Thursday 31 July 2014

26/7/14 Hunting Mackerel

 A full set for 'the boy'


The word on the 'street' at the moment is that there is a distinct lack of mackerel about in our local waters-a worrying situation to say the least.
 Out at sea it's a subject that is constantly brought up over the air waves with everybody trying desperately to find some for bait, swapping locations and following up catches usually for just a handful of fish .
I use an awful lot of them myself for bait at this time of year for shark, tope conger and of course bass , and its essential for me to have a decent frozen stock. I even have a dedicated 'mackerel' freezer in my garage.
It's always great to get my son Jack out fishing in the boat-something we do together all too rarely nowadays. He'd just returned from a six week trip to North America and was able to spend a couple of days with the 'old man' before returning home to North Devon.
With limited time , we decided just to target mackerel on a short trip , something that's always good fun and for my part,something of a necessity. The problem is that they're extremely hard to find -my plan being just to head due south from the river entrance stopping every mile or so until we found them...hopefully.
To cut a long story short, we did find them, forty six of them to be precise and a good size too but, we had to travel five miles out before they showed in any numbers. Almost too valuable to eat, four were smoked up for lunch and the rest of this most precious commodity were consigned to the bait freezer. Listening to the radio , the quality of the general fishing was quite poor however, a certain marina neighbour did fill his boots somewhat with various flatfish and rays from the local sand banks-noted for the future.

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