

The Ultimate Angling Bucket List

Dr Phill Williams

**To be born a fisherman is to win first prize in the lottery of life**

**Copyright © 2016 by Dr Phill Williams**

**All Rights Reserved**

# THE ACTUAL BUCKET LIST

**

100 species of fish from British and Irish waters  
300 hundred species in total worldwide  
A 200 pound fish from my own trailed boat  
A 200 pound fish from the shore  
A 100 pound fish from freshwater  
A double figure trout  
A double figure bass  
Any fish in excess of 1000 pounds  
A British record fish  
A European record fish  
A World record fish  
Write features for all the UK sea angling magazines  
Produce and publish this book  
Produce 200 archive audio angling interviews  
Complete a fishery based Ph. D research project**

# INTRODUCTION

In theory, there is never an ideal time to present a book such as this built on a finite tick list and potentially infinite species list. Always there is the chance that something else new will come along, either on the end of your own line, or added by others to the overall species list. But to write it, there has to be a cut-off point, and for a number of reasons, late 2015 was mine.

Aged 67, and with every targeted tick in place except for one, that elusive 'grander', I set up a trip to Ascension with amongst other things, the objective of trying for a thousand pound plus six gilled shark, knowing that if I got one, the whole project would be complete, and that if I didn't, well, I was getting too long in the tooth anyway to have another go. So either way, the timing could not have been more right.

What I didn't realise when that trip was initially arranged, was that between setting it up and finally flying out, health-wise, my fishing prospects would take a very rapid down-turn in fortunes, also pointing to a late 2015 cut-off. By that stage, rapid onset rheumatoid arthritis was making fishing difficult at best, and at times virtually impossible.

Fortunately, I was able to persuade my consultant to provide me with wrist splints and a steroid injection for the trip, after which I would have to be more realistic about my day to day activities. Then again, with the fishing I've enjoyed, the places I've visited, and having virtually no previous medical issues of note, most people would settle for that. So even if I was forced to completely retire from fishing tomorrow, I can't complain.

If you read all four parts of this book in sequence from beginning to end, which I doubt anybody ever would, it will very quickly become apparent, and I might be criticized for this fact, that there are areas of over-lap and repetition, particularly between the individual big fish targets and certain home waters species or venues, and between some of the more closely related home waters species themselves in terms of identification and tactics.

I make no apology for this fact. The 'Ultimate Angling Bucket List' is not a novel. It's a fact based reference book in which every individual unit needs to be able to stand on its own, allowing people to dip in and out of it at any time and at any point, dependant on what it is they are looking for, and to do so without the feeling that something is missing which they might need to search for elsewhere.

At the time of writing, there are one hundred and fifty one saltwater species, plus a further thirty six freshwater fish species officially ratified as caught on rod and line by the combined record fish committee's of Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, referred to collectively from this point on as 'home waters' species. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as having their own record lists, also contribute to the overall British record list. But for some inexplicable reason, there is no separate English record list.

Actually those species stats are not entirely accurate, as the British Record Fish Committee (BRFC) appears to have gotten itself into all sorts of difficulties with its record keeping over recent years, with some species included which for various reasons should not have been, a fact I have pointed out to BRFC Chairman Mike Heylin, which as an individual I know he is sympathetic to. But as yet the problem remains unresolved. Where relevant, these will be high-lighted as we go along.

Taking those officially quoted figures then at face value, as I must, we are looking here at a combined total availability to angling species enthusiasts such as myself of one hundred and eighty seven named targets, with me wanting to catch at least one hundred of them from home waters, which believe me, is no easy task.

As always, with any sort of ambitious project, things tend to get under-way well enough. Initially in fact, you race away. Then gradually the brakes start to be applied to the point where, despite at times making even more of a determined effort than previously, little if any meaningful additional headway seems to result.

I reckon my brakes started sticking when I got up around the seventy species mark. However, one anglers stumbling block can be another anglers 'quick tick', for which reason, appreciating that we won't all be targeting the same one hundred species of fish, I have decided to deal with all one hundred and eighty seven of them, indicating for each my success or failure, with all sorts of tips, tactics, and relevant history thrown in for good measure.

Don't however expect the same level of detail for the foreign contingent of my targeted overall total of three hundred species world-wide. Instead, the foreign fishing will be dealt with on a location by location basis. Then there's the individual specimen targets, and finally the more peripheral related stuff such as the journalism and fisheries research.

Things kick off with my main comfort zone, the saltwater species, mainly caught from boats, which for ease of flow, I'm going to break down under the two natural biological groupings of cartilaginous fishes, which for our purposes here are the sharks and rays, and bony fishes, which is everything else including all the freshwater species, dealt with under their various family headings.

A couple of final points to highlight before getting into the main body of the text itself. The first is that this being a self published ebook which has not been subjected to the level of proof reading and scrutiny that a professional printing company might go to, means there could well still be small over-looked errors here and there which familiarity with the text and electronic spell-checks don't always pick up. Inevitably, I find a few more each time I read it through. But a point must come when it has to go public and that time has now passed. So I apologise if any still remain and trust it doesn't suffer too much as a result.

The second concerns the final presentation of the book completed mid 2016. The original version contained just short of 600 photographic illustrations. Unfortunately, ebook publishers such as Kindle make no facility for file sizes of that magnitude, causing us to think long and hard about the various options open to us, finally coming out in favour of a two pronged approach. Obviously we have the version you are seeing here with its limited range of illustration. We have however also stuck with the fully illustrated version which can be vierwed at www.fishingfilmsandfacts.co.uk towards the end of 2016.

Finally, the Irish listing of roach-rudd and roach-bream hybrids, plus the Welsh listing of ghost, mirror, and common carp as separate record list inclusions has not been reflected here in the over-all species count, as hybrids and within species variants are not biologically recognised as separate species of fish. Sea trout and brown trout, which are also the same species Salmo trutta, should in my opinion also be treated as a single inclusion too, despite what fish recorders and game anglers might think.

# PART ONE  
HOME WATERS

THE CATCHING IN HOME WATERS OF ONE HUNDRED SPECIES OF FISH FROM THE RECORD LISTS OF ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND AND WALES.

**Bucket List status – result**

## SALTWATER SPECIES

## THE CARTILAGINOUS FISHES

These are the sharks and rays. Fish whose musculature is built onto a flexible cartilaginous frame with only the teeth becoming hardened through calcification. In home waters there are no indigenous cartilaginous freshwater species.

There are however freshwater rays elsewhere in the world, plus freshwater dwelling bull sharks which are even more deadly than great whites, exploiting an adaptation that allows them not only to penetrate rivers and lakes, but also to it seems to breed there.

I haven't caught any freshwater sharks yet myself, but I have caught freshwater stingrays thousands of miles away from the sea on some of the Peruvian tributaries of the upper Amazon.

There are also a few more distantly related cartilaginous species which are neither sharks nor rays. Deep water rabbit-fishes for example.

Meanwhile, back within regular angling range, the monkfish or angel shark as it is now starting to be known, plus the many sub-tropical and tropical guitar fish species, are arguably transitional forms between the round bodied sharks and the flat bodied rays.

For taxonomic classification purposes, monkfish are included with the sharks and guitar fishes with the rays, giving a global total of just under a thousand cartilaginous species, of which almost four hundred are sharks and just over five hundred are rays, with the remainder being chimaera's and the like.

Skeletons aside, obvious external features setting cartilaginous fishes apart from bony fish species include having between five and seven gill slits on either side of the head in the case of the sharks, and on the underside of the body either side of the mouth in the case of skates and rays.

Working in conjunction with these in the skates and rays, on each side of the head close to the eye, is a small hole known as a spiracle through which water is drawn in to oxygenate the gills over which it is passed before exiting the respiratory system through the gill slits.

Were skates and rays to take water in through their mouths like bony fish, they would run the risk of also taking in sand and other unwanted particulate material from the bottom they are resting on.

Spiracles vary in size, though evolution has seen to it that some of the larger free swimming shark species, and in particular the mackerel sharks and thresher sharks, have managed to do away with them altogether, passing water over their gills via the open mouth passively while swimming.

One feature however all round bodied cartilaginous fishes other than angel sharks or monkfishes share is uneven tail lobes, with the upper lobe always being longer than the lower, which in conjunction with large pectoral fins in many open water shark species helps produce lift when swimming as they are negatively buoyant and would otherwise sink and therefore can't stay still.

Characteristically, they all also lack traditional scales, having instead opted for small sharp edged over-lapping back pointing denticles for aqua-dynamic stream-lining, which is the reason why they have such a rough feel when brushed against the grain from tail to head.

Less obvious will be the many tiny pores dotted around the nose and mouth. Dependant on species, these relay information of varying quality back to one of the most amazing and sensitive natural detection adaptations known to science, the ampullae of lorenzini. Special jelly filled pores which act as electro-receptors capable of locating weak electrical impulses from the blood circulatory system of potential prey items.

This feature is not entirely unique to sharks and rays, all of which have them, as they can also be found in some non-cartilaginous fishes such as reed fish and sturgeon.

Sharks and rays are also able to pick up subtle pressure changes using their lateral line. But arguably, the sense they are perhaps best known for is their legendary ability to detect minute quantities of blood and other lost body fluids in seemingly vast volumes of surrounding water.

Smell is the main detection sense acting at long range on organic traces such as blood, though it is actually tuned in to a whole range of odours of the type released typically by injured or distressed prey species.

This is facilitated by the extraordinarily large size of the olfactory lobes of the brain, which when water containing an odour enters the nostrils, the information provided is analysed specifically by these lobes, which can be as much as two thirds of the weight of the entire brain, a level of development unique to sharks and rays.

Having nostrils placed wide apart on either side of the head also allows for directional swimming along the greatest line of concentration of an odour back to its source, aided by side to side movement of the head to keep the fish on track. Taste only comes into play once an item of potential interest is located.

Test biting then allows taste buds inside the mouth to determine whether the item in question is suitably edible or not, which explains why surfers and swimmers attacked by sharks are often rejected. The problem is that because of the high speed mode of attack of say a great white, the damage inflicted can be so catastrophic that the victim bleeds to death anyway.

Sight is another sense which if the evolutionary processes that have developed it in some shark species is anything to go by, also plays an important hunting and feeding role. But only at very close quarters once the other senses have directed the hunt almost to the victim.

Sight generally works on the basis of incoming light being focused by a lens onto the retina at the back of the eye, which then uses a combination of rods and cones to get the fine detail. The rods detect shades of light and therefore movement, whereas the cones detect the fine detail and colour, which varies species to species according to the ratio between rods and cones.

It was thought that sharks and rays could only see in black and white, and in some cases that may well be the case. But not so in all species. The human eye, which gives both definition and colour, has a rods to cones ratio of four to one. Exactly the same numbers as a great white shark. Other species however have ratios as low as fifty to one.

Sharks and rays have another visual trick up their sleeve known as the tapetum lucidum, which is a reflective layer of shiny cells behind the retina for enhanced low light and nocturnal vision.

They also have two eye lids, with those species belonging to the requiem shark family having a third even tougher eye lid known as a nictitating membrane. This closes upwards from the bottom to protect the eyeball when attacking prey, something you can see in use when disgorging tope.

Arguably the most important anatomical difference between cartilaginous and bony fishes, certainly from an angling perspective, is their breeding strategy. Sharks and rays all show clear signs of sexual dimorphism or outward physical difference based on sex, with long thin modifications to the pelvic fins known as clasper's in the males which are clearly missing in the females.

These are erectile and are used to transfer sperm into the female during mating, ultimately leading via one of three different approaches to the production of low numbers of well-developed offspring.

A great survival strategy in some ways in that unlike broadcast spawner's such as cod which eject potentially millions of eggs and sperm for external mixing, the vast majority of which won't make it through to adulthood, the offspring survival ratio for sharks and rays can theoretically be very high, which is great when everything is at a point of natural balance, but potentially disastrous when that isn't the case.

The first and most primitive of these three approaches, and the one favoured by rays and dogfishes, is oviparous reproduction. After fertilization, the eggs are laid in horny capsules which you often see washed up empty on the strand-line of the beach.

Another approach is viviparous reproduction resulting in the birth of live fully formed young. Option three, which in terms of evolutionary progress falls roughly between the other two, is ovoviviparous reproduction, now also termed aplacental viviparous reproduction, and the method favoured by most sharks.

Here the fertilised eggs are retained in the two oviducts within capsules known as candles into which the young will hatch within the mother. After feeding on the remainder of their yolk-sac, glands within the mother secrete a nourishing uterine milk.

Later in their development, the most advanced of the pups in some species become what is termed 'oophagus' and will eat not only other ovulated eggs, but also their smaller siblings, which is why ovoviviparous species tend to produce small numbers of offspring.

A good example of aplacental viviparous reproduction and its potential for unfortunate consequences is the spurdog. Once this was the most common small shark in northern European waters. I remember trips back in the 1970's where we would have to up-anchor to get away from the things.

It was like dropping baits into a vast grey hungry swarm, which, because of sexual segregation, which is common in spurdogs, if the shoal comprised all females, would often see the deck awash with yolk sac pups.

Not surprisingly, within a very short time the spurdog was a critically engendered species due primarily to commercial over exploitation, though I'm sure angling must also have contributed here too. A species fished to the very brink of extinction compounded by the longest gestation period in the animal kingdom at 22 to 24 months, it has taken many years for even the weakest signs of a comeback to show.

Even when left alone and with optimum offspring survival rates, a few remaining survivors simply cannot reproduce fast enough to facilitate recovery in the way that cod and other broadcast spawners with their millions of eggs per individual potentially can.

It's imperative then that as responsible anglers we do everything within our power to help not only the spurdog, but all shark and ray species. Every individual counts.

Unfortunately, proposed EU Common Fishery Policy reforms offer little in the way of salvation here, and may well ultimately result in even further problems for already struggling species, as it looks likely that all commercially caught fish in the future will have to be landed in response to the current situation of discards going back into the water dead.

Some species such as porbeagle sharks and undulate rays may possibly be put onto a prohibited list, for all the good that will do. The tope was another species up for similar consideration.

Unfortunately, a ministerial meeting in December 2014 decided not to award tope prohibited status due to objections from France and Spain who collectively have commercially landed over one million tope in recent times, and who in both cases exercised their veto.

For my money, sharks and rays have poor culinary qualities at the best of times on account of the way in which they regulate their isotonic balance, as all marine fish must do due to the salinity of their environment being greater than that of their body salt concentration.

The reason why the cartilaginous approach to isotonic balance makes for poor eating is because it can make the flesh both taste and smell like an incontinence pad.

Marine bony fishes have to drink sea water to make up for losses from their cells, as the salinity either side of their cell membranes strives to find a balance through the process of osmosis drawing water out from their body. The salt in the water they drink is removed by the fish and excreted through cells in its gills.

The reverse is true in freshwater species where the water surrounding them is less salty than in their cells, so water is absorbed, again in an attempt to achieve isotonic balance, which they can never do, so their kidneys must constantly off-load the excesses as urine.

Cartilaginous fishes on the other hand are osmo-conformers. They achieve this by maintaining high urea levels within their tissues and body fluids. As the salinity of this can be at a slighter higher level than the surrounding sea water, a small amount of water is taken in via the gills which is later excreted along with excess urea. This explains the smell (and sometimes the taste) of ammonia in these fish.

Unfortunately sharks and rays can only manage to achieve this at quite an advanced developmental stage, which in the case of egg laying rays and dogfishes prevents their eggs being deposited outside of the body without an impervious protective case containing fluid of a lower salt concentration than the environment outside.

To avoid repetition, now might be a good time to comment on the handling of sharks generally, both for their well-being and that of anglers fingers and hands. Fearsome apex predators they may well be, but they are also highly sensitive animals, which even though they might appear to swim away unharmed, can die a slow lingering death later as a result of in-appropriate treatment.

The first point to be made is to opt for in-water release if there is no pressing need to have a fish inside the boat. If it must come aboard, either for disgorging, weighing, or even a photograph, then wherever possible, use a landing net, and that goes for tope too which some charter boat skippers now routinely do.

If you don't have a net and intend lifting a fish in, always try to keep it horizontal using the tail and either a pectoral fin or the dorsal fin as gripping points, then lay it down slowly and carefully onto the deck, all of which I know is easier said than done. But at least be prepared to try.

The reason for this is simple. In-appropriate handling, particularly tail lifting either into the boat or for a photograph can lead to unseen internal bleeding and possibly even death.

What happens is that when a big fish is removed from the support given to it by the surrounding water pressure, if not given replacement support either by the mesh of a landing net, the deck of the boat, or being cradled in an anglers arms, which I appreciate is not always practicable, then the heavy organs inside the body cavity can shift through gravity rupturing internal blood vessels.

So get the fish down on the deck as soon as possible, cover its eyes with a wet rag to quieten it down, and if necessary, leave a deep seated hook in place rather that struggling to free it. Unless made of stainless steel, it should rot away over time. And always weigh sharks of all sizes and species using a supportive weighing sling.

As for the skates and rays, these are just dorso-ventrally flattened out sharks. In other words, they've settled out on the sea bed resting on their stomachs, with their mouth, gills slits and anus underneath, unlike conventional flatfish species such as plaice and dabs which have come to rest on one side of their body, prompting the eye from the underside to migrate around the head to join its partner on the top.

Another way of putting it is that rays are little more than smoothhounds or dogfishes that have been put through a mangle. Also with skates and rays, the pectoral fins have become enlarged and fused to the front of the head while extending horizontally outwards to form their now familiar wings.

The obvious question here is what is the difference between the skates and rays. Anglers tend to see the smaller species with a short rounded snout and nipple like tip as being rays, while the larger species in which the wing tip takes an almost continuous line through to the end of a long well angled pointed snout are the skates.

In actual fact, these are interchangeable terms, both of which have equal meaning and validity, which is perhaps as well with the white skate or bottle nosed ray as it is also known, having a foot in both those camps, with its well defined long nipple like snout, and a capacity to grow to something like two hundred pounds.

The stingrays, eagle rays and electric rays, all of which are recorded from home waters, are the only true rays here. However, within the smaller skate-ray species there is one other very obvious and helpful identification feature worth noting. The thornback, small eyed, spotted, and blonde rays all have pointed wing tips, whereas the undulate, sandy, and cuckoo ray have noticeably rounded wing tips.

### SHORTFIN MAKO SHARK Isurus oxyrinchus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Reputedly the fastest swimming shark in the sea with bursts clocked in excess of thirty knots. Also a species prone to leaping from the water when hooked, the mako is a beautifully streamlined yet heavily built fish with a sharply pointed snout.

The first dorsal fin originates behind the origin of the pectoral fins, and the tiny second dorsal slightly ahead of the anal fin beneath it, whereas in the similar looking porbeagle shark, the dorsals originate over the origins of the pectorals and anal fin.

The mako also has a single keel on the side of the tail stalk just in front of the tail lobes, while the porbeagle has both this and a smaller secondary keel below it.

Colouration is a dark petrol blue giving way suddenly to pure white on the lower flanks and under-parts. A fish that is still at times confused with the porbeagle shark for which it has a passing resemblance.

Only when a world record claim was was made for a 352 pound porbeagle by Hetty Eathorne caught off Looe in 1955 and subsequently rejected by the IGFA because it turned out to be a mako shark, did the angling presence of the species as far north as the British Isles first come to light.

Though there are external anatomical differences if you look carefully enough for them, the IGFA identification was made solely on the basis of the teeth. Those of the mako are long and pointed without cusps at their base, whereas porbeagle teeth are more triangular with very obvious cusps or spikes at either side.

Unlike porbeagle's, mako's are northerly migrants from warmer southern seas to the Biscay area and extreme south-western parts of the British Isles, though there is no predictable pattern to any of this.

An open water species usually found well offshore, often very close to or actually at the surface. Lengths of up to twelve feet have been recorded with weights well in excess of a thousand pounds, though half that size would be nearer the European maximum.

Every mako shark I am aware of on rod and line in home waters has either come from, or very close to, the western approaches to the English Channel, and that includes specimens over on the Irish side.

To be even more specific, from the time that first 1955 mako was correctly identified through to a fish caught by David Turner in 1971, I believe that every single UK specimen was taken by boats working either out of Looe around the Eddystone, or Falmouth around the Manacles and just beyond.

In total, according to research figures provided by David Turner, forty five mako sharks were caught on rod and line during that period, of which thirty, which is two out of every three, fell to the Falmouth boats, and one skipper in particular, that being Robin Vinnicombe aboard his boat 'Huntress'.

In addition to meeting up with and recording an audio interview with Robin Vinnicombe on the subject, I have similarly spoken on the record with Robin's brother Frank, and with David Turner, resulting in conflicting accounts of who actually caught what, though the weight of evidence from a variety of sources seems to sit most comfortably with Robin Vinnicombe and David Turners version of events.

In fact, it was on Robin's boat that David Turner took his fish, which at the time of recording the three interviews was the last mako shark taken on rod and line in British waters, a fact that has always struck me as being odd, as mako sharks are supposedly a warm water species.

You might be forgiven for thinking that if global warming and rising sea temperatures are a reality, we should have seen a steady stream of mako sharks since 1971, which catch statistics clearly demonstrate obviously isn't the case.

In my personal opinion, a number of factors are operating here. First off, at the best of times, mako shark visits at our latitude have never been a common occurrence. Even when the popularity of shark fishing was at its height, which coincided with pretty much all of the recorded mako catches, they were still very rare fish indeed.

Later, when interest in blue shark fishing slipped into decline resulting not only in far fewer baits in the water, but equally, fewer rubby dubby trails up which to entice an occasional visiting mako, a numerical drop off in the catch rate of an already rare and accidental encounter was always likely to be the result.

The same numbers of visiting fish may well have continued coming. But with fewer anglers out there in with a shout of hooking one, the chance encounter rate understandably went right down the pan. That is until recently when South Wales skipper Andrew Alsop revived UK shark fishing big style aboard his boat 'White Water' out of Milford Haven.

Catch rates and sizes for both blue sharks and porbeagle's aboard 'White Water', along with boats operated by Rob Rennie and Craig Deans have been outstanding, and as such, getting a spot on-board any of these three boats is understandably at a premium.

One man who has spent a lot of time with Andrew Alsop is Kent property developer Andy Griffith who charters 'White Water' all to himself to have the very best shot, albeit an expensive shot, at anything good that might come along.

As expected, though long overdue, in 2013 the two Andrews combined to catch and release the first UK mako shark in thirty seven years, on a day which amongst other things also turned up both blue and porbeagle sharks in excess of one hundred pounds, making it the first ever ton up grand slam of the three shark species in question ratified by the IGFA.

How long it will be before we see the next mako is open to debate. Shark fishing in that corner of South Wales is still developing. As ever, the more rubby dubby lanes and shark baits there are going out into potential mako shark territory, the greater the chances of a repeat. But the odds were never high, not even when they were at their peak.

Associated audio interview numbers: 31, 109, 112 and 137

**NOTE:** As most mako sharks have been caught while fishing for blue sharks, from a tactical point of view, it might help to also read the blue shark account, particularly the part about rubby dubby and bait positioning.

### PORBEAGLE SHARK Lamna nasus

**Bucket List status – result**

A more stocky, heavily built fish than the mako, which if I'm honest, is a statement only of any real value when a straight comparison between these two related and similar looking species can be made.

So superficially similar are they in fact that a claim submitted to the IGFA for a 352 pound porbeagle caught by Hetty Eathorne in 1955 ultimately turned out to be Britain's first authenticated rod caught mako shark. That's a measure of how similar they are.

Unlike the mako, whose first dorsal fin originates behind the origin of the pectoral fin, the origin of the first dorsal fin of a porbeagle is directly above the origin of the pectorals, with the second dorsal directly above the anal fin.

Like the mako, there is a keel on the side of the tail-stalk just in front of the tail. But unlike the mako, there is also a smaller secondary keel just beneath it running onto the tail. However, it was the teeth that solved the riddle for the IGFA. Porbeagle teeth are more triangular than mako teeth, with obvious cusps or spikes at their base. Colouration is very deep blue to dark grey with off white lower regions.

In angling terms, this is very different fish to the mako shark. For starters, it's more abundant, more widespread well up into northern latitudes so obviously better cold water adapted, and more willing to feed incredibly close to the shore. So close in fact that over in Ireland specimens have actually been caught from the shore, though not unfortunately in recent years.

During the 1960's and 70's, the eastern fringe of the Isle of Wight and the inshore waters along the North Cornish Coast through on into North Devon were the UK's main porbeagle grounds, with Padstow being the Mecca to which most big shark enthusiasts at that time would gravitate. Then in seemingly no time at all, things started to change and catch rates went into decline.

Angler pressure certainly won't have helped. Most sharks were killed and brought ashore back then, even the blue's. But if the truth be known, commercial pressure contributed most to sending porbeagle populations into free fall, which a slow growing and equally slowly reproducing species such as this was never going to be able to withstand.

That said, all was not lost. Other holding areas were discovered around the country, and for a short while at least, it remained business as usual, albeit in some cases with smaller fish in fewer numbers as Wales and Scotland started to come into the frame.

Porbeagle pioneers such as Mike Thrussell helped Aberystwyth and Aberdovey mid-way down Cardigan Bay in West Wales build themselves quite a reputation back in the 1980's, though as with the trend of their contemporaries, that too didn't last long either.

Most of the fish there were at the smaller end of the size range, coming in just either side of the one hundred pound mark, which was way short of the average for the Cornish fish. And again unlike the Cornish fish, they were also found much further offshore.

Then they too were gone, supposedly fished out commercially around Lundy Island which formed a part of their predictable migration ritual, though yet again, with seemingly all specimens brought ashore, angler pressure can't have helped.

As for the Scottish link, that had been demonstrated as far back as the early 1970's when a friend of mine, the late Dr. Dietrich Burkel, set out on a summer long quest to demonstrate that porbeagles could be caught that far north, eventually taking one from a dinghy fishing off the tip of the Mull of Galloway. A catch that would later have quite a bit of controversy attached to it, much of which was sour grapes, which Dietrich cleared up in a recorded interview we did in 2013 just a few weeks before his death.

A couple of other small specimens were also taken over the years in and around Luce Bay. But Scottish shark fishing never really came to much until good numbers of big porbeagles, world all tackle records included, were discovered off Sumburgh Head in Shetland and Dunnet Head on the Pentland Firth.

The west coast of Ireland, in particular Co. Clare was also a regular producer, including those shore caught specimens mentioned earlier by legendary Irish angler Jack Shine fishing from Green Island at the mouth of Liscannor Bay. But sadly, there too the trail now seems to have gone cold.

However, in West Wales in July 2016 fishing from a well known rock mark, Simon Shaw and Mark Turner beat and released the UK's first ever shore caught porbeagle which had taken one of their tope baits, the fish being estimated at around 150 pounds.

Though perhaps not immediately obvious, there is a link here between many of these potential porbeagle holding areas, with the possible exception of Cardigan Bay. That link is disturbed tide of the kind often produced by islands and headlands with submerged reefs and strong local tidal influences, though it should also be said that many of the current Milford Haven fish are taken well offshore.

The Isle of Wight, Mull of Galloway, Lundy Island, Sumburgh Head and Dunnet Head are all typical examples. And let's not forget the stretch of coastline to the north of Padstow running across the Devon border up to Hartland Point, because this is where my link to the scene kicks in. An episode which starts with Graeme Pullen, Pete Scott, and a small trailed fifteen foot displacement boat launched (and occasionally swamped) through the pounding surf tables at Bude in the late 1990's.

Graeme's exploits with big sharks on the world stage are legendary, so if there were sharks there for the taking, he was the man who would find them. But even he was to be surprised by the levels of their success. For while it had long been the known that porbeagles in the area frequented the tide rips and headlands dotted all along this inhospitable stretch of cliffs, most people had given up on trying for them thinking they had all gone. But not so, as Graeme and Pete would demonstrate.

Some of the encounters the duo experienced close into shore were scary on a number of fronts. Huge fish in poor conditions from such a small boat, broken rods, big sea's, and with absolutely nowhere to run to in a sudden bad weather emergency, this can be a most unforgiving area, but also a very productive one, both for big fish and for big numbers of fish.

Fortunately, they survived it, though at times perhaps only just, coming away with the knowledge that the very biggest fish were still there to be found almost within touching distance of the shore during March and April, backed up by larger numbers of smaller pack fish in the sixty to eighty pound bracket further off over the summer months.

Typical of a summer trip is a two day session Graeme and I videoed for YouTube in 2009 aboard his seventeen foot Wilson Flier. By this stage, Boscastle had taken over from Bude as a far safer launching site, though not without its own pitfalls by any stretch of the imagination.

The harbour there sits in a long very narrow ravine with poor access and a ramshackle slipway which can only be used for maybe half an hour or so either side of high-water on a big tide. Then there's the exit-entrance which is an 'S' shape.

The harbour itself completely dries at low tide, and the opening is difficult to find on the way back in as it blends into the surrounding cliffs, in addition to which, when you go out, regardless of what the open Atlantic might throw at you, that's it for at least ten hours with nowhere else to sun for safety.

Other than that, Boscastle is ideal, and a vast improvement on Bude, though on this occasion, it being midsummer, the radar dishes to the west of Bude were to be our destination anyway, drifting maybe a mile of so off the coast in around eighty feet of water.

Key to good porbeagle fishing is rubby dubby. The more you put in, the more potentially you get back out in return. This cannot be over stressed, despite making repeated fairly short drifts which breaks the trail and could it's argued confuse the fish.

Not just any rubby dubby either. Graeme is friendly with the people who run Avington trout fishery in Hampshire where they save the filleted carcases and fatalities for him. He then mashes them up, adds bran, and freezes it in onion bags ready to go at the drop of a hat.

You could of course use mackerel if you can catch them, which probably won't be possible in March or April. But as oily as they are, mackerel don't come anywhere close to pellet fed trout, which literally ooze oil into the water.

So there we were with four rubby dubby bags out fishing whole mackerel baits on 10/0 O' shaughnessy hooks to five feet of four hundred pounds wire attached to a further eight feet of similar strength mono, suspended under lightly inflated balloons set at various levels around three quarters of the depth of the water column using fifty pound class outfits.

Not over inflating the balloons can be very important, as despite being apex predators, porbeagles can at times be quite skittish fish and will not take a bait they have any suspicion about, particularly if the balloon creates too much drag due to its size.

Even so, some of the takes were still fickle. Tugs and snatches, or simply float bobbing with short half-hearted runs. Very much a waiting game, often not knowing when or if to strike, which unfortunately can lead to swallowed baits and deep hooking which is the last thing any of us want.

Maybe the answer would to use circle hooks which only expose the point in the direction of flesh as they exit the mouth where they invariably make contact in the scissor.

Even for fast hard running fish such as blue sharks and tope they might prove useful, though for different reasons. Not so for skates and rays though. There are other ways to prevent more sedentary species becoming hook damaged.

I think it's worth saying a few words about floats generally at this point, as some of the methods of suspending baits in the water can create more problems than they cure.

In the early days, floats were circular net corks with a hole in the centre which were threaded on to the reel line. They would then have a knife cut in the side of the hole for the line to be pulled into and trapped which could quickly be released once the cork came back within reach.

Plastic bottles, lumps of polystyrene; I've seen them all. But without doubt the best approach is to lightly inflate a balloon tying the end obviously so it stays up, then wrap an elastic band around the reel line a few times at the required depth, inserting the knot in the balloon through the two free end loops which will clamp up locating it in place. Then, when the balloon comes back within reach, simply pull it clear snapping the elastic band, leaving the line to run back freely through the rod rings or rollers.

We knew we were after relatively small fish, which for the most part is what we got. But we were also rewarded with a lively specimen to my rod of around a hundred and seventy pounds, which proved much more of a handful.

At one point, with the angle in the line rising towards the surface at long range, I thought it was going to jump, and secretly had my fingers crossed that I might be on for a mako. Then it went down again and gave me quite a mauling before we had it to the boat, disgorged, tagged and away.

Surprisingly, we also had tope come right up off the bottom to take the shark baits, and conversely, when we put baits down on the bottom aimed at targeting tope, some of those were picked up by porbeagles too. But in the main, the tactics described offer the best option.

I have tried to get down to Boscastle in the spring for a crack at the biggies, but invariably the weather has stepped in and written off all my attempts. Well, I say all of them, but actually that should read all but one which I couldn't make because of other commitments, leaving Wayne Comben to step in and take my place.

A cold grim couple of days in reasonable conditions spent doing all the usual stuff, but very much closer to the shore making short drifts through known holding spots off the headlands where the big female fish come in to pup. Quite a slow couple of days too as it turned out, until one obviously very good fish started going nuts at the surface in the slick.

To cut a long hard fought story short, that fish, played by Wayne and filmed by Graeme, appeared all over the TV news and press with an estimated weight way in excess of the current all tackle World record of 504 pounds. Not that record proportions matter on a number of fronts here. After-all, what can you do with a shark of that size in a seventeen foot boat even if you had wanted to weigh it, besides which, how can anybody kill such a magnificent fish anyway.

Into the bargain, and in common with a number of threatened cartilaginous species, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) now lists the porbeagle shark as being in need of protection, in addition to which, all commercial and recreationally caught porbeagle sharks must now be returned at the point of capture right across all EU member states.

Quite where this leaves the British Record Fish Committee is anybodies guess. But they need to deal with this situation and quickly, as anglers can no longer comply with their insistence that all record fish must be weighed on firm ground and not in a boat.

Nor can weights be estimated by using length and girth measurements, all of which rather makes a mockery of record keeping as it currently stands. Some sort of weight estimation formula needs to be agreed and urgently.

Associated audio interview numbers: 52, 54, 90, 120 and 141.

**NOTE:** Milford Haven in Wales is currently the UK's chartering 'in venue' for all things shark fishing with Andrew Alsop aboard his boat 'White Water', Rob Rennie on 'Lady Jue 3', and Craig Deans aboard 'Phatcat'.

### THRESHER SHARK Alopias vulpinus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A temperate water family of sharks containing four species world-wide, all characterised by the length of their tail, which can be almost equal to the length of the rest of the body. As only one species is recorded from northern European waters, identification should present no problem whatsoever.

Colouration varies from bluish grey through to brown and is white ventrally. Though recorded throughout all northern European waters right up to the Arctic, numbers actually penetrating north of the English Channel are not thought to be high, with both commercial and angling catches suggesting this is not an abundant fish anywhere, though specimens both turn up and are spotted with reasonable regularity.

As with most pelagic sharks, actual sea bed geography probably means very little here. A fish found living and feeding in the mid to upper layers often quite close to the surface, and often in fairly shallow water, with a taste for various small fish, in particular pelagic shoaling species such as mackerel, herring and pilchard.

The long tail is used to great effect when prey fish are encountered. The thresher will circle a shoal, balling it up by thrashing its tail which may also stun some individuals which are picked off after the initial attack.

Something of a prestige species on account of its rarity in northern European waters, the thresher shark is caught in much the same way as the other recorded shark species, using similar gear, tactics, and rubby dubby to that outlined already for porbeagle fishing.

Most recorded specimens in fact have been taken by anglers targeting porbeagle's, though legendary skipper Ted Legge fishing out to the east of the Isle of Wight made quite a name for himself in much the same way that mako skipper Robin Vinnicombe did, by taking many more than his fair share over the years.

Obviously then he was doing something right. Again, location it seems has a big part to play, and for some reason, the area to the east of the Isle of Wight both was, and probably still is, for whatever reason, particularly attractive to visiting threshers. But there has to be more to it than that.

Of course, there needs to be fish there to target. But it's how you target them it seems that also counts, and in that regard, Ted Legge most certainly had it well and truly sussed.

As mentioned earlier, baits – in this case a small single mackerel due to the threshers relatively small mouth, suspended under floats at increasing depths with distance from the boat in a good rubby dubby slick, which itself becomes deeper further away from the boat as the heavier particles start to sink.

This is the time honoured shark fishing approach, and no doubt some of the threshers, as well as porbeagle's ,would have been taken in this way. But most definitely not all of them. For invariably Ted Legge would also drop a bait straight down to around mid-water and leave it to hang there with the ratchet set on the reel, and it was this that would account for many of his customers fish.

Thresher sharks pretty much went off the reporting radar for quite a few years after the porbeagle population collapsed around the Isle of Wight. Again, the link there I guess being lack of baits in the water leading to fewer if any bonus thresher shark hook ups.

The same is probably true for other shark fishing areas around the country, though despite reported sightings and the odd accidental commercial encounter, plus plenty of shark angling activity, the West Country ports both north and south of the Lizard have added very few inclusions to the UK thresher list over the years.

That said, buoyed up by his successes with the big Boscastle porbeagle shark already detailed, plus some amazing dinghy blue shark fishing out from Falmouth with Graeme Pullen, Wayne Comben, who fishes out of Langstone over-looking historically the best thresher shark grounds in the country, decided to launch an all-out attempt from his own Wilson Flier in 2013.

Initially fishing alone, and with several blanks already to his credit, he eventually teamed up with Graeme, who while perhaps not expecting to see much in the way of action, tagged along with the video camera to make a historical documentary on the attempt, little knowing that it would make angling history in its own right.

This was done with a huge thresher shark easily twice the size of Steve Mills British record taken back in 1982, also from a dinghy fishing the same area off the Nab Tower, and again, as with the duo's blue shark and porbeagle exploits, all on YouTube as part of Graeme's Totally Awesome Fishing Show collection.

At one point at the side of the boat, the huge fish whipped its tail right across the two gunnel's, narrowly missing both Graeme and Wayne in the process. But eventually it was measured, tagged, disgorged, and sent on its way.

In July 2015, the species put in a surprise double showing off the coast of South Wales. For years the Welsh record slot had stood vacant, then to use the old bus stop cliché, you wait for ages then two come along at the same time (well, almost).

The first at 253 pounds was taken by Andy Turrell aboard Rob Rennie's 'Lady Jue 3' off Milford Haven, with the second three days later by Dave Thomas aboard 'Phatcat' skippered by Craig Deans also fishing the same area. So as with Andy Griffith's Mako Shark, again from Milford Haven aboard Andrew Alsops 'white Water II', if you put in the sea hours and play the percentages game, good things should eventually come your way.

And one year on the British thresher record was bettered with a fish given a weight of 368 pounds caught and released by Nick Lane out from Illfracombe, the weight having been estimated from measurements given to the Shark Trust. Note: catch and release means that no official record claim can be made.

Associated audio interview numbers: 141.

**NOTE:** As most thresher sharks have been caught while fishing for porbeagle sharks, from a tactical point of view, it might help to read the porbeagle account, particularly the part about tackle and tactics.

### BLUE SHARK Prionace glauca

**Bucket List status – result**

Blue sharks are open oceanic fish found in all warm temperate, sub-tropical, and tropical seas world-wide where the depth exceeds around forty fathoms. In northern European waters they are most regularly found throughout the Biscay area, the western English Channel, and off the south and west coasts of Ireland.

Occasional isolated specimens have turned up in western Scottish waters, and even further to the east off southern Norway, but such occurrences are rare. Long warm summers and prolonged south westerly winds will increase arrival numbers, and can extend their range to higher latitudes.

Blue shark are pelagic hunters of small shoaling species such as mackerel, pilchard, and herring which frequent the upper layers of the water column. Squids too as they hunt close to the surface late in the day may also be taken.

In terms of physical appearance, a noticeably long slender fish with a long pointed snout and long curved sickle shaped pectoral fins. A strikingly beautiful animal, its upper surface being a deep inky blue giving way to a more brilliant shade of blue lower down the flanks, and an unbelievably pure white on its under-parts.

Blue sharks have always visited the warmer parts of Europe, either where general sea temperatures have not been restrictive, or where warm water arms of the North Atlantic Drift or Gulf Stream have allowed them to penetrate beyond their normal latitude.

For many years they were accidentally caught by Cornish pilchard netters who saw them as little more than a pest, though during the 1950's they would also become a much appreciated extra source of income, particularly later on as the pilchard fishery went into decline and a few early pioneering shark anglers began to sit up and take notice.

This eventually led to the group embarking on a quest that would ultimately result in the tried and tested blue shark fishing techniques still used today, and to the port of Looe, which up until the 1980's at least, took pride of place on the UK shark fishing map.

Shark fishing in northern European waters, and off Britain and Ireland in particular, differs radically in approach and technique to that practised in more regularly shark frequented areas elsewhere in the world, where the blue shark is held in less regard as a species to deliberately target.

This does not however mean that one approach is right, and therefore by default, the other must be wrong. They are just different, with in this case, a history that has stood the test of time, primarily because it addressed all the basic requirements of a specific area where feeding takes place in the middle to upper layers over depth, and where both water clarity and salinity are high.

It also addressed the habits of a species requiring vast open spaces to wander in, where it not only needs to be located generally, but drawn in specifically to an artificially created feeding zone to maximise the potential of a successful encounter. And so the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain (SACGB) was born.

Without any doubt whatsoever, the most important outcome of the SACGB's early strategy meetings was planned continuous deep water drifting employing what they would call rubby dubby bags, and people elsewhere call ground-bait or chum, to feed scent and fish particles into the upper water layers over as large an area as possible.

A long continuous drift, which in turn gives a long unbroken rubby dubby trail is a must if widely scattered sharks being drawn into the lane are to be able to work back towards its source and the baits.

Broken trails only serve to confuse fish. A drifting boat in open water offers a great deal of potential fish coverage over the course of a day. But of greater importance is the way in which the rubby dubby is fed into the water, and where in relation to it the baits are set.

Rubby dubby is, or should be, the previous day's mackerel which have been left to soften and ripen overnight which some people like to put through a hand mincer.

Arguably, a better way is to smash them to a pulp in a large bin with a lump of wood. Mincing creates particles of uniform size in turn dispersing in the tide in a uniform manner, which is not what the principle of blue shark rubby dubby is meant to be all about.

Mincing also makes demands on the mesh size of the bag, which has to be small if a rapid mass evacuation of the contents is to be avoided. The idea is that particles of varying sizes and weights escape continuously over the day, encouraged both by the motion of the boat and the tide, and by periodically shaking the bags which are suspended at the water's surface.

As a result, the smaller lighter particles ride high in the water while the larger heavier pieces sink at varying rates, creating a deepening lengthening corridor of attraction emanating from a source just uptide of the baits.

Rubby dubby doesn't simply rely on mashed up fish particles. Blood, oils, and other body juices are also released to fill in the gaps between the bigger more visible pieces. So important is getting it right and getting enough of it out working that rubby dubby can literally make or break a shark fishing trip.

In this regard, the addition of agricultural bran to help soak up and distribute the juices, plus a pint or two of concentrated pilchard oil will enhance its quality enormously.

Several handfuls of the mix are then placed into bags with something like a half inch mesh, which are far superior to old onion sacks. These are then lowered just into the water spaced out along the length of the boat, where for the best results they should be shaken and topped up throughout the day.

Positioning the baits at the appropriate ranges and levels is the next piece of tactical thinking which needs to be just right. Sea conditions are going to have some say in just how this is done. Wind and tide, either working with or against each other, or even absent altogether, will affect the shape and extent of the rubby dubby lane, and therefore the placing of the baits.

So as far as is possible, drifts should be planned to work a complete half cycle of the tide. In other words, staying with it in one direction as it either ebbs or floods. Preferably not bits of both if that can be avoided, though if that is the case, it still shouldn't totally ruin the slick.

Obviously, the best conditions are those allowing the boat and the particles in the developing lane of attraction to get plenty of distance between each other, but not too quickly, creating an efficient slick which encourages fish passing through it to turn and swim along the line of greatest concentration.

No wind or tide at all is the worst possible scenario, with the rubby dubby particles `snowing' down towards the sea bed giving little or no ground coverage at all.

There is no way of knowing exactly what level blue sharks might be feeding at on any given day, on top of which, not all of them will necessarily be following the same pattern.

Those fish either at or close to the surface will continue to work that line towards the boat, whereas fish picking things up at the deepest level will follow the trails decreasing angle of depth as they close in on the source. Then there will be all manner of variation in between. So placing the baits at the wrong level could easily see fish missed.

Offering baits as a pre-planned spread in terms of distance and depths helps mirror the profile of the rubby dubby lane, placing the shallowest bait closest to the boat, and the deepest furthest away down tide.

Distances and depths are there to be experimented with, but as a starting suggestion, set the one closest in at say ten feet down, progressing in even increments for the others down to maybe fifty or even sixty feet with twenty to thirty yards between the floats until a feeding pattern for the day establishes itself.

It can also pay to drop an additional bait straight down ten to twenty feet on the hang looking for confused fish that have made it all the way up to the boat, but having missed the other baits on the way.

Blue sharks, which can grow big, usually range between around fifty to eighty pounds, though hundred pounders are becoming less scarce these days as the number of fish being brought ashore for weighing has virtually gone altogether, as was once the case when Looe and the SACGB were at the peak of their game.

So no special hand tackle is required. Certainly nothing heavier than a thirty pound class outfit, with a twenty pound set-up probably being more than adequate, unless of course, as is the case out from Milford Haven which is currently the UK's premier shark port, porbeagle sharks are also likely to take a bait.

Down at the business end though, you still need a long durable trace, on the one hand to beat the teeth, while on the other to avoid rough skin contact with the reel line, as blue sharks have a habit of getting themselves wrapped up in the trace.

It pays to use at least a couple of feet of suitable wire to a forged 10/0 or 12/0 hook, backed up with eight to ten feet of at least two hundred pounds bs commercial monofilament to act as a suitable protective rubbing length.

I think it's also worth saying a few words about floats here too, as some of the methods of suspending baits in the water can create more problems than they cure.

In the early days at Looe we used to use net floats which were circular pieces of cork with a hole in the centre threaded on to the reel line. A knife cut would then be made in the side of the hole for the line to be pulled into and trapped which could quickly be released once the cork came back within reach.

