Sat 21st Jan Bristol Channel

[jonnyswamp]

After what felt like 4 months of rain and high winds, he weekend forecast was good, cold but good

Should have been around 5mph Easterly

Got the 7am lock out and as the tide was fairly big, decided to anchor up on the inner coral to wait for it to ease enough to get out a bit wider

It's only a short dap from the locks and the anchor was down within 15 mins and we started to bait up whilst the boat settled

However, the anchor had other ideas and we were dragging at 1.5 knots

I went up front and retrieved the anchor to find a boulder which fitted exactly between the 3 flukes (15kg Bruce, is that what the pointy things are called ?) so now wonder it didn't hold

No pics of that as I was hanging over the bow getting the said stone out of it's holder and didn't want to chance getting my phone out and it following the same route as the stone back to the sea bed

Anyway, re positioned the boat and dropped anchor for the second time and we were holding in quite a strong tide considering where we were

4 of us on board today with the usual baits of dirty squid, rag, lug and Shuff had some Mackerel

Not a sniff for the first hour or 2, then whilst I was making some hot beverages, I noticed my line kiting

I was using 8 oz Gemini extended grip wires and hoped that it had been pulled out by a fish, rather than a lump of weed, so started my retrieve with a bit of hopeful anticipation

First Codling of the day at 2 3/4 lb, so although not big it was a keeper

Another or so hour went by with very little movement on any of our rods, until Nipper had quite a big nod on his 

He lifted into it and quite quickly brought in a slightly smaller Codling of just over 2lb

After hearing what the other boats were catching (or not as the case was) we decided to stay until low, then move

Just before low we made the short move up Channel to just inside the Cardiff mid buoy, was going to fish one of the holes off the foreshore but not enough water to get in to them on low, sounder was showing 5 ft and getting shallower so I erred on the side of caution and went out a bit wider

Did I mention the biting Easterly ? It was fine on the ebb as we had shelter from the cabin (shed, wheelhouse, greenhouse, outhouse or whatever you want to call it)

When we turned on the flood the wind was straight onto the back of the boat and by christ it was cold, but we had a bit more rod twitching up here and Llewelyn was soon into a good scrap which put a hell of a bend in his new rod. A Savage Gear 12-20lb class I think he said, This was soon on the deck and was almost a twin to mine from earlier in the morning

Just a couple of bites followed this with Llewelyn dropping what was thought to be a Ray. He was only using 18lb traces and that just aint enough to deal with the teeth on a Ray, or any other part of a Ray come to that

I made an executive decision to get the 15.15 lock back in, which due to the temp and lack of any more fish was very much welcomed. We had the anchor up by 10 to 3 and we made the short journey back to Cardiff

There were 4 other boats in the lock and after chatting to them it seemed that we didn't fare too badly at all, with only 3 Codling between them and a few dogs

That put my mind to rest as the boats that went down the channel to Barry/Aberthaw areas hadn't done very good (that was my plan A for yesterday, but thankfully decided to stay local and save a bit of fuel)

If the weather holds we have a couple of days fishing out of Penzance this coming weekend 🤞

Just the one group photo

 

 

 

[Saintly Fish]

Nice nick, always great to get out !!

[Odyssey]

@jonnyswamp you did well, I heard of a lot of blanks with not even a doggie 😮😮 so 3 cod was good going 🙂 

[mike farrants]

Nice one - decent fish and i bet it was lovely to just get out after so long!

[Andy135]

Nice cod. Bah humbug.

[daio web]

well done jonny boy top dangling bud  great report