Becky M Newsletter

Monday 25th June, 2007

Here we are at long last, “Late again” I hear you say, well just a bit and I have no excuse’s what so ever.

I recently invited to take part in the Poole “Fladen International Species Hunt” run by the Poole Charter Skippers Association, along with a couple of other boats from our association, (Wight Sapphire & Southern Star).

This is a great competition, each boat has two teams of four onboard and they only have to catch one of a species to count, I think we managed to account for seventeen different species, including mini species, anyway the best team on my boat managed to come sixth overall. I was quite pleased with their achievement considering that they weren’t too familiar fishing that type of competition. With a bit of luck they would have learnt a lot from the experience this year, and be able to do better at their next attempt.

The Black Bream fishing has dropped off a bit at the moment, and we are being plagued with the junior fish, but that isn’t a bad thing really as it means that they will be growing up for the future stocks.

I had some holiday makers onboard the other day, and we had a session fishing for Bass at anchor, where we had some success in as much as everyone onboard caught fish, with the best one weighing 8lbs 11ozs.

On my last trip, (Friday) the weather was absolutely crap, and the fishing was just as bad, all in all I was having a bad day, what with the Mackerel being dispersed to all points of the compass, and about as hard to find as “rocking horse droppings”, the wheelhouse being rearranged because of the silly slop that was running at the time. I then moved into the Solent so as to be in calmer waters, but the anchor did not want to hold, then tripping twice in quick succession. As I said I was having a bad day.

In the end I decided to go back out around the Needles and put up with being thrown around. The fishing began to improve as the baby pack Tope moved in onto the baits, but the icing on the cake for me was when I saw Mike Humm on only his second trip out with me (Mike being a fairly newcomer to boat fishing), latched into a half decent fish, thinking it was a Tope I stood by with the disgorger, only to see the bluey/ grey/white colouring of a Bass swimming towards the boat. I immediately grabbed the net, and landed a cracking Bass weighing 12lbs 4ozs.

Well done Mike, that’s going to be a hard fish to better, I will send the photos off to the magazines.

Tight lines,

Dave