Plastic bottles, lumps of polystyrene; I've seen them all. But without doubt, the best approach is to lightly inflate a balloon, tying the end obviously so it stays up, then wrap an elastic band around the reel line a few times at the required depth ready for inserting the knot in the balloon through the two free end loops which will clamp up locating it in place. Then, when the balloon comes back within reach, simply pull it clear snapping the elastic band, leaving the line to run back freely through the rod rings or rollers.

Like a lot of people of my generation, my interest in sharks was prompted by what was happening out from Looe, with my first successful encounter taking place in July 1964. I remember it well as a sixteen year old who had just done battle with a fearsome monster from the deep.

Least-ways, that's what the fishermen at Looe would have you believe as they went through the daily ritual of hauling shark corpses up on to the quay for weighing in front of terrified marvelling holiday makers, some of whom it was hoped would rush straight down to the tackle shop to book a trip and have a similar story to tell when they got home.

This unfortunately was the first step on the slippery slope towards the decline of Looe as an angling port, the decline of the blue shark as a visiting species, and the decline in shark fishing interest generally with its over-powering tackle and barbaric ways.

Plymouth and some of the surrounding ports played less to the holiday crowds. But even there the pursuit was tarnished, and for many years had virtually little if any following at all except for 'proper' anglers fishing over in Ireland.

The discovery of good but short lived porbeagle fishing along Cornwall's north coast was probably another nail in blue shark fishing's coffin.

Obviously, some blue sharks were still caught both sides of Lands End. But not in either the size or quantity range previously seen. And so it remained for many years until Andrew Alsop revived interest in the species with his exploits out of Milford Haven in Wales.

There he has located and catches vast numbers of very good fish, many going over a hundred pounds, and some even topping the two hundred pound mark, including one which had it been brought ashore would have bettered the British record.

Instead however, it was weighted at sea at 222 pounds before being released, which thankfully they all are these days, providing a good solid platform for the species to recover as evidenced not only by an increase in average size, but catches of up to sixty fish and more in a single day.

July 2016 saw a second record plus blue shark of 242 pounds estimated and released by another of Andrew Alsops clients out of Milford Haven, the captor this time being Danny Fitch. And again no record claim will be either made, or entertained by the British Record Fish Committee, because yet again the fish was not killed and weighed on solid ground as per the BRFC antiquated rules.

As for my own recent personal exploits, these have mainly be out from Hugh Town on the Isles of Scilly, fishing the deep water fringing the south east of St. Mary's.

Back in the 1980's when I first visited the place, we would get the occasional bird watcher booking on the trip too, as besides drawing in sharks, a rubby dubby slick will also draw in a wide variety of open water sea birds picking up fish particles floating on the surface.

It was something of a novelty back then, which if nothing else gave you more fishing room on the boat. How things have changed. I was back there in 2006 by which time it was groups of specialist bird watchers booking the trips and me tucking in amongst them with the whole fishing well virtually to myself.

Better still, the twitchers would bring along additional rubby dubby of their own to help attract more feathered interest. To me the birds were all 'seagulls,' but the twitchers would be literally wetting themselves with excitement over species like wilson's petrel and fork tailed skua, which are just a couple of the names imprinted on my brain.

We'd be out a long way in some quite big seas at times too. But don't let that rule out the prospects of dinghy fishing for blue sharks which Graeme Pullen and Wayne Comben have done with great success on a couple of occasions recently out from Falmouth.

Obviously you have to pick your day to be heading right off, which they did. There is however the fall back situation at Falmouth of staying inshore if conditions further off are not too good.

The Manacles, providing you have a good chart for safe collision proof navigation, is a good area for conger and bass, plus of course, it has that long standing reputation for some reason of attracting in mako sharks. Nobody fishes for them there these days, so who knows what their current status is. Only one way to find out.

Associated audio interview numbers: 54 and 144.

### SIX GILLED SHARK Hexanchus griseus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

To be more precise, the bluntnose six gilled shark, which is one of the largest growing, best distributed, and most common big fish in the oceans of the world. A very primitive animal related to the equally primitive greenland shark and seven gilled shark to name but two, with more extinct direct relatives than living examples.

A fish characterised by its dorsal fin being set well back towards the origin of the tail, and its eyes, which look like large green jewels, having no nictitating membranes, none of which is particularly relevant in light of the fact that unlike all other shark species recorded on rod and line in home waters which have five gill slits, as the name here implies, this fish has six, and looks rather like a very large blunt snouted dogfish.

A potentially huge fish which thrives on the bottom all along the continental slope down to depths of a thousand fathoms where it feeds on any available molluscs, crustaceans, or fish it can find, as well as disposing of corpses of various types that have descended from above.

At face value then, not a fish you should expect to see on rod and line, and for the most part that is the case. At the time of writing, a single lone juvenile straggler of 9½ pounds taken off Penlee Point near Plymouth back in 1976 is the sole British rod and line example.

That however isn't the entire story. This is a genuine rod and line target, even from a small trailed boat, and potentially the 'grander' for projects like my bucket list here, with authenticated specimens in excess of a thousand pounds having already been taken by anglers around the British Isles.

The west coast of Ireland is already a proven six gill hot spot, with locations along the Scottish coast arguably also waiting to be discovered.

Mixed amongst my two hundred plus audio podcasts are interviews with Irish charter skipper Luke Aston and Liverpool dinghy angler Mick Duff, both of whom have experience with big six gills in the area around Ireland's Shannon Estuary.

Mick first, fishing out of Kilkee, which is never a reliable prospect on account of the number of times you can't get out in a small boat there due to the Atlantic weather. He and his pals caught several on different occasions in around two hundred feet of water while fishing for common skate.

This was in daylight too, which makes the story even more interesting, as six gills are said to stay out in very deep water by day, which in any case is close by all around the outer Shannon. Six gills normally only venture into shallower areas and up in the water column after dark.

Fortunately, even huge six gills are fairly docile fish at the surface, which helps when bringing them up from a dinghy. For obvious reasons, all were cut free at the side of the boat with weights estimated up to around four hundred pounds, which in six gilled terms isn't even an average fish.

I'm not sure what gear Mickey Duff used, though if he was targeting common skate and subsequently expecting big six gills, then it will have been fairly substantial.

Going off my own experience, I did a 'biggie' once on an eighty pound class outfit. Graeme Pullen, who had far larger fish than mine, even managed to beat a 'grander' on a stand-up outfit, though I personally would be a bit concerned about trying that.

You really need to be sat comfortably when harnessed up to a huge fish in a safe way that won't see you suddenly vanishing over the side. This might sound dramatic, and big six gills can hardly be described as fighting fish, but they can pull, which added to the constant immense pressure you are already under from their sheer bulk, on a lumpy day could just be enough to tip the balance.....literally.

So it's a big, wide, large capacity reel loaded to the hilt with quality powerful braid obviously due to the depth. Down at the business end we used quite a short wire trace of around four hundred pounds bs with two forged 14/0 hooks impaled into a whole bonito.

A thousand pound six gill is over thirteen feet in length, so from the wire to the main line you will then need a good fifteen feet of ultra heavy mono to act as a protective rubbing strip, particularly as braid will have to be used for bite detection due to the depth.

As for the take, that will be in the form of a few short tugs and pulls. That's it. Don't expect line to suddenly start vanishing from the reel. And last but not least, like Mick Duff, we did most of our fishing at anchor, so be aware of the fish getting around the rope, which in deep water is probably going to be at a steeper angle than usual.

I have had them on the drift, but that was with the engine running bow into the tide trying to maintain position. Otherwise, think safety all the way through. For as docile as they often are, these are not fish to be messed with, particularly in a small boat, so treat them with the utmost respect.

Luke Aston, who charters out from Carrigaholt further into the Shannon estuary, but who, weather permitting, spends a lot of time outside offshore fishing for all sorts of stuff, regularly has them take his clients baits in one particular area, and also during daylight hours.

So again, as with Mick Duff fishing out from nearby Kilkee, he isn't targeting the six gills, and isn't fishing for them at supposedly the best time of day either. Yet still he catches them, with one particular fish brought ashore and weighed at 1,056 pounds which had scientists from all around the world clambering to come and collect it for research purposes as so little is known about the species.

My biggest six gill was estimated at nine hundred pounds, though not in UK or Irish waters, something which is discussed in more detail in Parts 2 and 3. We also had them to 800 pounds over at Ascension. So I still need to get a grander of some species, which would more than likely be a six gill if I ever decided that I have to get that last missing tick, the time for which so far as I'm concerned has unfortunately passed.

It can be done, and from what I hear from other parts of the world without too much difficulty either, other than the physical exertion of bringing the thing up, which from experience I know can be tough. Ireland currently is the leading proven contender in our corner of northern Europe. But I wouldn't rule out Scotland if given a proper go.

Associated audio interview numbers: 45 and 123.

### TOPE Galeorhinus galeus

**Bucket List status – result**

About as typical of a shark species as any fish could possibly look, with a worldwide distribution at temperate latitudes, and extremely migratory in its habits. Specimens tagged here in the UK and Ireland have turned up as far afield as the Azores, the Canary Islands and even Iceland, very clearly demonstrating that whatever protection status is given to the species, must extend beyond the boundaries of the British Isles.

A predominantly bottom feeding fish which for the most part comes within angling range from around the end of April through to quite late in the year, at which point falling sea temperatures push it back offshore and out of reach.

Not a fish likely to cause much in the way of identification problems, though occasionally confusion does exist. Those species potentially mistaken for it, and of course visa versa, are the spurdog with its very obvious sharp spine in front of each dorsal fin which the tope doesn't have, and the smoothhound, some of which have white spots which tope lack, and all of which have a mouth resembling that of a ray, whereas tope are more typically shark like with lots of teeth.

Upper colouration is a uniform greyish brown giving way to dull while below. Has a maximum growth potential of around one hundred pounds.

I was once president, secretary, or something of that order within the Tope Angling Club of Great Britain (TACGB) during the late 1970's. I was doing a lot of rainbow trout fishing at the time on the any method hydro-electricity generating reservoir at Ffestiniog in North Wales, where a chap called Dick Elliot was in charge of the fishery side of things.

Dick was a long standing and very well respected name on the Welsh sea angling scene, and had been active within the TACGB for many years right throughout the good times.

By that stage unfortunately, interest had very obviously waned, and fearful that the imminent AGM might fall flat on its face, he persuaded me to attend.

I thought it was as a journalist in the hope of drumming up some media coverage and extra support, but as I subsequently found out, it was as part of a potential future recruitment drive to fill any necessary vacant posts to keep the whole thing ticking over.

So I was persuaded to get myself down to some big hotel in Colwyn Bay where I met the great and good on the tope fishing scene, including the legendary Bruce Millen, the master of catching them from the shore at the southern entrance to the Menai Strait over on the Anglesey side, which if for no other reason, made the journey down there worthwhile.

One thing people need to realise here is that back then, not only tope fishing, but angling generally was still in the dark ages by comparison to the approaches and tactics we take for granted today. To describe typical tope gear as antiquated animal tackle would be no exaggeration, and to see dead tope piled up ready for dumping after a competition was the norm.

Subsequent to that AGM, I was approached to set up a TACGB sponsored dinghy tope fishing competition on my home turf in Lancashire in conjunction with the Fylde Boat Angling Club, which I agreed to do, but only on the proviso that certain conservation rules could be put in place.

The competition would be for the biggest individual fish as opposed to overall weight, and competitors would be required to broadcast weights immediately over their VHF radio so that everyone else would know to return all fish under that weight.

Sadly, it still meant that some tope were brought ashore. But no huge pile of dead bodies, and if my memory serves me well, out of over two hundred tope caught across something like thirty small boats, no more than half a dozen were brought to the scales, which while still far from ideal, was a vast improvement on other events I'd witnessed in the past.

The following year I was again persuaded to attend the AGM. Not in a hotel this time, but rather, in the lounge of someone's house with just four of us present – myself and Dick Elliot of course, some chap from Birmingham who was more interested in CB radio, and obviously, whoever it was that owned the house.

In short, not enough people to occupy all the required active posts which saw us all multi-tasking, taking on two or even three committee roles until it could finally and legally be wound up, which shortly afterwards it was.

Whether this was due to a lack of interest in tope fishing or simply in large single species clubs generally we will never know. The Shark Angling Club of Great Britain down at Looe endured a similar down turn in fortune, whereas the British Conger Club continues to thrive. The SACGB still exists, but its prestige has long since departed.

Despite this, tope fishing as a pursuit has continued to be popular, and tope as a species have been the subject of a great deal of conservation effort, finally delivering some formalised protection, more of which later. So the angling interest in the species is still very much alive.

Unfortunately, the fish themselves have been a bit up and down at times in terms of availability, despite their current recreational fishing only status with a forty five kilo's per day commercial by-catch allowance in England and Wales, which suggests that all may not be well on the wider European scene, where long-lined fish only have to be retuned with no limits at all on netted fish.

This is something the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN) have been fighting on behalf of all home water anglers for quite some time now. So there is a certain irony in the fact that since protective legislation has finally been won by SSACN, stocks visiting the south west of Scotland, and in particular Luce Bay, appear to be experiencing the greatest pressure, and as yet nobody has been able to put their finger on the precise reason why.

Rather than do a systematic sweep of the whole UK tope potential, some of which, if I'm honest, I am not really in a position to comment on anyway, what I propose to do is offer a round-up of my own experiences, starting as you might expect on my home patch of Lancashire, where over the years I've had some very good fish and numerically good catches. But never with any real season on season consistency.

Inshore we see a lot of small bait robbing tope hovering just either side of the double figure mark. But I've also had them to over fifty pounds within minutes of the beach. However, when you move further off around Shell Wharf to the south of Lune Deep, and Lune Buoy on the north side fishing along the Lune slope, tides allowing, bigger fish and more of them are a much better prospect.

The patchy rough ground at the south end of Walney Island is another good area. I remember back in 2008 going out from Fleetwood aboard Andy Bradbury's 'Blue Mink' to shoot some video and write a feature on a trip aimed at catching mixed species with a party from British Aerospace at Preston, which by default turned into a real tope trip to remember.

Initially sticking with the game plan, the lads started off with a variety of traces and mix of baits, which unfortunately kept getting bitten off by tope. We finished up with over forty tope to around forty pounds, all of which is on YouTube, a haul made all the more creditable taking into account the fact that nobody had any tope gear with them.

Other than a small spool of old wire for traces, there was nothing else suitable onboard. Imagine then what the final figures might have stacked up like had tope been the primary objective.

Another memorable angling feature and video trip was a day spent aboard Stan Dickinson's Liverpool based 'Tusker'. The weather was perfect. A beautiful flat calm summers day at anchor many miles off towards a couple of rigs somewhere midway between Liverpool and Rhyl, and loads of good tope up to just short of fifty pounds, along with the usual huss, LSD's, plus some very nice tub gurnards.

I suppose it would have been just as easy to hit the same area sailing out of Rhyl from where I've fished many times and for all manner of stuff including tope with Tony Parry aboard his boat 'Jensen II'. You would see some very good tope hauls out there with some very big female fish amongst them late spring to early summer.

Or should I say, you did. Less so these days unfortunately in one of Tony's favourite areas, which features a gulley up which good numbers of big tope would run. That was until the North Hoyle and Rhyl Flats wind-farms were constructed and ran their power cables from North Hoyle back to shore right along the gulley in question.

As I mentioned in my introduction to the cartilaginous species, sharks are very sensitive fish able to pick up tiny electrical signals from concealed prey fish, which for tope includes a high proportion of flatfish.

Forget mackerel as an important prey fish. They make the best baits, but hardly feature at all in the tope's regular diet of dabs, whiting and the like. So they ran these power carrying cables emitting their electo magnetic fields (EMF's) right along one of the favoured pathways for tope to the north of Rhyl.

It should have been obvious to their so-called science experts what the outcome was going to be, and not only to sharks and rays, but reputedly bass, plaice, cod and eels too if they were present. Yet research scientists funded by the energy companies concerned say there isn't a problem.

What else would you expect them to say. You never bite the hand that feeds you. So in light of the many thousands more of these turbines that are proposed all around the country, isn't it about time that a meaningful independent investigation into EMF's as a barrier to fish migration and distribution is carried out.

They get some very good tope fishing out of Holyhead, plus a few, though not as many as previously, throughout Caernarfon Bay. We've also taken some big ones in the dinghy around the base of some of the banks around the worryingly tidal Lleyn Peninsula. But it's further west out off Pwllheli that I've witnessed some of the best Welsh tope fishing over recent times.

Around twelve miles pretty much due south of the port lie a series of shallow bouldery reefs which I'm told are moraines, these being deposits of solid material picked up and carried by long departed glaciers, hence their long finger-like shape.

On the bigger tides throughout the summer, these are usually covered in black bream, with huss and tope tending to feed in the deeper water along their edges, though also willing on occasions to snatch at hooked bream over the tops.

One such an occasion came in June of 2013 aboard Jason Owen's 'Haf Aled' where the tope were biting at our swim feeders and making off with hooked bream like there was no tomorrow. So much so that some of lads switched to heavier gear, taking literally dozens of the things to forty eight pounds.

You get more tope, or you could, right along the coast of west Wales round into the Bristol Channel. I was given a tope lesson to remember one day off Tenby by Clive Gammon who took me out as a young up and coming angling journalist, a trip that also produced my first ever turbot. Nearby Swansea was another noted Welsh venue I fished several times.

I've also taken them over the way on the North Devon and Cornish side too, occasionally on shark baits fished under a float. Graeme Pullen and I picked up a few there while fishing for porbeagles, and I know that they also catch, or at least hook them from some of the rock perches over-looking deep water such as Baggy Point which is where the current British shore record comes from.

Moving along the mid English Channel, the Sussex Coast can be good, and further around into the southern North Sea, the Thames Estuary, with Bradwell in particular having an excellent track record both for numbers and size of individual fish.

By far the best specimen tope I personally have seen, which weighed in at seventy one pounds, came out from Brancaster on the north Norfolk Coast fishing the northern entrance to The Wash, which years ago was a tope fishing Mecca in its own right.

One area I haven't mentioned yet, and deliberately so, is south west Scotland, either out from Port Logan for the big end of season female fish, or from Drummore fishing in Luce Bay throughout the summer for the more numerous pack males out around The Scares.

In both cases this would be with charter skipper Ian Burrett aboard his nineteen foot orkney fastliner 'Onyermarks', more often than not in the company of the Essex Boys Paul Maris and Dave Hawkeswood.

We had some absolutely fabulous days out there with numerical catches up around the fifty fish mark, and individuals ranging between around thirty and almost fifty pounds.

What also makes this so memorable is the fact that Ian Burrett is projects director for the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN), and it was on these trips over the years that I observed his tactics for catching and handling tope evolve.

So much so that in 2013, we made a series of short video's for the SSACN website demonstrating such diverse things as tope baits, tope handling, tagging and release, plus a little earlier in the year, all the same procedures for big common skate at Crinan on the Sound of Jura.

In the early days, Ian and his customers would fish with carp rods and ultra-light uptiders to maximise the pleasure of each individual fish, which has its merits when you are not looking to catch fish to eat.

It was also a good opportunity to practise tagging and handling and to devise the best ways of doing so with the least amount of stress. But more time spent on the end of the line can be a stress in its own right, for which reason it might be better to go slightly heavier in terms of rod, reel and line.

Bait size and presentation was another thing that evolved over time, moving away from whole mackerel with their tails removed to prevent them spinning in the tide put on the hook with a baiting needle, to smaller half sections of a whole mackerel lightly hooked to allow for ease of taking by an interested fish, followed by a quick strike to minimise deep hooking.

They also used to fish with short wire traces of around twelve inches in length attached to around six feet of heavy mono as a rubbing strip. That too has now changed to several feet of two hundred pounds bs mono without the wire. Occasionally a tope might get lucky and bite the hook off. But this would be an exception.

Tope teeth can certainly damage and weaken the mono adjacent to the hook though, which if you start off with some surplus length in the trace, can be clipped out and retied or re-crimped.

This is a far more user friendly approach from the point of view of the person taking the trace and guiding the fish in too, and a far cry from the six to eight feet of heavy duty wire fished from a billiard cue rod and huge multiplier loaded with fifty pound bs line that we were recommended to use back in the 1960's.

The often quoted way of hooking tope, certainly when the sort of animal tackle I've just described was vogue, was to wait for the first run to end and a longer second run to really get under-way, then drive the hook home.

The problem is that this much talked about short first run while turning the bait followed by a longer run with the bait properly inside the mouth is a fallacy. It might happen that way. But just as easily, it might not. Consequently, anglers were unsure when to strike resulting in gut hooked fish, which is a risk that need not be taken.

Mackerel flappers, where the backbone is removed leaving the two fillets still attached to the head were ruled out on account of dogfish being able to mouth the bait easier than they can when fishing either a whole or a half fish.

So the switch to smaller baits was made, which tends to result in less messing about on the tope's behalf, encouraging them to pick up and swim off taking line from reel more readily. And now through trial and error, Ian has demonstrated that a count to six when the ratchet is sounding out then putting the drag lever up to strike pressure usually does the trick.

I mentioned in the introduction to the cartilaginous fishes the need for careful handling, cradled lifting, covering of the eyes etc.. All of this was devised and revised aboard 'Onyermarks' over the years. So too was the use of flattened down hook barbs with small pieces of wide rubber band pushed over the bump after baiting up to keep the offering in place.

This is a particularly good trick when uptiding with squashed down barbs, as impact with the water can otherwise knock the bait off leaving you fishing an empty hook for ages without realising it.

Slider float fishing suspending the bait a foot or so off the bottom to take advantage of any remaining movement from an otherwise dying tide towards slack water in an attempt to eke out a few extra fish was another successful Burrett experiment.

With a couple of ounces of lead above the trace swivel to take it down and cock the float, and the reel out of gear as you pay out line trotting it away from the boat, this can be one of the most exciting ways of catching tope, which yet again can be viewed on YouTube.

Two other things Ian has always been big on are mackerel live-baits when you can catch them to order, and rubby dubby. A nice long chum slick filled with blood, juices, and fish particles is just what the doctor ordered for all cartilaginous apex predators, and with that in mind, Ian's technique has always been to cut up and mash enough mackerel to fill a mesh bag, which he would then attach to the anchor before sending it down.

Great when the boat is lying nicely in the tide with the baits spread out in the slick. Not so great when you get a breeze across the tide as it slackens taking you slightly off line. The trail still keeps working drawing fish up towards the anchor, but not necessarily under the boat, causing them to by-pass the baits.

Far better to my mind to put a well weighted bag down over the stern which moves with the boat as or if it swings about, and can be topped up. On the other hand, with some of the tides they have in Luce Bay, lateral drifting may not be much of a problem, and getting the bag to stay down at the bottom might be. It could however be a worthwhile consideration for less tidal situations elsewhere.

Ironically, and sadly, as I hinted earlier, those heady days around the turn of the century have given way to much leaner times in and around Luce Bay, despite SSACN driving the conservation agenda, and south west Scotland once having been one of the UK's most prized tope assets.

Effective and administered legislation, certainly in the UK, may well be in place, but not across the remainder of Europe, which for a fish showing such strong migratory urges and carrying a set of fins with such a high commercial value on the Chinese market, looks increasingly unlikely to be enough.

Associated audio interview numbers: 1 and 131

### COMMON SMOOTHHOUND Mustelus mustelus

**Bucket List status – result**

A typically shark like species with noticeably large powerful pectoral and dorsal fins, the second dorsal being very obviously larger than the anal fin sited below it. A greyish brown fish not dissimilar to a small sleek tope, until that is you turn it over and check out its mouth and nostrils.

Here the mouth resembles that of a ray, with crushing nodules as opposed to conventional teeth lining both jaws as a means of dealing with hard shelled crustaceans. The nostrils are noticeably large with obvious flaps.

That's all very well for picking out smoothhounds from other similar looking species. Not unfortunately for separating the smoothhound species themselves, where the only accurate way of identifying the two species is to check out the dermal denticles, which all cartilaginous fishes have instead of conventional scales, plus their respective reproductive strategies, both of which are difficult if not impossible field observations to make.

The common smoothhound is viviparous producing live young, whereas the starry smoothhound is aplacental or ovoviviparous, meaning it has eggs which hatch within the oviducts where they remain and grow on, nourished by uterine milk, which as anglers, we are not in a position to investigate.

Even a rudimentary examination of the denticles requires laboratory precision looking to see if those on the shoulders are rounded and ridged all the way to their tips indicating the species is _M. Asterias_ , or are longer and slimmer with ridging extending only along the first half of their length as in _M. Mustelus_ , all of which may well become academic and irrelevant anyway in light of recent findings.

Getting straight to the point, because as a species _Mustelus mustelus_ is listed as an angling catch by the BRFC, the Welsh, and the Scots, I have to treat it as an inclusion here, though in reality, it very likely should never have been listed in the first place in light of recent scientific evidence.

This states that the species _Mustelus mustelus_ doesn't occur at our latitude, and that ALL smoothhounds taken around the British Isles and most of northern Europe are the of starry variety, either with or without spots.

A fuller explanation is given below under _Mustelus asterias_. For now, as I am basing this part of my bucket list on the published record lists which still display the two species, I must therefore continue to count it as an additional tick until such time as fish recorders see fit to combine the two inclusions as one.

### STARRY SMOOTHHOUND Mustelus asterias

**Bucket List status – result**

A typically shark like species with noticeably large powerful pectoral and dorsal fins, the second dorsal being very obviously larger than the anal fin sited below it. A greyish brown fish not dissimilar to a small sleek tope covered on its upper back and flanks with small white spots or stars, the only smoothhound species in fact that has these.

Like _M. Mustelus_ above, the mouth resembles that of a ray, with crushing nodules as opposed to conventional teeth lining both jaws as a means of dealing with hard shelled crustaceans, and again the nostrils are noticeably large with obvious flaps.

Unfortunately, the only accurate way of separating the two listed smoothhound species is to check out the dermal denticles which all cartilaginous fishes have instead of conventional scales, plus their respective reproductive strategies, both of which are difficult if not impossible field observations to make.

The common smoothhound is viviparous and produces live young, whereas the starry smoothhound is aplacental or ovoviviparous, meaning it has eggs which hatch within the oviducts where they remain and grow on, nourished by uterine milk, which as anglers we are not in a position to investigate.

Even a rudimentary examination of the denticles requires laboratory precision looking to see if those on the shoulders are rounded and ridged all the way to their tips indicating the species is _M. Asterias_ , or are longer and slimmer with ridging extending only along the first half of their length as in _M. Mustelus_ , all of which may well become academic and irrelevant in light of recent findings.

As an evolutionary scientist myself, I have often wondered how two almost identical species with completely over-lapping distribution, feeding strategies, and habitat preferences, can co-exist without for some reason one ultimately displacing the other.

Irish fishery researcher Dr. Ed Farrell it seems must have been thinking along similar lines, except in his case, he decided to tackle the question head on using DNA comparisons as the basis for his research and Ph. D thesis.

Samples were provided from a number of sources dotted the UK and Ireland. In addition to these, tissue samples were also obtained from museum collections all around Europe, plus further afield, to get DNA data from reliably identified _M. Mustelus_ against which to compare the European results, all of which, spots or no spots, came from the starry smoothhound _M. Asterias._

This confirmed to Ed what he already suspected, that being that European smoothhounds without spots are just variants on the starry layout, and that the common smoothhound _M. mustelus_ does not occur at our latitude, which you could be forgiven for thinking would be a conclusive end to any argument on the subject.

But you would be wrong. Because experts at the British Natural History Museum in London who advise the BRFC are not convinced. Consequently, the committee itself is not convinced.

The Irish record fish committee have already gone for just the one inclusion, while the Welsh and Scots are still currently considering their position. So for now I must record them as separate species, even though having spoken at length to Ed Farrell, I completely accept his results and conclusions.

From an angling perspective, the smoothhound has to be anglings greatest success story of the twenty first century so far, though the foundations for this were undoubtedly laid in the latter part of the twentieth century.

I well remember my first encounter with the species at Bradwell while fishing with John Rawle back in the 1970's. Bob Cox, John's long time business partner had pondered in the press why a fish which hunts slow moving prey needed to evolve such a turn of power and speed, concluding that it must be God's gift to angling, a thought echoed by many people who regularly fish for them today. They are tremendous fun fish to catch.

I next encountered them in The Solent fishing at night with Dink LeMoignan after drop netting for hermit crabs for bait, and later out from Penarth with Dave Lewis on peeler crab, who said at the time that if he had to be restricted to just one species of fish for the rest of his life, the smoothhound(s) would be heading up his list. And that pretty much was that.

I knew they also occurred from maybe The Wash around into the English Channel as far west as the Isle of Wight. But as a dyed in the wool Lancashire dinghy angler by that stage, they were never going to feature too much in my plans. Or so I thought. Then, reports started circulating about the odd one or two showing along The Fylde Coast.

Whether or not they had always been there and people had only just become aware of them, or had maybe even previously mis-identified them as small tope, is difficult to say. But in light of the situation both smoothhounds and sea angling find themselves in today, I think I can safely say that with hind-sight, they started to make it into Lancashire waters during the mid 1970's, since when things have got better and better almost year on year.

Why do I say this. Well locally they have become an integral part of our boat and shore fishing scene, particularly in the Cleveleys to Bispham area, though they don't seem to venture much further along the Fylde either to the south or to the north, and not too far seaward either, which for a fish which likes shallow inshore water is exactly what you would expect.

But that of itself is not the reason. Back in 2005 I had an invite from 'Jensen II' skipper Tony Parry to take a look at the up and coming smoothhound scene in the harbour entrance at Rhyl for a magazine feature after one of the salmon gill netters had accidentally caught a few the summer before. Up until that point, smoothhounds weren't on the Rhyl radar.

Just prior to my visit, Tony tried a few early exploratory trips fishing peeler crab almost up to the shore and they were most definitely there. So now it was time to tell the world, and a great days fishing ensued.

Nothing bigger that around seven pounds, but plenty of them, and by all accounts, a brand new potential that had just presented itself as opposed to being something previously over-looked.

So they'd appeared off Lancashire's Fylde coast, presumably moving from south to north as nobody beyond the Cleveleys area had reported encountering them, and had somehow by-passed other north-west venues in-between. Then some years later they suddenly started back filling, first at Rhyl, then over the banks either side of the revetment walls leading out of the River Mersey.

Morecambe now has them too, with specimens also showing up in Cumbria. But the biggest surprise of all has been Scotland, where they have now installed themselves in vast numbers throughout Luce Bay right around into Wigtown Bay.

So many in fact that Drummore charter skipper and fishing friend Ian Burrett invited me up to do a feature fishing for them out from Ardwell, as ever, tucked quite close in to the shore fishing with peeler crab, again with big numbers of small to average sized fish.

They say smoothhounds like sandy to gravelly ground, but off the Fylde coast it can be quite heavy. Lots of rough stuff interspersed with small patches of sand lying under around thirty feet of water. Elsewhere in the country, inshore shallow waters also appear to be favoured, so no real problem in locating fish.

No real problem either in catching them, though as ever, some tactics and baits are going to work better than others, which can and will vary locally, so some homework may also need to be done.

As a general trend, from the shore it's peeler crab, preferably after dark over the late spring and summer months, whereas out in the boat, daylight fishing is more the norm, preferably uptiding if the water is very shallow.

If not, then with a light drop down outfit, yard long flowing trace of forty to fifty pounds bs mono and a 4/0 hook, or even a mono trace tipped off with a short length of wire if tope are knocking about. And of course, the right bait.

Smoothhounds in my experience will readily take squid, worm and crab. In fact, some of my biggest smoothies have come to a whole calamari fished early season for tope before the mackerel have arrived. I've even had the odd one on fish baits, though I wouldn't recommend trying them.

You can also look at baits as much for what they might deter such as nuisance dogfish or un-wanted tope bite-off's as what they attract, particularly if the intended target doesn't seem too fussed either way.

Obviously, peeler crab is tops. Unfortunately dogfish love them too, and there are far more of those critters about these days than hungry hounds. So last summer (2014) we took to catching hard backed crabs for bait on a kids crab line in the local boating lake for a YouTube video and feature for Sea Angler Magazine.

Had we had suitable crab hunting territory along the shoreline we would have tried there instead. But a hard backed crab with the rear of its shell cracked or lifted up and lightly hooked will usually lie there untroubled by dogs until a smoothhound finds it, and they quite literally love them.

There are lots of good smoothhound holding areas around the country. Too many to name here, and not all of them by a long chalk known to me. The local grapevine should satisfy that particular need. What I would like to do is point the finger in the direction of a couple capable to turning up better than average individual fish.

Many venues will produce the occasional specimen from time to time. I've had them to just over fifteen pounds off Cleveleys, and one of Andy Bradbury's clients aboard 'Blue Mink' lost an absolute monster at the surface as it ran through all the other lines, chafing and finally parting his braid on somebody else's mono.

What I'm talking about here is consistency, and in that regard, two particular venues spring to mind. One is Bradwell which has a vast array of marks to visit making it difficult to be more precise.

The other is Holyhead fishing just across the way from the breakwater in and around Church Bay, where good doubles and occasionally fish of over twenty pounds are caught late spring to early summer on crab. Interestingly, the current Welsh record tope of seventy nine pounds was also caught here on a smoothhound trip.

Currently, smoothhounds are one of the few species in home waters that are not under any sort of sustained commercial pressure, and as a result are doing very well. That unfortunately is most definitely not the case in other parts of the European Union where they are targeted commercially.

A load of butchered carcasses and juvenile smoothhounds was found washed up on the Isle of Wight in 2014 causing an Internet outcry, and rightly so, prompting fears of either EU trawling, or more probably some 'enterprising' UK commercial fisherman looking to make a killing and a quick buck.

I've not heard of any repeat of that episode so far. Having the story splattered all over the press may well have had a deterrent effect. Either way, we must do all within our powers to see that our coastal smoothhound stocks remain safe as a recreational resource.

Associated audio interview numbers: 41.

### SPURDOG Squalus acanthias

**Bucket List status – result**

From being the most abundant small shark in northern European waters to the verge of extinction in my angling lifetime, now, thankfully, with protective measures in place requiring that all spurdogs, both recreational and commercial be returned, the species is hopefully embarked very tentatively on the long slow road to recovery.

Unfortunately, a fact not helped by its own reproductive biology, as all cartilaginous species produce very small numbers of offspring, which even if they all survived, could at best only ever facilitate a moderately quick recovery.

In the case of the Spurdog, although it can give birth to as many as a dozen pups (though typically less), having a gestation period of up to twenty two months, which is the longest in the entire animal kingdom, only exacerbates the problem.

For those reasons, not too many current generation anglers will be that familiar with the species. Not that this will affect identification in any way, as this is the only home waters shark to have a large prominent sharp spine in front of each of its two dorsal fins.

Colouration is some shade of grey on the back and upper flanks with a scattering of white spots which may not always be immediately noticeable.

I remember once writing that anglers don't so much find spurdogs as spurdogs find anglers, after which it was often a struggle to shake them off.

You sometimes had to move literally miles to be in with a chance of catching anything else, as the huge grey swarm of aquatic locusts went about its business of cleaning up everything edible in its path. Sometimes they would even swim up to the surface in their dozens following one of their hooked compatriots to the boat.

Obviously, those days are long gone, and certainly won't be back within my life-time, if ever at all. It would be nice if they were, even at a fraction of the numbers back then, but most unlikely ever again to be so.

Hopefully they would get a much better deal this time around, including from anglers, many of whom, myself included, treated not only the spurdog shoals, but all species back then as if stocks were inexhaustible, which we now know only too well is not the case.

In embarrassingly scant defence of that snippet of history, quite frankly, we didn't know any better, so we'd keep pretty much every one that came into the boat, which if you happened to be over a shoal of pregnant females, as spurdogs tend to knock around in same sex shoals, the whole deck could be awash with aborted yolk sac pups further adding to the carnage.

I'm told that if the pups aren't aborted too prematurely and are handled carefully they can survive if put into the water straight away, though I don't have any direct evidence for that. But shamefully, I'm not even sure we did that.

We just took everything for granted, which combined to what the long-liners would later ultimately do once they cottoned on to their commercial value, plunged sea angling into a dark period of not seeing a single spurdog from one season to the next for the best part of two decades and more.

There were still a few small isolated pockets just about managing to hang on here and there. But it was quite literally just a few. Mainly in Scotland in the Firth of Lorne and Sound of Mull area, with Loch's Etive and Sunart, which are part of this system, in particular acting as pupping and nursery areas, which thanks to sustained pressure from the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN) have now become conservation zones from which hopefully the species might be able to re-establish itself.

But it was a long hard fought campaign. Every time a fishery minister was approached with any sort of conservation requirement request, the stalling technique of asking to see hard evidence was brought into play.

So SSACN set about gathering that evidence through organised angling tagathons, acoustic tag recorders at the narrow entrance to Loch Etive, and many other similarly innovative data generating projects, all of which involved anglers.

I took part in two of those tagathons on Loch Sunart, the first in the company of SSACN projects director Ian Burrett on his boat 'Onyermarks', and later with event organisers Stuart Cresswell and Willie Kennedy aboard their trailed boat, where in the second event, Gordon Goldie re-caught a spurdog he himself had tagged in the same spot three years earlier. Now what are the chances of that.

As a result, slowly but surely the data built up to be collated and interpreted by SSACN's own fishery science team, until not only did the Scottish government relent in respect of Loch's Etive and Sunart, but also with protection for adult spurdogs, tope, and common skate to name but three species, all of which was also down to the efforts of SSACN on anglings behalf, not only here in the UK, but right across Europe too.

The war is still far from won. That said, spurdogs are not too difficult to catch now in 2015 throughout that corner of Scotland, and are even starting to put in a regular showing in the deep water from Port Logan down to the Mull of Galloway, where back in the 1970's they were present in vast numbers.

They can also now be relied upon in the deeper waters around Anglesey in Wales, especially Holyhead Deep, with reports starting to come in from other deep water locations dotted all around the country.

Anglers thankfully can now target them once again, as I have myself with Gethyn Owen out from Holyhead recently for a magazine feature, only this time around, with the species welfare always the foremost consideration.

That these fish must go back, morally as well as legally, is now a given. But the mere act of returning a fish doesn't necessarily ensure that it is going to survive, though we know from tagged recaptures that with the right level of care and attention, there is no reason at all why that shouldn't be the case.

As regards fishing for spurdogs, rod, reel and line choice will be dictated by water depth and tidal demands rather than the size of the fish themselves, which under ideal conditions could easily be handled on a twelve pound class outfit.

Top bait for me is a fresh mackerel-squid cocktail, though either of the two on its own will still catch well, as indeed will most fish baits, as these are not particularly demanding fish, which was perhaps part of their earlier downfall.

My personal preference is to fish a short sixty pounds bs mono flowing trace armed with a 4/0 that has had its barb squashed down using a pair of pliers. Having the 'bump' this creates helps keep the bait in place, though pushing the hook point through a quarter inch piece cut from a wide rubber band after baiting up, then sliding it up over the 'bump' will help ensure it stays put.

You can also catch them on other rigs including baited feathers. But why would anybody who isn't fish-mongering want to be hauling up two or more fish at a time, each fighting against the other, thereby cancelling out their individual sporting attributes.

One fish at a time using a landing net and quickly getting them back into the water is what's needed to ensure their continued revival, and for my part, make some sort of recompense for what went on in the past.

Associated audio interview numbers: 16 and 63.

### BULL HUSS Scyliorhinus stellaris

**Bucket List status – result**

Picking out the dogfishes generally from the rest of the sharks is easy enough. Unfortunately, pinning exactly the right name on the specimen in question is at times something a number of anglers still find problematic. Lesser spotted dogfish are the other similar species responsible here for this confusion.

When you have a 'dog' in double figures, you don't even need to think LSD. It's when weights come is at under five pounds that people seem to struggle. Time then for a full LSD – bull huss comparison, starting with colouration and markings, which are sometimes helpful, but can also be very variable, over-lapping, and therefore confusing too.

Text book huss are generally sandy brown with large well spaced dark spots scattered over their back, flanks, and upper fin surfaces. But in reality, not always. Over heavy kelpy ground for example the spots can be smaller and denser giving an almost completely black upper body similar to that of an LSD over the same terrain.

The archetypal LSD will also have a sandy brown base colouration, but with much smaller more tightly packed spots which often form light and dark vertical bands along the length of the body.

The fool proof way of separating the two is to look at the positioning of the fins and at the nasal flaps on the underside of the head close to the mouth. If the nasal flaps overlap the upper jaw and are joined, one running on into the other, it's an LSD. If not and they are obviously individually separated and set well up the snout away from the upper lip, then it's a bull huss.

As for the fins, in the LSD, the point at the back end of the anal fin lies directly under the base or start of the first dorsal fin located above it, whereas with the bull huss, the rear point where the anal fin actually joins to the body lines directly under the base or start of the first dorsal fin above it.

There was time when I looked upon bull huss as being almost as much of a nuisance as LSD's. It was only the fact that there were fewer of them about that kept them from being treated with equal contempt. Then one day while out fishing over Holyhead Deep for a magazine feature aboard Gethyn Owen's boat 'My Way', I had a 'road to Damascus moment'.

The object of the exercise was to catch spurdogs, which were just starting to show some early signs of recovery after the commercial battering they had previously taken pushing them literally to the brink of extinction. Obviously, if caught, they would all be going back. What we needed was camera fodder to make the proposed comeback and conservation magazine article work.

After a few hours inshore catching pollack and wrasse around the cliffs patiently waiting for The Deep's ferocious run to ease, Gethyn decided to head off half an hour earlier than planned, which meant a good pound and a half of lead would initially be needed for even a shot at touching bottom until the tide died away.

Not that this affected the fishing. People were in straight away, struggling, and loving every minute of it, catching big bull huss as fast as they could get their baits down to them.

I remember remarking to Gethyn that this was no good, which it wasn't from my perspective. But he soon put me straight, as did the other lads on-board. For while I needed to see spurs and they were also hoping to connect with a few tope, the huss were not a problem to them, nor to many other charter boat anglers around much of the country either for whom they can often represent the biggest and hardest fighting fish a lot of them will ever hook. There endeth the lesson.

Huss can also be caught quite regularly from the shore in parts of north Devon and Cornwall, plus around the Lleyn Peninsula in Wales where there is deep enough water to cast a big bait out onto mixed to rocky ground close in to safe accessible cliff perches.

Specialist shore anglers it seems can't get enough of them for the same reason as already outlined for many boat anglers. Especially during the spring when big heavily pregnant females come in close to deposit their egg cases, the corner tendrils of which wrap around weed stems to anchor them in position hidden from view.

Close inshore like this they are definitely more nocturnal in their feeding than further off. It probably won't matter much what rig is used in purely presentational terms. But from a getting gear and/or the fish in without any hang-ups perspective, a single hook pulley rig has to be favourite.

It has to be said though that huss are almost exclusively a boat anglers fish, preferring a bit of depth over their heads over mixed or broken through to heavy ground. They will stray out onto the cleaner stuff, but mixed topography seems to suit their feeding needs better, offering more in the way of variation and opportunity, as huss will eat virtually anything.

Not that this influences what it's best to put on the hook. Some say fresh mackerel is king, while others prefer squid. Both catch well, and a cocktail of the two is even better. But they will eat just about any sort of suitably sized fish bait.

I even had one come up having half chocked itself trying to swallow a small codling that had beaten it to the bait. Though not actually hooked, that fish simply refused to let the codling go right up to the side of the boat.

Huss actually are renowned for coming to the surface clinging on to baits without having taken the hook, only to let go right at the very last moment and arrogantly swimming away. Very frustrating.

Most rods and reels can handle huss, so that aspect of fishing for them is down to personal preference or local requirements. Because of the way they squirm and contort their bodies in the water, they are more of a dogged dead weight to haul in than an actual fight in the way that most free swimming species such as smoothhounds and tope are. No need then to fish too heavy.

I remember a session we did in the dinghy close in to Blackpool's south pier on a day when the weather looked too ominous to be heading any further offshore, so I decided to fish with a light pike lure rod and fixed spool, not expecting much other than LSD's, gurnards, and a few dabs.

Unexpectedly, that session brought us over twenty huss to around fourteen pounds which the flimsy outfit managed no problem at all. That came after the Holyhead trip mentioned earlier, and helped reinforce my new found outlook on the species.

Typically that day, I used a flowing trace made up from four feet of heavy mono of around sixty pounds bs with a 4/0 hook. You don't need wire. So long as the mono is checked in the vicinity of the hook for tooth damage which can be clipped out and retied when necessary, you're not going to loose fish through trace failure, unless of course a tope comes along, which at some locations can be a distinct possibility.

Heavy mono and a strong hook should also allow you to trace haul small to average fish on-board, though a landing net is always preferable. Then, as with the LSD's, to avoid hand contact while retrieving the hook, use a gemini T-bar disgorger.

Never the best of fish to hold as anyone who has ever struggled to pose one for a photograph can testify, so the less hands on contact you have the better. Get it in, get it off, and get it away.

### LESSER SPOTTED DOGFISH Scyliorhinus canicula

**Bucket List status – result**

Picking out the dogfishes generally from the rest of the sharks is easy enough. Unfortunately, pinning exactly the right name on the specimen in question is something a number of anglers still find problematic. Bull huss are the other similar species here responsible for this confusion.

When you have a 'dog' in double figures you don't even need to think LSD. It's when weights come is at under five pounds that people seem to struggle. Time then for a full LSD – bull huss comparison, starting with colouration and markings, which are sometimes helpful, but can also be very variable, over-lapping, and therefore confusing too.

