25/5/14 Undulates and Hounds In The Rain

One of the most enjoyable aspects of owning your own boat, is showing off your skills and putting your mates on to fish, especially if they are not boat owners themselves. A boat trip to most shore anglers can be a very special occasion. I know I felt that way about trips out with mates before owning my own boat especially as the fishing can at times be comparatively excellent. I personally find finding fish  as satisfying as catching the fish myself. It's all about where you park the boat.

My angling buddy Simon has enjoyed some pretty successful trips on 'Jupiter' in the past with both bream and tope so when he told me that he'd yet to catch an undulate ray, yet another challenge was laid before me.
To be fair, the local undulate fishing has been pretty 'hot' of late with all the usual 'suspects' reporting good catches and from marks that I can see from my living room window so I can't really claim too much of the 'skipper's glory' for this one.
However, it did give me an opportunity to try out a new mark close to the 'scene of operations' from Brian's catalogue, that I'd been meaning to have a go at for some time. A patch of hard ground , surrounded by soft which has a heritage of both rays and hounds.
 Baiting our 4/0s and circles with my newly prepared cuttle strips, tipped with squid proved to be a great success, and generally resisted the attention of the small bream that can be found in the area.
Despite heavy rain which forced us to 'tuck up' under Jupiter's canopy( a really useful bit of kit), it was no time at all before Simon popped his undulate cherry and a final tally of eight double figure fish came aboard (most and biggest to Simon's baits) along with half a dozen smoothounds(I did all of these), a bold, bait stealing bream and the ubiquitous cat sharks.
Great company, and very satisfying fishing.