waist with just his wellies on to grab it for me, it was at this point I realized it must have been something special!

Ben weighed the fish and took some pictures before I walked the fish out and held it to recover for nearly 20 minutes before it swam away to fight another day. 

I had one more bite on this trip that came as we were packing down, I had a long slow pull down that just kept going, I picked up and wound into a large amount of weight, after a short stint of pumping and winding i got to massive lump of weed stuck on my leader knot, I had to put the rod down to remove it, as I was doing so I spotted an awesome Stingray flapping away on the surface, after seeing this I tore the weed off a whole lot faster picked up the rod and beached the fish. On the scales it went 7lb 11oz and was another new PB from the trip.

I did also achieve another one of my goals for the year this month when I set my Cod personal best after a trip out with Ben and my uncle Mike. We went to Abbotsbury to target the species and I was clueless on how to do so, Ben helped me out a lot with rigs, I tied the right rig but I had made them much longer than they needed to be. I was using Pulley Pennel rigs about 24" in length, and after deciding to simplify bait selection massively I was baiting the with four or five Blow Lug depending on worm size. 

I had a pull down followed by a slack line on my right hand rod on my first cast, I grabbed the rod and wound and wound and then wound some more, it took most of the way in to catch up with the fish, but once I did and caught sight of it coming over the shingle I knew I had the target species with in twenty minutes! After waking the fish over to show Ben and having him take a picture for me I got the rod back in the water.

Around fifteen minutes later the same rod was off again with the exact same type of bite, this time though I caught up with the fish quite quickly, I could feel the fish head shaking and battling all the way in and again to see another Codling gliding over the shingle made me ecstatic.

All in all it's been a very good month of fishing for me with a fair amount of help from Ben, thanks for ready and until next month tight lines!

Quality over Quantity fishing this month

Before we get into any of this months effort towards my goals I have to say a huge thank you to my cousin Ben Carter, we have met up fishing a few times this month and he has helped me out massively. Not just on our fishing trips together but almost daily over messages and on the phone, it is in these conversations with him I discovered just how much I really do have to learn. 

As a lot of you will know from past posts on here, one species I've been enjoying catching is the Sole, I've kind of set myself a little side challenge of getting one over a pound and a half by the end of the year. The reason I mention this is that on my last trip out with Ben he landed two incredible specimens, one going 1lb 12oz and the other going 2lb, this is a dream for me and just to see the fish was a pleasure!

On top of answering all my questions and helping with what to target, how to target and where to target, Ben also spent a few hours working on my cast, I'm not the biggest caster infact I'm probably average at best but he helped me out massively and I now grasp the basis of the pendulum cast and he also helped me add quite a bit of distance.

If any of you want to check out the kind of fishing Ben does then you can click the Vision Angling image on the side of this blog and it will take you to his YouTube channel.

I'm still not 100% confident when it comes to casting with a few people around me but I'm constantly practicing if I have a bit of room to swing a lead safely. 

I haven't managed to get out on as many trips this month as I did last month due to the fact I am no longer furloughed, I am however glad to be back at work, I just wish I could still fish as much as I was doing a few weeks back, but hey as long as I pick the right location and the right tide I'm hoping for quality over quantity from now on.

My only really good session fishing wise was one where I went off to Southbourne beach with Lee again to try for a few Ray's, this time we met my Dad down there who was metal detecting for a few hours that evening.

I fished a Ray bait on one rod and a 3 hook clip down on the other, I managed a lovely little Small-Eyed Ray on my first cast on a Sandeel with half a Squid wrapped on the side, this was bound to a pair of 3/0 Sakuma manta extra hooks on a pulley drop down rig.

I then managed to bring in a Plaice and a Sole on the other rods first cast, before hooking into the second Ray of the evening. On the way in this rod got snagged on something, not a hundred percent sure of what though, after around a minute of trying to free the line and failing I decided on walking to my left to get a new angle on it, I took about 3 steps to my left and the line snapped, some how Lee caught the line and started to walk right with in instead. About 10 steps to the right and it was free, he ran the end of the line to me and I hand lined in my first ever Undulate!