Text book huss are generally sandy brown with large well spaced dark spots scattered over their back, flanks, and upper fin surfaces. But not always. Over heavy kelpy ground for example, the spots can be smaller and denser, giving an almost completely black upper body similar to that of an LSD over the same terrain.

The archetypal LSD will also have a sandy brown base colouration, but with much smaller tightly packed spots which often form light and dark vertical bands along the length of the body.

The fool proof way of separating the two is to look at the positioning of the fins and the nasal flaps on the underside of the head close to the mouth. If the nasal flaps overlap the upper jaw and are joined, one running on into the other, it's an LSD. If not and they are obviously individually separated and set well up the snout away from the upper lip, then it's a bull huss.

As for the fins, in the LSD, the point at the back end of the anal fin lies directly under the base or start of the first dorsal fin located above it, whereas with the bull huss, the rear point where the anal fin actually joins to the body lines directly under the base or start of the first dorsal fin above it.

If you want or need advice on catching lesser spotted dogfish, then if I'm honest, this account, and more probably this entire book are perhaps not for you. Advice on avoiding them; now that would be another matter altogether. Most of us can't, often at the expense of good baits and time wasted, both of which are aimed at targeting better fish.

Something has happened in recent years that for most parts of the British Isles has brought dogfish numbers, or cat sharks as some scientists are now preferring to call them, up to almost epidemic levels.

We always had a few here off my native Lancashire coast for example. But back in the 1970's on into the early 80's, you could safely put out a mackerel bait over the summer months and expect it to lay there until a tope or the occasional bull huss picked it up. Rarely an LSD.

You can't unfortunately do that these days. Now anything and everything on pretty much any type of rig is destined to get dogged, sometimes well on into late autumn and early winter when they used to be gone. In fact, in some years now they don't even go at all.

There's no doubting that rising sea temperatures and milder winters are contributing to this fact. But the problem goes deeper; very much deeper, and not only off the Fylde coast.

Pretty much of all of Western Britain and Ireland is now affected, as is the English Channel running around into the North Sea. Less so further up into the North Sea where cod and ling dominate, though there are increasing reports of LSD's in that area too.

What the reason is has yet to be officially identified and corrected, and I fear might take a lot of scientific input to accurately resolve.

For my part, I suspect that extra food made available by commercial species being over-cropped is at least part of the problem. In addition to that, LSD's are hardy fish which nobody takes; they lack widespread predation, and are willing to eat almost anything.

Like the supposed survival of cockroaches on land after a nuclear war, LSD's look set to out-survive everything and inherit the seas. What's left in the sea that is after all the plunder, pollution, dumping, and temperature fluctuations have done their worst.

For those that do want a bit of advise on deliberately catching LSD's, and I'll wager there can't be many, then you' have definitely come to the right person here.

I remember a session dinghy fishing in the Sound of Mull when collectively we had twenty four LSD's onboard of which I caught twenty three.

On another occasion, again dinghy fishing this time out of Ballycastle in Northern Ireland looking to see what might be lurking at depth around Rathlin Island, I managed to haul one up from well over five hundred feet.

Similarly, fishing the Sound of Jura for common skate and hoping to pick up a black mouthed dog on squid baited feathers. While others around me succeeded, again all I could get was LSD's. So I have something of a track record here. If I can't catch them, then usually nobody can.

One of the few occasions when I can recall managing to avoid them completely while others around me were 'blessed' was while experimenting with limpets as bait to see what they might catch offshore. The answer turned out to be nothing, not even dogs, so still no miracle cure there.

One way I have found of avoiding them over the summer months is when using hard backed crab which smoothhounds seem to love almost as much as peeler crab, and at virtually no cost all all, nor losses to the dogs, which are equally partial to peelers given the chance.

If on the other hand I had to pick a bait to recommend, or in my case to avoid, it would be squid, run a close second by freshly caught mackerel, then worm, and that goes for both the boat and from the shore.

As for presentation, it doesn't seem to matter from the boat so long as it's either at or close to the bottom, which baits cast from the shore at range invariably will be anyway due to the angle of the line. And expect more action as the tides starts to drop away.

The only other point I would add here is to invest in a Gemini T-bar disgorger. The perfect easy to use hook retrieval tool without any need to handle the fish at all, and therefore no risk of having that rough LSD skin cause painful scuff wounds to the backs of your hands.

### BLACK MOUTHED DOGFISH Galeus melastomus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A beautiful, delicate, amazing looking small shark species. Superficially similar to a lesser spotted dogfish in terms of anatomical layout, though slightly stumpier looking and with a tendency not to squirm around or even move much at all, quietly waiting for the hook to be removed so it can go back, which in all cases it must.

A deep water fish widespread throughout northern Europe at depths traditionally beyond the regular reach of anglers baits, but one which does occasionally come within catching range, though still at depth, where even deeper water is immediately adjacent.

Correct identification is easy due to the unusual patterning consisting of large round connecting blotches across the back and flanks with lighter margins at their lower edges.

The nostrils are well separated from each other and from the mouth, the interior of which, as the name suggests, is very noticeably black. As with other deep water sharks, the eye looks like a green jewel.

With my track record of catching dogfish you would have thought that ticking the black mouthed variety off my list would be a mere formality.

Unfortunately not so, though I do have first-hand experience of the fish from a number of locations, including the deep water around Gibraltar where we were fishing for bluemouth. But always on somebody else's hook. In particular when fishing the common skate grounds either out of Crinan on the Sound of Jura, or both the Firth of Lorne and Sound of Mull.

Much of my fishing around the Mull area has been from small boats, but there are also a number of charter boats working out from Oban which overlooks some of the deepest water, and therefore potentially at least, the best BMD opportunities.

Mackerel feathers baited with small strips of squid are as good a ploy as any. Stick at it for long enough (or not in my case) and eventually one should come along mixed in amongst the inevitable stream of LSD's and spurdogs.

### MONKFISH Squatina squatina

**Bucket List status – result**

Monkfish, or angel sharks as we are now being persuaded to call them, look like an intermediate stage in cartilaginous fish evolution from a round body shape to a flat one, with the monkfish not having made the full transition, yet.

But neither does it have the full rounded body profile more typical of sharks, making it a very difficult fish to put the wrong name to on account of its broad flattened front end and shark like hind quarters.

Both the pectoral and the pelvic fins are extended horizontally outwards, but unlike in the skates and rays, these are not fused to the head, therefore creating only a semi-ray like profile. On the other hand, in common with the skates and rays, the two small dorsal fins are situated well back towards the tail.

There is no anal fin on the under side, and unusually amongst sharks, with which, as the name angel shark suggests, this fish is classed, the lower lobe of the caudal fin or tail is slightly longer than the upper, and is a true upright fin.

The eyes are very noticeably small and set well apart from the spiracles. Colouration is usually some shade of sandy brown to grey with a light flecked pattern depending on substrate and location.

When they were more numerous than today, they would migrate both inshore and northwards over the summer months, preying on whatever small fish, molluscs, or crustaceans their fairly sedate way of life would allow them to catch.

That unfortunately is no longer the case, and it's doubtful whether current Europe-wide protection requiring that all monkfish, be they commercially or recreationally caught must be returned, stands any real chance of turning the home waters situation around now at this late stage.

Never at any time was this a common fish, but one distributed sufficiently well that a few specimens both could and would turn up every year pretty much anywhere around the British Isles.

West Wales was a regular producer if that be the right term. I've seen them out from Porthmadog, Pwllheli, and Aberystwyth, and know anglers also used to catch them at some of the other ports nearby such as Aberdovey.

A few also in south Wales, parts of the mid to eastern English Channel, and even occasionally the Lancashire coast all help give a flavour of their recent history. Then, suddenly, nothing. And by that I mean I haven't heard of even a single one caught anywhere over the past thirty or so years.

The last one I saw was a fifty five pounder caught by wife Dawn in the Canary Islands where they are making a comeback. Yet we used to catch them virtually to order over the water in County Kerry. We'd put the boat in at the side of Fenit Pier, then motor back inland following the shoreline of Tralee Bay until we came to one particular old farm building that had a rusty corrugated tin roof. That was our cue to start creeping carefully inshore.

We couldn't have been in much more than four feet of water and would be taking care not to run aground. Then suddenly, the depth would creep down a few more feet as we crossed the lip of a small shallow saucer like depression no more than a stones throw from the beach, famously known as the 'monk hole'.

Somewhere mid point we would put the anchor down followed by traces made up from four feet of eighty pounds bs mono tied to a 6/0 hook baited with half a fresh mackerel if we could find a few to the seaward side of Fenit Pier before heading inland, then we'd sit back and wait.

Nothing we ever caught in there gave a running take. Just a few pulls and tugs, or maybe a yard or so of line clicked out slowly against the ratchet. But always plenty of interest, and plenty of fish. And as the name suggests, the place was a holding ground for big monkfish.

Fortunately, that wasn't all it attracted. Small eyed and thornback rays were also plentiful there too. We even had a few stingrays, along with huss, and maybe an occasional small tope. But it was the monkfish that were the big draw. Probably on account of their size and novelty value more than anything, because they didn't put up that much of a fight, despite regularly being in the forty to sixty pound bracket.

Let me re-phrase that to read they didn't put up much of a fight in the water. Because it was so shallow, they were up and at the boat in no time at all just lying there waiting for the next thing to happen, which of course was the landing net, and that they most definitely didn't like.

We had with us a huge purpose built landing net made up for the winter jumbo cod we were taking throughout the 1980's along Lancashire's Fylde coast. That unfortunately didn't see the Irish trip out.

One particular fish broke its way out through the bottom ending up back in the water being played through the hole in the mesh, which we later repaired, only to have the frame wrecked a day or so later.

When you got them into the boat it was even worse. They turned from docile almost willing participant into a good impression of crazed crocodile. Very powerful fish too. Difficult to settle down, retrieve the hook from, then get back over the side, for which reason we didn't take too many photographs thinking that their availability would never end and that we could always get some pictures another time.

Obviously, that wasn't the case. The following year we returned and caught virtually nothing. We heard that some 'live for today' commercial fisherman had also decided to pay the spot a visit, and in common with the UK just over the way, that as they say was the end of that.

Tralee Bay does in fact still have the Irish Monkfish record, but unfortunately it dates way back. More recently however, the whole bay has been voluntarily closed to commercial fishing, though not to angling, in the hope that monkfish and undulate ray populations might start to re-establish themselves now that the pair have been given both ICES red list as well as Europe-wide legal protection. Fingers crossed. Only time will tell.

Associated audio interview numbers: 44.

### FLAPPER SKATE  Dipturus intermedia  &   
Dipturus flossada (formerly the Common Skate)

**Bucket List status – result (D. intermedia)**

With its recent history, can there be any more inappropriately named species of fish in the sea than the common skate. A name that is still in regular widespread use but has actually now been consigned to the waste bin, which on reflection is probably no bad thing.

It all started when along with a couple of other skate and ray species, the common skate was taken out of the genus _Raja_ and placed into the genus _Dipturus._ Then shortly afterwards, it was discovered that what had been thought of as one species with the new scientific name of _Dipturus batis_ was in fact two very similar species.

That name too has also now had to be binned in favour of two new names, which are the flapper skate _Dipturus intermedia,_ and the blue skate _Dipturus flossada,_ the unfortunate knock on consequence of which is that we've now gone from what was one of the easiest and most straight forward name pinning exercises to one of the hardest, as flapper skate and blue skate are so much alike, hence the earlier confusion.

The big knock on question this then throws up is who previously caught what, and which species currently holds the British, Irish and Scottish records. Something the fish recorders are going to have to come to terms with and sort out ASAP. Meanwhile, we now have two identification sequences to go through.

The five main points of difference are........

1. Eye colour: Both the easiest to determine and arguably the key identifier. In the flapper skate it is dark green or olive, whereas in the blue skate it is a pale yellow.

2. Blotches on the wings: Flapper skate have dark blotches covered in lighter yellowish spots, whereas blue skate have dark blotches ringed by yellowish brown.

3. Tail Spines: To say that these are larger and more prominent in flapper skate is of little help unless a direct comparison can be made, which is one field observation anglers will not be in a position to make.

4. Dorsal fins: As in all skates and rays, these are set well back towards the end of the tail. In the case of blue skate, the gap between them is very small, whereas in flapper skate it's approximately half a fin width wide.

5. Teeth: Again, not something for anglers to undertake as a field observation, if for no other reason than their own safety, plus of course the well being of the fish.

Otherwise you are looking at potentially the largest skate(s) in European waters, with a long angular pointed snout and dirty greyish white underside covered in tiny mucus pores, each of which is marked with a black spot. Upper surface colour and markings can vary between grey and brown with a sparse covering of lighter blotches and black dots.

Size alone will help eliminate most other smaller skate and ray species. If an individual is over forty pounds, the likelihood is that it's going to be either a flapper skate or a blue skate. If not, the CSI process kicks in.

My understanding is that while the two species do overlap geographically, fish caught in what are (or now were) traditional common skate haunts along the west coast of Scotland are flapper skate _D. intermedia,_ which as it turns out is the bigger of the two species.

Blue skate _D. flossada_ are said to have a marked southerly bias and are more likely to be the ones found in the Irish Sea and Celtic Sea, making the likelihood of fish caught off the southern Irish coast being blue skate.

All very confusing and still early days yet in trying to untangle the situation, not helped by the many similarities between the two species. **NOTE:** From here on in and elsewhere in the book, I am still going to refer to the two as common skate.

When I first started fishing, Shetland and Orkney were the top home waters venues for huge skate. There probably are still skate to be caught at both these locations, and as likely as not, access as much as decline will have played some part in reduced visitor participation.

I fished both locations when they were in their hey day, and while Orkney fell well short of expectation, Dury Voe in Shetland produced some very good fish, which in the company of a bonus one hundred and sixty seven pound halibut on one of the skate baits, were all brought to the scales, a practise regularly repeated elsewhere at the time.

Is it any wonder then that population numbers started to crash, sounding alarm bells in the corridors of academia hundreds of miles to the south in Glasgow. For it was there that the first tentative moves towards skate conservation were made.

Instrumental amongst other people in all of this was Dr. Dietrich Burkel, who I talked with at length on the subject in 2013 just before his death. A day when with a touch of both irony and justice, his last ever fish turned out to be a male skate of just over a hundred pounds which he and Ian Burrett tagged and released.

To cut a long story short, back in those earliest days, catch and release, tagging, and measurement data, were all collected and put on file at Glasgow museum where Dietrich worked. And there they remained for many years, long after his departure back to Germany until Brian Little and Davy Holt took the project over, adding much more data of their own from fish brought aboard Davy's boat based at Lochaline on the Sound of Mull.

This ultimately lead to the compilation of the separate weight estimation tables for both male and female fish which most anglers happily use today, and which are said to be accurate to within around 5%. Not that this has cut any ice with the various record fish committee's.

They still insist that all fish are brought ashore and weighed on firm ground as part of their record claims procedure rules, putting them squarely at odds with the law, which states that all so called common skate must be returned at the point of capture.

Despite this, in the years before legal protection, Bill and Davy pressed on compiling the two separate weight estimation charts, because not only are the sexes proportioned slightly differently, but their maximum growth potential differs greatly too.

It's the females that are potentially the big ones. Males rarely exceed around one hundred and forty pounds, and would be more typically nearer the hundred pound mark. Females on the other hand have the capacity to well top three hundred pounds.

To compensate, despite the size differential, male fish often give a far better account of themselves when hooked. Another point worth mentioning here is that when you find a productive area, segregation of the sexes can also be evident, with the males forming small pods well away from where the females are foraging.

Getting back to the history of those early tagging and measuring days, skate were still a single species _Raja batis,_ and one which was in virtual free fall beyond mere decline, almost to the point of virtual extinction.

The Swinbank brothers chartering out of Tobermory on the Isle of Mull were still catching and releasing a few, including the current British record of 227 pounds taken in 1986, which despite the rules laid down by the BRFC, was as I understand it, weighed on a gantry fitted to the boat and later released.

They fished both in the Sound of Mull, and weather permitting, out in more open water as far north as Ardnamurchan Point, building for themselves quite a deserved reputation for a range of species of which huge skate were just one.

No doubt other people would be fishing for the skate as well, particularly out from Oban at the other end of the Sound of Mull. But it wasn't until Ian Burrett and a few of his friends started taking a serious look at the species after the Swinbank brothers had sold their boat on to Andy Jackson on Loch Sunart, that the future of skate fishing, and skate as a viable species, would take a very dramatic upturn.

Ian chartered back then from a nineteen foot fastliner out of Drummore on Luce Bay over the summer months, fishing for tope and pollack where he has long operated an uncompromising all fish must be returned policy, fearful of the consequences indiscriminate and un-necessary taking of fish can have on vulnerable and localised populations.

However, Luce Bay unfortunately does not fish well over the winter and early spring period, providing Ian and his friends with the opportunity to hitch up the trailer, and either pleasure fish or explore.

Though I'd done magazine features with Ian previously in Luce Bay, I bumped into him for the first time socially on Loch Sunart, which lies at the northern end of the Sound of Mull. Dave Devine and I had gone up to Laga Bay to do a feature aboard one of Andy Jacksons self drive boats. There we bumped in to Ian at the salmon farm slip where he was putting his boat in, making ready to head out of the loch to fish for big skate.

Only having a sixteen foot orkney longliner with an eight hp outboard clamped to the transom rather limited our potential. But before he vanished into the distance, Ian gave us some marks within a few minutes of the slip where he'd taken skate in the past, one of which was, and still is, the biggest fish he has ever had aboard his boat 'Onyermarks', coming out of the weight estimation formula at 235 pounds.

A fish way bigger than the current record, though that doesn't concern him at all as all fish regardless of status are returned, which I know only too well having both seen and released record sized fish myself with him over the years.

There can't be many places where you can potter off maybe half a mile on an eight hp outboard and expect to catch hundred pound plus skate. But thanks to Ian, plus some guidance from Andy Jackson, that trip produced fish of one hundred and forty and one hundred and five pounds, plus an assortment of spurdogs, conger and LSD's.

By that stage Ian was still fishing with a few friends during March and April. That however quickly began to gather momentum to the point of having three fully booked boats up there for the best part of a month based at Ardtornish, fishing out of Lochaline down as far as the Firth of Lorne when the weather permitted, or restricted to the Sound of Mull when it wasn't, with nearby Loch Sunart as a really foul weather fall back if needed.

It was also here that much of the tagging work done for the blossoming Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN) was done, and where conservation minded techniques, both for the fishing and fish handling were perfected, which I'll discuss in more detail shortly. A location which produced some truly outstanding catches.

After yet more exploration work, Ian has since upped sticks and shifted his big skate operation to Crinan on the Sound of Jura where he puts in a few weeks chartering either end of his summer fishing in and around Luce Bay.

A venue which again produces some very big fish. But also a better spread in terms of size, plus shorter sailing times, and for the most part more shelter on all winds other than a brisk south westerly.

Typically, depths there are not perhaps as great as the Firth of Lorne, where I have anchored my own boat in over five hundred and fifty feet of water, though in the Sound of Mull it was probably more like four hundred feet, which depending on where you fish at Crinan is roughly what you can expect there too.

Whether the Crinan fish have always been there or are the progressive overspill from around the Isle of Mull just to the north is difficult to say. Possibly even a mix of the two. But certainly there is an element of the SSACN driven conservation in the mix there as well, as evidenced by a few skate being caught now by Ian Burrett and his clients as far south as Port Logan down towards the Mull of Galloway, again after an absence of many years.

In the early days, skate fishing was done using animal tackle. Applying sustained pressure to prise such a huge fish free using its size to create bottom suction requires heavy gear, and even today, fifty pound class outfits including a good lever drag reel loaded with as much as seventy or even eighty pound bs braid are used.

It's down at the business end where most of the changes have taken place. Gone is the use of wire to beat the teeth. Now it's two hundred pounds bs monofilament right through, with an overall length of at least ninety inches, which is longer than the biggest skate likely to be hooked, so as to ensure that the fishes tail sharp tail spines don't make contact with the braid and part it.

Initially, the mono would have been one continuous length with a 12/0 to 14/0 hook at one end and a heavy duty swivel at the other, fished as a flowing trace using a tubi-boom, all of which is lowered down slowly to avoid tangles on the drop.

That has since changed in terms of both the positioning of the sliding lead and the application of the bait, as a further step towards the conservation of these fish.

I remember Ian using a five pound coalfish with its tail removed as bait. Dogfish and bunches of mackerel or squid have also caught their share. But all of that has now given way to a two staged trace comprising twelve to eighteen inches of two hundred pounds bs monofilament with the hook and a swivel at either end, and the remainder of the heavy mono attached to that swivel with another swivel at the far end to attach the reel line to.

This time however there is no sliding tubi-boom on the main line. Instead, a four inch length of garden hose with a lead attachment clip cable tied to it is placed on the longer rubbing length portion of the trace between the two swivels.

A split ring or some other form of stopper also needs to be fixed to the swivel on the short hook length to prevent the hose and the lead sliding all the way down to the bait.

Why this arrangement works so well is that having the lead so near to the bait helps keep it tight to the bottom. But more importantly, if a main line breakage should occur, when the fish moves off, it pulls the remaining trace mono and swivel through the wide diameter of the hose thereby jettisoning the lead, all of which is video demonstrated on both YouTube and the SSACN website.

The bait presentation has also switched from a single big offering to what is commonly called a 'kebab'. Mackerel are cut into two inch chunks which are threaded up over the hook and onto the trace until there is a necklace of them numbering around a dozen pieces.

It's at this point that the bait is put onto the hook, which can be two or three mackerel, or a cocktail even of mackerel with octopus or squid. All work well on their day. A heavy duty elastic band is then stretched around the constituents of the bait to keep it all contained.

But long before the bait goes on the hook, the barb will have been squashed down using a pair of pliers so it can be removed easily with a long reach T-bar disgorger if a fish takes deep or swallows it.

The only drawback here is that without the barb, bait can become dislodged from the hook. So a half inch square of rubber cut from an old car inter-tube is pushed onto the hook and up over the squashed barb 'bump' to ensure this can't happen, creating the perfect big stream-lined bait with its own rubby dubby source attached.

Obviously, the reel is set on ratchet, but not so light on the drag that line is yielded in the tide. Big skate areas tend to be quite tidal over a base of sand and mud, though invariably, most of the action comes as the tide eases away, allowing the fish more freedom to forage and feed.

Sometimes an interested fish will take line. On other occasions it can be no more than a series of bumps and tugs as it settles over the bait to eat it, after which it may not move much at all.

Timing the strike is something to be decided on a fish by fish basis, though not so much a strike in the conventional definition of the word as winding hard in to the fish, then pulling at it to have the hook penetrate its thick skin.

After that it's a case of hanging on while applying maximum pressure for as long as it takes until you break its suction with the seabed, which when you do, must be taken full advantage of by lifting and holding the fish clear if you can so it doesn't get back down, which I know is easier said than done.

Though still hard graft, and often with a few power dives along the way, the journey all those hundreds of feet up usually isn't too bad. It's when you get it to the boat, and worse still inside the boat that the real problems can start, unless you have prepared well.

This involves the use of two heavy duty stainless steel gaffs - one for the fleshy leading edge of each wing, inserted well clear of the body cavity with the fish top side facing upwards on the surface.

Struggling with a single gaff will do neither you or the fish any favours. A two gaff lift placing the skate gently on to the deck is the way to do it, at which point, despite the size, it will usually lie there motionless accepting of its situation.

At this point you can lift up the nose to expose the mouth for retrieving the hook. This is also the stage at which existing tags are read or new ones are put in and photographs or measurements can be taken. But don't take too long about it. They soon start to redden up where they should be white, indicating they've been out of the water for too long.

All of that done, as quickly as you can, work a piece of trawl netting or tarpaulin underneath the fish allowing you to lift it at the four corners up on to the side of the boat then slide it back into the water and away.

To the uninitiated, sticking gaffs into a fish can sound cruel and potentially damaging, but tagged recaptures and inspection of historical scars have shown that while it can't be much fun for them, neither is it harmful. So much so that some fish have been caught on multiple occasions, and every so often you get the same fish coming up more than once in the same day.

From the shore, obviously, it won't be anything like as straight forward, though I would hesitate to comment on just how that would happen as I have no experience here to draw on. But yes, big skate are occasionally taken from the shore.

The current record standing at 169 pounds comes from Loch Roag on the Isle of Lewis, with reports of three figure skate having been taken from the piers at both Lochaline and Achiltibuie, and anecdotally, there may even be some un-tried potential for them from a few of the deeper rock marks around Crinan.

There are also historical tales of huge skate having been taken from the long stone pier at Fenit over in Ireland, though from my experiences there, these could well have been white skate and not one of the two common skate variants, which if that were not the case, because of the location, would very likely be the blue skate _Dipturus flossada._

Speaking of Ireland, there are some excellent boat prospects over that side that are also worth taking note of. Hamish Currie based at Cushendall in Northern Ireland gets some very good fish on his patch, which, as it's not that far away from the western Scottish population, will very likely be flapper skate, though obviously I can't say for sure. Either way, they are very big fish.

Further to the south, particularly out from Courtmacsherry, they see a lot of good skate too. Graeme Pullen who is a friend of local charter skipper Mark Gannon has trailed his own boat over, and using GPS coordinates given to him by Mark, had fish to well over a hundred pounds, which again speculating, as this is the Celtic Sea, could well have been blue skate.

Either way, as before, they were very big fish. Similarly Clew Bay over on the Atlantic coast is another well known skate area, with lady charter skipper Mary Gavin-Hughes finding her clients quite a few decent specimens up into treble figures.

Due to its location, I would not like to hazard a guess between blue or flapper skate for that one. But again, as ever, more very good fish.

Associated audio interview numbers: 16, 121 and 153.

### BOTTLE NOSED RAY Rostroraja alba

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

The bottle nosed ray or white skate as it is also known, is listed here so far as I am aware on account of a single British fish taken off The Needles in 1970, plus an undisclosed number of specimens, though presumably not too many from the west coast of Ireland, the biggest of which at one hundred and sixty five pounds was caught in Clew Bay in 1966. So potentially a very big fish, and by all accounts, these days at least, a very rare fish too.

What sets it apart from the other so called ray species is the fact that the nipple like extension it has on the end of its snout is noticeably longer and bottle shaped, protruding from an obviously rounded head profile, hence the name, unlike the other large skate species where the line from the wing tip seems to stretch straight to the end of the snout in one continuous run, with only the slightest hint of a bulge at the head.

Thankfully, there are easier ways of separating white skate from the other large growing species such as the common skates and long nose skate, and to access the main one, you only need to turn the fish over.

As the name suggests, the white skate has a pure un-marked white underside with darker margins, whereas the underside of the other large skates is grey and covered in small black dots which are actually black ringed pores that are often tightly packed.

Colouration on the dorsal surface ranges from a mottled greyish blue in the larger fish, to reddish brown with numerous white spots in younger specimens. Supposedly a deep water species, but in my experience, that isn't necessarily always the case.

Back in the early 1980's, Brian Douglas and I were invited to trail my fifteen foot dinghy across to Ireland's County Kerry. To Fenit in fact, to spend a week exploring the small boat fishing potential in and around Tralee Bay, after which we would report back to the Bord Failte as well as publicise the trip in the UK angling press.

The arrangement was that we would follow a local charter boat about the area learning the ropes for a couple of days, at which point, the late great Kevin Linnane would join us with a view to making a promotional video for use on Irish Tourist Board road shows and the like, all of which was a great idea on paper, but in reality, didn't quite go according to plan, though with far better results than any of us could have possibly anticipated.

We did initially follow the charter skipper around, both for safety reasons and to get a feel for the area. But he wanted to head out towards the mouth of the bay, where besides catching nothing much other than dogfish, also meant we had some quite sizeable Atlantic swells to contend with, which when you're sat so low down in a small boat, look as though they're coming in at head height. So not the most comfortable feeling. But we stuck with it anyway on day one.

By mid-morning on day two however after 'enjoying' more of the same, enough was enough, and we decided to motor back inshore and do some exploring in the quieter areas just to the seaward side of Fenit Pier.

The water there was quite shallow. Probably no more than twenty feet or so. But that didn't deter us as we'd heard there were monkfish to be caught close in, though by that stage we didn't realise just how close in, and had yet to discover the famous 'monk hole'.

Pretty much immediately thank goodness, we started catching stuff other than LSD's, which of itself was reason enough to stick with it and continue to go our own way. As I recall we had tope, huss and thornback rays.

All the other ray species came later, both closer in to the big concrete pier and in the 'monk hole'. And we also hooked two or three fish which initially took a short burst of line from the reel, but would then lock up solid on the bottom when they felt the hook.

I remember one particular fish that I'd hooked suddenly taking off at right angles to the boat and actually pulling the stern around with it which had previously been held in the tide on the anchor rope. Then, as with other similar hook ups, everything went solid again.

Nobody had mentioned to us anything about big skate, besides which, it was so shallow that when the boat was moved directly over the culprit, we could see the lead well off the bottom above it. So skate never once entered into our thinking

The gear we were fishing was at best thirty pounds class, and in some cases less, though the traces were quite substantial. We figured they might be big monkfish that had taken the line under a snag, so we piled on the pressure looking to break free, which is precisely what happened.

Three hang ups and break outs in succession; how unlucky can you get we thought. But as we were soon to find out, luck (good or bad) had nothing to do with it. Patience and having an inkling as to what might be on the end of the line was what we needed, and we got that when Kevin turned up the following day.

We told him about what had happened, but at that stage he didn't comment much. Only when it happened again in his presence did he say right, be patient, keep the pressure on, you're into a big skate. Actually it was Brian who was hooked up that time around, fortunately on the heaviest outfit we could cobble together between us.

Encouraged by Kevin, he hung on and hung on with the CFB video camera recording the whole thing. Then suddenly the mighty fishes bottom suction was broken, and almost immediately we could see a huge grey shape free swimming on the end of the line.

In what seemed like little more than moments later it was up on the top and in went the gaff into the fleshy part of its wing, which as we had yet to discover was the easy bit. I then had to get it into the fifteen boat, which with three of us, plus the weight of the fish itself all on the same side was a combination of dodgy and difficult.

Since those early days, I've racked up a lot of experience of dealing with huge skate in small boats. On that trip, fish of that size and shape had never been in our thinking, and with hind sight, we both could and should have done things differently.

Back then unfortunately we didn't know any better. For starters, though I somehow managed, one gaff isn't really enough. You need one in the leading edge of each wing clear of the body cavity with two people doing the lifting.

More difficult still was getting the thing back out and away afterwards. Nowadays we work either a piece of trawl netting or tarpaulin under skate and lift at the corners. Here everything had to be done by hand. But not before Kevin had identified it as a white skate and we'd measured its length and width with pieces of monofilament line.

Back at Godley's bar that evening, Kevin ran the dimensions through a measurement to weight conversion table, where it came out at around one hundred and forty pounds.

The following day we had to go back out towing a tiny rowing boat for Kevin to sit in a few yards away, hang several pounds of lead on the line, then simulate the boat to boat footage he needed to complete the film, after which he headed back to Dublin leaving us with the rough location of the 'monk hole' to search for.

For reasons which will become apparent in the account on catching monkfish, plus our lack of suitable heavy tackle, we didn't fish for the big skate again that trip, though we did give it a go the following year, with Brian again taking a fish that was obviously well over a hundred pounds.

Following that magazine article, Dave Lewis contacted me for information, resulting in a similar encounter aboard his boat which I encouraged him to write about, and so began the glittering journalistic career we all know and love today.

In addition, while browsing on FaceBook just before putting the final draft to bed, I came across a photograph on Irish charter boat skipper Mary Gavin-Hughes page of a 175 pound skate off Westport, which despite being labelled as a common skate, because it was posed underside up showing its white colouration, plus it's elongated snout, was so very obviously a white skate, and one which was bigger than the then Irish record.

I notified both Jonathan and Mary who both agreed and representations were made to the Irish fish recorders. But in all honesty, it was pretty much a lost cause right from the onset. With no body to inspect for verification (yes, even in this supposedly enlightened day and age), coupled to the fact that the fish had been given a weigh at sea then returned, they simply didn't want to know.

So what happened to the so called Irish enlightenment on matters of trail blazing and conservation. A lesson here for the rest of us on a number of fronts.

Associated audio interview numbers: 44.

**NOTE:** I recently found a VHS copy of Kevin Linnanes film which I had converted to digital and have uploaded to YouTube.

### THORNBACK RAY Raja clavata

**Bucket List status – result**

Theoretically, a straight forward fish to pin an accurate name to. In practice unfortunately, this statement can at times be some way short of the truth, the reason being the highly variable patterning, colouration, and markings the species can adopt, plus it's ability, be that deliberately or coincidentally, to mimic the patterning of some of the other ray species.

One consolation is that it cannot alter its basic body shape of having pointed wings which automatically eliminates confusion with the cuckoo, undulate and sandy ray. Equally, it can't avoid having the thorns, mainly on the top side, but to an extent also underneath, from which it's name is derived.

Numerically these thorns can vary from just a scattered few to a dense threatening carpet growing out from swollen calcified bases which are situated just underneath the skin. Geographical location can have a lot to do with numbers, distribution, and size of the larger thorns. The body will also be covered with smaller prickles giving the fish a rough feel all over.

Colouration is typically grey to light brown with variable mottled or marbled patterning including off white blotches and darker spots. More often than not, the tail will be banded dark and light from its base down to the two dorsal fins towards its tip.

I caught my first ever thornback way back in the early 1970's on a trip out from Rhyl. They were particularly abundant in that neck of the woods at the time, and although I caught several others that day, my first, which probably weighed no more than a couple of pounds, sticks in my memory because I was just so pleased with myself for how the trip had gone.

In the car with us on the way down was a bucket full of pigs lungs, which by that stage had really ripened in the heat of the day. Someone it seems had written that thornbacks could be taken using pig offal, so one of the lads I was travelling with had brought some along to try.

Needless to say, it didn't work. Even the seagulls wouldn't touch it when he finally threw it over-board having conceded defeat. At least it wouldn't be travelling back with us thank goodness.

You could catch thornbacks pretty much anywhere over clean to mixed ground back then, and like bull huss and spurdogs, they would often be the amongst biggest fish most anglers would ever catch. We would see loads of the things in Loch Ryan and Luce Bay. Allonby over on the Cumbrian side of the Solway was another venue with a good reputation.

Travelling south, Morecambe Bay was not only the next hot spot, but one of the finest thornback ray fisheries in the country throughout the 1970's and 80's. There they would congregate in huge numbers over the roughs towards the outer edge of the bay all the way from Lune Buoy through to Lightening Knoll.

The big draw-back with Morecambe Bay is the ferocity of the tide. You could only really fish there at the lower end of the tidal cycle and the slack waters, and it was on this species that Fleetwood built much of its charter angling reputation after ex-commercial fisherman turned full-time charter skipper Frank Bee switched his vast knowledge of the area to putting anglers over fish.

One particular stand-out day for me was the ports annual lifeboat match, the year of which I can't remember, but as all the dozen or more charter boats Fleetwood once had were involved, it probably dates it to around the early 1980's.

I was fishing aboard 'Happy Hooker' skippered by long-time fishing friend Keith Philbin, and we started the day very slowly just to the north of Lune. So slowly in fact that by lunch time we were in contention for nothing, so we moved a little further on up into the bay.

What an inspired re-positioning that turned out to be. As fast as the baits went down they were taken by rays. But being a competition, we could only stick with it until such time as we had to make our way back for the weigh in, and in that short time we boated ninety seven, which to this day stands as the port record.

Had we moved there earlier, or not had to leave prematurely, who knows what the final figure might have been. Ironically, two other boats also beat the old record of forty five fish that day, and to our shame, all fish over a pre-determined minimum size were brought ashore to be weighed.

Preston on the River Ribble was another very productive Lancashire charter boat venue in its day producing lots of rays, in the main by heading south off Ainsdale and Formby to fish along the northern edge of the buoyed outer Mersey Channel.

In those days we put the dinghy in from Pontins at Ainsdale and would catch loads of the things from the same area between the FT buoy and Jordan Spit. South of that, as I've already mentioned, Rhyl was the next hot spot, as indeed were most charter venues right throughout Wales, from Llandudno around into the Bristol Channel.

The stand-outs, for me certainly, were Aberystwyth and Aberdovey which share much of the same ground. The boats there could catch them like there was no tomorrow.

Once you rounded St. Davids Head, other ray species started to become as prevalent, particularly small eyed rays. The same was true along the north coast of Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset, rounding Lands End eastwards to the Isle of Wight.

Thornbacks were still also regularly caught throughout that area. But it wasn't until you passed through the Dover Strait that they reclaimed their species dominance, with the Thames Estuary seemingly being alive with the things. Bradwell in particular springs to mind, fishing with John Rawle in the early days of uptide fishing. Further up into the North Sea, far less were caught.

Whether that was due to the type of ground or the style of fishing, I'm not sure, though as you get beyond The Wash, cod and lure fishing tend to dominate much more of the thinking.

That said, I have on occasion been out from Hartlepool aboard commercial fly shooters within a few miles of the shore, and while you couldn't describe the deck as being awash with thornback rays, they still put in a reasonably good showing, so obviously there were quite a few about there too.

Shore anglers were also getting their share at selected venues. The rock marks looking out onto clean ground along the Solway always gave up a few. But it wasn't until you got down to Anglesey that they stated to feature well again, by-passing the long stretch of English coastline between the Scottish and Welsh borders in the process.

The stand-out beach hot spot for me was the Dinas Dinlle just to the south of Caernarfon. But rock marks looking out onto clean ground all around the UK had the capacity to throw up a few. And let's not forget Ireland. I was on an Irish Tourist Board sea safari to Clifden one year when we split into two groups to fish the boats and the shore.

Being a boat angler, I went offshore. Later, as we came back in passing the 'White Lady' at the narrow inlet, the other half of the party were all there on the rocks holding up a couple of thornbacks apiece having had a brilliant day. Again, sadly, most of the fish were killed as was the norm.

Then suddenly, right throughout home waters, the species slumped into almost terminal decline. I'm sure the 'seek and destroy' mentality we all had back then can't have helped. But that wasn't the real under lying reason. Commercial over-cropping in tangle nets and by spurdog long-liners took this species, and doubtless other ray species too, very sharply down the slippery slope towards virtual oblivion.

Of course, they couldn't ever get them all, and a time eventually did come when the cost of perusing those few that remained was out-weighted by whatever commercial value they might have had.

The problem is that for cartilaginous species with their painfully slow potential recovery rates, that empty vacuum, as history has shown us only too well, would take many years to backfill and show even the most modest signs of recovery, which over the past several years, for thornback rays at least, thankfully has now started to happen.

The Thames Estuary is once again full of the things. Unfortunately, elsewhere it's a mixed story of winners and losers, which hasn't necessarily always turned out quite as expected.

In 2011 for example, I met up and recorded an audio interview with long time Aberystwyth charter skipper Dave Taylor in which he speaks of not seeing even a single ray there since who knows when.

Similarly, Morecambe Bay has never recovered. You get the odd one or two along The Fylde now which we never used to see before. But from Fleetwood just around the corner, rays hardly enter the reckoning these days, and again at Rhyl they've had nothing to speak of for years, though a few are now starting to show up again close in to the shore.

On the other side of the coin, the River Mersey from mid summer through to November is absolutely full of the things, and over the last two years, they have suddenly turned up from well up inside the channel at Morecambe right down to Heysham, where in calm conditions, and with not too much tide, we can regularly now catch them from the shore.

Doubtless there are going to be other examples I don't know about. But it's the trend rather than the actual distribution that I'm looking to highlight here.

Thornback numbers are on the increase with anglers seeing ever more of them, but for some reason, not always where they expected to find them from past experience, which is puzzling. Presumably the terrain won't have changed much over those absent years. So if it attracted them back then, why not now.

I'm speculating here, but could it be the increase and imbalance between the rays and species such as dogfish possibly competing in part at least for the same food. Previously, competing species may well have been kept in check by a larger head of already established rays, whereas now the imbalance has become too great to challenge.

Only targeted research can ever hope to answer that question. Simple dart tags are going into thornback rays in Scottish waters and here in the north west. What scientists might be able to do with the data these can potentially generate is another matter.

Ever since that first fish of mine at Rhyl, I've always had a soft spot for thornback rays. Not necessarily to the point of regularly targeting them, though I do as the tide slackens when I'm cod fishing in October and November on the Mersey by putting out a whole calamari squid.

As such, when one pops up anywhere, it's always welcome. And while they don't exactly put up a proper fight in the true angling dictionary definition of the word, they can be quite a handful due to their surface area in the tide, particularly if one takes your bait when the water is still running hard in the Mersey.

Ask Welsh international angler Mike Morgan who I filmed having hooked one at peak flow during a cod championship anchored up just off Birkenhead town hall. A fish that took him a good forty minutes to bring to the net, after which he had to sit down for a spell to recover.

Tactically speaking, what is true here of thornback rays goes for all the other ray species too, the only slight deviation being trace length, breaking strain, and hook sizes which need to be matched to the size, strength, and location of the particular species being targeted.

Otherwise, it's a simple heavy monofilament flowing trace from the boats, and for my money, a similar gauge monofilament pulley rig from the shore, particularly if there are potential snags for the lead to go to ground in on the retrieve.

For thornback and other rays up into low double figures, four feet of sixty pounds bs monofilament and a 4/0 hook should do fine. In the Mersey however, we tend to fish traces much shorter than that rigged as a self hooking bolt rig, not so much for the rays, but for the cod in the fearsome run, and these too work well.

Having a shorter length in a fast tide helps keep the bait closer to the bottom instead of it bobbling and being lifted out of the feeding zone due to a combination of tide and resistance to it.

Typically, when they find a bait, skates and rays will settle over and smother it, then start to position themselves so that they can get it into their mouth.

I once took a bucket full of live mackerel to the Portrush aquarium, where, because mackerel are not the hardiest of fish, some did better than others in survival terms.

One mackerel in particular in its death throes, dropped down between two rocks where it was difficult for the rays to reach it. Undeterred, a thornback quickly settled over it, which because it couldn't get hold by protruding its lips, started flapping its wings hard on the spot creating an upward current, which eventually, after several attempts, lifted the mackerel sufficiently to be grabbed and dragged off to a flatter spot where it could eaten it in the normal way.

An amazing thing to watch. Anyway, I digress. So the fish settles down over the bait which might register as a few pulls at the rod tip. Leave it. Give it time to mouth the bait properly, or run the risk of foul hooking it instead.

When it's ready, it may swim off, or it might just lay there for a while, so timing the strike can sometimes be difficult to gauge, leading occasionally to deep hooked fish. This is where flattened down hook barbs and a long T-bar disgorger come in to their own.

I'm a big fan of the gemini T-bar disgorger. This has a fully looped end rather like an oval split ring to get it over the trace mono which is then positioned through the centre of the stainless steel loop so it can't come off.

By lifting the fish with the disgorger and pushing the trace downwards with the other hand, the loop can be slid right down over the hook to invert it, allowing the weight of the fish, with a quick jolt from the angler, to dislodge it ready for it to go back, which beats putting fingers too close to those powerful crushing jaws, plus you don't have to hold the fish either further risking blood loss through scrapes or cuts.

When you do come to hold a ray, either for a photograph or to put it back, there is a soft indentation close to the edge of the body just up from the eye on the top, and to the side of the mouth underneath for the fingers and thumb.

This is the only safe holding point on a ray. Then as I say, carefully place it back into the water and watch it swim off. They don't make good eating, besides which, they are too scarce a commodity these days to catch just the once.

One other point worth making on the subject of rays, and this crosses nicely over into the other species too, is boosting the scent attraction of your bait.

I'm not so much thinking of marinating it in say pilchard oil or similar, though that will do it no harm at all. More a case of using the natural scent of the baits themselves, and not necessarily only your own.

Have you ever noticed on a charter boat used for drop down fishing, how the stern of the boat is not only the most sought after spot, but often produces the most fish too.

In part, this is because you can trot your baits down tide out of tangling reach of everyone else if you so wish. But there's actually more to it than that. Much much more.

A combined scent trail from all the baits is going to wash down tide drawing in interested fish. And which baits are fish tracking back up that lane to source most likely to come across first.

This obviously doesn't work when uptiding. You can however use a small homemade swim-feeder on the lead, or even a purpose built grip lead swim feeder which are now available. Filled with something suitable, this can add a little extra scent to that being put out by your hook bait.

Associated audio interview numbers: 40.

### SMALL EYED RAY Raja microocellata

**Bucket List status – result**

In Ireland this fish is also known as the painted ray, which can be a little confusing. Otherwise, a fish fairly readily identified by its very specific markings. The base colour is greyish to sandy brown over-laid by a series of off-white spots and lines spread over the entire upper surface, with the lines tending to follow the outline of the outer body profile.

As a further aid to getting the identification right, it should have little in the way of sharp thorns, with any that are present being small and lying almost flat along the ridge of the spine.

What smaller prickles there are present should be confined mainly to the front area of the body, leaving the back half with a much smoother feel, and as the name suggests, the eye is small.

The word _microocellata_ as part of the scientific name here actually refers to the small size of the eye. Thornback mimics apart, the only other ray with markings even remotely to be confused with the small eyed ray is the undulate ray, which unlike the small eyed ray with its pointed wings has rounded wing tips.

Undulate markings, while these also consist of lines and spots, are presented as a series of obviously darker wavy bands edged by small creamy white spots, with many larger spots of the same pale colour also woven into the pattern laid over a much darker brown base colour.

Small eyed rays are fun fish to catch, and are rated at the higher end of the scale when it comes to awarding points for fighting abilities. Another big plus is that they are also particularly shore angler friendly, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, as they often tend to be nocturnal in their feeding when they come within casting range.

The downside unfortunately is their rather limited distribution within which they tend to form isolated, though at times quite abundant pockets over areas of sea bed which specifically suits their needs.

