- Vic Fisher's sea angling journal - http://www.vicfisher.co.uk -

Codling are here

Picture of codlingOn Friday 17th. August, the weather looked awful with quite high winds and didn’t appear ideal for fishing. Undeterred, I decided I was going to fish come hell or high water. The East arm of Brighton Marina was the favoured venue and I was aiming to go quite a way around on the arm but as there was quite a bit of water being thrown up over the marina wall (slaps) by the wind, I decided to fish further inshore on Bay 18 .

I set up at around 9pm with two rods; one on a single running ledger baited with lugworm and sent out at about fifty yards or so. The second rod was a 2/0 pennel rig baited with whole calamari and lobbed down the side in the hope of a large bass.

The wind was blowing quite a bit with a strong W/SW breeze and there were a few slaps coming over but on the whole not too bad. There was a lot of weed though, which eased towards high water.

The first fish to come were small ‘bootlace’ eels which created havoc with my rigs, coating them in slime and knotting them up as they usually do. A couple of bass soon followed but were unfortunately only small schoolies, not large enough for the table. All these came to the lug baited rod. The next few fish were to my surprise, small codling of around 12oz. again too small for the table but indeed a welcome sight and perhaps a sign of better fishing to come.

As it neared high water, the wind strengthened and the sea was getting lumpier, with ‘slaps’ becoming larger and more frequent. It was time to leave, so having packed up and donated my unused bait to a chap fishing along from me, I trundled back to the car quite content with the evening’s result.