During this time, Lee was fishing pop up rigs and had managed to bring in a couple of fresh Mackerel for bait, I baited my rig with the tail end of one of these, this is probably the largest bait ever attempted to use, I cast it hoping to hit about 80 yards, the plan for this one was to leave it out and hope for a bigger fish to come along.

When it came time to pack up, I wound down to the lead and lifted to break out the grips, I said to Lee, 'it didn't seem to want to trip' so I did it again, this time though i felt some movement too. After pumping and winding for a while I finally beached the fish, an awesome 7lb Undulate Ray, a massive thanks to who ever he was that lent me his scales! Still can't believe I left mine in the car, I didn't want to make the walk back leaving the fish out of the water so running to the guys next to us was the better option in my opinion.

The only other trip I had this month was with Ben, Lee and George Hennessy, this was a local trip again, Lee and I blanked, Ben and George both managed Sole, with Ben landing a monster brace. He also had a brace of Plaice and an awesome Undulate, this might well be up on their YouTube channel so I'll leave the details for them to tell you.

Another Target Achieved

Hello again, following on from last months success this month has been just as good. I have managed to complete another of my targets for the year this month as well as make some really good progress on the species front.

The Loni's tackle shop species hunt has officially started back up again so I've been focusing a fair bit of my time into trying to catch up on that this month, which has also obviously helped in pushing me forward in species towards my year goal. I was only on six species when the lock down started but I've made it up to 11 now after heading down again to target another Thin Lipped Mullet. Seems to be a bit of an recurring theme in my fishing these days.

There were a few species I've been out to catch that I'd already caught since setting the targets due to the hunt not being on until now, such as Sole, Black Bream and Plaice. I have now managed to enter all three of these, I did manage to enter the Sole in style too.

I have also been able to add some species to both, one of which also completed another target, I set my first personal best for Smooth Hound, not massive at 3lb 11oz but I was extremely excited either way. I realise the blog is about my pursuit of specimen fish but it's a starting point.

Over the last few weeks I've had a couple of guys with me that are learning to fish the sea as well, I'm doing my best to pass on any of what little I do know to them and help them achieve their own targets. One of the guys Lee was wanting to target a Smooth Hound himself, I was very happy to have helped him in so far managing to get two out for him.

Neither of us have manged anything of any size but we were both very happy to have achieved something we had set out to do, next up for us now is to get out and see how many of the Ray species we can check off, the other guy that has been coming with us is Jordan and its the Rays hes had his sights on, unfortunately for him we haven't really been fishing many known Ray marks lately due to tides locally and weather not playing ball.

This is something we are set to remedy as of now! The Spotted Ray Shimano mission badge is what I am trying to get next as well as bettering my Small-Eyed Ray personal best of 7lb 11oz. Jordan has his mind set on an Undulate Ray and Lee the Stingray so fingers crossed for a good report coming next month and us having done all 4 of these.

I also had a very proud dad moment this month when my son Kieran asked me to help him catch a Sole of his own and he managed one on his last cast of a short evening session we had. This was taken on a loop rig he sat with me and tied himself baited with Ragworm.

His new Sole personal best is 9oz and he was one very happy boy, so much so he hasn't stopped asking about going out to beat it since so that is also something we will be arranging soon.

As of last night I have made it up to 15 species for the year now, these are:

Thin Lipped Mullet
Whiting
Flounder
Ballan Wrasse
Corkwing Wrasse
Goldsinny Wrasse
Dogfish
Conger Eel
Pouting
Dover Sole
Plaice
Bass
Black Bream
Starry Smooth Hound
Silver Eel

I am extremely happy with my progress this month and I'm hoping to add a few more this coming month! Thank you all for reading I hope you enjoyed the post and are looking forward to next months update.