The furthest northerly reports I have come across centre around Anglesey in North Wales. More specifically, the Holyhead area, and in particular, the south west facing side of the island where they are taken from various rock marks as well as from small boats launched at Trearddur Bay through to Rhosneigr on the main island itself.

Then seemingly nothing right down to and around the Lleyn Peninsula on through Cardigan Bay and beyond, until you round St. Davids Head and the start of the run along into the Bristol Channel.

With fast tides, a profusion of banks, and suitable adjacent beaches, South Wales, Somerset, North Devon, and to a lesser extent North Cornwall, make for prime small eyed ray territory. Then as you round Lands End, numbers again become sparse until you cross the border into Devon and progress along the channel towards the Dover Strait.

Around the corner through Kent on up into North Sea, once again they are sparse to absent. South and West Ireland and the Channel Islands also see their share.

While out boat fishing, I've picked them up in dribs and drabs pretty much throughout the entire distribution area described. But being predominantly a small boat angler tending to stick to my local Lancashire patch, I certainly haven't caught nearly as many as I would have liked.

Charter boat fishing the offshore banks out from Dartmouth and Salcombe immediately spring to mind, as does a week Graeme Pullen and I spent boat and rock fishing from Lundy Island. There are however two particular instances where long distance dinghy trailing memorably saw us knee deep in the things.

The first was a run down to the Gower Peninsula back in the 1980's, which after an early morning kick off saw us first call in at Swansea marina to meet up with charter skipper Paul Radford, who then dug out his charts and advised on where we should be headed, accompanied by a set of navigator coordinates for the very top of the Helwick Bank.

We then had to drive over to Oxwich Bay, put the boat in, and motor west along the coast to the bank using Paul's coordinates as a starting point to work out from.

That probably took us to around lunch time, and as we still needed to get back to Swansea in time to find ourselves some digs, it didn't leave us with a lot of time to fish on day one. But it was enough.

Conditions on both days were ideal. Not too much tide and no more than a gentle swell pushing up over the slope and top under a clear blue summer sky.

First drop with the anchor was smack on top of the bank at a point where we could trot our baits over the down tide slope in case fish were tucking in there out of the run.

Not being on the helm, I was able to tackle my rod up on the run out, and as such was ready to drop a bait down the instant the boat tightened up on the rope. Pete Sharples on the other hand whose boat it was, had to set up in situ.

By the time he had a bait in the water, I'd picked up a brace of turbot and a small eye ray, which was to set the pattern for the rest of the afternoon. No need to move looking for fish as they were stacked up directly under the hull.

In approximately four hours of very exhausting fishing, we boated twenty six turbot and sixty four small eyed rays on a mix of mackerel, sandeel and squid baits fished on four foot heavy monofilament flowing traces, with all the rays and eventually quite a few of the turbot going back, with day two a virtual repeat of day one.

The second trip is one I've touched on elsewhere whilst dealing with the monkfish. This was a week in which Brian Douglas and I trailed my boat over to Fenit in Tralee Bay and found our way into the once famous 'monk hole'.

Thinking back, this recollection could well be a composite of two or maybe even three separate visits in different years during the early to mid 1980's, but no matter.

Back then the 'monk hole' was a fabulous place. Obviously for big monkfish, plus quite a few stingrays. But far and away the most abundant fish in there at that time was the small eyed ray. A marvellous experience to have had.

Alas, in common with the Helwick Bank and a good many other once prolific hot spots, that is no longer the case. For as with all the ray species, small eyed numbers took a very sharp down turn, which for a fish of patchy distributions and specific terrain requirements, can be a particularly deep hole to have to climb back out of. But not impossible, as once more increasing numbers of all ray species are now starting to demonstrate.

There's still a long way to go yet, particularly to re-stock some of the offshore banks where they must have quite literally carpeted the sea bed. There are also promising signs of them showing up once again along some of the beaches and rock marks that used to regularly produce them.

Small eyed rays are caught mainly over shallow offshore sand, shell grit, or light gravel banks with moderately deep water nearby creating quite a rush of tide up the bank slope and over the top.

Shallow surf beaches, plus sandy patches within casting range of rocky headlands, again with plenty of tidal disturbance, are also attractive to these fish, particularly if, as with the offshore banks, they attract good numbers of sandeels which are a key staple in the diet of the small eyed ray.

Obviously then, sandeel, either fresh or frozen, is going to be a preferred bait, though long thin strips of mackerel belly or cuts from the thinned down flanks can fish equally well. As I mentioned earlier, we also caught quite a few on whole calamari squid, along with some of the turbot.

The same baits should work equally well from the shore. Again, fish a flowing trace if casting isn't a problem, or a couple of heavy duty long droppers if that's what you prefer.

Personally, I would stick to a pulley rig tied from fifty pounds bs monofilament with a 4/0 hook, the idea being for it to help lift the lead clear of snags, particularly when fishing rock marks.

Associated audio interview numbers: 81 and 145.

### BLONDE RAY Raja brachyura

**Bucket List status – result**

One of the largest growing and thankfully easier home waters ray species to identify, confirmed by a combination of both visual patterning and feel to the hand. Potentially a very large fish too with regularly confirmed weights approaching forty pounds, which is way bigger than the only other ray species likely to cause any identification confusion, the spotted ray.

Both species sit within the pointed wing tip camp, so no help there. However, if the specimen in question is covered in spots and is bigger than ten pounds, then it's a pretty safe you have a blonde ray.

To confirm this, the dark spots of a blonde are reasonably uniform in size, spread over a pale sandy coloured back ground, and will cover the entire upper surface right to the edges of the wings.

There can be a few small lighter blotches here and there which may be edged with dark spots, but not many. The fish will also feel rough and prickly to the touch over its entire upper surface.

In complete contrast, a spotted ray will have dark spots which tend to vary in size scattered over a more golden brown background, all of which fail to reach the wing edges, leaving a narrow unmarked margin.

Some of these may even group together to form a small tight clump known as an ocellus or eye spot in the middle of each wing, though this is not guaranteed to happen. Spotted rays lack rough prickles over the back half of their upper body leaving it smooth to the touch.

For the most part, if you want to catch blonde rays, then you really need to be deliberately fishing for them. As with most species, there will always be incidents of chance encounters. But more often than not, the specific requirements of this fish tend to keep its presence under wraps, unless you specifically set out to do something about catching it.

This means fishing offshore banks of sand, shell grit, or gravel, where fierce tides sculpt scours, gullies, and holes, into which fish can drop down and tuck in to get out of the run until it starts to ease.

That is typical blonde ray country. But you won't or shouldn't be looking to take them on the drift. The boat needs to anchored in a position that allows the baits to drop into the type of refuge already outlined, or onto a down tide slope just as the flow starts to die away, which is probably best achieved at the smaller end of the fortnightly tidal range.

This conceivably could be anywhere in the country. In reality however, where holding conditions are right, the English Channel and the west coast seem to be most regularly blessed, as are parts of Ireland, both north and south.

This is not a species that is common in the areas I tend mainly to fish, and as such, not one that I have put a lot of effort into trying to catch.

Normally, when I fish the kind of marks where blonde rays undoubtedly hang out, it will be on the drift trailing a live sandeel on a very long trace across the banks for bass, turbot, and brill, where I have picked up the odd one doing that, most notably a specimen just off the northern tide race at Lundy Island. But that isn't the norm.

A static sandeel or mackerel bait on the usual four to six feet of at least sixty pounds bs monofilament hard on the bottom is what is required, and fished from a more powerful outfit than might normally be used for catching other rays, because these fish, besides potentially growing to a good size, also fight particularly well.

In addition to this, you may well have a lot of tide and therefore quite a bit of lead to contend with too. A combination I remember only too well on a trip with Hamish Currie to fish the banks out from Cushendall in Northern Ireland a few years ago.

Noted for its big blonde rays, I decided to try out a rod I had been asked to put through its paces for a magazine review. I won't say what make it was. What I will say though is that having fought a very good blonde ray to the point where we could see it in the water coming up, the combined pressures mentioned earlier were just too much for the rods tip which broke, parting the line in the process. Needless to say, I didn't bother with the write up.

A lot of good blonde rays are caught out of venues such as Weymouth, Salcombe, Dartmouth and the like. A friend of mine, Wayne Comben, targets them regularly out from Langstone to the east of the Isle of Wight, where he can, if he puts his mind to it, catch five different species of ray all in the same day, including his favourite blondes, though not all from the same spot.

The Channel Islands are another very good area. I've seen quite a few brought in to Guernsey by the local commercial boats, and have been out rod and line fishing from Jersey over the Corbiere Bank where we had a few.

Banks formed in some of the narrower outlets from Cork Harbour in south east Ireland are yet another renowned area, as are some of the Bristol Channel banks, particularly along the South Wales side. Brian Swinbank has even taken them around Caliach Point operating out of Tobermory on the Isle of Mull.

So potentially quite a widespread species which should not prove too difficult to locate from a boat, though less so from the shore, the main ingredient being to pick the right boat, book a suitable set of tides in terms of size and seasonal timing which the skipper should be able to advise on, then get some baits down there with the boat lying at anchor.

As for shore fishing, I know an odd one has been taken from rock marks around the Holyhead area of Anglesey, including Rhoscolyn which I know well. But the safest bet would again have to be the Channel Islands, both from the rocks and from St. Catherines Breakwater on Jersey, fishing a heavy monofilament pulley rig.

Associated audio interview numbers: 81.

### SPOTTED RAY Raja montagui

**Bucket List status – result**

Also known in Ireland as the homelyn ray, the spotted ray has a potential range taking in the whole of the British Isles, though it is less abundant along North Sea coasts. A fish similar in general appearance to the blonde ray, which is also covered in dark spots, but without the blonde ray's very much bigger growth range. So anything with spots weighing in at ten pounds or more is very unlikely to be a spotted ray, even a record spotted ray.

To confirm the identity as being that of a spotted ray it will have dark spots which tend to vary in size scattered over a golden brown background, all of which will fail to reach the edges of the wings, leaving a narrow unmarked margin.

Some spots may well group together to form a small tight clump known as an ocellus or eye spot in the middle of each wing, though this isn't always going to be the case.

Spotted Rays also lack rough prickles over the back half of their upper body, leaving it smooth to the touch. Blonde rays on the other hand are prickly all over, have fairly uniform sized dark spots over their entire upper body right through to their wing edges, and are generally a paler sandy brown.

One of the smallest, and supposedly in the past, most abundant inshore rays after the thornback. Certainly so when I first started fishing Luce Bay and Loch Ryan in south west Scotland where we would see them on a reasonably regular basis.

Ireland, the Solent, and many venues to the east of the Isle of Wight also regularly produced them, as did some of the rock marks along the South coast of Devon and Cornwall.

I even recall seeing a few around Anglesey in North Wales, occasionally in South Wales, and while out bottom fishing around the Scilly Isles. Then, suddenly, it all went sour. Not only for the spotted ray, but for inshore rays generally, as their numbers plummeted everywhere.

Some say it was due to an increase in anchored tangle nets. Others put it down to rays being taken as bye-catch by the spurdog longliners. Very likely it was a combination of both those activities and more, coupled to their slow reproductive replacement rate, a set of 'problems' all cartilaginous species unfortunately share.

Ray numbers generally right throughout home waters plummeted into decline, and while they are now showing some signs of making a measured comeback, that isn't everywhere. Nor is it always back to the locations they previously liked to frequent.

Spotted rays however are to some extent sticking to the old game plan. So if an area had them before, chances are it could well see them again, albeit in perhaps smaller numbers than was previously the case.

Two areas which immediately spring to mind are the Hampshire and Sussex coast to the east of the Isle of Wight, and the area I am more familiar with, which is south west Scotland where some of the inshore marks previously known for their populations of rays lay barren in that regard for many years.

Around 2005, a few started trickling back, and by 2008 I am reliably informed that under the right conditions, you could more or less pick up a few spotted rays almost to order around Ardwell in Luce Bay, with others scattered throughout the bay around to Whithorn and possibly beyond, which is great news.

Wayne Comben tells me a similar story for his stamping ground out of Langstone. I personally haven't fished for rays in that area so I can't comment from my own experience, though we used to pick up a few on ragworm baits in the Solent in years gone by.

We also had a few in other parts of Luce Bay way back while fishing for rays generally, which used to be prolific out from Drummore. But I suppose my most cherished memory of the species is one of fishing mackerel strip on a typical fifty pounds bs monofilament flowing trace in Loch Ryan, where I caught my then Scottish, British and European record in 1973.

The Scottish shore record for the species also comes from the loch down at Cairnryan.

Associated audio interview numbers: 81.

### UNDULATE RAY Raja undulata

**Bucket List status – result**

A strikingly beautiful fish which even in the least well marked specimens will immediately grab your attention. The kind of fish which if you don't know what it is, then you will almost certainly want to find out.

Only one other home waters ray species in any way even slightly resembles it, and then only superficially, that being the small eyed ray which is a species with pointed wing tips, whereas those of the undulate are rounded. But of far greater importance are its markings and colouration.

A small eyed ray will be some shade of pale sandy grey with white spots and white lines which tend to run parallel to the edges of the wings. Undulates on the other hand are usually a darker shade of brown, though with the patterning they have laid over it, base colour is a secondary consideration.

This comprises a series of obviously darker wavy bands edged by small creamy white spots, with other larger spots of the same colour also woven into the pattern. The underside is white with a darker edging.

When I first saw a picture of an undulate ray I fell in love with its incredible colouration and markings to the point that I just had to catch one. At that time, the Channel Islands and the south west of Ireland, in particular Tralee Bay, were the two stand-out venues producing them. Elsewhere they were rare in the extreme, and remained so until they were given protection back in 2009, after which their recovery has been little short of miraculous.

I've no doubt they were also being caught along the mid-section of the English Channel, and occasionally in Cornish waters too. But the angling press kept pushing Tralee and the Channel Islands into my face. Particularly Fenit. So when Brian Douglas and myself got the invite to trail my fifteen foot Seahog across to explore Tralee Bay for Bord Failte, the undulate ray was placed very firmly at the top of the must catch species list so far as I was concerned.

We were given other objectives too, including monkfish, plus more general exploration. We also fished from the huge concrete commercial jetty after dark where we saw both undulates and small eyed rays caught from the seaward side.

That being the case, time was set aside one day to take the boat in close to the jetty, and give it a few hours fishing monofilament flowing traces baited with quite small mackerel strips.

By this stage, even at Fenit, undulate ray catches had declined numerically, so it was very much a race against time to grab that particular tick before it was too late. Thankfully, at the first attempt, both of us succeeded.

Granted, they were only small fish, probably similar in size to the ones the shore lads had hauled up the night before. But try as we may, both there and elsewhere throughout Tralee Bay with suitable baits properly presented on the bottom, despite catching shed loads of other ray species, we never saw another undulate.

Then, as with so many ray species throughout the 1990's on into the new century, this species too went into sharp decline. Whether it was a more severe decline than the others, taking account of its smaller and more localised population numbers, is impossible to say. But certainly a decline severe enough to see it placed on the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) red list of threatened species.

As a result, Tralee Bay is now voluntarily closed to commercial fishing, though not recreational fishing, in the hope that the small discrete populations of both undulate rays and monkfish might one day fully re-establish themselves.

In that regard, European law now states that both of these species must be returned to the water immediately at their point of capture, so in effect, it is now impossible to break either rod caught boat record, because they can no longer be officially weighed as stipulated on solid ground.

From what I see in the angling press, and from conversations with dinghy ray specialist Wayne Comben who fishes out of Langstone harbour, ray species generally, and undulates in particular are making a very strong come back from around Weymouth west along the Dorset, Hampshire and Sussex Coast.

You quite regularly see pictures of good sized specimens in the magazines, and I know from Wayne that he can catch them pretty much to order inshore when conditions are right. One of five species he has caught on the same day in fact on a number of occasions in recent times.

As for the shore prospects, the Channel Island rock marks and stone piers have always been favourite, with St. Catherines Breakwater on Jersey having a lot of history with this species. But without doubt, Dorset and Hampshire have stepped in to well and truly grab that mantle, particularly after dark from the beaches later summer well on in to the autumn and at times beyond.

Associated audio interview numbers: 81.

### CUCKOO RAY Leucoraja naevus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A small deep water ray with colouration and markings so obvious that mis-identification should be virtually impossible. I say virtually as opposed to absolutely, because I have seen thornback rays, which are potentially capable of mimicking other species, do a very good impression of a cuckoo ray.

Not perfect, but enough to throw doubt into the thinking of someone not too well up in fish identification. That is until you look at the wing tip profiles, which in the case of the cuckoo ray are particularly well rounded, unlike those of the thornback which come to a point.

Top side colouration should be some shade of pale brown with a prominent black and yellow patch known as an ocellus placed in the centre of each wing. There are no other markings. The upper surface is also covered in small prickles.

For anglers, this is not a fish you can deliberately hope to target. If one comes along then it's a bonus. If not, don't invest any time in the species. But you can increase your chances by having suitably sized small mackerel or squid baits fished on a 2/0 to 4/0 hook hard on the bottom with a short flowing trace when over clean ground in deep water.

The boat marks around the Isle of Arran are known to produce an odd one. I also once saw one brought ashore on rod and line at Aberystwyth, and have heard of an odd one or two from the boats around Anglesey and Caernarfon Bay.

An occasional specimen might even turn up from a deep water shore mark such as one of the rock platforms along the north Cornish coast and the inner Clyde. But that's pretty much it.

### SANDY RAY Leucoraja circularis

**Bucket List status – result**

Quite a small ray species, which because of its liking for deep water, rarely comes within reach of anglers baits, though I don't doubt - in fact I know that they are occasionally caught, particularly at more northerly latitudes, where they are probably not recognised for what they are. One of those species in which the wing tips are rounded instead of being pointed.

Colouration on the upper side will be some shade of light brown, possibly with a reddish tinge. But what ultimately gives it away are between four and six conspicuous creamy white marks spaced out across the wings and pelvic fins. There are also four tight rows of quite large curved spines present along the tail.

In some ways, this inclusion is irrelevant, as it hasn't officially been recorded on rod and line in any of the contributing record lists. The reasons why I have included it here are two fold. The first is that for some unknown reason, the British Record Fish Committee have it listed, but with both the boat and the shore slots vacant and open to claims.

In other words, none have ever been officially ratified. So why not then either remove it, or list all other species that anglers have yet to catch, a fact I have pointed out both in writing and at length in conversation with BRFC Chairman Mike Heylin.

In fairness, this probably is the result of it once having been listed many years ago, and subsequently, along with a number of other dubious records, evicted from the list in a much needed purge as having been mis-identified.

This leads me very nicely into my second point. Though I can't recall the weight involved here due its being maybe forty years ago, that standing record prior to eviction was sufficiently bigger than a sandy ray I did actually catch at that time, for which obviously no evidence was kept, and the fish was returned not knowing it could have been useful in the future when the old standing record was evicted.

I was fishing the deep waters off the Isle of Arran in Scotland with Neil McLean who had caught his record cuckoo ray in the same area, and wanting to add that species to my list, I fished a traditional four foot fifty pounds bs monofilament flowing trace, very likely with either mackerel strip or razor-fish as bait and up it came.

Just one more hard luck story, some measure of which all anglers suffer at one stage or other in their career.

Associated audio interview numbers: 134 and 135.

### STING RAY Dasyatis pastinaca

**Bucket List status – result**

The whip like tail with a sharp serrated venomous spine at its base will immediately set the stingray apart from all other home waters species, except maybe for one, the eagle ray.

Points of difference between the two are that in the eagle ray, the eyes are set into the sides of an almost separate slightly raised and protruding head, whereas those of the stingray are more conventionally placed on top with only the tinniest hint of a snout appearing from its otherwise flat facial profile.

The tail of the eagle ray is also very long and whip like with a short dorsal fin immediately in front of the spine In contrast, and a key distinguishing feature here, is that stingrays have no dorsal fin and the tail is very much shorter. Colouration can be variable with olive green through to brown being the most common shades.

Of particular note is the thickness of this fish along its central ridge. It can appear almost triangular in cross section, the wing bases being especially thick, making it potentially a very powerful fish.

There was a time during the 1970's and early 80's when stingray fishing really seemed to grab the angling public's attention. I'm not sure if that was down to increased availability, increased awareness, or just general angler interest levels. But you certainly don't hear too much about them in the angling press these days.

Back then, reports were an almost weekly occurrence, particularly in and around the Thames Estuary from both the boats and the shore. St. Osyth beach was especially famed for them to the point of holding stingray competitions.

Moving northwards, both the Welsh boat and shore records have been held from Aberdovey and Fairbourne respectively, both of which are on estuaries in Cardigan Bay, which could just as easily be a coincidence as a behavioural link.

We even had a short spate of them being caught up here in Lancashire at Cleveleys around the 1980's, with specimens well topping twenty pounds caught from both the dinghies and the shore.

But although I fished the Thames Estuary and probably harboured hopes of catching one there, that wasn't where I had my first stingray encounter, nor my best stingray experience.

I've caught stingrays in many parts of the world, and some big ones too. My very first taste however of the power a stingray can turn on came while dinghy fishing out from Lymington on the Solent.

Steve Lill and I used to trail our boat down to Christchurch for a couple of weeks during the summer, primarily to fish for thin lipped grey mullet in the lower Hampshire Avon just above Mudeford when the tide times were right, but also heading offshore armed with a tray of nice juicy ragworms which stingrays love when the early morning low water mullet fishing was off the agenda.

Most of the time we spent fishing in the Solent was during the daylight hours, though I have done all night sessions there for bass, smoothhounds and stingrays, providing the loose weed washing backwards and forwards with the tide wasn't going to be an added problem.

Even so, most of our stingray action came during the daytime, which is maybe as well considering what could happen when you're partly unsighted after nightfall, even with a good lamp.

On one of earliest trips one very breezy afternoon, my then young son Ian who couldn't have been much more than about six or seven decided he wanted to tag along, and caught himself a twenty two pounder. And as the boat at that time had no name, he insisted I call it 'stinger', which when we got back home is what we did.

Then, maybe four or five years later aboard a different updated incarnation of 'stinger' which Brian Douglas, myself, and Ian had trailed over to Tralee Bay in County Kerry, we spent a lot of time fishing a mark known locally as the 'monkhole' which was a slight depression very close in to the shore tucked up well inside the bay miles away from the open sea, where surprise surprise, huge monkfish used to hang out.

Not only monkfish though. All manner of other stuff too, including lots of small eyed rays and stingrays which we took plenty of, along with a sprinkling of thornbacks, small tope and the odd huss for good measure, providing us with some excellent shallow water sport where the only way fish could run and fight was away from the boat and as hard as they could.

Fortunately, the mix of fish in there all responded well to pretty much the same approach, that being a four to six foot sixty pounds bs monofilament trace with a 6/0 hook and mackerel bait. So much so that you quite literally didn't know what might be coming up next.

Then suddenly, the monkfish throughout Tralee Bay were cleaned out commercially and quickly faded from anglers thinking. However they did it, while it was most certainly the monkfish they were in there after, there is no doubting that other species would have suffered too, and that would have included the stingray.

Whether they had been the same ones returning year on year is difficult to know. But this hasn't stopped them completely, despite the fact that throughout the north east Atlantic to the north of Biscay, stingray numbers are now considered to be so low that the species has been declared as being under threat.

The current Irish record of just over seventy pounds was taken in Tralee Bay in 1999, a good fifteen years after our last visit, so they must still continue to come.

One of the main reasons why I love stingray fishing so much is that in terms of surface area when compared to say a thornback ray, they look deceivingly small. It isn't until you take note of the depth of their body along the spinal ridge, and the steep angle this takes into those short stumpy wings, that you really appreciate how much potential power there is there.

A good turn of speed, which along with a never say die attitude that would see some of the Tralee stingers quite literally leaping out of the water doing a pretty good impression of a giant bat, always ensured they were a handful. Spectacular stuff.

No wonder then that so many people sang, and possibly quietly continue to sing their praises, and more than reason enough for boat and shore anglers to again go out searching for them, particularly throughout the calm shallow waters of inner estuaries and creeks where they love to bask over the sun warmed muddy sand

### EAGLE RAY Myliobatis aquila

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

As with the stingray, which at a glance the eagle ray kind-of resembles, this is a 'true ray' species. The main physical difference between the stingray and eagle rays comes at the front end.

In the eagle ray, the head itself is very pronounced, both in terms of appearing to be raised up and in the way it protrudes forward of the shoulders rather than being merged into them. This allows the eyes to be set into the sides of the head, as opposed to the traditional skate and ray pattern of positioning them on top.

A heavily built thick bodied fish with wide pointed wings and a long whip like tail armed with a dangerous serrated spike or sting at its base just behind the small dorsal fin, a fin that is not present in the stingray. Colouration varies from dusky bronze though various darker shades of brown to almost black.

Another of those at best rarely repeated catches which angling throws up from time to time. If my recollection serves me well, the original fish which put the species in the record list came from around the Isle of Wight The same area that produced the current record at just over a hundred pounds back in 2004.

Coincidence..... possibly. Either way, not a common occurrence at our latitude, though in some ways there is no more reason for it to absent from Britain and Ireland's south coast than the stingray, both of which I have caught in big numbers elsewhere in the world on standard ray rigs comprising four to six feet of sixty pounds bs monofilament and a 6/0 hook baited with mackerel.

It's said that eagle rays spend more time swimming well up off the bottom than other rays, which if they do, could help explain the catch rate discrepancy. But they still feed hard on the sea bed, possibly taking more in the way of molluscs and crustaceans than fish.

That said, in my experience of bottom fishing out of Puerto Rico on Gran Canaria, we caught as many if not more eagle rays than stingrays, and all of them at the bottom on fish baits. So all the pointers are that in home waters at least, this still is a rare and occasional visitor from the south.

### DARK ELECTRIC RAY Torpedo nobiliana

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Electric rays are true rays which physically look completely different to what we as anglers tend to call rays. So much so that if even if you didn't know what it was you had on the end of your line, you would be immediately aware that it was something different, which in this case is perhaps safer left in the water.

The head and wings form an almost completely circular shape, though slightly blunted at the front end, creating a profile not unlike the shape of a banjo as shown in the illustration for the marbeled electric ray below.

The pelvic fins are also noticeably rounded, while the tail stalk is short and thick with two close set dorsal fins sited on it, terminating in a well developed tail fin which thornback rays and the like, plus stingrays, all lack.

Fish are the only vertebrates capable of producing an electrical current both for offence and defence, and in that regard, electric rays have quite a sizeable electricity generating organ sited in each wing, which collectively make up around one sixth of the fish's total body weight.

These are constructed from modified striated muscle fibres stacked against each other and connected up in parallel. The organs of a large specimen might contain as many as 500,000 such plates.

Discharges of up to sixty volts are the norm, though this can vary with the size and condition of an individual fish. Large specimens have been recorded emitting two hundred and twenty volts with a current of eight amps.

The upper surface of these fish is the positive side and the under surface the negative. Strong discharges however tend only to be used when the need arises

The value of these organs to the electric ray is two fold. Foremost, it is a means of capturing and subduing their prey. They feed on quite a large variety of small bottom loving fishes which are smothered then stunned, thus rendering them much more manageable.

The organs are also used for defensive purposes, though their power diminishes rapidly with each discharge due to the time required between usages to recharge the system.

Also known as the Atlantic torpedo ray, the dark electric ray, or just simply the electric ray, is the largest growing and most northerly ranging of the three electric ray species known in European waters. Sand and mud at depths of between thirty and one hundred and fifty feet are generally favoured.

In this case, additional features other than shape to look out for are a first dorsal fin that is very much larger than the second, and a lack of papillae (small growths) reaching into the aperture of the spiracles, these being the breathing holes close to the eyes on the top side, growths which the marbled electric ray has.

Colouration on the top side is an unmarked deep brown to slatey blue. The underside is cream with a darker edging suggestive of the upper surface shade. A fish with a recorded distribution on the west coast of the country as far northwards as the Shetland Islands.

Not a species I suspect you could ever actively target, particularly as it is thought to be predominantly nocturnal. As with the rarer and very much smaller growing marbled electric ray, they are very occasionally caught on rod and line, presumably using the same sorts of tactics likely to catch all rays such as a fish or squid bait on a four to six foot heavy monofilament flowing trace.

One of those fish which simply happens along infrequently, particularly from the Channel Islands and up along the south coast, with both the boat and the shore records coming from Cornish waters, the boat record being not too far short of one hundred pounds.

Also recorded in Irish waters from around Achill Island, and in Wales from Anglesey, this is most definitely a fish which it pays to know how to identify, if only to avoid inappropriate handling. Otherwise you could be in for a nasty shock......quite literally.

### MARBLED ELECTRIC RAY Torpedo marmorata

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Similar in shape to the dark electric ray described above, but in this case with the six to eight papillae, which are small conspicuous growths around and extending in to each spiracle, this being the breathing aperture situated on top of the head close to the eye.

Top side colouration and markings are some variant on mottled or marbled brown through to cream with a cream coloured underside, the edges of which are tinged with the darker base colour, though not the markings of the upper side.

A much smaller fish of more southerly distribution than the dark electric ray, confined in home water angling terms mainly to the Channel Islands where both the boat and shore record have come from in the past.

Being smaller, presumably it is less able to belt out the power of its larger cousin, an account of which has already been given above.

Again, not a fish I suspect you could actively target. As with the potentially much larger dark electric ray, they are very occasionally caught on rod and line, presumably using the same sorts of tactics likely to catch all rays such as a fish or squid bait on a four foot heavy monofilament flowing trace.

One of those fish which simply happens along from time to time, though with so many warm water species becoming increasingly commoner these days due to rising sea temperatures, maybe there are more to come, for which reason it pays to know what one looks like to avoid inappropriate handling.

Not so far recorded in Welsh, Scottish or Irish waters, though I suspect it's probably just a matter of time. Certainly for Ireland.

Mako Shark dentistry:   
Photo Andy Griffith

Phill Williams Morecambe:   
Photo Phill Williams

Allan Everington Pollack on fly:   
Photo Phill Williams

Charlie Pitchers Fleetwood Plaice:   
Photo Phill Williams

Barry Kemper Whitby Halibut 53 pounds:   
Photo Paul Kilpatrick

Dawn Williams Pwllheli Black Bream:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Norway Haddock:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Coniston Char:   
Photo Phill Williams

## THE BONY FISHES

In a nutshell, for angling purposes at least, this means every species of fish recorded as having been caught on rod and line in home waters, including those living in freshwater, that is not either a shark or a ray. Fish with recognisable bony skeletons as opposed to a framework of cartilage.

Tail layout is another major distinguishing feature. Bony fishes generally have tails of equal proportions either side of the mid point, whereas sharks never do.

Most bony fish species also have an operculum or gill cover to protect the gill arches which in turn support the gills. Scales are another common feature, though in some species these can be particularly hard to see or detect.

### THE COD FAMILY

Economically, the most important group of fishes, not only around the British Isles, but throughout all northern Europe, and consequently, the one whose more popular angling species come under the greatest measure of commercial pressure.

Cod as a species are also arguably the most important angling fish on the British scene, though slightly less so when you look at the British Isles or home waters as a whole.

Almost equally important, though thankfully of far less commercial interest for the moment at least is the whiting, which is another of sea anglings main bread and butter species, both boat and shore.

The family as a whole encompasses some of our most sought after sporting species too such as pollack and coalfish, plus a whole raft of other species with different body forms and fin layouts, ranging from top end predators such as ling through to mini versions of the same in the rocklings.

Collectively therefore, they deserve to be the first point of focus for this section of the book, starting with the family father figure itself, the cod.

#### COD Gadus morhua

**Bucket List status – result**

Despite the cods potential for quite a wide range of base colour variation depending on location, feeding, and habitat, upper body mottled patterning will always be present. Fish living over shallow, reefy, kelpy ground for example are often a brilliant reddish colour, while deeper water fish can be anything from green or brown through to sandy yellow.

This mottling however can vary in tone from dirty cream to brown, along with a scattering of small brown flecks. The lower sides and belly which are un-patterned should be white, but in shallow water fish, can often be some shade of dirty grey. The lateral line is very obvious and is white.

Cod have three dorsal fins and two anal fins, each of which is noticeably rounded at its peak. The chin carries a very prominent barbel. A fish with a very wide ranging and opportunistic appetite, willing to eat everything from worms, shellfish and crabs, through to sea mice, squids, and some quite large fishes such as sizeable whiting.

Fish feeding actually plays a major role at certain times of the year, with the larger cod concentrating on sandeels, sprats or herrings, along with pretty much any other suitably sized fish they can catch.

Bass may well be the iconic anglers fish, but its the cod that is the true anglers fish. More time, effort, and money goes into fishing for cod than bass have ever enjoyed, and if I'm honest, as much as I love bass and believe they should be given exclusive recreational status, when the chips are down, if I had to choose between cod or bass to go with my plate full, based on reality as opposed to fantasy, the cod wins out on all levels for me.

It has the numbers, the growth potential, and the distribution both offshore and from the shore, plus it's what the vast majority of us not only aspire to catch, but unlike bass, regularly succeed in catching, which is vitally important if waning angler interest levels are to have any realistic chance of being held in check.

As with all species, and for a range of reasons, population density can fluctuate. Usually though there will be some fish available in worthwhile numbers somewhere.

Not only that, but available to a wide enough range of tackle, tactics, and baits to keep a great many people both interested and happy, as cod are neither difficult fish to find or to catch, which for the boat angler is something that can readily be tapped into by chatting to any prospective charter boat skipper before booking, asking questions about seasonality, local tide preferences, and approach.

From the shore it takes a different type of investigative work to get a handle on what might be going on. A mix of talking, watching, and trying. Also of walking the beach at low water on a big spring tide, noting where features such as rough patches, gullies, and worm beds are. That's my key snippet of shore cod fishing advice.

Approached properly, both opportunities can produce fairly predictable results, on top of which, it would take a book in its own right to chronicle everything there is to know about fishing for cod throughout the British Isles.

With that point in mind, what I intend to do here is reflect on a number of historic case studies, which tactically speaking, should hopefully take us from where we were when I caught my first cod to where we find ourselves today.

My interest actually started before I'd even seen a cod caught on rod and line. I was at school at the time living a good thirty miles inland from the coast still fishing farm ponds for small rudd, when I started buying Creel Magazine, which later became Angling Magazine, under the editorship of the still highly regarded Brian Harris.

Back then it seemed that the eastern end of the English Channel was the place to be, with quite a few of the Kent and Sussex ports catching incredible numbers of cod.

Boat fishing out of Newhaven in particular sticks in my mind. But far away my most vivid recollection is of Les Moncreiff's shore casting abilities around Dungeness, and the huge hauls of big fish he would take from a beach mark known as 'the dustbin', which I believe was, and perhaps still is, one particular swirling back eddy in which food items became trapped.

I never got to fish any of those places, so I can only go off what I've read, but to a young lad they looked and sounded fabulous. Similarly, the winter marks both sides of the Isle of Wight.

I never got to fish those either, but again from what I read, while they weren't exactly teeming with fish, they could certainly attract some huge specimens taken on large squid baits combined with wire line to beat the tide, the forerunner of the braided lines that do the same job today.

Sadly, shortly afterwards, both those locations slipped into decline, though the Isle of Wight has once again started showing signs of a comeback over recent times.

I can however comment from personal experience on many of the remaining big cod hot spots, though not always with any appreciable or consistent measure of success.

Though I had sea fished while on holiday a few times, it wasn't until 1970 that I actually took it up seriously, and later, pretty much exclusively.

I will be discussing some of my earliest trips to Loch Ryan fishing from a sixteen foot open boat skippered by Davy Agnew more fully in Part 2. But still I need to mention it here briefly, because Davy introduced me to the pleasures of both catching cod, and of small boat fishing as a means of getting to them, which was to play a major role in my fishing several years later.

Sandwiched between those key two events however was the hey day of monster cod fishing in and around the Clyde and its sea lochs. Doug Dinnie, George Mann and Bill Freshwater, otherwise known as 'the trio' were making the headlines on an almost weekly basis with cod to over forty pounds from their little fourteen open boat out over a mark known as the Gantocks.

They were also making headlines for their tactics of using heavy metal pirks, which while these are common place now, at that time were virtually unheard of and had to be imported from Scandinavia by ABU.

Lots of good cod were running the Clyde system each winter back then, passing over the Gantocks on into the various sea lochs where boat and shore anglers were having an absolute field day.

To get a better first hand flavour of how all of that went, I've spoken at length with some of the people who were involved at the time, including Tony Bridge regarding the boat fishing, and Ken Robinson from the shore.

I even managed to get up there myself where we picked up a few half decent fish. But unfortunately, due to a combination of my young age, the distances involved, and having only just started getting into boat fishing, I saw the very tail end of it all, after which it plunged very rapidly and spectacularly into terminal decline.

So bad in fact that the Clyde is still even now a virtual desert and may never recover, which again is reflected in the audio interview I recorded with Ken Robinson.

Though I was travelling north quite a bit in search of cod during the early 1970's, around 1973 I decided that I also needed to travel south. The Thames Estuary at that time was producing both big numbers of cod and big specimens, though not on the Gantocks scale of things.

John Rawle and Bod Cox had everyone wanting to learn about and buy into uptide fishing, with the usual knock on effect of all the big tackle companies clambering to get in on the profit generating band wagon too.

The uptiding scene has come a long way since those early days of buying in twenty and thirty pound class boat rod blanks that had not been cut down to size, then ringing them to be used as boat casting rods.

So I did a couple of runs down to Bradwell fishing with John, both to learn all I could first hand from the master, and to get a slice of the excellent fishing action they had down there, and once again now have in that neck of the woods.

Our first trips didn't exactly light up the world. We caught plenty of small to middle range cod. But it wasn't about fish numbers. It was more about learning and perfecting a technique which back then was just about as alien as things could get to any dyed in the wool boat anglers way of thinking.

Uptiding actually came about through a combination of accident and evolution. As skippers, forced to fish up on the bow out of the way, John and Bob started casting to keep their lines clear of their paying customers. The holding out across the tide bit was a slow progressive development spurred on by catching more fish than the clients they were trying to keep clear of.

At the same time as all of this was going on, I also discovered the Isle of Arran with it's brilliant haddock and cod fishing in the company of local expert Neil McLean, fishing both from his charter boat and his self-drives, the latter which just happened to be GRP versions of Davy Agnew's Loch Ryan based sixteen foot MacKay Viking.

Briefly, why this fact is important to this particular strand of my cod fishing, is because one day we misjudged things at Arran and got caught out very badly by the weather to the point that we genuinely thought our number was up. Fortunately, the little MacKay powered by its tiny Seagull outboard did eventually bring us safely through, though in hindsight I'm not sure how.

So impressed was I with the boat that I actually ordered one of my own, partnering up with my fishing buddy Steve Lill who bought the 9.9 hp Johnson outboard to power it, all of which fell in perfectly with the start of historically one of the best small boat cod fishing episodes I am aware of.

This was the decade long jumbo cod era along my own patch of Lancashire's Fylde coast between Bispham and Rossall Point from the late 1970's through to the late 1980's.

Coincidentally, around the same time, anglers were enjoying a similar quality of fishing in South Wales from the Bristol Channel through to Swansea, plus what was arguably the best shore cod fishing ever known from Balcary Point in south west Scotland.

Whether there is a connection here, who can say. At all three venues the big cod appeared around the same time and ultimately would disappear around the same time too. One perhaps for the conspiracy theorists, so think what you will.

Equally coincidental was the fact that all of this kicked off at roughly the same time as the bumper big cod catches previously taken elsewhere around the country were starting to slip off the radar.

The growth of dinghy fishing along the Lancashire coast probably dates back to the early 1970's. An era of twelve to fourteen foot displacement boats powered by Seagull outboards, transported on rotting painted trailers running on wheel barrow hubs.

No electronics. Probably no safety gear either if the truth be known. But most definitely plenty of good fish, something technology and outfit quality improvements have done nothing to keep pace with.

Looking back, we had more and better fish back then from nothing more than a shell of a hull compared to today's small boats fitted with everything as standard, which in my case now includes radar and AIS.

A magic time, affectionately known as the Fylde coast jumbo cod era. But, nostalgia and rose tinted glasses aside, it wasn't a given that if you went out you would bag up with quality fish. In fact, it wasn't even guaranteed that you would catch anything at all.

There were actually some pretty tough times too as I recall, and often it was very much colder than today's winters, with freezing fog a regular occurrence, which in a small open boat with nothing more sophisticated than a hand held compass can be quite daunting, particularly at night, as we often fished after dark to compensate for weekend daytime blow-off's, though if I'm honest, despite night fishing supposedly feeling like it should produce the goods, it was often disappointing.

I think we possibly went out too far as evidenced by the successes of the beach night lines. But anywhere between Bispham and Rossall over very heavy ground in thirty to forty feet of water fishing at anchor on a good sized tide put you in with a shot.

Some people claimed they had marks, and it's true that there were a few gullies which on their day could produce quite well. But I've been out and had a burster prompting me to put down a buoy to return to the following day as we had no GPS back then, only to find that people elsewhere around me caught while I didn't.

In truth, there were never a lot of cod about. But as a percentage of the species population, a high proportion of them were decent sized fish, and it's fair to say that every time you got a bite, there was the genuine expectation that it could result in a twenty pounder.

Quite a few even topped thirty pounds, and Mark Millar fishing from ex-charter skipper Frank Bee's dinghy had one of forty two pounds, all within a mile or less of the shore.

They would catch them equally as big, and on occasions even bigger, on set lines pegged out on the beach at night. The problem was that at times there wouldn't be much else about in support, particularly between Christmas and the last big tides in February when the mature fish started pushing too far offshore to reach.

It's never been satisfactorily explained why we suddenly got these big cod in the first place, or why they disappeared. Regarding the why we got them part of the query, with dinghy fishing in its infancy at the time, it could be that they had always been there, but nobody up until then was aware of the fact.

Part two of the query regarding what happened to them is probably easier to explain. When big fish are taken out and not given the opportunity to replace themselves, slippage into a cycle of ever decreasing size maximums is inevitable, which is exactly what happened, but in our case with some bumper years in terms of sheer numbers of fish.

Unfortunately, these were small fish up to maybe a couple of pounds. I well remember us catching dozens of them and thinking just wait until next year when they come back as five to seven pounders. But that didn't happen. It was just more of the same, and eventually even they stopped for quite a few years, after which, as with many other venues around the country, we struggled for quite a while.

The same thing happened at Balcary on the Dumfriesshire Coast, where a number of low rock marks looking out on to sand produced a run of huge cod over several years before they too was gone. It wasn't unheard of to get two or more twenty to thirty pound cod there in a session. Sometimes even more and bigger. Ken Robinson topped it all off by taking the Scottish shore record with a monster of 40 pounds 11½ ounces in 1988.

Ken was also a regular fishing the rock ledges on his home patch up in the north east. Now I'm no shore fisherman, but I did manage to get across there on a few occasions to fish with him. In particular I remember one bleak winter night when Ken took myself, Gordon Thornes, and John Stonelake to a spot on Blythe Beach, then left us to it as he had to be elsewhere else.

Fishing blacklug on a simple two hook dropper rig, we all cast out, but unfortunately, due to my shore fishing inexperience, I got into a birds nest on my very first throw, which with my poor eye sight in the headlamp light, I struggled to sort out.

While I was doing so I could feel fish tugging at my rod tip. So I wound in, disgorged a nice codling, then re-cast to expose the overrun and continue sorting out the mess when the same thing happened again, and again. Sometimes one fish, other times two.

Gordon and John meanwhile were just getting odd ones, and in the dark couldn't see where my lead was landing. Obviously I could repeat the distance every time because that was all the available line I could get out due to the tangle. Amazingly, that birdy led me to catching forty two cod.

In 1989, the then British government decided to break up the big drinking water companies, hiving off their pollution enforcement teams from the supply side of things to form the National Rivers Authority (NRA). No longer would both poacher and game keeper share the same office space.

Also around that time we had the Toxteth riots in Liverpool, followed by Michael Hesseltines pledge to make huge environmental changes on Merseyside, which included a clean up of the River Mersey, and a new effluent treatment plant at Sandon Dock.

As an NRA officer, and later an EA Environment Officer, I worked on the Mersey in those early years, and actually took the first ever compliance sample from the newly commissioned Sandon primary treatment facility, thereby playing my part in the running sewer to running salmon revival of the River Mersey, which amazingly took a mere thirteen years.

I mention this because at the same time as the big cod were showing along the Fylde Coast, Balcary and in South Wales, anglers were also catching some very good fish on occasions from Seaforth rocks at the Mersey entrance. But unfortunately, as with the Fylde Coast fish, that too tailed off for a while.

Later, when cod numbers did eventually start to come back, returning fish were faced with a very much cleaner River Mersey than previously to spread up in to, sometimes as much as several miles inland to the Britannia Pub and beyond, making the Mersey one of the best and certainly most sheltered winter cod fisheries in the country.

On the downside, the ferocity of the river flow on all but the smallest of tides also makes it one of the toughest boat venues I have fished. Not so bad on tides up to around 8.2 metres with the right gear, plus a knowledge of how to go about it. But sole destroying at times for first time enthusiasts, as I've witnessed on more than an odd occasion, if any of those elements are even slightly out of kilter.

Beach launching over at New Brighton isn't that great either. Not so much for the risk of getting bogged in with the trailer or towing vehicle wheels, though that can happen. More because of New Brighton's position at the southern entrance to the Mersey leaving it so exposed, while up-river where the fish are it can be flat calm and perfectly fishable, if only you could get to it.

There are better and more sheltered slipways all along the Wirrall side of the river, which for whatever reason, the local authorities won't allow to be used, preferring to let small boat anglers, including local rate payers, struggle and put both their outfits and themselves at risk, despite the fact that it would cost nothing to offer the use of these facilities as they are already built.

