Last weekend the weather looked perfect for our first 2012 attempt at catching a Smooth-hound from one of our local beaches. So with 20 prime peeler crab from Gerry’s of Morecambe (where we got some new lure rods at the same time – more on these to follow) we arrived at Anchorsholme around 7pm, grabbed the gear from the car and waded over the large gully to fish the tide two hours down and two back up again.
Considering it was a Saturday night the beach was fairly busy and we counted 11 other anglers in total, some pumping lug and obviously after Bass but with the sea almost mirror calm the chance of Bass showing seemed very slim.
We were fishing our crab baits a fair distance as the beach is very flat and although we were getting the odd small ‘touch’ nothing was forthcoming until the tide started to flood.
I’d launched a bait out as far as I could and walked back letting line out as the tide flooded when my rod gave a proper knock – easily visible even at such a distance as I’m now fishing with braid. After a short fight a small Bass was landed and after unhooking was released to fight another day.
Half an hour or so later the same thing happened and again, a small, perfectly formed and incredibly spiky Bass was landed and then it all went quiet and that was that for the evening.
Why I got bites and Wendy didn’t was probably down to distance as even at my maximum the water can’t have been very deep. You could tell on retrieval there were no obvious features out there, maybe on a larger tide we’d have been able to reach some gullys but that’ll have to wait until next time.
The one thing that was a pain was the braided line coming back covered in sand which hasn’t happened before and we think it’s due to the shallowness of the beach and lack of waves due to the weather. As you ‘pick up’ the line to wind everything back in the fine muddy sand is obviously ‘sticking’ to the braided line and not being washed off by the waves or the depth of the water. It made a hell of a mess and next time we fish here in those conditions we’ll be using standard’non-sticky’ nylon line.
We had a great night though and although the Smooth-hounds didn’t show up for whatever reason, we managed to get a couple of Bass – the first of 2012.