New PB and 3 Month Update

Hello everyone and welcome back, so as you can tell from the title of this post I have managed to break a personal best of mine this month. This isn't something towards any of my goals for the year which may strike some of you as strange, the Mullet as a whole is one of my Mission Badge goals for the year but I had not planned on getting that with the Thin Lipped, the target size is 4lb and to be honest with you Thick Lipped Mullet would be the easiest one to do that with.

I don't want to take the easy option for any of these targets, there wouldn't be much point in calling them goals if I did, although with this one the goal was always going to be achieved by catching the Thick Lipped, they are larger on average so it made sense to me to do it that way.

The reason I have been out targeting the Thins though is I've been writing a follow article for the one I have just had in the Sea Angler magazine. I was playing around with some rigs to try target the larger of the species that hide a lot lower in the water and are not interested in the spinning tactics. You can see the rig its self in issue 584 of the magazine.

Due to it being a follow up article I'm not going to go into much detail about it now but what I will tell you is that my personal best was 2lb 7oz and it is now 3lb 4oz which comes in at just under 93% specimen for my area and I could not be happier. When I hooked the fish I knew it was bigger than anything I have played before and then when I seen it on the surface my heart started beating out of my chest. I will put up a cheeky picture of it now for you though.

After weighing it and taking a few pictures I sat the fish in the edge securely in my net for a few minutes to recover and then released it. I would absolutely love to meet him again some day but until then hopefully somebody else can enjoy catching him too.

Now onto some of the fishing I've been doing towards my targets for the year, I had a trip on the Thursday after lock down was partially lifted to target a new Small-Eyed Ray PB, I hit up Southbourne beach with my Mrs and the kids to have a short family evening out, with the fishing gear in the car to obviously.

The tides for this trip were not very good at all but I'd never catch one sat at home so in my mind there is no point in not trying! I took the usual bait with me for this one Sandeel, Squid and some X Seagoo, I used some Kraken Tackle Pulley Extra rigs and Up and Over rigs too. Like I said before they are so well made I don't see me using anything else, the components on the rigs would cost you almost what the rigs do, if not the same and the plus side is you don't have to tie them!

Unfortunately this trip turned out to be a blank session but it was the most enjoyable blank I've had to date. It was just nice to be back out after a few fish, had a lot of fun on the beach with the kids as well. One thing I have learned over the last few months is that my 10 year old boy, Kieran absolutely loves photography, I have since bought him a digital camera and let him take all my pictures for me. I am paying him a few pound per picture I use, that way I am encouraging him to keep taking pictures but also teaching him what it feels like to earn his own money.

Next up was a short notice session where I decided to give it a go at beating my Plaice personal best, we set off to the same beach, mostly because it was very quiet when we went there for the Ray. This time I only took some Ragworm and a wrap of Black Lug for tipping off with. Again using the Kraken rigs but this time the Loop rigs. Again this session ended in a blank but it was fun either way again. I enjoy catching fish obviously but most of it for me is seeing my kids enjoying the scenery and the nice beaches we live so close to, I took them all for granted when I was young so don't want my kids to do the same.

The small tides over the first week were not very helpful when it came to the fishing on the beaches but one thing it did help out with was getting out with the LRF gear and trying to make a dent in the species target for the year, I set myself the goal of hitting 35 species and now have my work cut out seeing as we are almost half way through the year.

I took Kieran out with the ultra light gear and had a play on the drop shot for some mini species, the target Blenny and Goby didn't make an appearance but three species of Wrasse did. Kieran managed an awesome little lime coloured Ballan Wrasse.

We were both really happy with how the short session panned out, it was our first LRF trip of the year so to be only one away from catching the four species of Wrasse we get locally I was super happy as well. The only one that didn't make an appearance was the Baillon's Wrasse, I'm certain I will get one soon but for now I'm happy to have managed the Goldsinny, Corkwing and Ballan. With the Corkwing below being the star of the show, its colours are amazing!