The charter boats on the other hand, which can take more weather anyway, start off up river at the marina, so never have to go down to the exposed entrance if they don't want to.

I once fished a trip aboard Tony Parry's 'Jensen II' in fifty seven knots of wind which equates to force eleven on the Beaufort's scale, and there was hardly a ripple over on the sheltered side.

It's the strength of the run that is the main Mersey bug-bare. Fortunately, when the Fylde Coast was producing its better cod, we would fish there on the big tide weekends and the Mersey on the smaller tides, which worked out quite well.

As both are roughly the same depth and fish best on baits pinned to the bottom in coloured water conditions, you would think that the tactics would be inter-changeable. We thought that ourselves. But it quickly became apparent that modifications were going to be required.

The Fylde would fish best after a bit of a blow to stir things up and colour the water. This keeps the cod feeding hard on the bottom, whereas when visibility is better, they can move up in the water column hunting sprats, which means less chance of them finding the baits.

Always one to keep things simple, a four foot fifty pound bs flowing trace was all I ever used. Forget add-ons or bling. Let the bait do the attracting. In coloured water, bling won't be visible anyway. Always this was with one or two large blacklug either on a single hook set up or a pennel rig, depending on personal preference.

With six to eight ounces of lead lobbed down-tide over the stern sufficient to hold bottom, that was the ideal Fylde coast terminal set up. Try that in the Mersey however and you stood a better than even chance of catching nothing. In fact, you probably wouldn't even touch bottom when the tide was running.

There, only uptiding with a decent grip lead guarantees a good bottom hold. It you have an angle in your line away from the boat, then you must be holding bottom.

Baits and trace presentation also had to be modified. In the Mersey, squid is a very good bait, and large blacklug-squid cocktails held together by elasticated thread presented on a pennel rig are even better. As for trace length, that too has been changed, with a reduction down to at most a couple of feet.

The power of the water hitting a bait that is not aqua-dynamically streamlined will tend to throw it all over the place, even lifting it up clear of the bottom, where in the low visibility, and with the fish keeping their heads down in the fierce run, is not where it needs to be.

My favourite way around all of this is to use a bolt rig pennel trace designed by Tony Parry, which very often sees the fish hooking themselves as they move off in the tide away from the grip of the wired lead.

Essentially this is a short pennel rig of around eighteen inches to two feet. The difference between this one and just any other short flowing trace is that it has a second component. A tubi-boom with a bead at either end trapped between two swivels on a fifteen inch length of fifty pounds bs monofilament. One swivel for attachment to the reel line, the other for a link such as the Gemini snood clip on the end of pennel rig.

Using a link clip in this way allows a second pennel to be baited up ready for a quick swap-over each time the trace comes in, thereby minimising lost fishing time in the way that shore anglers do by double patting. And when a fish picks up the bait, it can only run a very short distance before the sliding tubi-boom hits the stoppers and it's pulling against the anchored lead, thereby hooking itself.

On the smallest of tides, and in the slower period leading up to peak flow around mid tide on anything larger, six to eight ounces of standard fixed nose wired grip will usually hold out. Any more run and it starts to get more difficult, a problem anglers all around the country can be faced with from time.

To get around this I decided to produce a 'super grip' lead. However, the one I use now is not the same as the pattern I started off with. That's evolution.

Initially I had a bomb lead with four stainless steel wires poking out from each side which I bent over in the traditional way to grip, but with the bends on one side going the opposite way to those on the other.

This was so that which ever way it settled out it would have four well spread grip wires instead of the normal two biting into the seabed.

Unfortunately, I very quickly learned that it wasn't quite as simple as that, because depending on which way you bent the wires in relation to the positioning of the attachment loop, and which side of the boat you cast it from, you might very well end up with the grip wires all pointing skywards. Lesson learned, I switched to putting all eight wires into the nose.

To do this I had to find myself an open ended mould, which I did by using an adjusti-mould with the plunger removed and the side pouring hole sealed up.

What's more, this could take up to twelve ounces of lead. As for the wires, these are separated off into four pairs fanned out like a grass rake, then bent in opposite directions so that there was no right or wrong way for the lead to settle out.

Believe me, twelve ounces of lead with four well spaced gripping wires can hold out in some pretty ferocious flows. The one draw back here is that if you don't also use a long tubi-boom to dangle the trace away from the wires during casting, it can self tangle.

This, paired up with the short pennel bolt rig presenting a double blacklug and squid cocktail streamlined by using elasticated thread is a pretty formidable piece of terminal kit.

In terms of chronological timing, none of the above fits together as one continuous flow, but there is none the less a more general sort of pattern to it all, the next step on the journey being over to the North Sea.

Fish availability must have been much of a muchness from the Humber right up the east coast into Scottish waters during the late 1970's and 80's. But you wouldn't have thought so reading the angling press. According to reports, there was only ever one venue, that being Whitby.

It had the wrecks; it quickly built up a fleet of boats capable of ever lengthening forays offshore, and it had the angler catchment area, swelled by people journeying from all over the country to what would become the UK Mecca for catching cod.

It certainly had the fish, and a lot of very big, occasionally even huge fish mixed in amongst them too. It also had tackle and tactics specifically tailored to suit its needs, which were either less or completely none effective when used elsewhere in the country away from the east coast. Big pirks or 'jiggers' were the order of the day, attached to the bottom of a string of muppets.

Unlike the Gantocks, due to almost suicidal tackle loss rates over some of the wrecks, the pirks here were often home made from lead filled chrome tubes, used as much as sinkers as they were lures.

Muppets too began to appear in a range of sizes and colours, which as with the redgills over the mid-channel wrecks, could be deadly in one colour one day, then demanding of something totally different the next.

It reminded me very much of the early days of wrecking out from Brixham and Plymouth, where endless lines of fish hungry anglers metaphorically queued to get on to the boats, and everyone thinking it could never end. But it did end, both down in the south west and later on in the North Sea.

Over-fishing by wreck netters made net free wrecks ever harder to find, with the obvious knock on in terms of increased distance and reduced fishing time. Problems with cod population numbers more generally later compounded the problem. But it was Margaret Thatcher as much as anyone who knocked the last few nails into Whitby's coffin lid.

Much of the boat angling trade throughout the Yorkshire region had come from miners clubs, and with them gone, so too was a very lucrative source of regular income leading to a shrinking charter fleet, and not only at Whitby. All the other less publicised but equally successful adjacent ports that had been more quietly going about their business declined equally badly too.

Less anglers and very few fish pushed a lot charter boat operators to the wall. But fortunately, not all of them. A few clung on. And with catch expectations at an all time low, those hardy pioneers set about experimenting and exploring, ultimately laying the foundation upon which those same ports have since re-built their reputations and businesses.

One of those pioneers was Paul Kilpatrick at Whitby. With things as they were, it was time for him and others like him to start looking at areas of fishing and tactics previously neglected. In particular, the inshore hard ground, both during the winter as well as the summer months.

Over the summer months it was back to the old ways of drift fishing with worm, crab, mackerel, and squid, fished from short droppers above the lead, constantly feeling for bottom contact, but careful to avoid tackle hungry hangups, hence the hook positioning up the trace.

In the main this produced cod and ling, but with increasing numbers of pollack too in certain areas. Winter time was slightly different. Then the boats would anchor much closer in for uptide fishing, which again proved very effective. So effective in fact that it is now an established part of the Yorkshire cod fishing scene.

But it wasn't entirely a case of the wheel turning full circle from bait inshore to pirks and muppets over the wrecks then back to bait closer in. Paul Kilpatrick and the others didn't completely forsake the lures. The era of the shads was just about to open up.

In a way, shads look a bit like the old style redgills. Soft rubber or plastic fish shaped bodies, but generally shorter and deeper with less reliance on the long swimming tail. That however is where the similarity ends.

Many are now self weighted, though not nearly heavy enough to get them down into the feeding zone on their own in a good lick of Whitby tide, which is important. For unlike redgills, which as soon as they touched bottom were on their way back up using a slow retrieve looking to pick out fish which could be many feet clear of the reef or the wreck, at Whitby, shads when they touch bottom need to be fished at the bottom, because for the most part, that's where the cod will be feeding.

Presentation differs too. Very long flying collar rigs present swimming lures at their best. A three way swivel on the end of the braid with a short weaker monofilament link from the bottom loop to a lead, and around four to six feet of fifty pounds bs monofilament to the shad is the Whitby way.

This is then fished lift and drop with the reel out of gear and the thumb on the spool to let out a tiny bit more line if required on each down stroke to make sure the lead actually touches bottom every time, which it needs to do.

Colour can be important too, though again, as with the redgills over the channel wrecks, this can vary day by day, and even within a day, depending on water clarity, surface conditions, and available light.

So never be afraid to watch other people if they are having a good day and take note, and what better person to watch than the skipper himself, who in Paul Kirkpatrick's case is out on the cabin deck of 'Sea Otter 2' for every drift.

Whenever he lost a shad to the wreck, I noticed he would invariably go back to the same pattern, which was a four inch rhubarb and custard. That, from a man who's out every available day fishing every available drop, and with a lot of good cod to his credit, has to count for something.

There is another experience worth relating here, which in terms of timing, slots into the gap between the hey-day of muppets and jiggers and the shads. It's a little out of sequence, but I didn't want to break up the flow of the historical Whitby story.

Actually, for me at least, it all started at Whitby anyway in the days when Dave Devine and I used to trail our own boat over there to fish the rough ground maybe ten or twelve miles offshore, where we took some quite memorable cod catches.

On one particular occasion we needed a few extra pirks, so we called in at one of the towns tackle shops. But all they had in were straight pieces of lead filled chrome tube with a wire loop set half way up the side, to which was tied maybe three inches of heavy monofilament covered in coloured plastic sleeving, tipped off with a bare single 6/0 hook.

Unsure what to do, but low on pirks, we bought a few anyway, which at various times we tried both as they were, and with a small muppet on the hook.

On other occasions we even baited them and caught lots of fish on all three options. So much so that we started making our own, only later discovering that they were an updated variation on the traditional commercial lead cod ripper which had a long circular lead body of suitable weight with two small holes through it close to the bottom at right angles to each other.

Bright green or orange corlene is threaded through these holes and knots are tied close to the lead to lock the corlene in position. Shiny tinned 10/0 hooks are then tied to the four corlene ends, allowing them to dangle as a group a couple of inches below the rippers body. These are then jigged like pirks.

Some say they represent small darting sandeels which the cod grab at. Others say they simply foul hook the fish, hence the name 'ripper'. When you're commercial fishing, it doesn't matter either way.

What I would add here is that I once accompanied Preston Sea Anglers on a trip to Hartlepool for a magazine article, and they had a box full of these cod rippers.

Fearing lots of foul hooked fish, I thought I wouldn't get the feature. But I need not have worried. That day we had several hundred pounds of cod, many in double figures, pretty much all of which were legitimately hooked in and around the mouth.

Currently (2015) the North Sea is once again full of cod. Not the monsters of years gone by, but plenty of doubles, and some better fish mixed in amongst them, all the way from the Humber up into Scottish waters. In fact, one of my best east coast trips of recent times was out from Amble fishing the reefs close in around Coquet Island.

Over on the western side of the country from the Solway south through Wales, codling have also been showing everywhere, with lots of small fish winter and summer inshore over the reefs, and plenty of better fish out in the deeper water over the wrecks which I visited recently for a Sea Angler feature looking at the fishing in and out of the Mersey over the summer months aboard Kev McKies boat 'Brigand'.

In fact, one afternoon in January 2014, one of the gill netters working out of Fleetwood hauled his net within casting range of Andy Bradbury's charter boat 'Blue Mink' and filled up several boxes with big cod to just short of thirty pounds.

So maybe there is, or at least there was still a chance for the north west generally, and the Fylde coast in particular, to return to those jumbo era days. Yet rod and line anglers have had none of these fish and wouldn't even have known about them at all if Andy hadn't seen them with his own eyes on his return to the marina.

Shore fishing for cod too on my local patch from Fleetwood down into the Mersey has also picked up. But without doubt, the in place for very big cod just at the moment is Shetland.

Whether or not some or all of this will change any time soon is one of angling life's imponderables. If it does, it probably won't be for the better if the European Union continues on with its current draft of the Common Fisheries Policy, despite EU fishery scientists repeatedly begging ministers to think again while there is still some hope of a rescue of sorts from the brink of the abyss while there are still a few commercially high value species left.

Associated audio interview numbers: 5, 24, 43, 92, 111, 170, 171 and 181.

#### POLLACK Pollachius pollachius

**Bucket List status – result**

In common with several of the more common cod family members, pollack are fish with three dorsal fins and two anal fins, which at face value might sound like a recipe for identity confusion. Fortunately, in reality it turns out to be nothing of the sort.

Only the coalfish, to which pollack are most closely related and in many ways mirror in terms of life-style, present any sort of identity confusion, and even then not very much.

One obvious point of difference is the lower jaw of the pollack which very noticeably protrudes beyond the upper, whereas they are equal in the coalfish.

Colouration and lateral line are two further major points of difference. Pollack can vary in colour to some extent according to the ground they are taken from. Over inshore kelp they can be more reddish, while those taken from deep water wrecks tend to be duller, and as ever, there are all shades in between.

Either way, the back and upper flanks will be a much darker shade of brown than the mid flank region. More importantly, unlike most fish where colour change is gradual, the transition in pollack from one to the other is sudden and very obvious, eventually fading and lightening on the belly.

Starting at the gill cover, the brown lateral line tracks along the point of colour change from dark to light until it passes the pectoral fin where it then curves down onto the lighter golden colouration of the flank, dissecting it into two almost equal halves all the way to the tail.

Coalfish on the other hand are dark bottle green on the back and upper flanks which merges gradually into a dirty off white lower down the body, and have a straight white lateral.

In addition to this, pollack, to me at least, look to be too short in the latter half of their body for the front half proportions, and always they disappointingly seem to weigh less than you might expect them to in comparison to other similar sized fish.

Without doubt, one of the most versatile fish in home waters in terms of distribution, inshore-offshore availability, and the range of tactics and baits that can successfully be used to catch them. A true anglers fish. A very powerful hard fighting fish too. As such, how could anybody fail to be impressed by the pollack.

I remember a fly fishing session we once did for them, more of which later. Salmon angling writer and guide Ally Gowans was convinced he'd hooked the daddy of them all, only to find the fish weighed maybe three pounds. Needless to say he went away suitably impressed, and with a very different opinion as to the comparative fighting qualities of his regular quarry.

So with pollack as a species not being an especially difficult fish either to find or to catch, in addition to looking at the various boat and shore options, I'd also like to invest a fair chunk of time into exploring the various different approaches available, ranging from the seek and destroy string of feathers right through to the difficulties of fly fishing at sea, plus all options in between.

Pollack are not bottom feeding fish. They can be if food availability dictates, and they can lurk amongst the rocks and kelp at or close to the bottom. But they can just as easily hunt well up in the water column, both inshore and offshore, and are more than happy to dart up from cover to pick off any suitable small fish or lure passing over-head.

Pollack are not bottom feeding fish. They can be if food availability dictates, and they can lurk amongst the rocks and kelp at or close to the bottom. But they can just as easily hunt well up in the water column, both inshore and offshore, and are more than happy to dart up from cover to pick off any suitable small fish or lure passing over-head.

Out over the deep water wrecks for example, it's common practise to touch bottom with the lead in the run up to wreck showing on the sounder, then as the target begins to show, start winding, while at the same time counting the turns of the reel handle when fishing redgills, sidewinders and similar soft bodied swimming lures, so as to gauge the feeding zone on the day.

This can be well up and sometimes even well off the wreck, as the pollack, attracted by their prey fish, and in particular mackerel, may well be 'riding' the pressure wave created as water pushed along by the tide is deflected upwards in the same way that rocks create boils in rivers as they disrupt the flow.

That said, where you feel the first nips and tugs if they are playing with the lure, may not be a true reflection of where the fish first see it and give chase, as they will on occasions follow a lure for quite long distances. Sometimes even to within visual range from the boat, which on a calm day I've witnessed while reef pollack fishing around the Isles of Scilly.

This is probably the ideal point at which to talk about strikes and takes when fishing with a flying collar rig, which tactically can be any one of several variants on winding up a long monofilament trace through the water column. I've read many articles on this topic across a very wide range of views and experiences, some of which at times seem to be at odds with each other.

Some say traces in excess of twenty feet tied up from fluorocarbon are a must. Others suggest just plain old thirty pounds bs monofilament at lengths of between twelve and twenty feet.

My feet are firmly planted in the latter category, and I would add that the shorter the trace the fish allow you to get away with on the day the better. I say this because long traces if not handled carefully can lead to self tangling problems on the drop down.

Not so much on days with a good run of tide, or wind and tide working together taking the lure well clear of the wire stand off boom with it's lead attached.

It's in slower conditions that you need to be more aware, flicking the lead away from the boat to create a better angle of drop, then moving the rod tip to one side to keep the end gear clear of the main line on the descent.

Slower controlled drops also help and are much better than allowing the lead to go in to free fall. And it need not always be with lures.

King rag nicked through the head, live sandeels, even mackerel belly strips can all be fished in the same way either inshore or off, over both wrecks or reefs where a nice slow steady retrieve and sufficient self control never to strike are a must.

When they are ready, pollack will take a bait, turn, and kick for bottom in one fast continuous movement, hooking themselves in the process. So be sure and have the reel drag set right, both allowing and controlling the power dive under drag pressure which in turn will set the hook.

You can use a similar, lighter, shortened version for fishing soft lures from snaggy deep water rock marks, though with the advent of light rock fishing (LRF), and more so for bigger fish, heavy rock fishing (HRF), self weighted soft lures are now more the fashion.

With this in mind I talked at length to, and recorded a very interesting audio interview with Danny Parkins in which he talks primarily about targeting big ballan wrasse, but also of picking up bass and pollack from time to time.

I suspect slow twitching self weighted lures across the bottom would not be as good an approach for pollack and to some extent bass as would be a lure travelling overhead silhouetted against the surface, something I base on my fly fishing experiences.

Deep diving plugs too, providing the water isn't too deep, might be another good option, as would be a big lively ragworm, live prawn, or live sandeel, fished a few feet off the bottom under a sliding float bobbing along in the tide for that bit of extra movement.

I've also seen shore caught pollack taken on toby type lures and various other heavy self weighted spinners, plus of course, feathers fished cast and retrieve.

A more recent addition to the variety of potential approaches while fishing out in the boat are shads, either on the retrieve or fished sink and draw bouncing the bottom, and even large chrome pirks will on occasion also catch, though it has to be said that the flying collar approach with either soft swimming lures or natural baits takes some beating.

But believe it or not, under the right conditions, it can be beaten, and comprehensively so on the right day, with a technique which while it is gaining in momentum, is still rarely used. Fly fishing.

I was out with Ian Burrett and a party of Scottish salmon anglers headed up by Allan Everington aboard Ian's boat 'Onyermarks'. We were fishing in some thirty feet of water in and around the various coves and pieces of reef just either side of West Tarbert Bay on the Mull of Galloway. A session planned as a fly fishing only demonstration for a YouTube video, followed up more recently with an audio interview with Allan on the topic.

One of Ian's other boats was also out fishing not too far away using a variety of more traditional inshore pollack tactics, ranging from soft lures to slider floats, providing an unintentional control against which to compare the fly fishing results.

Later on in Part 3, in the section detailing my need to break a world record as part of my bucket list, I go into a lot of fine detail regarding the fly tackle and tactics required for pollack and coalfish, so rather than rehash that now, let me refer you over to that section instead.

What I will say here, is that despite the weight of the outfits, and in particular the weight of the larger lures which were tied in a range of sizes and colours to a basic sandeel pattern, fly fishing in saltwater from a boat is not as difficult as it might sound.

For starters, you can snake out line length as the boat drifts, then use the same drift to help work the lures. You don't have to get right down to the bottom either. In fairly shallow clear water, pollack will readily come up to snatch a meal passing over head.

In terms of direct comparison between the fly and the more traditional methods on the day, the fly won out by a very big margin indeed, with a number of IGFA world tippet record fish featuring in an overall catch in excess of fifty fish, all of which were returned to the water.

Wherever there is heavy ground, reefs, or wrecks, from Lands End to John O' Groats both east and west you will find pollack. Maybe not always big pollack, but game fighters on suitably selected outfits none the less. So I'm not going to single any particular location out.

I've fished a great many of them, and in their different ways, enjoyed them all. But if it's big pollack you want, let's say twenty pounds plus, then the mid channel wrecks in the early months of the year when the biggest mature fish pile on weight before heading out into even deeper water to spawn is the place to be.

Boats from a number of channel ports still get out there and find good fish, because unlike some species, pollack will migrate from wreck to wreck, and as such, providing there are suitable fish about to re-stock with, can do so very quickly.

The other side of the coin however is that they might just as easily choose to disappear. Back in the early 1970's when all of what we take for granted on the pollack scene today was still unfolding, and when most wrecks were still absolutely stuffed with fish, the main man for big pollack and coalfish was Plymouth based skipper JJ McVicar aboard the 'June Lipet'.

JJ broke the British coalfish record on his own rod twice in consecutive days, grabbed the pollack record, then added the angler fish record for good measure.

Getting on in years now, I caught up with him at his home in Plymouth recently where we recorded an amazing interview talking about a quality of fishing the likes of which, sadly, we will never see again.

Associated audio interview numbers: 72, 138 and 167.

#### COALFISH Pollachius virens

**Bucket List status – result**

In many ways, coalfish share a similar body layout and general habits to their close relative the pollack, having three dorsal fins, two anal fins, and a sleek streamlined torpedo like profile.

Of major importance in separating the two is the fact that coalfish have jaws of almost equal length and a straight white lateral line over a very dark brownish green to bottle green upper half which fades to greyish white below, whereas pollack have a protruding lower jaw, a dark brown lateral line which curves over the pectoral fin, and are brown on the back which suddenly gives way to golden brown on the flanks.

In addition, coalfish appear to have no chin barbel, though one should be just about detectable. Pollack on the other hand have absolutely no trace of a chin barbel at all.

Big coalfish in small numbers have always been present on the deep water mid channel wrecks, particularly over the late winter months when they fatten up ready for spawning. Some of the Welsh wrecks too, particularly those lying in over three hundred feet of water in St. Georges Channel off the Lleyn Peninsula, plus those out from Amlwch on Anglesey.

Whitby and the ports either side of it over on the other side of the country have also produced their share. But its not until you head further north around the Scottish and Northern Irish coasts that you really start to find them in increasing numbers out over open ground, with the reefs off Shetland currently the most consistent big coalfish producer of them all.

I'm not talking about isolated specimens of the type we used to see off Blackpool while winter cod fishing, or the shoals of small mackerel sized coalies they see around the east coast borders region.

For good solid numbers of potentially decent sized coalfish, the best areas to target are the deeper lying reefs off Scotland's west and north coast where they can be fished for on the drift with shads, soft plastic lures, even feathers if that's what turns you on.

In short, tactically speaking, it's pollack fishing with either a mixed or a different outcome, all of which I've detailed already under the pollack heading, so no point in repeating it again here.

As a snapshot of how coalfish can be locally abundant, yet at the same time missing over what might seem like suitable ground just a short boat ride away, try a trip out from Cushendall on the Northern Irish coast.

I was over there fishing with Hamish Currie aboard his RIB 'Predator II' during a week when conditions were so bad that even the ferries out of Cairnryan had to miss a few crossings.

It was wild. But, it was all coming from the west, which over on the east coast of the country meant we could at least get some shelter tucked in close fishing on the drift over heavy ground with strips of mackerel belly on long traces under the cliffs just to the north, where as expected, we caught some nice pollack.

But only pollack. Not a single coalfish mixed in amongst them. Yet on another day when the wind subsided and we were able to get off a short distance to the salmon cages further out in the bay, we caught nothing but coalfish, some going well up into double figures.

So why the separation, a question to which I have no definitive answer. But, like many people, I do have an opinion, mine being that although they can mix together in suitable areas of depth and habitat overlap, they also show specific preferences that can keep them apart. The laws of nature dictate that this has to be the case.

We are talking here of two very similar related fish species hunting and feeding in a seemingly identical manner, and evolution simply doesn't allow for that.

Ultimately, for whatever small reason, one species will prove more competitive than the other and displace it, which means that we either loose the evicted species altogether, or it adapts to exploit a slightly different niche not already completely occupied by something else and survives, and it would appear that this is what has happened here.

Preferred water depth and latitude is what generally separates these two species, with some small degree of overlap, allowing both to prosper, with a few adaptive physical changes or differences along the way.

By and large then, mature coalfish are an offshore deep water species. Catching small specimens inshore and from the shore is one thing. Finding the bigger fish from the shore is quite another matter. But it is occasionally done, the best of which I've managed to track down weighing in at just ounces under twenty five pounds from Filey Brigg in Yorkshire, which I'll wager was a bit of a shock to its captor. A bit of a handful too.

Back at the start of my fishing, a coalfish of that size would even have beaten the boat record. That now stands at 37½ pounds out from Plymouth over one of the mid channel wrecks.

I noticed too that the Scottish shore record was taken from Loch Long on the Clyde, reminding me of how good the Gantocks and some of the adjacent marks could be back in the 1970's for monster coalfish as 'by-catch' mixed in amongst the cod from the deep water on the pirks.

Now unfortunately all of that is long gone leaving the Clyde a virtual barren wilderness.

Associated audio interview numbers: 72.

#### HADDOCK Melanogrammus aeglefinus

**Bucket List status – result**

Very obviously a cod family member with its shape and body layout. A fish with three dorsal fins and two anal fins, plus a tiny chin barbel from what is a very noticeably shortened lower jaw. Using the cod for direct comparison, the haddock's first dorsal fin is quite tall, the first few rays of which are elongated giving it a noticeably pointed look.

There are other pertinent points, but these tend to be academic considering the haddock's quite unmistakable markings. On each flank above the pectoral fin is a brown blotch similar to that found on the John Dory, which again is said to be the apostle's thumb print.

The upper flanks and back have been variously described as brownish to greenish grey. However, when freshly caught, which is the way anglers get to see them, haddock often show a very noticeable purplish sheen spreading down onto the lighter middle flank region, with the whole of the upper body at times sparsely covered with tiny black dots.

It's also said from an angling perspective that haddock have soft mouths. Certainly there is a tendency towards loosing lightly hooked fish at the surface if they are not quickly netted. The fact that pound for pound they also fight particularly well won't help a light hook hold either. A hook firmly embedded inside the mouth is not too bad. But just nicked in the lip is another matter.

I once did an article for one of the magazines entitled 'haddiction', which besides being a good attention grabber I thought, pretty much summed up my fishing for quite a few years during the 1970's.

It all started with Dave Agnew fishing out on Loch Ryan, where while we weren't specifically targeting haddock, we would catch them on a regular basis while general bottom fishing at anchor out from Lady Bay on a mix of blowlug and cockle baits.

It was there that I came to appreciate both their fighting as well as their eating qualities. At the same time, I was also doing quite a bit of fishing over on the other coast out from Hartlepool with Tom Williams aboard 'Famous', where again while general bottom fishing, only this time on the drift with worm, squid and shellfish baits, we would pick a few up here and there.

In those days you could pretty much rely on seeing haddock anywhere from Bridlington northwards out over the deeper water of the North Sea where the ground was fairly clean.

These days unfortunately, you can do trip after trip after trip with small baits and probably won't see even a single one. That's the way North Sea haddock fishing unfortunately now is, with much of the rest of our home waters potential either going or already having gone the same way.

Again around the early to mid 1970's, I also discovered the Isle of Arran out in the entrance to the Clyde. In fact, I became very friendly with Neil McLean who ran the local creamery down at Kilmory and had a boat at Lamlash which he used for pleasure fishing as well as taking visitors out.

Neil was a Scottish international boat squad member at the time. He also held the cuckoo ray record taken in the deep water out from Lamlash. But it was for the quality of its haddock fishing that both his boat and the island made its reputation, and deservedly so, particularly over the winter months.

We had them there in the summer too mixed in amongst the cod, whiting, spurdogs and rays. But if you wanted either to specialise, or to target the better fish, then winter time was most definitely best. So we would make regular runs up to Ardrossan going over on the first ferry and coming back on the last one, with good haddock to over six pounds. Unfortunately, as ever, that didn't last long before they too were all gone.

Those that entered the Clyde lochs, Loch Fyne, and Northern Irish waters just across the way where we had quite a few good ones fishing the Causeway Bank with John Bradley out from Portrush didn't last long either. So with the North Sea already in decline, as far as we were concerned, that was the end of that. Or so we thought.

Fishery scientists tell us that haddock are a widespread species found offshore throughout home waters, though supposedly less numerous along the English Channel coast. Yet that's where some of the biggest home waters haddock ever caught have come from.

They don't, or until recently, they didn't seem to get the numbers of fish down there in the south west. But when it came to big haddock going up into double figures, the western approaches was the place to be.

Not so much deliberately fishing for them as putting mackerel strips down on baited feathers or similar out over deep water while targeting anything that might come along. I've done it myself while blue shark fishing out from Looe.

Better to fish at the bottom rather than hard on it when drifting to help eliminate potential hangups, besides which, the haddock, and pretty much everything else down there don't seem to mind. Then that too stopped making the headlines, leaving us to switch from haddiction to cold turkey.

It would take a chance conversation with Scottish sea angler Steve Souter back in 1997 to change all of that. Steve suggested I contact the harbour master up at Kinlochbervie on Scotland's north west coast who would take anglers out fishing specifically for haddock on his days off.

I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but that didn't work out in terms of arrangements, and somehow I ended up in touch with Englishman Peter Rawlinson who lived in a little touring caravan on the slipway at Kylesku and who also took out angling parties.

It was pretty much the same grounds just off Stoer Head at the entrance to Loch a' Chairn Bhain, but a whole lot less travelling than from Kinlochbervie, which equates to increased fishing time.

We arrived late afternoon on the day prior to fishing and decided to meet the boat in, where mixed in amongst the haddock were also several torsk caught from an area around a wreck which we unfortunately wouldn't be fishing, which was a shame.

The following morning it was out to Stoer Head where we feathered up a load of fresh mackerel for bait close in, then moved out into the deeper water over clean ground haddock drifting, where it was every egg a bird.

Each day we caught dozens of the things with the mackerel strips on 2/0 hooks to short droppers far and away out-fishing every other type of bait or rig combined.

Nothing big. Maybe four pounds maximum. But great to be re-acquainted with a fish I hadn't seen in many a long time, and one which feared I might perhaps never see again.

I'm not sure about the current state of play over on the east coast. The commercials say there are plenty of cod and haddock about now, but then again, they would say that to deflect criticism and to focus minds on their relentless quest for quota relaxation.

From my own experience, certainly from the English North Sea ports, little seems to have changed. It's true that there are good numbers of cod and ling out there now. But with only a single small haddock caught by us over several visits, I'm not holding my breath on that one. On the other hand, in south west Scotland and down in the western approaches there are very real signs of an up-turn.

Run south along the coast after exiting Loch Ryan and you come to the Mull of Galloway, passing Port Logan en route. Using Port Logan as an alternative launching site to Luce Bay, 'Onyermarks' skipper Ian Burrett has been noticing ever increasing numbers of haddock close in on small baits and rigs, to the point that these are now a very good deliberate proposition.

Add to this a thriving rod and line haddock fishery out from Penzance, and it could well be that the species, in pockets at least, has turned the corner. Let's hope so, because haddock are a very attractive fish for anglers to catch on a number of different levels.

#### WHITING Merlangius merlangus

**Bucket List status – result**

A slender fish in terms of basic body layout, not that dissimilar to the cod to which it is related, having three rounded dorsal and two anal fins, with the start of the first anal fin lying on a line taken from the mid point along the first dorsal fin above it.

Another feature to look for is a tiny, almost inconspicuous chin barbel, which might actually be totally absent in the very largest specimens.

The upper jaw is noticeably longer than the lower, with both containing quite an array of very sharp needle like teeth. In fact, often a key indicator of someone having had a good whiting session are many itchy cuts and scratches to those fingers used for disgorging as they scrape these teeth.

Colouration on the upper flanks and back varies between sandy green and bluish green, with winter specimens often having a purplish hue when freshly caught. The lateral line is brown, and there is a conspicuous dark spot at the upper base of the pectoral fin.

In terms of distribution nationally, expect them anywhere and everywhere if the ground is clean, or at most lightly broken. This is reflected in the home waters national boat and shore record locations, which at the time of writing include Plymouth, Orfordness, Swansea, Girvan, Gourock and Kenmare Bay over on the Irish side.

For my money, whiting are arguably one of, if not the single most important fish on the inshore and onshore angling scene. Cod, bass, plaice and all the rest may well be what we have on our wish lists. But increasingly these days, they are becoming treats.

Whiting on the other hand are the bread and butter that helps sustain the general day to day fishing, making them a staple component for many anglers whether they target them or not, and for many charter skippers too if the truth be known. For while we might not always consciously be aware of this fact when we catch them, we most certainly would be if they were suddenly to vanish, particularly on the winter inshore boat scene and from the beaches.

Presumably then, a very familiar fish to most if not all sea anglers, for which reason I don't intend to spend too much time detailing how to catch them in all the regular ways. Most baits, especially lugworms and mackerel strips presented on hooks in the size 1 to 2/0 range at or on the bottom over every type of sea bed from clean sand through to light mixed rough should catch them.

What I would like to do though is explore in a little more detail some of the peripheral stuff surrounding the species which, despite them being so widespread and obliging, tends not to get too much of an airing.

Depending on where you fish, whiting are for the most part a back-end and winter species. It's not common to find them too close in to the shore over the summer months, though they can usually be caught pretty much to order around north and west Wales.

Elsewhere, the summer whiting I've had have usually been good ones between two and four pounds, with even bigger specimens always on the cards, which in all cases have come from the south coast of Devon and Cornwall.

To be more precise, deep water, and usually well offshore. In fact, my first taster came between fifteen and twenty miles out in a good forty fathoms of water on the drift while shark fishing out from Looe.

Shark fishing is good when there is plenty of action. Less so on a quiet day. Obviously what you do then to fill in the blanks is try fishing for other things.

One alternative is garfish in the rubby dubby slick which I always enjoy doing. But on other days, I've sent baited mackerel feathers down to the bottom, which for me and others have brought up quite a wide variety of fish including megrims, big haddock, and even good sized pollack if you happen to be crossing a reef, or better still, a wreck.

More often than not though, if the ground is clean, much of the interest will come from big whiting, and you don't have to be fishing that far offshore either, providing the water is deep.

I remember once fishing a trip out of Gillan Creek at the mouth of the Helford River. It was a holiday trip, so most of those on-board were none anglers, the plan being to drift a small wreck in fairly deep water not too far away from the shore.

I don't know what the wreck was, but I do know it was lying on sand, because in the drift up to it, the holiday anglers fishing baited feathers were bagging up on big whiting to over four pounds. Then suddenly, that would switch to big goggle eyed pouting as we hit the broken scattered wreckage.

There were a few other bits and pieces too. But that's pretty much the gist of it. Good fishing though by any standards. In fact, shark man Frank Vinnicombe who lives just a few miles up the coast at Mylor, once showed me a photograph of a whiting he'd caught commercially in the same area some years ago that topped ten pounds.

And so it goes on all the way eastwards into Devon waters, with Plymouth holding the current record, and not for the first time, taken over the aptly named whiting grounds off Rame Head where they catch some real beauties during the colder months.

Inshore, shallow water whiting don't take too kindly to heavy weather. Not so much from the boats, though even there it can have a numerical effect if there is too much suspended material in the water.

From the shore, it's a combination of the wave buffeting within casting range, plus the particulate material this throws up that seems to put them off.

Fine settled conditions, particularly after dark are what make for a good beach or pier whiting session, all of which fits in very nicely with the urban myth that whiting are drawn inshore by cold frosty conditions.

Often they are. But this has little if anything to do with water temperature. In winter, frosty nights occur when the sky is clear, allowing the heat of the day to escape into space. It's always slightly warmer when there is some cloud cover, though it might not necessarily feel that way if there is also wind chill to be factored in.

Clear skies mean high pressure which in turn means calm settled conditions and frost. Just the ticket for a species that doesn't like either a battering in heavy surf or suspended material clogging up its gills.

You're always going to find some exceptions to this observation, because it isn't a binding rule. But it's calm conditions rather than cold frosty conditions which brings the whiting in close. The two just happen to work hand in glove from time to time.

Another area I'd like to explore a little more here, is timing within the tide, and indeed the sizes of tides generally which seem to suit whiting the best. This is more of an inshore boat fishing observation, though too much run will also affect both the whiting's feeding and the shore anglers ability to keep the baits out there in the zone.

I personally find that too much run tends to put the whiting down. You will still catch them, but not nearly so well as when the run eases away on a big spring tide either side of the mid two hour period when it runs at it's fiercest.

Obviously, on middle range, and more so small tides, the reverse may to some extent be true. For while whiting don't like too much run, in common with most fish, they still need some movement in the water to induce them to feed, and on a neap tide with less water to be shifted by the gravitational pull of the moon, the middle two hours may well be the only time when there is sufficient flow.

Local geography can play a major role here too. Take the River Mersey yet again as an example. Tides in the north west of England generally range between seven and ten metres. Fish the Mersey on anything greater than say 8.2 metres and you'll struggle to hold bottom. It quite literally screams through.

So even on the smallest tides, the whiting there tend to feed most heavily as the tide dies away. Yet just a few miles up the coast at Blackpool, it's not worth turning out on anything less that the same 8.2 metres, as you'll be faced with hardly any run and even fewer fish.

Bearing in mind what I've just said about whiting not liking too much run but requiring some movement to stimulate feeding, quite a few years ago we did some experimentation with small slider floats set to present our baits within a few inches of the bottom, the idea being to use these when the run had virtually gone, but with just about sufficient of it left to trot the float away from the boat to give the bait some movement.

In addition to that, I also took along my small push net to get some shrimps which were kept alive in a flowtroll floating live bait bucket which I'd brought back from America. Whiting love live shrimps, but if you put them down on the bottom, they will instinctively burrow out of sight. So just off the bottom is perfect.

The other draw back with shrimps is that to present them live, they need to be nicked on to a small fine wire hook around three to four segments up from the tail, which unfortunately leaves them vulnerable to being ripped off. So you have to be quick.

You could of course thread the hook down the centre of the body of the shrimp as you would a worm, but then it's offered dead which reduces its appeal.

Float fishing presents them perfectly and shows up every little touch. Definitely a very exciting way to fish when conditions are right. I've also used it under similar circumstances for black bream and for tope, when everyone else using standard drop down tactics has been waiting for the tide to kick in again and re-start their day.

For my final observation, let me say that I'm of that age where I remember regularly seeing boat anglers fishing with wire three boomed paternosters, and pier fisherman with bells clipped to the ends of the rods as bite indicators. But you know, just because an idea or an approach is antiquated, doesn't necessarily mean it's also out of fashion with the fish.

Most traces, in fact most basic tackle items, are no more than updates and variations on a few basic themes discovered and implemented back in the 1960's and 70's when I was first starting out, one of the most useful of which is still the wire paternoster.

I must admit to not having seen a pat for many years. Then one day while out with Tony Parry aboard his charter boat 'Jensen II' fishing the Mersey, he came out of the wheel-house at slack water with one he'd made and said here, put this on. Complete with size four hooks to probably thirty pounds bs monofilament to help eliminate self tangling, all it needed was bait and it was ready to go.

For what we were doing, which was fishing for whiting and dabs over the slack until the tide brought the cod back onto the feed, it was ideal. By placing the baits at rather than on the bottom, it introduced an extra visual stimuli just at the point where many fish would be starting to switch off in their feeding.

Of course, you can also do this with droppers strung out above the lead. But then, only the bottom bait is where it needs to be. The three boomed wire spreader on the other hand cleverly puts all three baits in the feeding zone at the same time.

Old fashioned, certainly. Looking like a Christmas tree, perhaps. But the presents it's might have hanging from it's branches can more than compensate for the antiquated retro look, which has also brought up cod and even thornbacks, while others fishing more 'modern' terminal gear have been left sitting out an otherwise quiet time of things.

#### BLUE WHITING Micromesistius poutassou

**Bucket List status – result**

Despite once being one of the most abundant species of fish in northern European waters, and still commercially landed in vast quantities, blue whiting or poutassou as they are also called, are a very unlikely fish for anglers even to see, let alone catch.

In the main this is down to their life style choice which is very much centred on deep water, usually way beyond angling reach, a fact hinted at by the large size of their eyes.

At a glance, a fish not unlike our inshore whiting _Merlangius merlangus_ with its sharp teeth and general body layout. The major distinguishing feature here is the very wide spacing between the dorsal fins, and in particular between the second and third dorsal fins, which in the case of true whiting all pretty much touch each other.

The first two dorsal fins are also quite noticeably angular and pointed. The chin barbel, which whiting have a tiny one of if you look closely enough, is absent here. Colouration is a deep slatey blue on the upper flanks and back, giving way to silvery beneath.

There are other anatomical differences. But the likelihood of ever having to deploy them is minimal in the extreme. That said, one particular day while feathering in reasonably deep water on the outer edge of St. Agnes in the Scillies, we suddenly brought up several strings of the things, then just as quickly, they were gone.

Later during that visit, I again saw a few in a trawl out off the bottom end of St. Mary's. Scottish anglers also pick up the very occasional specimen in some of the deeper western sea lochs, particularly Loch Fyne. Otherwise, a fish more at home in waters beyond a hundred and fifty fathoms.

#### POUTING Trisopterus luscus

**Bucket List status – result**

Another of those cod family members with three dorsal and two anal fins. In this case, the fins are so close to each other that they appear to slightly overlap. The eye is quite large, the snout blunt, and there is a prominent chin barbel below its shorter lower jaw.

A deep bodied, often 'dirty' looking fish due to its dark bronze brown colouration on the back and upper flanks, and grubby white below, with broad darker vertical bars, though this won't always be the case as they can also be much lighter and un-marked with a pinkish-purplish sheen.

Quite a straight forward fish to pin a name to, especially when weighing in at a pound and more. The only similar fish which can cause problems in the smaller size bracket is the poor cod, though mis-identification usually works the other way round, with poor cod being labelled as small pouting.

A true pouting will have the start of its anal fin situated underneath the mid point of the first dorsal fin, whereas in the poor cod, it's pretty much at the end of the first dorsal.

Both species have a dark spot at the upper base of their pectoral fins. In the pouting this spot is at least as big as the pupil of the eye, while that of the poor cod is noticeably smaller.

Or you could just handle the fish, which can be a dead give away. Invariably, poor cod leave lots of tiny pearly-silvery scales stuck to your hand, whereas pouting don't.

Other than anglers fishing species competitions and big conger addicts, I can think of few people who would deliberately target pouting.

A fish frequently caught by boat anglers, but hardly an angler's fish. At worst, a relentless bait robber; for most a nominal distraction or perhaps a day saver when there is little else about, and for wreck fishermen, presented as a flapper, arguably the best big conger bait there is, and certainly one which 'matches the hatch'.

Generally speaking, a fish with an offshore preference, particularly the biggest specimens. That said, the Channel Islands have produced shore specimens in excess of four pounds, which is one hell of a pouting by any standards.

Anywhere where there is rough ground or some sort of broken cover such as around a wreck, you should find shoals of pouting willing to take pretty much anything you can throw at them, providing the size of the bait and the hook is right.

Pestered is probably a good word to use here, because that's what pouting do. Even the biggest specimens favouring the deepest water are not exactly welcome.

I remember a time when red bream were abundant enough to deliberately target on and around wrecks with mackerel strips on 2/0 hooks tied to short droppers. An almost guaranteed recipe for pouting. The same was true over heavy ground when mixed reef fishing, particularly for black bream.

There was even a time when for several years, we had them inshore on the broken ground off Rossall on my home patch over the winter cod season, tugging, ragging, and stealing big cod baits like a plague of locusts.

Now, thankfully, for whatever reason, they are gone. A fish then that is inevitable, more so from the boat than the shore, with arguably little to be said in its favour.

#### POOR COD Trisopterus minutus

**Bucket List status – result**

A pouting like fish, which because of its small size is rarely going to be greater than half a pound in weight, and usually a lot smaller than that, invariably gets thrown back without a second glance ending up as seagull fodder, because as with pouting, poor cod tend to blow their swim bladders when hauled up too quickly from even moderate depths.

A slightly less deep bodied fish than the pouting and usually a 'cleaner' looking coppery brown colour. Species competition anglers are very much more aware of them these days because they represent an extra match point.

For the vast majority of people however, fishing over rough broken ground from boats or deep water rock marks along the shore, they are just another small pout, and even then, not that many people get to see them due to baits and hook sizes generally being too big for anything other that a very determined or suicidal poor cod to get down.

How frequently they are caught is difficult to say, as it's not the kind of catch people are likely to gossip about. For those who might be interested, I've done a compare and contrast identification features review under the pouting heading above, the potted version of which is, if it's a poor cod, you may well end up with small pearly white scales stuck to your hand after disgorging.

My son Ian held the record for many years with a ten ounce fish caught off Cleveleys, which I always expected would be beaten if people would just take the trouble to look. What I didn't expect was to see the record climb past a pound, something the Scottish boat and shore records have both managed to do from opposite sides of the country.

#### HAKE Merluccius merluccius

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Hake, and in particular those caught and landed commercially which have been dead for a while, can be very scruffy looking fish. Their fins become ragged and their colouration begins to turn a dirty shade of grey. Yet in life, or fresh from the water, the opposite is true. Then they look every bit the sleek efficient predator that they are.

