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By Vic, 13 October, 2006 15:56

I decided on Brighton Marina East arm as the venue for last night.

Arrived at about 9pm. and made my way to bay 58, to find I was the only one fishing in this area – lovely peace and quiet!

Weather was fine, clear sky, no wind at all, smooth sea with just the hint of a swell. The only sound was the incoming tide against the rocks below.

One rod was set up with standard paternoster with size4 hooks and baited with lugworm in the search for sole. The other rod had single paternoster with size 2/0 hook pennel rig baited with whole calamari and lobbed a few yards from the base.

A couple of hours passed with just a handful of Pout to show for it. This could be bait wasting exercise I thought to myself.

At around midnight or so, the lug rod arched over savagely, I lifted into what seemed like a reasonable fish. Got it to net and a few seconds later, a lovely conditioned bass of around 2 1/2lbs.was lying on the deck. Normally this would have gone back, but it had taken the small hook down so deeply, it had caused serious injury. There was no way that it would have survived, and so was quickly dispatched.

At this point, the second rod lurched over and the ratchet screamed as line was pulled from the spool – another bass? No, a pollack of around 2lbs. had struck the pennel rig. This was brought to the net and landed. I couldn’t believe it when I saw that this too had taken the hooks right down and had to meet it’s maker. I hoped that this wasn’t going to be the theme for the night.

After re-baiting casting, I sat down for a coffee and fag. I sat and studied the glowing rod tips when I saw the worm rod nodding a couple of times. I left it for a few seconds before lifting into the fish. A palm sized sole was duly landed – not quite the size I was hoping for but a sole none the less. This was lip hooked and was returned unharmed. A short while later another small sole was landed nda returned.

A few casts later, I was retrieving the worm rig and had got to the base just before lifting it out of the water, when the rod was wrenched downward so quickly, I nearly lost my grip. Another pollack slightly larger than the first had followed the worm and struck almost at the surface. It was duly landed and returned.

That was about it for the rest of the session apart from the usual suspects. So with a bass in the bag for lunch and pollack for the cat (although I do like it fresh like this, so the cat might have to fight me for it), I headed for home with plans for a near future return.

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By Vic,

This is a bit of a ‘catch up’ type post. Due to lack of a PC recently, fishing exploit updates have been sadly neglected.

Since 23 September, I’ve only had a few sessions, mainly at Seaford. Not much to write home about when I think about it, mostly whiting and Pout.

…Was this post really needed? Possibly not.

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By Vic, 11 October, 2006 16:58

Haven’t posted much recently, due, in part to the absence of a computer.

The old girl finally gave up the ghost and shut down forever. There had been intermittent problems and signs of impending doom such as a hard drive failure which resulted in some lost data. I know I should have had backups and I was going to do them ‘tomorrow’ but I never actually did it.

I managed to recover about 80% of the data using the hard drive in a freezer trick. I didn’t for one second believe it would work, but luckily I was proved wrong.

Finally the main board died and that was it. It worked out cheaper in the end to get a new system rather than to get new main board and have to upgrade all the components along with it.

I settled for a ‘barebones’ system from Novatech which comprised of:

MSI Intel 975X PCI Express Mainboard
Intel E6600 Core2Duo processor
1024Mb DDR2 667Mhz PC5400 RAM
Thermaltake Tsunami Dream ATX case

I got it up and running with a Maxtor 200Gb SATA drive plus all other components salvaged from the old system such as the LG DVD writer, LG DVD player, GeForce 7600GS 256MB DDR2 graphics card.

What followed was the usual slog of re-installing the OS (Windows XP Pro), all the software and re-configuring to get everything ‘just right’. Well it’s all done now, so things can get back to whatever normal is supposed to be.

Next on the agenda is to set up Linux (Suse 9.2 Pro), so I can have my dual boot machine again.