Sundays at Brighton Marina, especially sunny ones can be purgatory when it comes to serious fishing. You can generally never find your ‘hotspot’ or favourite bay, the place is noisy and quite frankly, the behaviour of some can only be described as disgusting. Anyway, I thought I’d take advantage of the England v Germany match and hit the marina after the game yesterday in the hope that it may not be way too crowded as normal. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to the East arm – there were hardly any people on there at at all. Weather-wise, it was a flat calm, clear sea, bright sunshine with no wind – not ideal for fishing in the day but I hoped that once dark it wouldn’t be too bad.
I walked out to my favoured bay and started to set up, one rod geared for bass, with a long link running ledger ending in a 3/0 hook to be baited with mackerel once I’d caught them. The idea was to feather for mackerel on the other rod until I had enough and then set that one up with a size 4 two hook sole rig baited with lugworm. As it happens, it was hard work getting the mackerel and they didn’t show until it was almost dark when I managed to bag half a dozen.
The bass rod was baited up with mackerel chunk and cast out before I swapped the feathers for the sole rig on the second rod, baited up and cast that out. First hit was a schoolie bass that took the lugworm. The next to come up was a small palm sized thornback ray, also on the lug.
As the evening wore on, the bass rod refused to twitch and nothing appeared to be interested in the mackerel bait – not even crabs, the only time it moved was when I retrieved to re-bait! The lug was proving to be a hit though as I had a steady stream of fish: schoolie bass, Pout and Small thornbacks, not great but at least I was busy.
High water arrived (about 1am) and went with nothing spectacular to report. The bait ran out at about 3am and that was my cue to leave with a final tally of 8 bass, the biggest at 35cm, a few Pout and half a dozen small thornbacks. The next trip will probably be a prawn and float and float session, although before that, I do have a mission to bag some mackerel for Anna’s cooking demo at Alex’s school on Wednesday. This will be a first light episode that morning, so I hope that the bloody mackerel oblige and show up.