Quite an elongate fish with two dorsal fins, the first of which is narrow and tall, whereas the second is less tall, elongate, and of fairly uniform depth other than a slight rise in height just before the tail.

There is a single anal fin, the origin of which can be overlapped by the tip of the long pectoral fins. The lateral line is straight, the lower jaw has no chin barbel, and the mouth large armed with rows of needle sharp hinged teeth

Fresh Hake have a beautiful metallic look about them. Colouration is an unmarked deep slatey grey, lightening in tone somewhat on the flanks and still further along the ventral region. The interior of the mouth is noticeably dark. There can also be a darker border to the back edges of the dorsal and anal fins.

Though I have still to catch one, there was a time when I had a bit of an obsession with fishing for hake. By collecting all available rod and line catch data, which was much easier back in the 1970's than it is today when we had a truly representative news hungry weekly angling press, it very quickly became apparent that ports dotted around one particular patch of sea produced more rod caught hake, and by some considerable margin, than everywhere else in home waters put together. This prompted further investigation which very soon hinted at the reason why.

The area in question stretches from the Isle of Man up through the North Channel which separates Northern Ireland from south west Scotland including the Clyde, and by implication rather than hard statistical support, on up into the Atlantic past the Sound of Jura, Islay, and the entrance to the Firth of Lorne, where the water is still exceptionally deep, but where sea angling, and therefore angling records generally become sparse to say the least.

In particular, ports either side of Beauforts Dyke, which is a thirty mile long by two mile wide trench with powerful tides and water depths between one hundred and one hundred and fifty fathoms, making it the deepest area within British coastal waters.

Hake are for the most part extreme deep water fish. Over much of the year they live out in water between one hundred and three hundred fathoms, though over the summer months they can move a little closer to the shore. But there's much more to it than that.

Chance angling encounters aside made close in to the shore, which it has to be said are rare, it's only when you get out deep and there is even deeper water close by that hake become more than the occasional news-worthy accident.

A friend of mine Mick Duff caught a few out from Kilkee while fishing for big skate. The fact that he also picked up several very large six gilled sharks at the same spots tells it's own story in terms of deep water.

Sean Palmer picked up a few out in the deep water way off Dingle where he also gets bluemouth, which again tells us much about the adjacent water depth. Yet at the same time, it tells us nothing about the true feeding and life style of the hake, because encounters on static baits fished on the bottom, while they obviously can occur, do not reflect the regular feeding strategy of the species, which is that of a mid water to surface feeder after dark, following the food chain up in the water column.

All of this is driven by phyto-plankton, the tiniest of vegetative planktonic organisms which rely on sunlight for photosynthesis to provide for their energy needs, which rise to the surface each night chasing the last rays from the sun as it dips down below the horizon.

Following and feeding on the phyto-plankton come the zoo-plankton which are tiny carnivorous animals, then other slightly larger animals all the way along the chain to small fish and ultimately larger predators.

As I've said, I have yet to catch a hake. I have tried a few after dark sessions and planned even more around Beauforts Dyke only to loose them to the weather. On top of that, the tide through the North Channel can be horrendous, which only adds to the overall degree of difficulty.

However, in support of the theory, though not with the same species, there is a fish called the escolar which leads a very similar life style to the hake around the Canary Islands which I have fished for and caught in exactly the same way.

The boat was drifting over around a thousand fathoms of water in total darkness. We started deep gradually positioning our whole mackerel baits closer to the surface by increments as the night wore on, catching some very good escolars to fifty five pounds.

Not exactly the same, but similar enough. So that's what I would do if I got the opportunity again in hake territory. A twenty pound class outfit fishing a heavy mono dropper say six feet in length above the lead, with a 6/0 hook and mackerel flapper, or perhaps a smaller cut bait, dropped straight down to depth with the reel left on ratchet.

Beauforts Dyke is definitely worth a shot. But with more opportunity of getting out fishing slightly to the north and east in the Sound of Jura and Firth of Lorne, either of those might actually prove an even better bet on account of their relative shelter and close proximity to the shore, plus of course, depths in places down to around a hundred fathoms.

Alternatively, as you progress up the Firth of Lorne towards the entrance to Loch Linnhe, tucked into the right hand corner just past Oban, if you pass under the Connel Bridge, you enter Loch Etive which has produced not only more hake, but more big hake to rod and line than any other venue I know.

Why this should be so is difficult to explain. If you've ever been to Connel and watched the water entering and exiting Loch Etive through the very constricted entrance, you would wonder how any fish would ever manage to get in to the place.

I've watched boats literally stood still at full power trying to get the better of the outflow. Yet the stats speak for themselves. Lots of spurdogs, cod, pollack and thornbacks too, though not common skate so far as I am aware, despite them being abundant all around the outer entrance. So that might be worth a look too.

Otherwise, hake are more commercially important down in the south west of Britain and Ireland where I saw plenty of them in the trawls within just a couple of miles of the shore, particularly around the Isles of Scilly, and on the markets at Newlyn and the like.

Rod and line records however reflect much of what has already been said, particularly in connection to Beauforts Dyke, with Loch Etive having produced the biggest ever at just short of twenty six pounds, with a fish of similar weight from Belfast Lough just the other side of the North Channel and Beauforts Dyke.

Milford Haven produced the best Wales has to offer from the boats, and amazingly Port Talbot the best from the shore with a fish of three pounds six ounces.

Tied in to this, I recall Dave Lewis telling me about a session he once had when he caught several small ones years ago in the same session somewhere around that neck of the woods.

#### LING Molva molva

**Bucket List status – result**

A full and important member of the cod family, but one with an elongate body and short very noticeably rounded first dorsal fin, followed immediately by a long second dorsal fin extending almost all the way to its equally noticeable rounded tail.

Along the bottom of the fish there is also one long anal fin, which while it too ends just in front of the tail, starts further back than the second dorsal fin above it.

The pelvic fins which are rather short do not extend further than the pectorals, and there is a very prominent chin barbel, but no barbels on the upper jaw which protrudes slightly beyond the lower jaw. Colouration is usually some shade of drab sandy green, though smaller immature fish tend to be more golden with a lighter mottled patterning.

Mature ling have a prominent light banded edging to their dorsal, anal and tail fins, beneath which is a noticeably darker band. The only other fish coming anywhere near fitting this description is the torsk, which can be immediately discounted by the fact that it has only the one continuous dorsal fin and is slightly less elongate.

Over the years, I've caught ling, lots of ling in fact, everywhere from north to south, both east and west. Anywhere there are depths in excess off eighty to one hundred feet over hard, broken, or reefy ground, and especially over wrecks, has the potential to attract and hold them, with, I think it's fair to say, certainly from angling observations, some correlation between increasing water depth and potential size.

I've caught or have seen them caught from both Orkney and Shetland, the latter having recently produced specimens to almost seventy pounds; the west coast of Scotland; numerous venues along Ireland's west and south coast, the North Sea, Anglesey, and in particular Amlwch; south Devon and Cornwall, and the Channel Islands.

I've even seen the odd small specimen from the wrecks off Lancashire and the heavy ground out to the west of Walney Island in Cumbria. But if you want big fish, Shetland is the current hot spot, whereas if you want numbers of fish with some occasionally topping twenty pounds, the Yorkshire coast through to the Scottish border is the place to target. But, it hasn't always been that way.

My earliest recollections of catching ling are of fishing out from Looe in Cornwall with baited feathers and dropper rigs over the Eddystone and adjacent reefs for mixed bags of fish, though always, red bream were very much central to our thinking. We'd get ling into double figures, and sometimes good numbers of them. But never any really big specimens.

That didn't happen for me until I started wreck fishing out of Plymouth aboard Dave Elworthy's 'Anjonika', Geordie Dicksons 'Artilleryman', and later with Dougal Lane out of St. Peterport at Guernsey aboard 'Arum', 'Midnight Moon', and finally 'Midnight express'.

In retrospect, wonderful days. Particularly the Guernsey based trips aboard 'Arum' out fishing the same mid channel wrecks as some of the Plymouth and Brixham boats. We'd often see Geordie tied up there in the marina. Long trips from the south coast, but well worth the time, cost, and trouble back then.

An era when to stand any chance of catching conger by anchoring over the slack water, you first had to give a wreck several hard fishing visits simply to thin out ling in the twenty to thirty pound bracket to be in with even a sniff of the biggest eels.

To some people those ling were quite literally a pest. I bet they wish they could get similarly pestered again now.

Occasionally you might pick one up on a redgill, especially in the early stages of slowly retrieving the lure just after it had touched bottom. We would also pick them up on pirks, particularly baited pirks, aimed at cod.

But if you really wanted them, a simple short single dropper rig made up of eighty to a hundred pound bs monofilament to beat the teeth, and a 10/0 hook to take a good sized mackerel bait, would out-fish any other approach hands down.

So prolific were the ling back then that if one came adrift on the way up, you could quickly send the gear back down again hoping there might be some bait still left on the hook, and if there was, immediately hook up a replacement for it.

In fact, there were days on which if the wind was light and the tide was slack enough, and if you was quick about it, when you could squeeze in another drop after the first fish, and hook up again before drifting off the wreck.

Hard work, but there if you wanted it. Then, progressively but noticeably, by the mid to late 1980's, the shoals of big ling were all but gone.

Angling over the wrecks certainly played some part here, particularly as ling can't get back down again even if you did want to put them back.

But commercial fishing, and an ever decreasing number of virgin or little known wrecks made a far bigger contribution. So much so, that my last run out to the mid Channel wrecks from Jersey saw us come back with maybe two or at best three moderately sized ling, and we were happy even to get those.

Following on from all of this was the realisation that wreck fishing out from Whitby, and subsequently quite a number of other ports in that general area of the North Sea, could be just as productive as the mid Channel wrecks previously had been. Only this time, monster cod and plenty of them were the target, with some exceptional bonus ling thrown in for good measure on baited pirks or muppets.

Ling weren't the primary target. None the less, anglers had them to over fifty pounds. Then, as with English Channel, over exploitation by everyone involved, anglers and commercials alike, saw that prospect also go into fairly spectacular melt down.

Now, thankfully, Whitby and its neighbours have all bounced back. So too have the fish stocks, but to nothing like the level prior to the crash.

These days, bait fishing open ground and drifting the inshore wrecks is a more likely prospect than heading many miles from port for just a few hours over the once prolific distant targets.

And ling are now a much more highly thought of fish as a result, particularly as the summer progresses, and ever increasing numbers of them come within regular angling range.

In that regard, Hartlepool is my favourite location, drifting patches of hard ground not too many miles from the shore. Tactically speaking, strong and simple are still the best approach, though I tend to use a string of heavy mono rigged 'fat boy' hokkai's in either pink or fluorescent green, baited with mackerel or squid.

Jigged up and down they will catch cod. Then, when your arms get tired and you need a rest, trundled along the bottom they will pick up ling. But best done so using braided line for better upward transfer of information regarding hang-ups, which might, if you are lucky, be avoided. You can still pick ling up when jigging or when fishing with shads, but not nearly so well as on a bottom bouncing bait.

A fish also taken, and to good size occasionally from deep water shore marks with venues scattered as far and wide as Plymouth, South Wales and Scrabster all there in the frame.

It's just a pity they blow their swim bladder so readily due to water pressure changes from depth on the way up, because for me at least, I don't find them that good for eating, and commercial prices paid to charter boat skippers for fish left on the boat are not that brilliant either. Far better to put them back if we could.

The Americans have worked out how to do this sort of thing with some of their pressure blown species such as amberjacks, which tagged recaptures have shown does at least provide some measure of survivability.

So perhaps there's a Ph. D project here begging for some academic angler to explore the survivability chances of this and other species too, including ballan wrasse and pollack, and how best to deal with fish that have suffered the bends.

#### TORSK Brosme brosme

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Imagine a ling with a shorter stumpier body than normal, and just one single long continuous dorsal fin. In fact, the only member of the cod family to have just a single dorsal fin. In a nutshell, that's the torsk.

It still has the chin barbel and the lighter, almost white edging to its fringing fins that are so characteristic of the ling, the ling also having a separate short rounded first dorsal fin ahead of the long continuous run.

Even the colouration is not that dissimilar, though it leans more toward bronze brown in the torsk and a lighter greenish brown for the ling. A fish with a much more northerly distribution and deeper water preference than the ling, which while this takes in some Scottish and western Irish waters, even there it is never common.

The furthest south I personally have come across torsk is out from Kylesku in north west Scotland. As I arrived there the afternoon before I was scheduled to fish a couple of days for haddock, I met the boat in that evening to see how they'd gone on. They had taken a lot of haddock, but had also spent a bit of time fishing around a wreck where they had picked up several torsk.

Another place I've seen them brought in by anglers on fish baits is Shetland, a fact reflected in the record lists. They also catch a few in the Pentland Firth. But if you want to catch them virtually to order, then go up into the Arctic.

We fished 198 miles north of the Arctic circle in Lyngen Fjord where you was virtually guaranteed torsk if you allowed a fish bait to touch bottom. To put it bluntly, they were a nuisance. We even had a few on the pirks, with some good ones amongst them going up to 23½ pounds.

#### GREATER FORKBEARD Phycis blennoides

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A semi elongate, rather dumpy looking fish, with a short pointed first dorsal fin in which the third ray is noticeably elongated. A second dorsal fin of uniform height follows on immediately. But it's the pelvic fins that really give the game away, comprising of just a single very long branched ray extending well past the start of the anal fin.

By comparison to the rest of the fish, the tail appears to be quite small. The snout is blunt with the lower lip shorter than the upper, and there is a chin barbel present. Colouration is a drab brownish grey giving way to a dirty grey ventrally.

Mature fish have a black edging to their dorsal, anal, and tail fins. Live specimens can have a purple hue which fades very quickly after death. If handled roughly, the large scales soon start to dislodge. An active predator with a large mouth, so no reason why one wouldn't take a bait, if one was dropped on to its nose.

In over fifty years of rod and line fishing here, there, and everywhere, around the British Isles and beyond, plus time spent at sea observing on commercial boats, only once have I ever come across the greater forkbeard.

Few other people I've spoken to have seen one either. So, very much a chance encounter about which you can do very little to improve your odds, other than keep on turning out playing the percentages game.

One day, maybe, but most probably not, mainly on account of its preference for very deep water along western Atlantic facing coasts, from the far north of Scotland down to the western approaches to the English Channel, a fact reflected in the records, which list fish from Cape Wrath at the top of Scotland down to Falmouth in Cornwall.

They also list Roker near Sunderland on the North Sea coast, which is supposedly not the best area to be thinking greater forkbeard. Ironically, that encounter I had which I mentioned earlier came from just down the coast from Roker at Hartlepool on board a trawler working quite close in to the shore.

#### TADPOLE FISH Raniceps raninus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

The tadpole fish, or lesser forkbeard as this fish is also known, looks like a cross between a greater forkbeard and a rockling. The head, eye, and mouth, are comparatively large, while the rest of the fish from the gill cover back is very typically rockling-like, being elongate with a minute barely detectable first dorsal fin, in this case reduced to a single ray, followed by a long fairly uniform second dorsal fin reaching almost to the tail, with not quite as long of an anal fin on the underside of the body.

Where it differs from the rocklings is in having no barbels or 'beards' on the upper lip. Just a single short chin barbel common to many members of the cod family. Colouration is a dirty blackish brown to reddish brown on the back and flanks, becoming lighter ventrally.

A small fish, said to be solitary but widespread, a description to some extent borne out by the statistics. Rod and line catches range from the Clyde sea lochs to Northern Ireland, and from south west Wales over to Tyne and Wear, none of which surprises me, as there is a lot of moderately deep lying rough ground in all those areas which wider catch records seem to suggest is favoured. Certainly around Tyne and Wear, where reports are not that infrequent.

Not a big fish, with specimens usually hovering just either side of the pound mark, but one with both a mouth and an appetite big enough to regularly put both fish and worm baits in the frame, the limiting factor here being locating them, which for a solitary animal is never going to be easy.

The North Sea is probably where the smart money should go. The suspicion is that they live in and around the foundations there, taking pretty much any hook bait that comes along, and in the company of fish like yarrell's blenny and viviparous blenny, always on LRF gear with a 6 pounds lbs flurocarbon trace and hooks in the size 12 to 18 range, despite the tadpole fishes cavernous mouth.

#### THREE BEARED ROCKLING Gaidropsarus vulgaris

**Bucket List status – result**

Rich pink to brick red base colouration patterned with a good scattering of large and small brown spots make the three bearded rockling a particularly eye catching and strikingly obvious fish. That alone should make identification a formality.

Having two barbels or 'beards' on top of the snout, plus a chin barbel, will add further weight to pinning the right name to it. Only the shore rockling has the same arrangement of barbels, but lacks the red colouration and markings.

In common with all the rocklings, this is an elongate fish with not much in the way of a first dorsal fin, which in this case starts off with one long ray followed by a series of very short rays.

The second dorsal fin is pretty uniform in height extending back almost to the tail, with a long anal fin on the underside. There are other helpful identifying features, but in light of what has been said, these should not be necessary.

Rocklings generally have comparatively large mouths, and equally large appetites when it comes to taking anglers baits. The main reason why more are not caught is probably down to numerical availability.

Three bearded rockling in particular would be more commonly caught if there were more of them about on account of their size potential, which can exceed three pounds, plus their willingness to take fish baits.

I've seen them caught around Anglesey, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and over in Ireland which is where my best specimen came from. We were boat fishing over some particularly heavy ground quite close in one evening on into the dark for conger out from Courtmacsherry. A specimen of around one and a half pounds managed to get my bait down, which is typical of the others I have seen caught elsewhere.

Heavy terrain of moderate depth seems to suit them best, anywhere from the Shetlands to the Channel Islands, east and west. Another of those fish which you can do little to improve your chances with, but which should hopefully come along when you're least expecting it, particularly if you scale things down to a 1/0 hook and small mackerel strip.

#### FOUR BEARDED ROCKLING Enchelyopus cimbrius

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Another easy fish to pin the right name on as this is the only rockling species to have four barbels or 'beards', with three on top of the snout, plus the obligatory chin barbel.

Typically elongate, as all the rocklings are, with not much in the way of a first dorsal fin, which in this case starts off with a very long first ray followed on by a series of very short rays ending just ahead of the long almost uniform second dorsal fin which reaches almost to the tail. Below this on the underside the anal fin is not quite so long.

This is an unmarked fish varying in colour according to habitat, ranging between sandy brown to almost black on the back and upper flanks, lightening along the lower flanks, and with a bluish tinge ventrally between the pelvic and anal fins.

More of a northerly deep water species than the other recorded rocklings, for which reason it should come as no surprise that the Inner Clyde and its deep water sea lochs probably see more than most other locations, though still with the potential for one to turn up anywhere in home waters.

I personally have never even seen one, and I don't particularly expect to either, though in rockling terms, it is potentially a big fish capable of weights of a pound and more, with a liking for what anglers tend to put on their hooks.

#### FIVE BEARDED ROCKLING Ciliata mustela

**Bucket List status – result**

The only rod caught rockling with five barbels or 'beards', having four on the upper lip or snout, plus the usual chin barbel. Also the commonest in angling terms, as well as being the most widespread. As with its close family members, a small fish with an elongate body.

Again, the first dorsal fin comprises a long first ray followed by a series of very much shorter rays, then a long continuous second dorsal fin with the anal fin below not quite so extensive.

Not that knowing the fin arrangements is of any real necessity as the five barbels should have long since confirmed its identity. Expect to see no patterning. Just a plain copper to greenish brown colouration giving way to off white below.

Said to be an extremely common little fish in the rocky coastal shallows throughout all home waters, which is probably true, but not fully reflected in angling terms due to its generally small size potential compared to the sizes of hooks and baits we tend to use.

Over the years I've caught literally dozens of the things, but because by and large these have been from the shore, either along the Lancashire coast or in the River Mersey, my observations might have a bit of an unfair bias to them.

I have had an odd one from the boat, which could be limited due to the generally larger hooks and baits I tend to use when I'm afloat. Most of my fish have been beach caught, specifically when using using small scratching rigs baited with lugworm in areas of sand or stones, and always over the winter months.

That may not be true of other parts of the country though. So again, something which should eventually come along in the normal course of events, particularly if hook and baits sizes are suitably small enough.

#### SHORE ROCKLING Gaidropsarus mediterraneus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

As with the other rocklings, an elongate fish with one long continuous anal fin and two dorsal fins, the first being a single ray followed by a series of very much shorter rays.

A fish with three barbels or 'beards', of which two are on the snout and the third on the chin, all of which means there is only one other fish, the three bearded rockling to potentially confuse it with, and only then with some difficulty.

The shore rockling is usually some shade of deep brown and is un-patterned, whereas the three bearded rockling is pink or red with lots of brown leopard like spots all over its body.

Personally, I have never seen one, with the photograph used here coming from shore match angler and species hunter Andy Copeland, who uses LRF along his native north east coast and elsewhere to come up with all manner of small unusual species, several of which have provided illustrations for this book.

Said to be a fish primarily of the southern and western coastal and inshore waters of England, Wales and Ireland, recorded specimens have come from locations as widely scattered as Loch Long on the Clyde, Milford Haven, and the Weymouth area, at least one of which has exceeded one and a half pounds.

### THE FLATFISHES

Before getting too deeply into the nitty gritty of the individual flatfish species, I feel it's important here to say a little bit first about general flatfish biology, which, as will become clear, has implications for catching them on rod and line too, because feeding habits, and therefore angling approach, very much revolve around the two distinct biological divisions brought about by their physical layout.

The eggs of flatfish and their early stage fry are pelagic. This means they float and live in the upper to surface water layers where the planktonic soup is richest, and therefore best able to support the early feeding of a great many species of fish. In that respect, certainly at this stage in their lives, flatfish and many round fish species are not that dissimilar.

They differ little in certain other respects too, particularly just after hatching, when flatfish fry are exactly the same as round fish fry, with round slender bodies, and their eyes situated either side of the head.

It's only after the yolk sac has been absorbed that physical differences begin to appear, starting with a progressive deepening of the body shape when the tail shows very early signs of forming, and both the dorsal and anal fin rays begin to develop, leading to very noticeable signs of flattening. The fin rays also grow longer to the extent of actually pushing up into a median fold of flesh which will eventually become the fringing fins.

As this happens, one of the eyes begins to migrate across the head to join the other, making the developing fry look more like the shape of fish it is about to become. Which eye, and to which side of the head, depends on the species and to which of the two groups, Bothidae or Pleuronectidae, it belongs.

This is the process known as metamorphosis, which using the plaice as an example, is usually completed inside of forty days, with a body length not greater than an inch.

Flatfishes such as plaice and turbot actually lie on a pre-elected side of their body, unlike skates and rays which have flattened down onto their stomachs, with their mouth and anus on the un-pigmented under-side.

True flatfishes are genetically pre-programmed to settle down on one or other side, though this can sometimes go wrong, with left to right handed ratios in some Pacific species being quoted as high as 50%. Either way, both the mouth and the anus are sited on the peripheral edge of the body.

Plaice for example lie on their left side, whereas the turbot lies on its right. Whichever side the eyes end up on should determine which side will be pigmented and which side will be white. The side of the body chosen to lie on, known as the 'blind side', also determines how the internal organs arrange themselves.

Pigmentation however isn't always confined to the eyed or top side, with some species more prone to varying degrees of blind side pigmentation than others. In our corner of the north Atlantic for example, it's not uncommon to see flounders either partially or even fully pigmented on the blind side. That said, they are rarely fully patterned on both sides.

When complete ambi-colouration occurs, there are often physical defects too, such as in a fourteen pound turbot we caught off Guernsey which had developed a fleshy hook between the eyes and the origin of the dorsal fin, and with its migrated eye not properly positioned next to its partner on top. Yet despite this, the fish had grown on well and appeared healthy enough.

Another colour variation suffered very occasionally by all species of flatfish is albinism, which is a genetic condition in which the entire body lacks pigmentation.

Going back to reverse handedness where individual fish settle out on the 'wrong side' of the body compared to the majority of their kin, from my experience in home waters, this is not too uncommon in flounders.

I've yet to come across anyone who has caught a reversed flounder on rod and line. But back in the 1980's I did several trips out of Fleetwood aboard the trawler 'Biddy' skippered by Ben Bee, who would trawl flounders to sell as pot bait from along the Lune slope when there was nothing much else about to catch.

I used to tag along to collect diseased flatfish of which there many for research purposes, and never a trip went by without at least half a dozed 'left handers' coming aboard.

It got to the point where I even started weighing and measuring them, and ultimately comparing the data against similar stats for 'right handers' which was interesting.

The results suggest that not only was being wrong sided of no apparent detriment to these flounders in terms of life expectancy, but the reversed fish were also typically heavier than the conforming specimens, and therefore from an evolutionary point of view, arguably better adapted.

I should however make the point that with such a small sample size it's impossible to make bold statements and back them up statistically, so my findings remain preliminary.

To summarise then, if you place any home waters flatfish you catch on a flat surface looking down on the fish with its mouth to your right, if the eyes are to the bottom of the mouth, the fish is lying on its right side and will be either a turbot, brill, topknot, or megrim, all of which are predominantly predators of small fish.

If however in the same orientation, the eyes are above the mouth, the fish is then lying on its left side and will be either a plaice, flounder, dab, lemon sole, witch, long rough dab, or a halibut, in which all but the halibut have a much wider diet of crustaceans, molluscs, worms, and occasionally some small fish.

Halibut as we all know are major predators of fish, which are taken either at the bottom or up in to open water.

Open water hunting such as by the halibut however takes a great deal of effort which needs to be compensated for nutritionally, because unlike round bodied fish with swim bladders, as part of their early stage metamorphosis, flatfish become negatively buoyant to facilitate life spent down on the seabed.

It takes effort and energy resource to lift yourself up clear of the bottom to feed, a lesson which shouldn't be lost on anglers when tying up flattie rigs.

The sole _Solea solea_ also lies on its left side, but belongs to a separate family altogether.

#### PLAICE Pleuronectes platessa

**Bucket List status – result**

As with the more familiar flounder and dab, one of those flatfishes to have settled out on the sea bed on the left side of the body, with the eyes, pigmentation, and patterning on the right.

A fish which literally everyone knows, even none anglers. Or so you might think, though on more than an odd occasion I've come across people with a dab, or more especially a flounder with a few orange flecks, wishfully thinking they have caught a plaice.

All you need do is brush the fish from tail to head with the finger tips, which if its feels rough against the grain all over means it's a dab, or run the finger along the base of either the dorsal fin, anal fin, or along the lateral line, which again, if it feels prickly, rules out the plaice and dab as it will then be a flounder.

A true plaice will have a series of distinct bony lumps extending from behind the eye to the lateral line, with the entire remainder of its upper body feeling perfectly smooth to the touch. And let's not forget those characteristic big red spots over their plain brown background.

Despite it's undoubted commercial importance, which usually goes hand in glove with numerical decline, amazingly, and against all the odds, plaice have to some extent been one of the success stories of recent times.

Usually when a highly marketable species enters into a spiral of decline, there is no going back. Only when the combined cost of diesel, boat up-keep, and man hours add up to more than the value of what's in the cod-end of the net do commercial species get any measure of respite, by which time it's often already too late. But apparently not so here.

This doesn't mean we won't still see year on year fluctuations, because that's part of the natural cycle for most fish species. Just so long as it is natural. So while the plaice might see a bit of a downward blip in one season or in one area, it's the bigger picture that counts.

In that regard, what I'm experiencing, coupled to what I'm hearing for the moment least, things are sounding tentatively positive in numerical terms, though there is still a long road ahead to get back anywhere close to the plaice scene of the late 1970's through to the mid 1980's when I first started fishing for them.

For me, a time of personal graduation to wearing the skippers wellies, when after years of tuition from Scots Davy Agnew and Neil McLean, plus a couple of seasons on the Fylde jumbo cod with future charter skipper Keith Philbin, I bought my own boat.

Around the same time I also began working with fellow small boat angler Mick Mairs from Preston who had a sixteen foot Pebble which he trailed up to Walney Island whenever the weather was fit. Mick and his dad would camp at the top of the shore near Biggar village and launch from the tiny ram-shackle slip onto the beach at Earnse Bay to fish either in and around the Duddon with its many shallow sandy banks, or down off Biggar over the rough for summer cod.

The plaice fishing there back then from May through to around September was exceptional. The slipway actually marked the approximate boundary between the rough and the sand, with a maze of drying banks and gullies stretching north right the way across to Haverigg and into the Duddon Estuary.

Our ritual was to arrive at low water and start digging blowlug, stopping only when we had at least three hundred worms, which was back breaking work. The boat would then go in, launched by car from the beach on a making tide, which was always a dodgy thing to do. We never came unstuck, but we certainly had our moments.

The person driving the car wouldn't actually stop at the waters edge. The trailer would be unhitched while the car was still inching along so that the wheels didn't sink, and would immediately go back to the top of the slip for safety, leaving the trailer to be hand-balled back using a tow ball launching trolley to make it into four wheel unit.

On the water, my boat partner Steve Lill would head up along the coast leaving me to layer the lug on three or four sheets of newspaper, maybe twenty at a go. These were stacked on top of each other in a bucket, with any damaged worms separated off for immediate use. A great way of treating blowlug. It cools, shelters, and hardens them up, all at the same time.

We later tried using frozen blacklug left over from our winter cod campaign which also worked quite well. Not so much in terms of numbers of fish, but for some reason with the better fish.

On odd occasions we even tried twice frozen blacklug. Now that really did sort some of the better fish out. Probably because it was a bigger bait in the first place eliminating unwanted attention from small dabs and smaller plaice, giving the better fish more of a chance.

This is probably as good a point as any to make a very clear distinction between two contrasting approaches to catching plaice, depending on where it is in the country you live. The choices are drift fishing and anchoring, and the determining factor is how the plaice in any given location distribute themselves.

Where they are spread out widely over a large geographical area, then drift fishing is fine. But when they are clumped up in discrete pockets, anchoring is a much better approach. There are however other considerations, such as rate of drift and water clarity.

Up here in the north west, we find them both clumped up and in areas with a mix of boulders, mussel banks, and sand, which makes drift fishing with bottom trailing baits potentially problematic both in terms of sticking with the fish, and loosing tackle. So for us, anchor fishing it is.

Back then it was with a wire three boomed paternoster with droppers measured just to touch bottom, armed with 1/0 hooks, because plaice have quite small mouths. That's how it was in the 1970's, though I don't know why I'm apologising for the pats in light of the numbers of fish they caught.

Bearing in mind that we dug bait for the first couple of hours, had to launch and motor out, and by the top of the tide we would be scratching about for any bait scraps we could find, on one particular session we finished up with 530 flatties, the majority of which were plaice with dozens going between two and three pounds, which while that might not sound big, actually seeing them in the flesh, they are a fabulous fish by any standards.

Over time, we tried all sorts of other rigs. Long two hook traces with the lead attached directly to the bottom of the boom were the flavour of the day for a while, as were one up and two down scratching rigs, all of which caught plenty of fish. So long as the baits were on the bottom and the rig wasn't causing problems through self tangling, it both didn't and still doesn't matter that much.

Other considerations and observations carry far more weight, and one in particular which needed to be taken on-board was patience, because without it you could spend an entire trip looking for numbers of fish, little realising that they were already there at some of the earlier marks tried, if only you hadn't kept motoring away from them.

As in a chain reaction, early on, the first few plaice in the vicinity would start tugging at the baits, sending out feeding signals, which in turn would draw in a few more fish, until eventually they were everywhere. Plaice are very inquisitive fish and can't help themselves in that regard when something interesting is happening.

When the second wave moved in, the time between bites and associated activity decreased, with the knock on effect of drawing in yet more fish. And so it would go on until as the tide and the bait were petering out,. Plaice would be literally queuing up for their turn at getting caught.

I know it sounds fanciful, but that's the way it was. I was literally fed up with eating plaice. Obviously we didn't keep them all, but still we kept quite a few.

These days however I tend only to keep fish that are deeply hooked, releasing all lip hooked fish regardless of size, because plaice are greedy fish which with their small mouths can be difficult to disgorge. That way at least, the ones with the best survival potential are going back.

Nowadays the tendency is to fish with a single fine wire hook on a yard long flowing trace, making it maybe an extra foot or so longer if I fancy adding a short dropper and a second bait. In part that's in response to there being far less fish about since the demise of the Duddon days. It's been many years in fact since I last fished up there.

Plaice at most locations up here became very scarce for quite a long time, only making a real comeback over the past several years, so what the state of play is around my old haunts is something I can't comment on. Maybe I should go back and take a look.

What I can say is that like the thornback rays in our area which were similarly prolific, slipped into decline, then started creeping back, when they did return, for some unknown reason, it wasn't necessarily always to their old haunts, and the same has also happened up here with the plaice.

Why that should be is difficult to say, because unlike say the Skerries Bank off Dartmouth which can physically change slightly on an almost daily basis due to the tide, our marks are pretty stable.

Why the plaice should suddenly decide to switch from areas they had previously favoured to areas they had previously ignored is a difficult mystery to solve.

Morecambe always had them, and now they are better than ever there. Fleetwood too, though the marks out in the bay seem less productive, whereas the Wyre Channel and the lower bay in and around Heysham now fish exceptionally well.

Cleveleys is the enigma here. We always picked up odd ones close in from Bispham to Rossall, though in fairness, we were probably looking for other things at the time. Now, since their reappearance several years ago, there have been days when we've had fifty and more fish there.

Nothing like the standard we set all those years ago up around Walney Island. But those days are gone, and by any new standards, fifty Plaice is an excellent session, particularly from an area we didn't much see them in previously.

Contrasting with all of this is the drift fishing scene. But first a few more observations, which to an extent overlap drift fishing and anchoring. In particular I'd like to look at conditions above and below the surface.

People tend to judge conditions below the waves by what is affecting them personally as they fish above them. I've had early season plaice recently in some pretty grim conditions. Snow, biting easterly or northerly winds, and after having had to scrape the car windscreen to get to where I'm intending to fish from.

Currently I fish my earliest sessions out from Fleetwood in March and April, because besides the fish being there, on an ebbing tide as the mussel banks expose, in all but a very brisk northerly wind, it can still be fishable in a stiff breeze, protected by the banks which almost form a lagoon into which all fish in the area must drop back into as the tide recedes.

Obviously, prolonged warm or cold air conditions will eventually affect water temperatures, particularly where it's shallow. But not so much on a day to day basis. Much of what fish do is governed by a combination of gradual temperature change coupled to increasing or decreasing day length, the latter being detected by photo-receptors which in turn trigger hormonal changes such as the urge to spawn. So don't automatically be put off by poor weather on the day.

That said, there are occasions when conditions above the waves can have a very immediate and real effect on what happens below, and never was this better demonstrated with plaice than on a day I spent working on a feature for Sea Angler Magazine aboard Andy Bradbury's Fleetwood based 'Blue Mink'.

Though it was still very early in the season, the sun was shining, which plaice like, and there wasn't a breath of wind, which plaice don't like. In the mirror calm conditions, Andy said we would struggle, and we did with just a few flounders and dabs.

By the last hour, I'd given up and packed the camera gear away. Then suddenly from nowhere, the slightest of breezes popped up putting a tiny ripple on the water which had Andy rubbing his hands in anticipation of a last minute rescue. In that last hour, more than thirty plaice hit the deck.

The other area of cross-over or otherwise, depending on your opinion, because for me the jury is still out, is bling. I said earlier that plaice are inquisitive fish, and so they are. So anything you can do to stimulate or exploit this can only be a good thing.

I remember drift fishing the Causeway Bank off Portrush in Northern Ireland, plus another geographically large plaice holding area suitable for drift fishing out from nearby Portballintrae, where bling and attractors were very much the order of the day.

The locals who fished the area regularly, and who you should always keep an eye for ideas, favoured a large wobbling spoon like the ABU Rauto with a short hook length of maybe six inches or so, loaded with various combinations of coloured beads.

In addition to that, their ragworm baits would also be tipped off with a tiny sliver of mackerel belly, as much for its visual effect acting as a flag as its scent or taste. You could still catch without the bling, but would definitely catch more with it. That however doesn't mean to say it will work every time and everywhere.

Off the Antrim coast we always fished on the drift, which would help work moving attractors. The same in not true of heavy metal bladed attractors at anchor, even in quite a lick of tide. Lighter plastic spoons may well stand a better chance, or coloured rotating spoons fixed to a stand-off boom of the type Knotless Tackle used to produce. Otherwise it's combinations of beads and sequins, of which there are many varieties and colours to choose from.

Different light conditions bring different success rates. Personally, I like black and green, which for my money will out-fish everything else, with the exception of the light absorbing and therefore luminous Gemini Genie in pale green with red spots.

I'm not sure about their effectiveness in coloured water, or even on some brighter or clearer water days when plain baits sometimes seem to catch as much.

The one thing you can most certainly say about bling though is that even if it doesn't attract, it usually doesn't detract either, so on balance it's probably better to have it just in case it could improve prospects on the day.

Another drift fishing tactic popular down on the south coast is plaice hopping, which is not that dissimilar to using the paternoster I was apologising for earlier, except that it has just the two booms acting as a spreader, and the wider the reach the better.

The monofilament droppers need be no more than twelve inches in length, with a light plastic spoon fixed mid point, either by a trapped bead or using a swivel. Bait it according to local preference, tipped off with either a tiny sliver of mackerel belly or squid, again to act as a flag.

At anchor, proving there isn't too much run, you can also cast this out as far down tide as possible, then lift and twitch is back slowly. Alternatively, fished on the drift, keep lifting it a few inches then dropping it back to the bottom taking in the slack line in the hope of catching a fishes eye. Brightly coloured lead lead weights can also be used to add to the spectacle.

Even from the shore bling comes in useful at times. Everything that has already been said applies just as much from the beach, the jetty, or deep water rock marks looking out on to sand as it does from the boat, and the deeper the water, the easier it is to make good use of attractors. Even the hopping technique of twitching the baits back in slowly.

All good tactics for numbers of fish. But if it's quality you want, and I'm thinking here of fish in the six pounds and upwards bracket, despite the fact that a few turn up each year off Bognor, Weymouth, and out over the Skerries, then really you are better looking at areas where commercial fishing pressure is at it lowest.

That's what happened when Harry Gardiner took the first ever double figure home waters plaice from Longa Sound near Gairloch up in the Scottish Highlands back in 1974.

Associated audio interview numbers: 91.

#### DAB Limanda limanda

**Bucket List status – result**

Like the plaice and flounder which it superficially resembles, the dab lays on the seabed on the left side of its body with its eyes and pigmentation on the right. By far the commonest home waters flatfish, and by far the easiest species to identify.

Simply rub the finger tips from tail to head against the grain of the scales and it will feel rough over every bit of its upper surface.

No bony knobs from the back of the eyes to the lateral line or rough prickles at the base of the dorsal and anal fins. Just a drab brown flatfish with a light scattering on faint orange flecks, and a strongly curved lateral line over its pectoral fin.

A fish with a distribution potentially taking in every corner of the British Isles where the ground in sandy through to mixed, from the shoreline to as far out to sea as anglers might care to venture.

Another one of boat anglings true bread and butter species. In fact, a genuine potential day saver at times, particularly on the charter fishing scene throughout west Wales right up into Cumbria, and at many locations elsewhere I suspect too. Remember, not everybody gets to fish for big fish all of the time.

There are days in the winter for example out codding and it's just not happening, when rather than suffering a blank or simply giving up, as good sea conditions are generally limited and therefore not to be wasted, I'll tie on a wire two boomed spreader or three boom paternoster armed with size one hooks, cut the blacklug up into portions, and happily spend a few hours pulling out dabs which can always be relied upon off Cleveleys and Rossall, despite the fact that this is largely a mixed to heavy ground area.

Maybe there are patches of sand there too, though judging by the numbers of dabs which we pick up pretty much everywhere in the area, I get the feeling that the ground doesn't have to be especially clean.

We also deliberately devote time to them over the winter months on the smaller tides when fishing the Mersey as the tide slackens off and the cod temporarily drop off the radar. Small baits, paternosters, and two down with one up scratching rigs get a couple of hours to earn their keep before switching back to the big baits and bolt pennel rigs as the new tide picks up

Just two examples of putting the reliability of the dab to good use. Love them or feeling indifferent on the subject, probably more so for charter boat skippers than anglers, life would become very much harder were they to disappear, which despite them now starting to turn up on the fish stalls of super-markets such as Morrison's, probably isn't likely to happen in the short term at least, as they are, so far as I can tell, not a widespread commercially targeted fish, and we all should be thankful for that.

When we used to fish for plaice off Walney Island with fresh blowlug, you could virtually guarantee that a good sprinkling of dabs would also put in a show. Not as greedy as plaice in swallowing the hooks, and easier to disgorge, most would go back.

Another point where they differ from plaice is the way they react to being hooked. Plaice always seem to come to the boat coloured side up, diving or trying to stay as deep as they can until you lift them from the water.

Despite my singing their praises, dabs unfortunately seem to give up the moment they feel the hook, hitting surface well away from the boat and often white side up. But still I love 'em.

We even pick up a few on tiny shrimp rigs during the summer when the lead touches bottom while feathering for mackerel. Add bait to the hooks and they become a much more available prospect, even willing to stray up off the bottom a short way.

Last winter I was given a new design of scratching rig for dabs and whiting to try out on the Mersey by 'Jensen II' skipper Tony Parry. One which allows you to adapt to changing conditions and the changing moods of the fish.

It's a forty two inch length of one hundred pound bs monofilament, with a swivel at one end, a Gemini Genie Bent Link G3002/2 clip at the other, and three further link clips at fourteen inch intervals trapped by micro beads either side stopped by a mono crimp.

By doing this you can then clip on the twelve inch long hook lengths which have an attachment swivel, plus the lead, in any number of combinations ranging from three up to three down, and all variations in between. You can even vary the droppers with different hook sizes and bling combinations without having to tie on a new trace every time you want something different. Simple, but very effective.

One other tactical difference between dabs and plaice is that dabs are much better approached from a boat fishing at anchor. They will take slow moving baits, and can be taken by a technique I've already gone into detail with for the plaice known as plaice hopping, but could just as easily be dab hopping if it works for them, which to an extent it does. But I personally would back myself for a better session if the baits were static on the bottom.

As for the addition of bling, again, for me at least, the jury is out. Some days snoods festooned with beads and sequins seem to score best, while on other days they don't. Or is it just that the people catching most fish on those occasions and under the prevailing circumstance would have done so regardless either way. Who can say.

If I happen to have beads and sequins on a rig I pick out for dabbing, then there they stay. If I haven't, who cares. As I've said elsewhere, in some ways it pays always to add bling to flattie rigs, because even when it doesn't attract, it never seems to detract either, so better to have some there just in case it does turn out to be a bling day.

The only other point I would make with regard to having success with dabs, is to try them on tiny mackerel belly strips. Start with it on just one hook, because on some occasions they seem less interested than on others. But if it is what they want on the day, they can really go for it big time.

Old manky bait too, including fork chopped blowlug or damaged worms that are on the turn can also catch well. So not the fussiest of feeders, which can be a God send, certainly on the charter fishing scene.

Turning to the shore now, again, they can be part of the staple diet, depending of course on where it is you fish. From the beach working out over clean ground it's going to be simple dropper rigs. Piers, harbour walls, and deep water rock marks allow tactics a bit more akin to the boat such as scratching rigs, bling, and slowly twitching the baits back in to give them movement.

As I've said, I don't mind catching dabs from the boat when the going is slow for other stuff, but from the shore, and the beach in particular, I will positively target them with 1/0 fine wire hooks, worms baits, and a tiny sliver of squid or mackerel for that extra bit of taste, and to help stop small fish ragging away and dislodging soft worm baits.

As with the boats, expect fish in the six to twelve ounce range, with anything bigger coming along as a bonus. But you certainly wouldn't expect one particular dab that a friend of mine Ken Robinson hauled in while fishing a night session from his local beach at Blythe. A fish which turned the scales to a staggering two pounds seven ounces. Unfortunately, that was back in the days of black and white photography. But what a fish.

#### FLOUNDER Platichthys flesus

**Bucket List status – result**

As widespread, obliging, and easy to pin the correct name on as either of its two close relatives the plaice and the dab, flounder identification is as simple as touching the fish with the finger tips along the base of the dorsal fin, anal fin, and along the lateral line between the tail and the gill cover.

If when you brush it from tail to head you detect a prickly feel along those areas and nowhere else, then it's a flounder. Dabs feel rough all over when rubbed from tail to head, whereas plaice feel smooth all over except for a series of visible bony bumps running from the back of the eyes to the edge of the gill cover.

Colour-wise, flounder can be far more variable than the other two species, ranging from light through to dark brown and even greenish brown, with a scattering of small faint orange flecks. Fortunately, the lines of prickles along the base of the fins on their own are enough to be certain without the colour and markings.

If you still need something extra to clinch the identification, simply turn the fish over and look at its underside, which will be a dull opaque white, unlike that of the other two flatfish species which though also white, give the impression that you can see a little way in beyond the skin. A fish which lays on the left side of its body with its eyes and markings on the right.

If dabs are one of boat anglings bread and butter species, then surely the same must be true of the flounder on the shore angling scene. I regularly make a very concerted effort to catch flounders from the shore over the late autumn and winter months, which in my book only adds to their value.

A good, obliging, reliable fall back for when everything else has already been taken off the shelf. Day's when it's blowing a gale and not only can you not get the boat out, but you can hardly stand up on the beach either let alone hope to fish it. Then it's time to be heading up into an estuary near you looking for shelter and a species you can invariably rely upon to pull your string.

That's what I tend to use flounder fishing for. So reliable is it in fact that on days when all the odds are stacked against you even getting a result there, it's often still possible to snatch victory from the jaws of seemingly certain defeat, which for me has always meant a run up to Arnside on the River Kent estuary in Cumbria, which I'm going to use here as my representative model on estuary flounder fishing from the shore.