So I'm happy to have made it to six species so far seeing as how the year started for us all but have a long way to go to reach the goal. Thanks again for reading and I really hope you enjoyed the post, maybe even the article when it come out too.

Additives, Bait For Fish Or Anglers?

So with no fishing being possible this past month I have had plenty of time to work on something I meant to do a few months back. I noticed then that the hot topic was whether or not liquid bait additives caught fish or were just a gimmick designed to catch anglers. I started looking around for bait companies making additives for salt water fishing, I found a few different companies but decided to go local and contacted Solent Seagoo. I explained to them my plans of reviewing a few of their products and they were more than happy for me to do so.

After a conversation with one of the owners of the company I bought a package of a few bottles but was actually sent the full range, this was the range at the time it has now expanded quite a lot. Along with bottles of Seagoo I was sent a T-shirt, a hoody, a hand towel and a syringe.  So to be fair the service from the company was outstanding! However we are here to figure out weather or not the additives work, so let's get into it.

On inspection of the product the first thing that jumps out is the smell, wow it is pungent! I had to wrap the bottles a few times and stow them away in a deep, dark recess of my desk to keep the other half from loosing her mind. Next thing to note is just how thick it is, this automatically put my mind to rest a little, I was worried if it was too thin of a liquid it would just wash off on impact with the water. 

Let's move on to some actual fishing shall we, I have used these liquids a number of times and in a number of different ways, the first one I tried was on a match at Swanage Pier, these matches are normally won with five to six metres of strap Conger so decided to take some Squid and X Seagoo with me for that, I started off though in the day light as I normally do, with my LRF rod, I fished with size 16 hooks on a drop shot rig as I do to target Perch, for this I took with me some Ragworm Seagoo, I was using 15-20mm sections of Ragworm and smothering it in the liquid before dropping down the side of a support, I was into Wrasse after Wrasse with the odd Pouting thrown in for good measure. My other half Jen was fishing this match and to start with she was only using worm but after seeing my catch rate she started adding on the liquid and her catch rate improved from there.

Going into the evening it was time to move onto targeting the straps, to start with I went with a pulley pennel rig, I baited up with a whole Squid pumped full of the X goo, one thing I will add now is it took me a little while to get any liquid into the syringe due to the thickness of the liquid. It didn't take long at all though to be into some fish, as I said before they are never very big off there but they provide some sport. One thing is for sure I am looking forward to finally getting down there with the floats and some Mackerel Seagoo for some Garfish!

I also decided to go out to target some Flounder at the end of last year, I looked into how a lot of people locally were targeting them and most were using multiple hook pop up rigs, this for me didn't feel the right way to go about it, I felt that when Flounder fishing these days quite often we are fishing for a single bite, so instead of going down the route of more baits gives more options, I went for the bigger the better, single size one hook with three big Ragworm and a strip of Mackerel belly smothered in Mackerel liquid. The results were three fish in two sessions not bad by anybody's standard but for someone who before then hadn't tried to catch one I'd say it went well.

In the few months since I started using the product I have found myself having three favourites that I go nowhere without. These are the Ragworm, Mackerel and X. I have caught so many fish using this stuff in a short space of time that in my mind it must be making a difference right? I feel like we would never know for sure, but a lot of the time in angling if something gives you confidence you'll be fishing better and the results will come along with it. So to summarise what started out me being sceptical I am now converted and I don't leave home with out my Seagoo.

Introduction.

Hello and welcome to my very first post on this blog, In this post I will go through everything you can expect going forward, as well as a catch up to this point.

Firstly a quick look at what is to come in the future on here, I as most anglers do have set myself a few targets for this coming year, a lot of these are based around the mission badges in the Sea Angler magazine. I managed to pick up my first one at near the end of last year, this is something I will go over a little further into this post.

