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.
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