At some venues around the country it possibly might matter whether you fish the ebb or the flood tide. At Arnside that doesn't seem to be the case. So long as the tide isn't too big or the flow from the river feeding the estuary too great, the prospects are usually good.

Personally, I prefer the low water period when the mud banks dry out forcing the water into its most confined state. This also concentrates whatever fish there are available into the smallest possible area, which in theory at least should help make them more catchable.

What I don't like about low water there is the threat of quick sands, which are a very real danger at Arnside, particularly when the tide starts to make, which at the bigger end of the cycle comes in as a tidal bore.

You wouldn't want to get stuck thigh deep in the mud under those circumstances. I've seen it happen, for which reason I always stick to those parts of the estuary with patches of stones protruding from the mud to be assured of some firm ground.

To make the point about reliability here, I'd like to quote a couple of stand-out visits, which in their different ways, on paper at least, were doomed to disaster, yet still came up trumps.

The first was a session which really was a bit too late in the year to be fishing for flounders, but which due to circumstances, Charlie Pitchers and I decided to do anyway, mainly because there was absolutely nothing else on offer other than staying at home.

It was January, by which time mature flounders often have things on their mind other than food as they start to make their way out of the estuaries to their offshore spring spawning areas. So if only for that reason we weren't expecting much, in addition to which, in the build up to the trip, there had been a lot of snow followed by an even bigger dose of rain.

Again, not exactly the best estuary flounder ingredients on either count. A sudden slug of cold snow melt is never good for anything. Having that happen in near flood conditions will usually only exacerbate a potentially already poor situation.

I remember us reaching Milnthorpe where we turn to follow the river to Arnside village and seeing the water bank high flooding over into the surrounding fields. So not only was it extra cold, but salinity levels in the estuary would also be well down.

Freshwater anglers fishing worm baits for chub or whatever many miles inland often catch small flounders, so obviously, they can tolerate not only low salinity, but no salinity.

What they can't do is adjust their physiology quickly to adapt and be in a position to cope with sudden change, and as such, when you get a bank high slug of freshwater coming down, estuarine fish have to fall back downstream to a salinity concentration they can deal with, which if it happens in January, could just be enough to push them right out with no chance of a return until the back end months come around again.

So it's late in the season, we've got snow melt in the river, and it's bank high. Why waste any more diesel completing the journey. A question we most certainly asked ourselves that day.

Having travelled so far, and with the village just a few miles down the road, plus nothing better to do, we carried on anyway, and finished up having one of the best flounder sessions I can remember in a long while with thirty one big fat fish. Explain that one away.

Running that visit a close second was one icy Sunday when Graeme Pullen was due up at my place early afternoon for a non angling related visit, but because he couldn't sleep the night before, he had got up extra early and was at my door around 9 am with all his video gear in the car, asking if we might be able to squeeze in a spot of flounder fishing for his Totally Awesome Fishing show.

The only problem was that the tides were big, plus we would be fishing it down at peak flow, which made Arnside not exactly the number one venue on the list. So I phoned Charlie who I'd shared quite a good Arnside flounder session with on the smaller tides the previous week, and despite the odds being stacked against, as Graeme had come so far, reluctantly we decided to give a go.

Tide size aside, conditions looked good. A fine bright day with nothing in the way of rain over the previous few days. On the other hand, the water was screaming though washing our grip leads back into the margins before they even had half a chance of digging in.

In a nutshell, it looked un-fishable. So having mentally given up, I then wandered off downstream where I found a little bay which was being by-passed by the main flow, forming a sort of branch-off lagoon.

I could see the flow skirting past maybe fifty yards off, so I flicked my two dropper rig out to the edge of the run, and bingo, had a small fish within minutes. I immediately got on the phone to Charlie and Graeme who joined me a short time later.

Obviously, not wanting to tough it out in the main flow, the flounders had tucked themselves into this slack eddy in their hundreds, which as with the example of the low water channels, was having a concentrating effect which we were then able to tap in to. We only had a couple of hours at best to get a result and get Graeme back for a bite to eat and out on the road again heading for Hampshire.

That short spell brought in well over twenty big fat flounders, often two at a time, and in Charlie's case because he had a three hook dropper rig on, occasionally three at a time, all falling to frozen blacklug tipped off with squid which was the only bait we could muster due to the extreme short notice of the trip.

Needless to say, Graeme was ecstatic. As for Charlie and I, we were just relieved. A case this time of thinking where the fish might be holed up, looking for them, and finding them, unlike the previous example of analysing all the available evidence which suggested a disaster waiting to happen, only to have it all over turned for reasons as yet to be explained.

The general theory of snow melt, low salinity and too much run all still hold true. But sometimes you just have to go and try things anyway, and occasionally, the gamble can pay off.

Moving out of the estuaries onto the beaches now, flounders become less of a proposition as the freshwater influence ceases to be a factor. I don't think it's the freshwater per se so much as a particular beaches proximity to an estuary. Over in Ireland it's common place to catch flounders on the bass surf beaches, more so than it is over here.

Nothing changes in terms of tactics. It's still a case of dropper rigs with 1/0 to 2/0 hooks. Bait on the other hand is another matter altogether, with peeler crab the number one hook filler when the main spring and autumn moults are under-way. Frozen crab is also useful when for whatever reason live peelers are not available.

Crab if you have access to it is excellent. But so too are a number of other offerings, including white rag, red rag, and probably best of all, creeper rag or 'maddies' which are the tiny things found in heavy estuarine muds which you need half a dozen of just to fill a hook. These can be lethal where flounders are concerned.

Mackerel strip is also a bait which can have its day, for which reason it can pay to tip off worms baits with a tiny sliver, or even a piece of squid which serves the triple role of adding to the overall edible attraction of the bait, acting as a visual flag to grab a bit of extra attention, and helping keep worm baits in place, particularly when small fish unable to get the hook inside their mouth start pulling and tugging at them, ragging and ripping them from the hook.

Strange as it might sound, me being primarily a small boat angler, I rarely fish for flounders from the boat, and I just as rarely pick them up accidentally as a result. The only time I expect to see a few is when I'm fishing for early plaice inside the River Wyre estuary at Fleetwood. Otherwise, they are a rarity.

In other parts of the country, particularly where there are large natural harbours based on estuaries, small boat fishing for flounders is a much anticipated event. Never having trailed down to the south coast and tried it, I can only throw in what I've heard about or read on the topic.

Devon and Cornwall seem to be the front runners in all of this, with the Fowey and Teign right at the head of the list, both having produced flounders in excess of five pounds, and in the case of the Teign, also from the shore.

Back-end and winter is the time to be in there, drift fishing with a bottom trailing rig such as a six foot flowing trace to an attractor spoon ahead of maybe six inches of bling laden monofilament hook length.

Hooks obviously can be bigger where big fish are expected, but as with all aspects of fishing, the size of a fishes mouth or its overall body weight are not the only factors to consider.

Hooks also need to be suitable for, and proportionate to, the bait being used, which if its sandeel, need not be bigger that a standard J-pattern 2/0, whereas for crab, a wider gape is often a better proposition to load the stuff onto without masking the point.

You don't need to use bling or spoons, but catch statistics certainly suggest that these can help. I've even taken them on and had repeated follows right up to the boat using fast moving ragworm baited spinners aimed at thin lipped grey mullet in Christchurch Harbour on a number of occasions.

#### LEMON SOLE Microstomus kitt

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

As with the more familiar plaice, dab and flounder, a small and in this case often attractive looking fish which has settled out on the sea bed on the left side of its body with its eyes and pigmentation on the right side. Quite a readily recognisable fish too meaning that rod caught specimens do tend to get reported, which could be quite literally from anywhere in home waters at depths generally in excess of twenty fathoms.

Both the head and the mouth are noticeably small. Above the pectoral fin, the lateral line is strongly curved like that of the dab, but unlike the dab, which has a rough feel to its scales when rubbed from tail to head, lemon sole feel extremely smooth and slippery. A strikingly marked fish with a light brown base colour topped off by a collage of deeper brown, dull yellow, and even green blotches.

Small polychaete worms are its main prey, which it hunts in a very intriguing way. Divers report that on finding a patch of ground where tube worms have withdrawn their cases in response to being alarmed, the fish will raise itself up into an almost 'standing' position on its tail and wait. Then, as the worm re-emerges from the sand thinking the danger has past, it strikes, either sucking it from its tube, or biting off that bit which it has hold of.

Despite the rather misleading name, this fish isn't in any way related to the sole other than by being flat. It is in fact quite closely allied to the plaice which it resembles in general body shape rather than the true sole which is narrow and long. A fish which ichthyologist Alwyne Wheeler in his book 'The Fishes of the British Isles and North-West Europe' describes as not taking angler's baits.

In this instance, that is most definitely not the case, as both the record list and my own personal experience shows, as this is a fish I have actually witnessed caught by an angler many years ago on Loch Long. Granted, it won't be a regular occurrence. But not an impossible one either.

Limited catch stats could just as easily be due to the fact that out in the deeper water it prefers, small worm baits on tiny hooks are hardly the norm, so what might be a willing fish in theory, is actually being restricted by angling practise.

On the plus side, most of those that do take a bait tend to be of good size, which for a fish of such high commercial value and renowned eating qualities is always a bonus.

#### WITCH Glytocephalus cynoglossus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A long narrow bodied fish, probably nearer to the basic shape of a dover sole than it is to that of the lemon sole to which it's related, but with a 'proper flatfish' head and a centrally placed very small mouth. The eyes, like those of the plaice and flounder are located on the right side of the body, are noticeably large to enhance vision in the darker depths the witch normally favours. The lateral line is virtually straight.

Colouration is a rather drab greyish brown with the scales having a dry roughish feel when brushed against the grain tail to head. The end of the pectoral fin on the fishes upper side is darker than the rest of the fin. However, it's most striking identification feature, which can readily be seen on close examination, is a series of small cavities on the underside of the head.

What limited experience I have of this species comes from commercially caught specimens taken off Hartlepool where we had a couple come aboard. That area of the North Sea supposedly marks the southerly extent of its distribution over on that side of the country.

All of Scotland, the west coast of Ireland, and the extreme south west of Britain make up the remainder of its regular range, usually well out beyond angling reach.

In his book 'The Fishes of the British Isles and North-West Europe' ichthyologist and one time advisor to the British Record Fish Committee the late Alwyne Wheeler, describes the witch as a species that is not caught on rod and line.

He also uses this description for the lemon sole, which I know from personal experience can be caught. But for the witch, my money is on him being right. The dilemma then comes from the fact that the very same record fish committee he advised and served for so long actually lists a rod caught inclusion for a witch taken from the shore at Colwyn Bay in 1967.

It could well be that there have been others, providing substance to the old saying that 'stranger things happen at sea'. But they don't get much stranger than that one, taken from of all places the beach.

We're talking here of an offshore fish that is so specialized in its feeding that it's tiny mouth has become adapted for almost exclusively sucking small polychaete worms from their burrows and for nipping off the ends of those which it can't dislodge.

To further complicate things, witch are quite a sparse fish even out in the deeper water where they are said to be most commonly found, if common be the right word, with depths of thirty to a hundred and fifty fathoms, and occasionally in excess of eight hundred fathoms over muddy sand being favoured.

So to have one take a baited hook, and to do it from the shore in an area not exactly noted for having them, while not impossible, is a bit of a stretch to say the least. Not a name then I expect myself or anyone else to be putting a tick against any time soon.

#### HALIBUT Hippoglossus hippoglossus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Halibut resemble a flounder, but on a grandiose scale. Colouration on the pigmented side is also flounder like, comprising shades of deep olive green to greenish brown with the underside pearly white. That however is where any flounder similarities end.

Halibut have a huge mouth extending back to at least the centre of the nearest eye. They also have a strongly curved lateral line just above the pectoral fin, and a concave free edge to the tail.

Size alone will as likely as not rule out mis-identification, unless of course a very small specimen is caught. They are after-all the largest flatfish in the world, with potential weights in excess of six hundred pounds.

Seasoned big fish hunters however regard halibut of three hundred pounds as the absolute limit of physical capability for even the strongest angler, which says much for the fighting potential of this giant predator.

If only they enjoyed a more widespread concentrated distribution. Contrary to what some anglers think, they are thankfully not exclusively an Arctic fish. But they are a northerly species, with the top half of the home waters scene being blessed with a few.

I am fortunate enough, though unfortunately also old enough as a result, to remember the birth of halibut fishing on rod and line and the subsequent boom in interest this generated, leading to a spate of catches around the north of Scotland.

As I recall, the first one was taken accidentally back in the 1960's out from Wick, prompting a few early pioneers to start deliberately fishing for them with large pirks from Scrabster and Thurso in the Pentland Firth, and more especially, around the southern islands of the Orkney's, in particular Hoy just across the way.

A wild unforgiving area even in good conditions. But generous in other ways, as a steady, though not numerically significant stream of big halibut started to reward those willing to put the effort in.

Flipping all of that on its head, the largest halibut I ever saw caught was a 167 pounder which picked up a static bait intended for common skate up around Dury Voe in Shetland back in 1974. And while a few more specimens continued to make the news, it wasn't long after that when things started to go quiet and eventually slip off the radar.

The odd one still gets caught in Scottish waters, though invariably by accident rather than intention. The last one I heard of was in 1997. A fish of a hundred and eighty pounds taken from the tide race off the Point of Stoer up on the west coast.

Not every halibut however gets caught in Scotland, and nor do they all date back to the 1990's and beyond.

I've mentioned already that I have spent time out from Hartlepool aboard the fly shooter 'Adaptable', which involved the towing of a net attached to very long warps with are formed into big arcs by sailing in a huge circle. The basic idea is that as the boat sails away from the net in the middle of the circle, the warps are drawn closer together herding the fish up into a lane which the net then drags along sweeping them all up.

We were out there catching amongst other things greater forkbeards, witches, and long rough dabs, and on a couple of hauls, small halibut also found themselves on the deck. So I decided to follow this up, and it turns out that the commercial boats pick them up fairly regularly within just a few miles of the shore all through the summer, with the angling boats also seeing an odd one or two while lure fishing for cod.

The story however doesn't end there, because in 2014 I went over to Whitby to do a feature for Sea Angler Magazine aboard Paul Kilpatrick's 'Sea Otter 2', and Paul provided me with a picture of a halibut one of his clients, Barry Kemper, had boated just a few weeks earlier, which tipped the scales at fifty three pounds, and was far from being the first either Paul or Whitby had seen in recent years.

In fact, they now actually expect to catch a few each year. Not to the point where you would go out and deliberately target them, otherwise you might be there trying all season. But there are most definitely things which can be done to improve the chances of contacting one.

I spent some time chatting to Paul on the subject, and even made a short audio recording with him where the halibut potential was brought up. It seems that while a few are expected and caught every year, more still are hooked and lost by anglers not expecting such a hard running powerful encounter.

I say this, because as Paul commented, unless the reel drag is set to protect the line from the kind of hit a halibut is likely to deliver, you won't have time to adjust it in play, and the thing will usually be gone along with the lure. Even with the small to middle range fish. So in the months between April and June, which is when most of the North Sea halibut seem to be hooked up, it pays to be aware of this fact.

They are there all summer, but are less likely to be picked up from around June onwards, because as the season progresses and the herring are about in good numbers, that extra abundance of natural food tends to reduce the chances of an encounter, besides which, with the shads working at or close to the bottom for cod, and the herring swimming further up in the water column, the chances of halibut and shad coming across each other are also appreciably less.

I've not caught halibut in home waters. But I do have a tick against it's name from a visit to Kappangen on Lyngen Fjord in northern Norway. As a group, we picked up a few to maybe twelve pounds, mainly on shads or similar lures, and always well up off the bottom. But in all honesty, we weren't deliberately fishing for them.

Had we wanted halibut, I dare say we could have had more, and had we really wanted to dedicate ourselves to the species, then there are better venues than Lyngen both for numbers and for size.

For my part, I stuck with the cod on the pirks as I wanted a fifty pounder, which unfortunately I didn't get. On the last afternoon however, Dave Lewis, myself and Dave Devine took one of the aluminium self-drive boats out and detoured in to a small side loch, call it what you will, where in previous years Dave Lewis had picked up small halibut on bait. So as I wanted that bucket list tick, that's what we did, and it was objective achieved on the very first drift.

Okay, so it wasn't much better than a big flounder, but I make no apology for that. For me the pressure is now off. Maybe one day I will develop full blown halibut fever, and if I do, Norway will most definitely be at the top of my list, though I've also seen them in southern Iceland. But don't rule out Whitby. It's very much nearer, more accessible, and from what I've seen, very underrated too.

Associated audio interview numbers: 181.

#### LONG ROUGH DAB Hippoglossoides platessoides

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A small fish which lies on the left side of its body and therefore has its eyes and pigmentation on the right hand side. The body outline is proportionately long and narrow, with a reasonably straight lateral line which just curves up slightly above the pectoral fin on a background colouration which can vary between greyish and reddish brown without patterning.

As with the true dab, the skin feels dry and rough to the touch when brushed from tail to head. But don't be misled by the name implication here. Dab sized it may be, but dab like it most certainly isn't. The clue here is in the generic part of its scientific name which is _Hippoglossoides,_ placing it as a close relative of the halibut, a fact visually confirmed by the size of the mouth and the eyes in comparison to the rest of the body.

An active predator, albeit on a down sized scale of small fish and quite a wide range of bottom invertebrates out in moderately deep water, mainly around the northern half of the country, and in particular Scottish waters from where it has been recorded on rod and line from both the boat and the shore. Particularly in and around the Clyde with its deep water sea lochs and at one time regular angling attention.

No doubt it could quite readily be caught elsewhere, and very probably is on occasions, but is then over-looked on account of its small size.

A fish I feel sure is fairly readily catchable on small baits and hooks, given the appropriate deliberate effort and knowledge of how to identify it should one come along. I've seen them in reasonable numbers on a few occasions while commercial fishing well within sight of land out from Hartlepool.

#### TURBOT Scophthalmus maximus

**Bucket List status – result**

Turbot lie on the right side of their body with their eyes and pigmentation on their left side. If the head end is pointing to your right when viewed from above, the eyes of the fish will be below the turbots very large mouth, which hints at its life-style as an ambush predator of small fish.

Often a beautifully marked fish with a blend of small darker spots over a sandy background, extending even onto the eyes and the tail. This, coupled to the dorsal fin extending right around to the head to help break up the body outline, offers excellent camouflage over sand and shell grit. The body is extremely broad giving a well-rounded outline.

Turbot lack scales as such, these having become fused to form small hard wart-like tubercles over the upper surface which are smaller and more tightly packed on the gill covers and other parts of the head.

A rub of the hand across the back feeling for these tubercles will soon determine whether a fish is a turbot or not, these being a key feature that the similar looking brill lacks. The lateral line is also very strongly curved over the pectoral fin.

Colouration is often adapted to suit a particular patch of sea bed. Said to be a shallow water fish found where there is sand, shell grit, and even light gravel pretty much all around the British Isles, with the North Sea in particular quoted as a fertile area for commercial fishing at least.

Individually, the odd turbot could conceivably turn up anywhere. Collectively, offshore banks and sand-waves both attract and concentrate them in better numbers, especially if there is a good resident population of sandeels on which to feed.

The first time I ever laid eyes on a turbot was while fishing out on Loch Ryan with 'Mr. Cool', the late great Davy Agnew from nearby Kirkcolm. Nothing flustered him. Nothing that was until this particular day.

We were catching plenty of thornbacks rays at the time, and if I'm honest, I suspect that's what he thought was coming up. Then it hit the surface. All fourteen and a half pounds of it. A beautiful big Turbot.

Cool was the first thing to go out of the window. In the end, having already fluffed it once with the gaff, Davy next hit his own line and parted it.

Not realising it's potential to make a bid for freedom, the fish was momentarily dazed, just for long enough to give Davy the chance to gaff it at the third attempt and lift it in to the boat, after which he was beaming from ear to ear.

A fabulous fish, particularly for me as a newcomer to boat fishing. But more importantly, that whole episode drove home just how important that fish was to Davy, a hardened super cool veteran, after which I decided that I had to have one for myself, which eventually I did. But it sure as hell was a long time in coming.

I would have to wait probably a good ten years in fact, in part because even in those days, turbot were not nearly so common as they once were. Also because if you really want to catch one, as with any fish, you have to go to where they are most abundant, and by that time I was heavily into fishing my home patch from a dinghy I'd bought which was a GRP version of Davy's clinker MacKay Viking. Cod and tope were the only show in town at that particular time. But even then, turbot were not that far away.

Restrictions on travelling distances over the water due to engine size back then were a real limiting factor. We had a 9.9 hp Johnson on the transom, but faster boats such as the CJR with engines up to thirty hp were just starting to appear, allowing people the freedom to explore more widely.

This was the late 1970's on into the early 1980's. A time when Fleetwood was a bustling charter port famous for the quality of its thornback ray fishing, particularly on the smaller tides in and around Morecambe Bay, which can be a hard place to fish when the tides gets up around nine metres and beyond.

One mark in particular drew quite a bit of attention. Not only from the Fleetwood charter fleet and Fylde Coast dinghies journeying across, but also from the Barrow boats coming out of the Walney Channel, plus a few dinghies from Morecambe, that being the ground around a particular buoy known as Lightening Knoll.

This was an excellent thornback holding area which would be fished at anchor with mackerel or squid on flowing traces. Not exactly the tactic most likely to catch turbot. None the less, over the years, quite a number of bonus turbot to over fifteen pounds were accidentally picked up, and always in that one particular area.

With hind-sight, you can't help but wonder what might have been achieved had anyone bothered to drift fish for them. It's also worth noting that if the you read the brill account below, the trawling line I refer to in that which produced a turbot and some of the biggest brill I have ever seen, passed right along-side Lightening Knoll. Amazingly a surprise 13½ pound turbot was also taken from the now collapsed and sadly no longer with us Blackpool North Pier jetty.

I had my first decent sized turbot fishing the offshore banks out from Guernsey. Over the years I've observed that some of the banks in that area appear to be better suited either to flatfish or to bass than others. I'm not sure why that is, but the skippers concerned seemed to know what to expect and where, obviously based on a lifetime of personal experience.

Some days bass would dominate, while on others, presumably either different banks or particular regions of the same bank, big flatties would be the order of the day. Mixed in amongst these occasionally would be an odd brill. But you couldn't really predict or set your stall out for them, which you could do more so with the turbot.

The thing is that when you're fishing for any one of big three main bank targets – bass, turbot or brill, tactically speaking, you're fishing for any and all of them.

A long flowing trace of twelve to twenty feet armed with a 4/0 hook baited with a live sandeel and weighted by a flat circular watch lead to help prevent it wandering laterally is the way to go about it, though I recall one trip where the skipper said that anyone specifically wanting turbot should fish either a dead sandeel or a long thin strip of mackerel belly.

Maybe it's because turbot have more chance of missing a live sandeel than the faster moving bass, I don't know, though that's what they're on the banks to feed on in the first place.

Whatever the reason, it did actually produce more turbot, particularly on top of the bank where there would be scour holes and gullies ripped out by the tide where a big flattie could tuck down into out of the run waiting for a meal to be delivered over head.

In complete contrast to this is a session I fished off the coast of South Wales. The inshore banks created by a combination of local geography and tide dotted along the run between Cardiff and possibly Milford Haven, certainly Worms Head, used to be loaded with small turbot up to maybe two or three pounds.

In fact, it was while fishing out from Tenby with of all people Clive Gammon that I caught my first ever turbot. As ever in these parts, a small fish of maybe three pounds at best which had somehow managed to gorge down a tope bait.

Nobody it seems ever bothered with camera's back then. Not even the greats like Gammon, who would have missed out on numerous golden opportunities. So unfortunately, there is no evidence of that day. But the static bait theme fits in very nicely with a string of other experiences fishing that same general area.

I used to launch my own boat from the beach at Port Eynon to fish for plaice, but would always either tip the worm baits off with a small strip of mackerel, or dispense with the worm altogether on one hook, and again, small turbot were not that uncommon.

My best memory of the area however is of a weekend spent fishing out of Oxwich next door which I've covered in full detail when looking at small eyed ray fishing previously.

In a nutshell, Swansea charter skipper Paul Radford gave us a chart plus some lat-long readings (GPS wasn't available in those days) for the top of the Helwick Bank as a starting point to explore from. Thinking rays, we put the anchor down.

I was already tackled up with a short flowing trace, and before the other two had even got a line in the water, I'd had two turbot and a small eyed ray out, which by the end of the day had collectively risen to twenty six turbot and sixty four small eyes. Nothing else. And from what I'm hearing, nothing much at all on these banks today.

Sticking with Wales, though further up to the north now, an odd one used to turn up when fishing for rays out from Aberystwyth and Aberdovey. I never managed it, but we heard accounts.

My next personal Welsh turbot encounter was while fishing out of 'Ron's place' tucked inside the southern entrance to the Menai Strait when he was still alive. We had some great trips there with Ron putting us in from his private slip with his battered old tractor.

Always it was straight out to the bar which was formed by suspended particulate material suddenly settling out as The Strait widens and looses its ferocity in upper Caernarfon Bay. A dodgy place to be at times, particular once you've crossed the bar itself and a south westerly breeze gets up.

Not exactly a bank in the precise definition of the word, but an area of clean ground with many of the angling related characteristics of a small bank.

Bass on the drift fishing live sandeel was usually our primary aim. Unfortunately, these could be patchy and un-predictable at times, so it paid always to have a plan B, which on the day I'm thinking of here was to try for tope.

We had plenty of fresh mackerel onboard which we'd picked up further out in the bay, so we put the anchor down where the slope of the bar merged in to the bay itself. And to help things along, we decided to try a spot of 'bagging', which is a ground baiting technique we'd used for sharks over in Gambia some time earlier.

This involves tying a big lead to the end of your reel line, dropping it into a plastic super market bag, then tying a piece of line around the outside of the bag just above the lead to trap it in one corner. You then fill the bag with chopped up pieces of mackerel and lower it to the sea bed using water pressure on the drop to keep it folded around its contents.

Jigged up and down a few times at the bottom, the bag then inverts, placing its contents on the sea bed both for scent and to be slowly dispersed by the tide. Fish supposedly then follow the trail uptide to find your baits, which on this particular day included two very nice turbot I had in successive drops, both of which were full of mackerel chunks.

One final boat trip I'd like to mention briefly is a week long stay on Lundy Island which myself and Graeme Pullen did some years ago. I don't think it's possible to fish there these days, but back then the Landmark Trust were looking to exploit the fishing, and had myself and Graeme go over for a look.

Unfortunately, the weather was awful and the tide rips at either end of the island were wild. But we went out none the less when the islands launch was available, one day getting around the top corner to fish a small bank that had formed there.

Typically we were catching blonde and small eyed rays. Then I hooked something which felt both different and obviously quite a bit smaller which I jokingly announced was a turbot. In all honesty, I had no idea what was on the end. I was just kidding along.

So when a turbot of around five pounds hit the surface, you can imagine how impressed the others were at my abilities to identify fish by the way they reacted to being hooked.

Well, if they were willing to believe that then why not let them, though the truth of the matter is that it could just as easily have been anything. So there it is, my guilty secret exposed, or one of them at least.

The idea behind relating this particular selection of turbot encounters is to demonstrate the different ways in which they can be caught. But without doubt the best way is with ground coverage on the drift, particularly in areas where turbot are known to hang out in numbers.

More importantly however, with the exception of my first turbot out from Tenby, what these catches also very clearly demonstrate is that regardless of tactics, there is a common theme here linking in all the other venues, that being particulate accumulations dropping out of suspension in response to reduced tidal activity in areas where local geography temporarily accentuates tidal run.

In other words, banks made up from fine sand, coarse sand, shell grit, or even gravel. That is where turbot are most likely to be caught deliberately when fishing out in a boat.

From the shore it's slightly different. One thing anyone reading this book will very quickly become aware of, is that while I do shore fish and have caught some outstanding fish from dry land, it isn't my first choice activity by a long shot.

Most definitely, it's something I do out of necessity when conditions are not conducive to offshore fishing, or when I'm out with someone else who is a shore specialist, both to kindle my interest and to advise. So I'm not the best person to talk about shore fishing with any measure of authority, and certainly not shore fishing for turbot.

That said, I do have shore caught turbot experiences and observations to draw on which might be worth throwing into the pot. Shore venues I've seen turbot come from include the surf beaches of north Cornwall in the Newquay area and south Cornwall such as Whitsands Bay. Also over in Northern Ireland along Magilligan Strand, plus some of the surf bass beaches in the south and west of Ireland.

The linking theme from the shore obviously is surf beaches, along with the summer and autumn months. Moreover, open Atlantic influenced surf beaches if possible, as in the case certainly of the Newquay area where sandeels come right in close and bury themselves.

I also know for a fact that clean ground areas which can be reached from rock platforms, particularly along Cornwall and Devon's north coast can also turn up a few.

In all cases, certainly from my experience, these have tended to be small fish, generally around a pound or so going up to maybe three pounds maximum. Obviously, as with any fish species, bigger specimens do occasionally also put in a show,but not often.

Generally as their size increases, so too does the turbots tendency to move further offshore, with the biggest fish most likely to come from where the biggest concentrations of food can be found such as those offshore banks, though let's not forget the sand build ups around wrecks that have settled out over clean ground.

As an anchored boat starts to swing off a wreck when the tide picks up dragging conger baits alongside the iron work, that's when some of the biggest turbot of them all can end up getting caught.

#### BRILL Scophthalmus rhombus

**Bucket List status – result**

Brill settle out on the seabed on the right side of their body with their eyes and pigmentation on their left side. In other words, if the head end is on your right when looking from above, the eyes of the fish will be below the mouth. The same is true of the turbot which is really the only other fish with which brill might be confused.

Both have wide rounded body shapes, though that of the brill is noticeably less wide than the turbot, which is helpful if you have both at hand to compare, but pretty meaningless for just one isolated fish. No problem though, as nature comes to the rescue in other ways.

The upper surface of the turbot is covered in small, well-spaced, hard 'warts' known as tubercles. These may not be immediately picked up by the eye, but are readily detected by the hand. Brill have no such 'warts' and will feel completely smooth.

For completeness, the first few dorsal rays at the head end are partly free of their connecting membranes and branched, and there are no patterned markings on the tail.

Colouration is variable according to habitat, with anything from quite a drab brown to beautifully mottled brown and yellow with a scattering of small white flecks. Much of my experience is with the latter which can make them very pleasing fish to the eye.

Never a common fish, and nothing like as abundant as its close relative the turbot, which these days unfortunately is itself becoming something of rarity or specialist catch, brill and turbot fishing is identical in all but the final outcome.

Every brill I've either caught or seen caught has come on a day when we had turbot too. Never in isolation. Particularly around the Channel Islands where there are many offshore banks laden with sandeels, which turbot, brill and bass love in equal measure. But they won't be there hunting for them in equal measure, with bass the most abundant of the trio and brill the least.

All my personal brill encounters have been around Jersey, Guernsey and Aldernay, drifting the banks with a long flowing trace of maybe twelve feet of thirty pounds bs monofilament with a 4/0 hook, a live sandeel, and a watch lead to take it down. It doesn't have to be a watch lead, but there are some pretty compelling arguments as to which it should be.

For those unfamiliar with the watch lead, this is a circular lead like a polo mint with studs on it. The reason why it brings something to the bank fishing, whether it be for bass, turbot or brill, especially on a crowded charter boat, is that it helps prevent tangles. But to do so most effectively, it needs everyone to be using them.

Bank geography is the underlying problem here, with numerous slopes, scour holes, and gullies sculpted by the tide. Bomb leads are more subject to gravity than a watch lead and can roll sideways into other peoples gear. Watch leads can also move down a side slope, but do so much more slowly by virtue of lying flat on the bottom.

Whatever your ultimate lead choice, make sure it's big enough to keep the bait down, and avoid the round ball leads you might see some bank anglers using if you want to stay out of trouble.

And if you are not holding your rod all the time, then tether it to the rails or risk losing it, as the sudden weight of a fish stopping the trailing end gear in its tracks can only have one outcome, which I've witnessed on a number of occasions over the years.

The Channel Islands are probably the best populated home of the brill, but they are far from the only one. Anywhere that produces turbot, and there are a good many offshore banks around numerous charter boat locations throughout Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, not to mention dotted around the Isle of Wight, has the potential to throw up an odd brill, which while it might be done reasonably regularly, shouldn't be expected on a daily basis.

It might take several or even more trips to track one down, or you might get lucky and connect with one on your very first drop. Angling can be like that. Just keep the faith, which is to fish with the best approach and bait possible, which I've already outlined, and be prepared if necessary to invest the time.

But don't ever be surprised to hear of or to see brill caught in other ways that are not supposedly conducive to catching them, or from areas where they are not necessarily expected to be, such as on a static bait fished from a short trace at anchor out over fairly featureless shallow lying clean ground. It occasionally happens.

As a rough guide, what you do tend to find with brill is that the further north you travel the scarcer and smaller they seem to become. There is however one very glaring exception to this hypothesis, that being the British record standing at sixteen pounds caught way back in 1950 out from the Isle of Man.

Knowing the area with it's many banks and sand-waves I shouldn't be surprised. But I am surprised in a way, because apart from lots of sandeels, which you would think must attract larger predators, in my experience, these banks seem to attract little else.

Great as a one shop stop for feathering bait, but then neglected as that bait is taken back inshore to use for pollack. So something of an angling enigma at times.

Looking at the record lists, other venues that have produced boat caught brill include Northern Ireland's Causeway Coast which I've fished with long mackerel belly strips on the drift over the Causeway Bank out from Portrush for Turbot; Pembroke on the Welsh scene, and Girvan north of the border.

From the shore it's Guernsey again, so no surprise there; Holyhead, which has plenty of tide and a few bits of banks, plus Killintrinnan on Scotland's Mull of Galloway, which is a noted flatfish area, particularly for plaice all the way from Corsewall down through Dally Bay to Portpatrick. So again, not that surprising. What was surprising to me has been a couple of encounters with brill I've made on my local patch along Lancashire's Fylde Coast.

Not rod and line encounters unfortunately. I've only ever heard of one rod caught specimen up here, which given the very rough or flat featureless nature of the ground, that isn't surprising. But, as I said earlier, an odd one can turn up anywhere, which is what I've seen happen over the years when I've been push netting shrimps for bait.

Generally, small palm of your hand sized fish at best, but obviously with a bigger parent stock somewhere out there. And one day we 'kind of' found out where that somewhere was.

I was out aboard the Fleetwood trawler 'Biddy' collecting research specimens with Ben Bee who was catching flounders for pot bait, which while they barely covered the cost of the diesel, meant he didn't have to stay at home on his own.

Unfortunately, this particular day even that was hard going. So Ben decided to make a tow across from Lune Buoy to the south end of Walney, which when he hauled, dropped almost twenty nice brill between maybe five and ten pounds on the deck, plus a lone turbot.

To say that he was gob smacked would be no under-statement. The big unanswered question is, where on the transit line did those fish come from, which when you tow for between three and four hours you can never truly know.

So rod and line brill fishing is the same as turbot fishing, which while this is true, it can't be entirely true, as having two almost identical species living identical lifestyles at the same location is not allowed under the rules of evolution. Either there will be some difference, however small, or one will eventually out compete the other and displace it.

Obviously then, as we still have both species, there must be differences with some degree of overlap, which in angling terms seems to be deep water offshore banks with plenty of sandeels, and equally plenty of tide.

Away from the banks over more general ground, identifying just exactly what the attracting features are is another matter, because not that many brill are taken from open ground these days, commercial netters having presumably swept most of them up.

One stand out fact and difference is that brill appear to be more southerly and offshore in their distribution than turbot. Equally, it could also have something to do with substrate preference, with brill preferring finer particulates such as sand or mud, as opposed to turbot which are happier with coarse sand, shell grit, and even gravel, with the presence of rich pickings out over some banks sufficient to override any natural preferences.

On the other hand, it could just be that brill are nothing like as common as turbot, with all the aforementioned other factors also having some measure of a role to play. Even rarer are brill from the shore from where no one would should realistically think of targeting the species.

#### MEGRIM Lepidorhombus whiffiagonis

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Another of those flatfish to have settled out on the seabed on the right side of its body with the eyes and pigmentation on the left side. Again, with the megrim's head pointing to your right, the eyes will be below the mouth.

And what a size of mouth it is compared to the size of its owner, designed to make short work of any small fish that might happen to stray within range. Having large eyes also gives some clue to its deep water preference, where even then it prefers west facing open Atlantic coasts.

In shape it is nothing like as wide bodied as either the turbot or even the brill. In fact, the body is noticeably quite narrow and oval, with the dorsal fin almost reaching to the end of the snout. Colouration varies from yellowish to pale brown, with a scattering of indistinct small dark flecks.

In life the fish looks semi-transparent when held up and viewed against the light, but when dead, it can quickly appear scruffy looking as the fins soon become ragged and tattered and the scales are dislodged. None the less, still one of the finest eating fish in the sea.

Megrim are never going to be easy fish to catch, mainly on account of their life style as a highly predatory deep water species which doesn't often stray within angling range. Even if it did, given the way most people tend to fish over clean open ground, I'm not sure how much of a difference being a bit more available would make anyway.

The approach we use for turbot and brill over offshore banks of trailing a live sandeel or fish strip along the bottom on a long trace might help improve catch rates. But that isn't how we normally fish over deep lying open clean ground.

In a lot of instances, we tend not even to fish at the bottom at all as this is blue shark territory, which is why I like to get baits down there when waiting for a shark run to come along.

Megrim will take a mackerel strip trundling past the end of its nose, but are just as inclined, if not more so, to grab at a small pirk, jigged baited feathers, or even a small jigged shad, which in part explains their angling scarcity.

They are active predators of small fish. But really, it's the water depth being fished that is the main limiting factor here. Having even deeper water close by also helps improve the odds, all of which restricts the number of genuine opportunities available.

You occasionally hear of an odd one caught closer to shore, and even from the shore, such as from some of the deeper water rock marks. These however are the exception rather than the rule. Gairloch in western Scotland and Holyhead, both of which have deep water close by, have been known to throw up the odd one.

Like everyone else, my experiences with megrim, particularly on rod and line, are extremely limited. I remember us once getting one out off Northern Ireland's Causeway coast which very much fits the distributional criteria. Anglers also pick them up occasionally in deep water off the south and west coast of Ireland.

There are however places where Irish megrim can 'almost' be caught to order, such as to the seaward side of the island of Inishbofin off the Connemara coast, at Broad Haven to the north of Belmullet, and aboard 'Rosguill' out of Mulroy Bay near Downings, where Michael McVeigh's customers find quite a few.

The location where I personally have seen most, and I'm talking here of a couple of dozen or so in the same day, was while trawling within just a few miles of the Isles of Scilly where we also picked up a number of other deep water species including hake and boar fish, and not too far from that spot where on a different occasion we caught quite a few blue whiting on baited feathers.

So a proven deep water species area fitting all the criteria of depth within range over clean ground, with exceptionally deep open Atlantic water in the immediate vicinity.

#### COMMON TOPKNOT Zeugopterus punctatus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

As flatfishes go, the topknot is something of a misnomer. With a body shape which on the face of things looks best suited to clean ground, this particular flatfish species prefers to live amongst rocks and under boulders in shallow areas of permanent water where it feeds on small fishes and anything else it can catch.

Topknot may well reasonably regularly take a bait. Perhaps more so than anglers realize, for it is both able and willing to flex its body to grip around boulders and even get underneath them, which could understandably lead to thoughts of a tackle hang up followed by a break out.

Never a big fish, with say a pound maximum being its upper size limit. Also a strikingly odd looking fish, which should help make identification a formality. The mouth and eyes are large and the body shape deeply elliptical. The dorsal fin extends onto the head almost to the lip, and both it and the anal fin under lap the tail, with the anal and pelvic fins being fused together by a connecting membrane.

Colouration is brown with some darker mottling, an even darker blotch in the centre of the body, and dark bars radiating outwards from each eye. The upper pigmented side of the body feels distinctly rough due to this fishes ctenoid (toothed edged) scales, and like the turbot, brill and megrim, with its head facing to your right, the eyes will be below the mouth.

Though never common, probably not as rare a fish as sightings and angling catches might suggest. Anywhere where the bottom is suitably bouldery offering recesses to slide either between or under is a potential holding area.

With catches reported from Peterhead right up on Scotland's north east coast all the way through to the Channel Islands, one could turn up anywhere, though it's more likely to be along the western side of the country, and around all of Ireland.

Personally, I've only come across them on a handful of occasions. The first time was when a young lad of about eight years old fishing down the side of the wall in Portrush harbour brought one up, and the second by somebody fishing in St. Peterport Harbour.

It was also around Guernsey at low water on some of the bigger tides that we would find an odd one while turning over boulders looking for bait. A very strange life style for an equally strange looking little fish.

All of that said, amazingly, the topknot pictured here was taken on a soft lure fished out over a wreck out in Liverpool Bay aboard Kev McKies Liverpool based boat 'Brigand'. So it just goes to show that whatever the supposed knowledge has to say about fish, you should always be prepared to expect the unexpected, which in part is why fishing is such a captivating pursuit.

#### SOLE Solea solea

**Bucket List status – result**

Not directly related to either of the previous two flatfish families Pleuronectidae (plaice, dab etc.) or Bothidae (turbot, brill etc.), as well as being a species in its own right, the term sole also refers to a family of similar looking fishes, a couple more of which could very easily turn up in home waters.

On the other hand, as sole are not that regularly caught on rod and line for reasons to be explained, perhaps the chances of one of the others putting in a show might not be that great after all. Time will tell. Otherwise, a long narrow bodied fish, which like the plaice and dab lies on the left side of its body, having a rough almost dry feel to its skin when rubbed against the grain from tail to head.

The dorsal fin actually runs onto the head almost reaching the snout which is blunt and round, with a tiny curved mouth set into it. Colouration is a deep greyish brown with darker blotches which tend to fade after death, plus a conspicuous dark spot on the upper side pectoral fin.

Despite being widespread and common, sole are not a fish most anglers are ever going to catch, simply because most people don't fish for them. Putting baits in the water where sole are known to hang out just simply isn't enough.

There will always be the odd accidental encounter. In fact I had one myself very recently. The first sole I've caught while dinghy fishing on my local patch in over forty years of catching other small flatfish there. So if you want them then you need to deliberately fish for them, and frankly, you stand a much better chance of doing that successfully from the shore.

Much of this has to do with the type of places where sole like to hang out and feed, which are often so close in as to make boat fishing more trouble than it's worth, though casting back to the shore from a kayak might be worth a go.

By day, sole tend to bury themselves in the bottom sediments showing little interest in food. You will get exceptions to every rule like that one I had in bright sunny conditions off Cleveleys in 2014. But look at the hundreds of hours of fishing time I've also put in there which didn't produce a sole.

Nocturnal feeding then is the first point to take onboard. The second is terminal presentation. Offerings must be very firmly pinned to the bottom, which means short droppers and a good grip lead.

Baits must also be manageable, both in terms of size and the hooks they are presented on. Hooks in the size four to six range stand the best chance, with a nice portion of worm threaded up over the shank on to the snood. Forget bling. At night this counts for nothing.

The final point here is don't over cast. A short thirty to forty yard lob is all it takes, which is probably easiest done with a fixed spool reel. Patience is the one big remaining ingredient, both for the bites, and when reacting to them when they do come along.

Sole have small mouths and are slow methodical feeders, so don't be in any great hurry to set the hook. Give a bite time to develop properly to be sure the hook is well inside the fishes mouth before attempting to drive the point home.

Sole are potentially found all around the British Isles, which isn't the same as saying they can be caught all around the British Isles. Potential is one thing. You have to seek out and identify sole territory to be in with a genuine shot.

Using my own patch up here in the north west as a working example, the River Mersey turns up a few, often at the base of the walls. But I would be more inclined to fish the outer beaches say from Crosby through to Ainsdale, which is a shallow fine sandy area sandwiched between the Mersey and the Ribble Estuaries. There I've seen literally dozens of soles come up in the shrimp trawls towed by the shankers, who drive tractors or purpose built wagons in to a few feet of water to work their nets.

The Thames estuary, the Humber, and the upper Bristol Channel all typify good sole country. But I have to say that when it comes to widespread consistency, the south coast from the Isle of Wight eastwards through Sussex on into Kent offers some of the very best and most consistent opportunities. Particularly when fishing from sandy or shingle beaches after dark, grabbing the last couple of hours of the flooding tide in calm settled conditions any time between May and November.

Because of my small boat fishing inclinations, I don't often get to deliberately fish for Sole. But sometimes it happens when I'm away somewhere on holiday, or when I get an invite to give it a go at a location I'm not otherwise familiar with.

That's how I got my first ever sole from the shore. A friend of mine, Brian Needs from Romsey, who digs bait for a living along the Solent, set up a sole session one calm July evening.

I'm not saying exactly where it was because in all honesty I don't know. He picked me up just before dark and drove me down some God forsaken track, after which we abandoned the car and headed off on foot. I remember crossing a golf course where there were fire flies all over the place, eventually ending up on top of a shingle bank over-looking the shore.

Coming from Lancashire where the distance between high and low water can be vast, I remember thinking how weird it was that the tide hardly moved in or out. Obviously, as Brian digs predominately ragworms for a living, that's what we had for bait.

The rigs were pretty much as described earlier with small hooks on short droppers lobbed out a short distance in front of us for a couple of hours up to around midnight, and bingo. We finished up with half a dozen soles. It could even have been more. A clear example of targeting and succeeding, which for this particular fish is without doubt what it takes.