I have set my sights on getting another five of these this year, these will be the Bull Huss, Spotted Ray, Mullet, Black Bream and the Ballan Wrasse. I'm guessing that some of you are reading this and thinking that doesn't sound like much for a full year, to be honest you're probably right, although I am very new to sea angling and most of the time spent this year will be more in learning to target these than in actually fishing for them.

I have also set my sights on bettering a few of my personal bests, or setting some as the case may be for a few species. These will be Plaice, Smoothhound, Small-Eyed Ray, Dover Sole and then later on in the year a Cod and Flounder. I currently only have PB's for three of these species, Plaice 1lb 4oz, Small-Eyed Ray 7lb 12oz and the Flounder at 1lb 1oz, none of these are specimens by any stretch of the imagination although I have only been sea fishing for 'big' fish a little over 6 months and have a lot to learn!

Finally I have set myself a target for how many species caught from the shore this year, that number has been set at thirty-five, not too many but still a challenge. I do this mostly because I really enjoy LRF so it gives me a little target for that as well.

Okay so lets move on to a little bit about the lead up to creating this blog, for many of you that know me you will know that this is not my first blog, I have done one in the past but I felt it wasn't going in the direction I wanted it to and because of that have decided to start this one. I have all but given up fresh water fishing as I now find the sea fishing a lot more exciting.

As I said earlier in this post I do have a few sea fishing personal bests and have done a fair bit of it over the last twelve to eighteen months, mostly though this was all just heading off to the beach to see what I could catch and maybe the odd match. It was only really six months or so ago I decided to start 'specimen hunting' I started to learn a few marks locally and what to expect from them species wise. Also as mentioned earlier I still am yet to set a PB over the 100% mark.

The above picture is my personal best Thin Lipped Mullet at 2lb 7oz, this is one case where I had set out to catch the species and achieved it, I had learned of a mark and after two or three learning sessions I managed to figure out how to catch them. I will go through how I target them in a future post when I finally get back out targeting the mission badge for the species.

Speaking of the badges as I mentioned earlier I did manage to get one in November last year, this is one of my proudest achievements in angling so far as I set out to target the species and caught it on the second session after putting in months of research on how to catch them. This is something I will again go through with you at a later date as I am looking to beat the PB for the species this year. Again any of you who had checked out my old blog would know that I'm talking about the Small-Eyed Ray as I did not stop talking about it for about a month after catching it.

That was the second species in the same month I had managed by design, I was over the moon, so as you can imagine when I set out this January to target a Flounder and had two in the first trip I was ecstatic.

The Flounder has always been and remains one of my favourite species of fish so I am very much looking forward to the latter part of the coming year to get out and try for a bigger one. I am not however going to be wishing the year away as I have a lot I want to achieve before then and I really hope you guys want to join me on my journey!

Just as a quick side note, due to my coarse fishing background one thing I feel very strongly about is catch and release and all of these fish were returned fighting fit to the sea.

So onto things that have happened up until now, I have only been out fishing four times this year so far, once for the Flounder back in January, once back to the same spot for a match and managed a third of the species.

My second trip out to target a set species was a nice evening session with a few friends where they took me to a mark to try for my first Spotted Ray. I was also there to test out some new 'up and over rigs' from Kraken Tackle. I was very dubious of using a rig that I had not tied myself although I was extremely happy with these. The components that make up the rigs are of a very high standard and very well tied. In fact I cannot honestly remember a time where I had used a rig not tied myself but I will for sure be trying out the other rig types the company produces. If you want to check them out click the company logo on the side of this blog.

Unfortunately I only managed to hook a small Whiting on this trip but we will be back there very soon to try again, this was also the story for the forth and last time I've been out up until now, I went out for another evening session this time with my brother at the mark I caught the Small-Eyed Ray trying for an early season specimen. Once again only a small Whiting for me and a Pouting for my brother. These were kept in a bucket for a picture and then released alive again after.

Thank you very much for reading this post and I really do hope you enjoyed it, the posts on here will be monthly (current global situation allowing) and I look forward to starting writing the next one.