### THE BASSES

Many people, experienced anglers amongst them, will be surprised to hear that the bass is in fact the named head figure of a family of species occurring in our corner of northern Europe, and not simply an individual fish which seemingly everyone except for politicians regularly gets hot under the collar about.

There are in fact three other family members in the home waters record lists, with a fourth, the speckled bass _Dicentrarchus punctatus_ known to have been caught in UK waters but not claimed, plus at least one American striped bass which somehow managed to cross the Atlantic only to end up taking an anglers bait off Dover in Kent.

I have actually caught speckled bass around Gibraltar on float fished bread intended for mullet, and expect to hear more about them around the Channel Islands and along the south coast over the coming years.

As for the others, comber and wreckfish have been caught on quite a number of occasions, with wreckfish often forming huge shoals, particularly along open oceanic coasts, where when located they can be caught in their dozens. Conversely, the dusky perch is recorded on rod and line at our latitude just the once.

#### BASS Dicentrarchus labrax

**Bucket List status – result**

In my opinion, one of the major reasons why the bass is such an iconic species with anglers is its physical appearance. Looking every inch the sleek, fast moving predator it is, you cannot fail to be impressed by its silvery metallic, rough, large scaled body armour, the spiny first dorsal fin which is separate from the second dorsal fin, and its huge power generating tail.

A fish which requires great care in the handling if it's not to draw blood using these and other angler-unfriendly features too, particularly around the head and gill cover, with its sharp serrated edges.

In terms of colour, washed over the metallic silver which underpins everything here, the back can be quite dark, varying in individual fish from almost black through to greyish blue, which quickly fades or merges into the silver above the lateral line.

On the head this will often extend down around the eye and follow the outline of both the pre-operculum and operculum (first and second gill cover), sometimes forming a spot or blotch on the gill cover edge. There can also be a hint of yellow on the otherwise white underparts.

In terms of tactical approach, the bass is without equal in being arguably the most versatile fish in our home waters, which very likely lies at the heart of its being described as 'the anglers fish'. A quarry which in theory at least can be caught regardless of how you choose to fish.

A definition which on the one hand has widened over recent times as fly fishing and new approaches to lure fishing have come in to play, while on the other, it has also narrowed, as population numbers have become so critically low that even the dinosaurial head burying fisheries ministers of the European Union are now seriously starting to look at taking last gasp protective action.

Where there are still a few bass left, they can be caught on everything from plugs, surface poppers, shads, and soft plastics, through to crab from the shore when the major moults are under-way, lugworms, and live-baits further offshore. All have the potential to catch well on their day. But if I had to single out just one, particularly from the shore, it would have to be soft plastic lures.

Not a technique I regularly use myself as I'm primarily a boat angler, more of which later. However,chatting to Irish bass guide John Quinlan with the voice recorder running really brought home the degree of difference these lures can make in a variety of shapes and colours, some with paddle tails and others not, but always fished with the hook tip buried inside the lure to avoid snags, and presented on a jig head or belly weighted for casting.

Fished this way, this huge range of patterns offer the ability to safely fish the kinds of shallow, snaggy areas bass will frequent, but which were previously ruled out of bounds using other tactics. What's more, they can also be twitched back in so slowly as to be barely moving, persuading fish which may well not be feeding to hit them anyway.

In terms of terrain preference, bass enter harbours and estuaries, move in close along surf beaches, frequent offshore banks and reefs, and will visit wrecks. In short, there isn't anywhere under the right conditions where they won't go, and as I've said, few baits, lures or tactics they can't be tempted by.

So much so that it would take a complete book to work through everything useful there is to know on the subject of catching them, which is way beyond the scope of what I am I aiming to do here.

That being the case, rather than deal with some baits or tactics while leaving out others, my only angling references will be to personal experiences, with the key piece of advice of not trying to be a generalist and soak up everything.

Either choose a tactic that suits you, or allow local circumstances to dictate one for you, and initially at least, work on mastering that. And to help in that regard, there is a vast wealth of information already out there on each, including a number of audio interviews I have done with bass specialists on a wide range of topics, which as ever I will reference at the end of this discussion.

The main thing these days is not to build your hopes up too high. This is a species in crisis. That said, the American striped bass was even further down the road to extinction not so long ago, and look at the situation there now. In a generation, they've turned it around into a world class recreational fishery. So with the will it can be done.

Unfortunately, the American striped bass example, which while it has some home waters parallels, is very different to that facing the European bass. Similar in the fact that like the European Union, the USA has a federal system of states each making some of their own laws, but different in that the European federation is a collection of separate countries with different economies, electorates, and national identities, in which the largest and strongest member states, despite them saying otherwise, have a disproportionately bigger say in what happens.

One thing the EU most certainly is not is a collection of equals, and therefore political bullying is rife, such as by the French not wanting the minimum size limit for bass to go up from thirty six cm, at which stage bass have yet to reproduce, to forty two cm when some of them might have replaced themselves, because believe it or not, a thirty six cm bass supposedly fits better on a dinner plate.

Forget the science. It's house wife and restaurateur driven, which could very easily be satisfied by hatchery reared fish, were it not for the fact that there is a premium paid for wild fish, and more especially in posh nosh gaffs, for large wild fish, where customers prefer a bigger, meatier, bone-free lump on their plate.

For these reasons and more, commercial exploitation is never going to go away until the economics of cost in pursuit of catching bass is out-weighed by the income they deliver. The law of diminishing returns.

Adding further insult to injury here is the blame culture of finger pointing by the EU at anglers, holding us responsible for the bulk of the species decline by imposing a three fish per day bag limit from April 2015.

I have no problem at all with bag limits as part of a package of measures aimed at rehabilitating the species, providing they are universally applied. But to single out rod and line fishing is ludicrous.

Like most anglers, I would not want to take three bass per trip anyway, and would be happy if I could occasionally catch three in a session these days. So in that sense it doesn't affect me, and I dare say many other anglers. Yet now incredibly, I find myself opposing bag limits, simply because of the implication they carry in terms of blame.

Being a recreational fishing representative on the Inshore Fisheries Conservation Authority (IFCA), as you might expect, I get bombarded by arguments and counter arguments on the current bass situation quite literally on a daily basis. It comes from being on so many interested parties block email lists. So I think to an extent I do have my finger on the pulse.

Equally, I also have my own opinions, which I can say without fear of contradiction will ruffle a few feathers amongst the angling community. But before I give them, let me first say that they have been well thought through, so at least give them a fair hearing, even if you disagree.

The first thing I want to say in connection with this is that I feel I have done as much as the next man to champion the cause of the bass, which is something I will continue to do, even though it invariably feels like swimming against the tide.

At the time of first daft writing here, and flying in the face of all the scientific wisdom, bass could still legally be taken at thirty six cm in length, despite the fact that forty two cm probably represents a fish about to spawn for the first time, with forty five cm a more responsible figure to ensure all have done so at least once.

To its credit, the Irish government has just announced a proposal for fifty cm. Yet despite the fact that the various regional IFCA's have the legal right to unilaterally change size limits, providing they are raised and not lowered, and let's face it, why would anyone with even half a brain want to lower them, still nothing is done.

Certainly not by my regional IFCA, other than to complain about work loads, though by the time I was proof reading the final draft here, realising the species was now finally looking over the edge of the abyss, the EU through a majority vote, finally but reluctantly agreed to up the minimum size limit to 42 cm. Not only that, this time it would apply to everybody.

Meanwhile, in the face of dire warnings from the International Council for Exploitation of the Seas (ICES) in 2014 saying that unless there was an eighty percent reduction in bass landings to allow some recruitment in the face of imminent stock collapse, having investigated the problem, the EU's technical committee for fisheries concluded that 25% of mortality was down to anglers which was the driver for the three fish recreational bag limit, then as previously mentioned, applied no penalties at all to those responsible for the other 75%, the commercial sector

Prior to the 42 cm size limit coming in, I contacted my IFCA CEO requesting information on how to take the first steps on the long arduous road towards drafting a by-law proposal to protect bass within the North West IFCA's six mile coastal jurisdiction, which is sandwiched between the Scottish and Welsh borders.

I knew in advance that when or if it was ever presented to the assembly for approval it would be defeated. But that didn't matter. At least it would put the topic onto the agenda, forcing the commercials to think about it, and hear another point of view before black balling the suggestion.

I didn't even get the courtesy of a reply. So I personally approached the director of enforcement to sound him out with regard to a forty two cm minimum landing size; a two fish bag limit applicable to all as most of the commercially caught bass along the Lancashire Coast are rod caught, and for a slot limit where all big bass which have ducked and weaved their way through to proven spawning ability are put back, and he looked at me as if I was trying to steal the food from commercial fishermen's plates.

The answer I received was that any suggestion of change would be vigorously and emphatically blocked every inch of the way, citing amongst other things, a lack of resources to enforce it.

Putting the bag and slot limits aside, I politely pointed out that as his fishery officers were already legally obliged to enforce the thirty six cm minimum size limit, which it still was at the time, how much more man power would it take to stretch a tape measure out an additional eight cm. But I might as well have been talking to him in Latin. It was water off a ducks back. Well now at last we are going to find out.

The obvious answer to man power deficiencies, and to the current plight of the bass, would be to make it a recreational species only, which in the current climate is never going to happen. Alternatively, exit the EU and reclaim control over our own legislative powers, because as it stands, despite claims to the contrary, the UK government continues to insist that its hands are tied.

Ireland on the other hand, which is also a member of the European Union, has had a two fish bag limit for years; operates a minimum landing size in excess of what is required to allow all bass to spawn at least once, and has made fishing for the species recreational only, yet still retains its EU membership.

In terms of catching bass, I've had mixed results over the years from a number of locations, both boat and shore, and using a wide variety of tactics and baits. Numerically speaking however, one specific type of mark, and two approaches to fishing it, have probably accounted for a good 90% of all my success.

I love to fish on and around offshore banks. When I charter boat fish for bass, it's almost exclusively on the drift with live-baits, whereas from my own boat on our local patch, a good proportion of the fishing will be at anchor with lugworm.

We do occasionally fish squid or dead sandeel, and we have in the past also fished with lures such as redgills and large hokkai's. But usually it's fresh black lugworm on a simple flowing trace. We've tried all sorts of other baits over the years with the results always bringing us back to the worm.

The tide quite literally screams over these shallow bank tops, so a flowing trace that it able to gather up any loose weed hitting and being forced down the line it is a must. This leaves the bait clear as the weed gathers up at the lead, sometimes to the point that you can barely get it back in to clear it if you leave it out for too long.

So it's no relaxing alternative to lure or live-bait fishing on the drift. In fact, it's very much a constantly hard working day, with bass in the small to middle range as a result. And when they hit with all that tide running through it will be both fast and hard. So hard in fact that we've had rods vanish over the stern without any prior warning, so these need to be tethered or held.

What we did find was that circle hooks work well for these hard running high speed takes. Because of their ability not to deep hook or take hold until they actually start to exit the fishes mouth at the scissor, fast moving fish have a greater tendency to hook themselves in a spot where disgorging is easy, all of which happens long before you've even had time to grab the rod and react. Their one big draw back is getting worms over that in-pointing hook tip.

We also at times fish the exit and entrance points to narrow gullies between closely adjacent banks, which bass will often use as motorways for getting around the area rather than running the bank tops through the tide at peak flow, and these too can be quite productive at times.

When it comes to charter boat fishing offshore banks, though I've done it in Wales, Devon, and Cornwall, the bulk of my experiences, and most certainly all my better fish have come from around the Channel Islands fishing out of St. Peterport on Guernsey.

I've probably fished all the main banks around Guernsey, Aldernay, Sark and Jersey. Most of the time it has been with Dougal Lane fishing live sandeel on a long flying collar type rig with a watch lead to minimise lateral drifting and tangling other people's lines.

There was one occasion though when we got an invite to join a group of local anglers on a different boat, chartered specifically for a bass tagging project. This took us to within sight of Cherbourg, where numerous double figure fish were tagged and released. The average size of the many bass caught there must have been between seven and nine pounds, some of which were taken on small mackerel live- baits.

Typically, when fishing with Dougal Lane, we would see between forty and sixty bass per trip, also typically between seven and nine pounds, plus turbot, brill, and an occasional pollack.

As ever, there was always the danger of a rod vanishing over the rails. So if you needed to take a leak or grab a bite to eat, rods needed to be tied down. Not so much because the takes were violent in the way described earlier when fishing at anchor with bait. More a case of the drifting boat putting distance between itself and a hooked fish, which when all the stretch had gone out of the monofilament line can only have one end result.

This obviously would also set the hook when holding the rod, so no need to strike. The rod tip would gradually arch over and you are in business.

So, easy fishing in many respects with some fantastic catch stats coming out of it all. But difficult at times too, particularly in less than favourable conditions, and especially when drifting on to the bank from deeper water where some of the rolling swells marking the edge would test even the hardiest constitution.

Despite all that, being honest, as a predominantly boat angling enthusiast, bass have never played any sort of major role in my fishing over the years. Obviously, like everyone else, I like to catch them and will fish for them whenever I get the opportunity.

Currently, due completely to the way they are managed, or more accurately mis-managed, for me, and I suspect many other people too if the truth be known, bass are a species which these days bring more disappointment than pleasure. For while they are held up as the iconic sea anglers fish, that's probably more symbolic than real, with the vast majority of boat and shore anglers spending a great deal more of their time and money fishing for, and most certainly catching, species other than bass.

So if bass did, heaven forbid, ever completely vanish from our coastal waters, you have to ask the question, would anglers actually miss them as much as those beating the conservation drum on our behalf suggest would be the case.

I suspect probably not. That's not a defeatist statement so much as a piece of hard to swallow truth based on the reality of the situation we currently find ourselves in as part of a centralised federal political system, the majority of which either doesn't have bass because they never did, or don't have them any more because they've picked their own coastal waters clean. And now, in conjunction with our home grown commercial fleet, EU boats want to move in and do the same to our stocks, until economic as opposed to political or conservation arguments force them out of the game.

To illustrate the depth of angler apathy outside of a vocal minority willing to plead their case at any and every opportunity, the rest of the angling world slowly stumbles along accepting of whatever does or increasingly doesn't come their way.

Back in the 1980's I ran a very well publicised sponsored marathon with the proceeds going to bass conservation. Magazine readers were put in the picture as to the need for organised group action and finances to take the fight to those who could possibly do something about the situation, and I got a grand total of two sponsors.

So when the commercial sector finally leaves the species alone, chances are there will not be a self-sustaining bass population left for the recreational sector, which probably won't mean jack shit to most people, as we are already on the road to becoming accustomed to not catching them anyway, with the promise of things like Light Rock Fishing (LRF), which is the art of stalking tiny pouting, wrasse and other insignificant species with no commercial value, looming as a replacement in the wings.

Until then, the plunder continues until things get to the state of Canada's Grand Banks, where it was said that once you could walk across the water on the backs of cod, and now research vessels struggle to find even a single fish.

What I'd like to do now, for reasons of historical record as much as anything else, is quote from a response to a report by the EU's Technical Committee for Fisheries, which was asked to look at the impact of different fisheries of bass based on surveys from various EU member countries, which as mentioned previously, concluded that recreational fishermen were responsible for approximately 25% of all bass mortality across the EU, including the Irish Sea, Celtic Sea, Bristol Channel, English Channel and North Sea.

This was deemed to be significant enough to be included in an any measures necessary proposal to reduce total fishing mortality and increase the biomass towards the Common Fishery Policy objective of reaching Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). That response in the form of a list of questions and answers given below came from The Angling Trust, which is a self appointed body purporting to speak on behalf of anglers.......

**Are recreational catches really responsible for 25% of the catch.**

There is not enough robust scientific data to be able to prove or disprove this with any accuracy. Recreational catches are an estimate taken from surveys of recreational anglers carried out in France, the UK and the Netherlands. However, we can say that official catch data from commercial landings are notoriously understated with a combination of illegal unreported landings and legal landings sold directly from boats that are not recorded.

The issue of understated commercial landings is well documented in various scientifically published documents and 'true' commercial landings may be double or treble official landings. Consequently, the proportion of fishing mortality attributable to recreational fishing is significantly less than the alleged 25%. Once more accurate data on both true commercial landings and recreational fisheries becomes available we will seek to ensure that the impact of recreational fishing is reviewed. It is important to note that forty years ago, before commercial bass fishing had developed, bass were mainly a recreational species and recreational catches were responsible for most fishing mortality – but that this was perfectly sustainable. As commercial fishing for bass developed, the proportion of total fishing mortality attributable to recreational fishing has substantially declined.

That recreational fisheries should play some part in any attempt at restoring bass stocks is not in question, but recreational anglers should not be accused of having significantly contributed to overfishing when compared to the exponential increase in commercial bass fishing over the last four decades. The problem is added to by those, intentionally and unintentionally, accusing recreational anglers of selling their catches when by definition recreational anglers do not sell their fish. These catches are being sold by unlicensed commercial rod and line fishermen.

**How will the bag limit be enforced.**

The EU is relying on existing enforcement at national level by Member States. In England this means enforcement of the bag limit will be carried out by the Inshore Fishery and Conservation Authorities (IFCA's) from the shore out to six nautical miles. Beyond six miles enforcement will be carried out by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO). In the UK it is currently legal to sell fish caught from the shore or from un-powered vessels where no license is available. There are therefore potential enforcement issues around whether bass retained above the three-fish-per-day limit can be proven to have been caught commercially and are therefore legally retainable. We have raised this issue with DEFRA and await a response.

**Who does the bag limit apply to.**

Recreational fisheries are defined by this legislation as "non-commercial fishing activities exploiting marine living aquatic resources such as for recreation, tourism or sport". The bag limit applies to all recreational catches, from the shore and from boats, using rod and line, nets, spearguns or other fishing gears where the catch is retained for personal consumption and not sold.

**Is it permanent.**

The bag limit has been introduced through an amendment to the 2015 TAC and quota regulations which set fishing opportunities for the year ahead. These are usually agreed by the Council of Ministers in December and expire on December 31st the following year. The bag limit will therefore have to be re-agreed and included in the TAC and quota regulations for 2016 unless another, perhaps more appropriate, piece of legislation can be found to maintain it.

**Does the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) apply to recreational fishing.**

The reform of the Common Fisheries Policy in 2013 was very careful to exclude reference to recreational fisheries apart from one reference where,  
" _Recreational fisheries can have a significant impact on fish resources and Member States should, therefore, ensure that they are conducted in a manner that is compatible with the objectives of the CFP_ ".

The CFP also gives the Commission general powers to address any kind of negative impact on a stock, be it overfishing, pollution, predation or other. On this basis, the European Commission took legal advice and was confident that it had the authority to introduce measures to reduce fishing mortality from recreational fishing.

**What about other measures for commercial fishing.**

In January the UK, following pressure from anglers, was successful in getting the EU to agree to the use of emergency measures closing the Irish Sea, Celtic Sea, Bristol Channel, English Channel and southern North Sea to pelagic trawling (including the use of 'pair' trawls) from January 2015 to April 30th 2015. This was due to a threat to the reproductive capacity of the stock as pelagic trawlers at this time of year actively target aggregating, spawning adult bass and are responsible for approximately 30% of total fishing mortality for bass. This was the first time Article 12 of the reformed Common Fisheries Policy had been used and only the fifth or sixth time emergency measures have ever been used by the EU.

The closure of the pelagic fishery was a very big step to take but came on the condition that proportionate measures would also apply to other fisheries in a non-discriminatory way. These other fisheries included recreational and 'mixed' fisheries. Member States were able to agree on a bag limit for recreational fisheries more easily than on measures for the other commercial or 'mixed' fisheries where a main concern was that discards might increase as a consequence of new management measures for commercial fisheries.

Informal proposals then came to light suggesting monthly vessel limits for commercial fisheries and the possibility of a new minimum legal size of forty two cm for recreational fishing only. The Angling Trust lobbied hard with arguments for any new MLS to apply to all fisheries and argued that the proposals put forward for catch limits would leave up to 90% of the UK's inshore fleet untouched by restrictions, despite contributing the most to fishing mortality out of any of the UK's bass fisheries.

The Angling Trust, BASS, and members of the European Anglers Alliance met for a second time with the Commission in Brussels to discuss the proposals being put forward for the mixed fisheries. We were subsequently successful in submitting evidence from the UK showing that many more of the UK's bass fisheries were actually targeted fisheries and should therefore be subject to controls on bass fishing without increasing discards.

As a result of this, and due to more evidence that has come to light, the proposals for restrictions on other commercial fisheries are now expected to be:

·Monthly vessel limits by fishing method (weights to be confirmed).

·A new MLS of 42 cm for all fisheries (including recreational catches).

·Seasonal closures to be determined by fishing method.

These will be introduced through a combination of amendments to the 2015 TAC and quota regulation and the use of Article 45 of the technical conservation regulation 850/98 which allows the Commission to use its implementing powers to take immediate action – something the Angling Trust and partners have been calling on the Commission to do since discussions began at the start of the year.

If agreed, this will be a very significant shift towards the package of measures being more balanced and the commercial fishing sector playing a more balanced role in reducing total bass fishing mortality. We are pushing for these measures to be implemented at the earliest opportunity and consider that we have had a significant amount of influence over making sure that commercial fisheries take more responsibility for restoring the stock.

**Why was the bag limit introduced before measures for other commercial fisheries were known.**

As previously mentioned, agreement was reached by the EU Council on a three fish bag limit for recreational catches quite early on. Agreement on measures for 'mixed' commercial fisheries has been much more difficult. The Angling Trust, supported by the government, called on the introduction of the bag limit to be postponed until the measures for other commercial fisheries were known, in order for us to judge whether the package of measures was balanced. However, there was intense political pressure on the UK, having instigated the emergency measures which closed the pelagic fishery, not to delay the introduction of further measures to support it. As a result the bag limit was introduced as an 'in year' amendment, along with amendments to other fisheries, of the 2015 TAC and Quota regulations.

**What happens next year.**

The use of emergency measures for a second time should not be ruled out. However, they will be difficult to justify given that the situation is known and therefore should not constitute an emergency. The status of bass will decline in 2015 and the pelagic fishery will still pose a threat to the reproductive capacity of the stock. If emergency measures are not used the Commission and Member States will have to explore other avenues to maintain the closure. The Angling Trust has called on the Government to make sure the closure becomes permanent so that this unsustainable fishery is not allowed to reopen. Other measures introduced using the TAC and quota regulations will need to be re-agreed annually. Other measures which are amendments to the EU technical conservation regulation will be open ended and roll-over into 2016.

**Will these measures be enough to restore Bass.**

The total reduction in fishing mortality that the three elements of the 2015 measures will deliver is unclear due to proposals for a new MKS and seasonal closures which are yet to be calculated. However, it is clear that the reduction will be nowhere near the 80% reduction in landings advised by ICES or the 60% reduction in fishing mortality needed to reach MAY. ICES issues its advice for 2016 in the summer which will provide an update on the status of the stock and advice on landings. We are seeking commitment from the government for it to follow the scientific advice in full when it is published.

**Why three fish.**

The Commission's original proposal to be adopted at the Council's December meeting was for one fish per-person-per-day. This was rejected by the Council. The Angling Trust and European Anglers Alliance had argued against a one fish bag limit (and against compulsory catch and release) for a long time. This has been communicated to the EU in various ways including meeting with Commission representatives in Brussels last year and in February this year to explain, among other things, why a one or zero fish bag limit would be unfair on anglers and would have a damaging impact on the jobs and businesses reliant on recreational bass angling.

This position was supported by other angling organisations across the EU. Member States listened to our arguments and finally it was agreed to amend the proposal and increase the bag limit from one to three fish per day which, if complemented by proportionate controls on commercial fishing, would be more balanced as well as contributing to recreational anglers reducing their impact on bass stocks. This bag limit also discourages illegal sales of bass from unlicensed commercial fishermen claiming to be fishing recreationally.

**Is there a long term plan.**

Not yet, but there is commitment to develop a long term management plan (also known as multi-annual plan) for bass. However, proposals for this are not expected to be made until 2017 and will take approximately two years to be agreed through co-decision between the European Council, Commission and the European Parliament (which adopted a resolution on bass earlier this month which included a request to the Commission to bring forward the development of a multi-annual plan).

**Will the discard ban apply to Bass.**

Yes, but not immediately. Timings are unclear but we expect discards of bass to be banned over coming years. This will have implications for minimum landing sizes and minimum conservation reference sizes which have replaced the MKS for quota species since the CAP was reformed. It is therefore very important in our opinion that commercial fishers change to more selective gears and practises now and not after the discard ban takes effect. That will secure a smooth transition to a sustainable bass fishery with little or no discards.

**Did the angling trust support the introduction of a bag limit.**

Not as a stand-alone measure and certainly not the one-fish-per-angler bag limit initially proposed by the EU. However, in the course of researching how other bass fisheries are successfully managed we looked at other parts of the world, such as in Ireland and in the United States. It was clear from these two examples that bag limits can play an important role, and be supported by recreational anglers, in these fisheries where bag limits are used in conjunction with restrictions on commercial fisheries.

We have always told government that bag limits would be unjust if they were not accompanied by measures to cut back significantly on fishing mortality from commercial fisheries where fishing effort has been allowed to increase unchecked and which are responsible for the vast majority of landings. During the course of discussions with the EU Commission and the UK Government we argued that a higher minimum landing size (MKS) would be a better alternative measure to reduce fishing mortality from recreational catches because it would be fairer and more balanced because it would apply to all, and because compliance would be higher due to many anglers already adhering to legal size limits or their own limits which often exceed those set legally. It also would protect immature fish and secure that more bass reach spawning size before being captured (no female bass spawn at the present MKS 36 cm).

So, make what you will of that. As for me, while there aren't many compensations for growing old and not having the same number of years left on the clock as younger anglers, one definite plus is the satisfaction of knowing that at least I fished at a time when we had the best of it. A time which sadly is now long gone, possibly never to return.

Associated audio interview numbers: 59, 73, 74, 142, 168, 169, 190, 195 and 200.

#### COMBER Serranus cabrilla

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Comber are quite small but strikingly colourful relatives of the bass, and as such are one of those fish which again, if you don't know what it is, begs to be identified. In general layout it is not unlike the other `grouper' shaped members of the family, having quite a thick set body with a spiny first and softer second dorsal fin which are joined.

Its colouration and markings are what most catch the eye. The base colour is usually a rusty brown with several darker vertical bars and two or three bluish longitudinal stripes starting on the head close to the eye, extending along the length of the body over the mid to lower flank region.

Said to be more or less at their regular northerly limit over the reefs of the western English Channel, larval counts from plankton samples in that area suggest it to be quite a scarce fish at our latitude, something angling catches also tend to support, though numbers on reefs such as the Eddystone could be swelled in favourable years by immigration from more established populations a little further to the south, as it is a common enough fish throughout the Bay Biscay, and exceedingly abundant around mainland Atlantic European into the Mediterranean.

If not by name, then certainly by sight, comber will be a reasonably familiar fish to many of those holiday making Brits who pack a telescopic rod for visits to the Mediterranean or Canary Islands. Not so much on the insides of harbours or around shallower rock marks. But along the seaward side of rock based harbour walls where there is deeper water, and more especially, over heavy ground while out in boats, comber will be a fairly regular catch.

They should also be an obvious catch, taking a wide variety of baits including worms and prawns, though more usually for holiday anglers, calamari squid or raw prawns cadged for the hotel kitchen.

However, that's not how we used to catch them up here in home waters. Though we never saw many, and I personally didn't catch one, our group would pick up odd ones here and there, and of a fairly decent size it has to be said, on small strips of mackerel out from Looe over the Eddystone and some of its surrounding reefs.

And we it seems weren't alone in that. Occasional reports in the press suggested that others all along that stretch of the south Devon and Cornwall coast were occasionally also doing the same.

Then the reports stopped coming in. Whether that was because the fish also stopped coming, or news editors no longer saw the value in reporting them is difficult to know.

What I would say is that in the current climate, that being the appropriate word here, with sea temperatures rising and comber being fish of a more southerly warmer water persuasion, I would be most surprised if a few were not still out there for the taking.

#### WRECKFISH Polyprion americanus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

This is a thick set fish with a large mouth and very noticeable protruding lower jaw, plus a particularly spiky looking first dorsal fin which runs on into the taller softer second dorsal fin, and as with the anal fin, is set on top of what looks like a raised fleshy hump, which like the rest of the body and the head is covered in small scales.

The first long thick sharp spine of the pelvic fins has a rough serrated edge, as has the pre-operculum or first gill cover and the lower edge of the operculum or main gill cover, both of which also carry some sharp spines.

Colouration is usually dark brown, lightening a little on the lower flanks and becoming more yellowish underneath. Immature fish may show signs of lighter and darker flecking on the back and sides. The edge of the rounded tail has a lighter banding than its base colour.

Also known as the stone bass, the wreckfish is an open oceanic species making it a most unlikely catch on rod and line. On the other hand, when it is found, it can be encountered in vast numbers.

The larger fish, which can weight anything up to a hundred pounds, are bottom feeders in very deep water ranging between fifty and a hundred fathoms, occasionally down to five hundred fathoms, with a regular distribution taking in the Bay of Biscay, all of the English Channel, and the British Isles as far north as south-west Ireland.

Distribution becomes more erratic beyond that area, though it can extend as far north as Faroe on into the northern North Sea, sometimes even as far as the Norwegian coast.

Usually it's the smaller fish up to perhaps ten pounds that are caught within home waters angling range, having strayed close enough in for boats either to find them or to pick them up accidentally.

Though they seem to run in cycles, some years ago, chance encounters were not that uncommon around southern and western parts of Ireland.

Odd specimens were also picked up here and there along the English Channel coast. Then every so often an angling party would get lucky and catch them literally by the boat full.

This happens because the smaller fish show a tendency to gather around pieces of floating wreckage or weed drifting closer to shore, which is undoubtedly the origin of their name.

Angling boats simply stumble into large shoals, sometimes at the surface, as has happened with parties going well off to the wrecks from Plymouth, where it's every egg a bird. Then nothing for ages afterwards.

#### DUSKY PERCH Epinephelus marginatus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Not a species likely to cause much confusion. Quite a heavily built thick set fish with joined spiny and soft first and second dorsal fins, the first part of which can have an orange tint.

Basic body colouration is invariably deep chocolate brown becoming more yellowish on the underparts, with markings present in the form of pale brown to green flecks, and possibly some mottling, which is most prominent on top of the head and along the upper back.

These marks tend to reduce in size and regularity lower down the body, though they may well show as clearly defined lines of spots radiating outwards over the gill cover from the eye.

A fish with a large mouth and powerful teeth used to deal with molluscs, crustaceans, and some smaller fishes. Rather confusingly, a fish also described in various publications under the scientific names of _Serranus gigas_ and _Epinephelus gigas._

Of academic interest perhaps, but important when you consider that this is an extremely rare fish at northern latitudes, and a most unlikely migrant in view of its poor swimming abilities, fiercely territorial lifestyle, and the fact that because it will stand its ground to defend that territory, spear fishermen have been able to decimate its numbers on a large scale.

Normally it's the warmer waters of Portugal and the Mediterranean that are its principal European haunts. I've observed them myself on odd occasions while scuba diving around Malta.

Usually a solitary fish with a liking for very heavy ground, particularly with large holes or even caves around which it will patrol. Potentially quite a large fish too which would make it of great interest to anglers were it more regularly available.

A lone boat caught specimen of twenty eight pounds taken off Durlston Head in Dorset back in 1973 has placed it on the bucket list here.

### THE MULLETS

The mullets, or more to the point, the grey mullets, are something of an enigma. Generally, one of the best known and most widely observed fish in the sea, familiar to anglers and none anglers alike, yet containing within its family ranks not only one of the most difficult of all saltwater species to catch, but also two of the most difficult to identify when you move away from the common thick lipped grey variety to species like the thin lipped and golden grey.

A fourth species, the red mullet, though a mullet by name, has no genetic or family ties to the grey mullets whatsoever, and would be better re-named as the red goat fish, that being the family to which it actually belongs.

#### THICK LIPPED GREY MULLET Chelon labrosus

**Bucket List status – result**

A familiar fish to anglers and none anglers alike as it so often shows itself at the surface cruising around harbours, marina's and estuaries. Quite a long, narrow, torpedo like fish with a sharp spiny first dorsal fin and a second softer dorsal fin some distance behind it.

Colouration in all three home waters species is very similar, that being greenish to bluish grey on the back becoming silvery on the sides and underparts, with several narrow longitudinal darker stripes running the full length of the body.

Some of the mullet species are difficult to separate from each other. Fortunately, that is not the case here. As the name implies, the upper lip is obvious and is key to instant positive recognition.

With the other species, the lips are pretty normal and evenly paired. Not so here. In the thick lipped grey mullet the top lip is extremely prominent and enlarged or swollen looking, with rows of what are known as papillae, which are small bumps on its lower edge.

It may well be the most common and universally best known visually observed marine fish around the British Isles, but in angling terms, the thick lipped grey mullet doesn't sit comfortably with all the other species on the saltwater scene. And though tactically it is more akin to freshwater fishing, it doesn't sit too well there either.

A grey mullet, and an equally grey area. In some ways even an angling cross-over species with a foot in both camps, and for the most part also ignored by both.

Mullet specialists need an appreciation of float choice, shotting patterns, and the use of bread flake, coupled to an understanding of tides and their effect on the distribution and feeding habits of saltwater fish. As a result, and despite the earlier visual reference, this is not a species most sea anglers are hands on familiar with, often considering it too difficult or too demanding to invest time in.

Similarly, few freshwater anglers target them, despite being at a distinct advantage tactically. That said, grey mullet are a species many of us have a bit of a dabble at while on holiday, particularly to southern Europe where they seem to be everywhere, tempting us to pack a few floats, small hooks, and telescopic rod in our suitcase, and in all of those regards I am no different to everyone else.

Then back home, I see them and I ignore them again. Well, most of the time anyway. But I have had my moments both here and abroad, and it's these that form the basis of my own personal experiences related here.

Ironically, my personal best thick lipped grey fell so far outside the regular rules of engagement that I still struggle to believe what actually happened there.

I was conger fishing along the side a wreck in Oxwich Bay from Dave Lewis's dinghy with a full side of mackerel on a 6/0 hook. I don't particularly recall the take. But what I do recall is eventually seeing a grey missile of a fish shooting off across the surface, which quite naturally we both thought was a bass. It was still a bass even as it slid into the landing net. Only when it was on the deck did the reality kick in.

This actually is not the first time I've seen mullet caught against all the odds like that. I can think of at least two previous occasions at Looe in Cornwall where kids lowering big chunks of mackerel down the side of the quay for crabs have hooked big mullet, one of which when they eventually got it in and weighed, was well over seven pounds.

To an extent I can understand why this happens at commercial fishing ports. It's well known in mullet circles that 'conditioning' through loose feed is essential in weaning these otherwise algae grazers into taking whatever it is you intend to put on the hook. So dead fish, discards, rubby dubby bags and the like still hanging over the sides of shark fishing boats, all fall under the umbrella of 'conditioning'.

On many occasions I've seen fish skeletons on harbour bottoms suddenly appear to come back to 'life'. Least ways that's what it looks like out of the corner of your eye. Then on closer inspection you see several mullet lifting them up with their noses as they poke around the bones looking to pick off any remaining soft flesh.

Over in the Isle of Man I've even watched mullet anglers tie a mackerel head to their line, with a tiny piece of flesh on a small hook to a short dropper fluttering a few inches away, looking like it's just drifted free.

So carnivorous feeding, while it doesn't fit with their supposed normal regime of grazing algae from harbour walls, boat hulls and even the mud at the harbour base where they leave characteristic scrape marks, is under specific circumstances, a factor.

Some small animals are also regularly taken, though often these will be accidents mixed in with any vegetative matter being grazed. Scavenging, thought not supposedly a part of their routine diet is none the less a reasonably regular practise, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised so by my Oxwich fish.

To an extent, this links very nicely into what few experiences I have had of fishing for Mullet around the UK. These actually are all confined to Guernsey with friends of mine Peter Frise and Joe Gomez, both keen shore match anglers, who unless specifically targeting big fish such as conger, or pleasure fishing the bottom for say plaice, usually have a couple of rods set up ready, feed in plenty of shirvey, then play it by ear according to how the session develops.

Shirvey is a mix of boiled sandeels, bread, water, and pilchard oil made into a sort of porridge. This is then spooned in little and often when fishing from the rocks to be dispersed far and wide by the tide and back wash wave action.

Often the first fish on the scene will be garfish, known locally as long nose. But always there is the expectation of mullet coming into the swim, for which reason a light float rig with a size eight to ten hook is set up ready to take a small portion of sandeel as bait, because when the mullet are spotted in the swim, that's what they'll be mopping up from the shirvey.

So it is deliberate mullet fishing, though not the primary objective of the session. More of a bonus target if they come along. However, there have been days, not only with Peter and Joe, but other Channel Islanders I've fished with specifically targeting mullet, when the time honoured way of days of preparatory loose feeding followed by a float fished offering of the same was the last thing on their mind.

This involved a more typical shore angling scratching rig of two short droppers above the lead and one below tied to line of maybe six to eight pounds breaking strain with small hooks which were baited with pieces of bread crust. The lead was light so as not to break the fine line during casting and would therefore do a bit of wandering about, particularly in any surf. And amazingly, I saw mullet in excess of five pounds as a result.

My personal best ever mullet fishing was over in Gibraltar. I was going to cover this fully in Part 2 looking at the foreign fishing venues, but have decided to extract the mullet component from it and discuss it here, exploring two stand out incidents which may well carry over to home waters.

Both took place in Gibraltar's main harbour which is no longer accessible due to it having been converted into a plush waterside marina from which angling riff-raff it seems is now barred.

The first incident of interest was a late evening session. It was pitch dark in fact, with just a couple of harbour side lights shinning on the water. We'd been encouraged to give it a try by our local guide Tony Triay. So, fishing small bubble floats with attached tails of a couple of feet of light mono, a size ten hook, and a piece of bread flake, we decided to give it a go.

I can't honestly remember if we threw in any loose feed, though I feel sure we probably would have. We couldn't see the floats either. But providing you kept a tight line, you sure as hell could feel the mullet pulling at them.

I've never heard of people mullet fishing after dark before. The fish however didn't seem to mind, and we finished up the session with literally dozens of the things, which in terms of conditions is in complete contrast to my other Gibraltar mullet session which was in broad daylight under a blisteringly hot sun.

I'd been badly bitten and hospitalised by a moray eel the previous day and therefore couldn't go out with the others in the boat. Bored out of my skull, I decided to take a walk around the harbour where I saw lots of small to average mullet out in open water.

Always the absolute monsters would be lurking under boat hulls, either out of the sun or grazing the weed and algae off them. So, as you do, I nipped back to the hotel for my gear then to a small supermarket for a loaf.

Again I was fishing the bubble float rig to give me range with the bread on the top, and initially, as you would expect, the action came from the smaller fish. But eventually, all that activity would draw some of the bigger fish out too, which would bully their way to the head of the queue.

That so called 'rest' day saw me take dozens of mullet to over seven pounds, with a bonus speckled bass, again on bread, which was the last thing I expected to see.

That is pretty much my total thick lipped grey mullet experience, though I did once try for them in the traditional ground bait and shotted float rig style inside Christchurch Harbour, where all I could catch was freshwater bream.

Not a hint of a mullet throughout my stay, which doesn't surprise me, as while I don't think mullet are as difficult to catch as most sea anglers tend to think, unless you are prepared to adapt, locate prime spots, and put in the time both swim feeding and fishing specifically for them, except for the odd once in a lifetime accident like my Oxwich fish, then you are simply just not going to catch them at all.

Adapt and target, and success should start to come, which is what the fanatical mullet specialists have all had to do. Be prepared to put in an apprenticeship. So it would be pointless for me to start spouting off about techniques I've read up on for catching them without actual experiences of my own. There is plenty of potential help out there in magazines, on book shelves, and on the Internet. Tap in to that and learn.

One tip I will give is to refer people to a couple of audio interviews I have recorded on mullet fishing. One is with Leon Roskilly looking at it from a bait fishing perspective, the other being with Dr. Mike Ladle who catches them on the fly, at times in bigger numbers than can be caught on bait.

Associated audio interview numbers: 157 and 190.

#### THIN LIPPED GREY MULLET Liza ramada

**Bucket List status – result**

A fish with the potential to be both easy and at the same time difficult to identify. Easy in the sense that because, as the name suggests, it has lips which are far and away thinner that it's more common and widespread cousin the thick lipped grey mullet, so there will be no mistaking it there. On the other hand, difficult because superficially it shares a number of similar traits to the golden grey mullet.

Coming to the rescue here to some extent is the fact that golden greys are probably less common, and more inclined from an angling perspective to feed along open beaches than well up inside brackish estuaries.

So the chances are that most of the mullet caught that are not thick lips, and almost certainly those caught on ragworm baited spinners, are going to be thin lips. But just in case, fold the pectoral fin forward. If it fails to reach or just touches the margin of the eye it's a thin lip, whereas if it reaches past the margin of the eye it's a golden grey.

Basic colouration and patterning seems to follow a similar format for all three home water grey mullet species, that being blue or grey on the back and upper sides becoming silvery lower down and along the belly, with several longitudinal stripes running along on each side.

Obviously, golden greys also have the golden spots on the cheek and gill cover from which they derive their name. Unfortunately, used in isolation, these are not enough, as I have also caught thin lips with golden markings around the gill cover area with just the very occasional genuine golden grey in amongst them, despite at a glance perhaps thinking we had caught more.

This is a paradoxical fish in that throughout much of Europe it is a rare, or should I say rather localised fish, yet within favoured locations it can also be extremely abundant. Find one thin lipped grey mullet and you invariably find large numbers of them. Let me quote an example I am familiar with which Keith Philbin, Steve Lill and myself turned up completely out of the blue.

During the late 1970's when my kids were young, I used to trail a caravan down to Christchurch in Dorset, which obviously meant that I couldn't also trail the boat down there to fish. So on the first weekend, my boat partner Steve would trail our sixteen foot Mackay Viking down, stay for the weekend to fish, then repeat the operation on the last weekend to drag it back home, meaning that in fact I could actually have both.

At the same time, Fleetwood charter skipper Keith Philbin and his family would be in the caravan next door, and we would explore either the Solent out from Lymington if the wind was right, or when the tides were right and the weather wasn't, put the boat in at Pontins on the River Stour and explore the stretch from the slip down to Mudeford harbour instead.

We liked to go early, often launching around five am before all the holiday makers in the self-drive motor boats took over the place. There wasn't any sort of a game plan to it. More a case of taking everything tackle-wise we could muster along with a load of fresh ragworm and simply making best use of the boat.

Not being shore anglers, we were fairly resistant to mullet fishing, though we had both read and heard about the good mullet potential in and around Christchurch harbour.

On a number of occasions I had seen anglers float fishing for thick lipped greys and even tried it myself. You could see the things swimming around all over the place, but amazingly, all I could catch was freshwater bream.

I also had to put up with kids throwing stuff into the water, which seems to be a juvenile genetic trait, and let's not forget families feeding the swans with all the commotion that involves. Needless to say, after a couple of attempts I gave up trying, which was when we switched more of our attention to the boat.

Much of the lower Stour, certainly when travelling down it by boat looks inaccessible, or at best problematic, which meant we pretty much had the entire place to ourselves.

We'd also heard that there were bass and sea trout to be had on spinners in the lower reaches, plus lots of flounders, which would not only take the ragworms, but also give chase to a moving bait, particularly if something in the way of 'bling' catches their eye.

Looking to combine all these prospects and factors into one single hit, we put ragworms onto the trebles of our spinners and proceeded to twitch and inch them back, looking for anything that might be willing to take hold.

With not much to show from our earliest attempts, one particular morning, everything unexpectedly clicked into place. We had started casting just below where the motor boats moored up, slowly working our way downstream trying the baited lures both on the drift, and for short spells at anchor, on what turned out to be an ebbing tide.

It must have been getting well down too, because as we reached the spot where the Avon joins the Stour just above Mudeford, there was hardly any water left to fish in.

So little in fact that we pulled over alongside the reeds on the western side, popped the anchor into reeds themselves, and with hardly enough width in the low water channel to cast, started twitching our rag baited spinners back towards the boat with pretty much instant interest shown. But from who knows what.

We were getting repeated tugs and pulls, and all the time the ragworm was getting shorter and shorter to the point where it was barely filling the hook. Then things really started to happen.

One of us finally was into a fish, and a powerful fish too, streaking off in all directions against the fixed spool drag. Moments after the first glimpse, it was there in the landing net. A mullet of maybe a couple of pounds, which being unaware of what was about to happen, we didn't give a second glance to.

The only observation we did make was that despite all we'd read about mullet being shy, soft mouthed, and easily lost, you could have swung this one around your head and still not have had it come free. It had seen the bait and it was having it, with all three hooks of the treble firmly embedded inside its mouth.

Obviously buoyed up by our success 'at last' we fished on for another hour or so and probably caught a dozen more. Something however wasn't quite right. Neither of us had either caught or examined many mullet before. But we'd seen pictures, and around the mouth, these mullet didn't look anything like what we had expected them to look like.

With some unfortunate individuals having been deeply hooked, and always willing to try new culinary challenges, we took a few back to the caravans with us to eat.

There was no Internet back then to refer to, but I did have Alwyne Wheelers classic fish identification book 'The Fishes of the British Isles and North-West Europe' with me at the caravan for guidance, and very quickly we established that they were in fact thin lipped grey mullet.

We then began theorising as to how and why our earlier failures had suddenly been transformed into success, the gist of which was to put only a small piece of ragworm onto the hook to ensure they could get it down without first nipping bits off it; keeping the spinners working high up in the water at a reasonable pace, and be there over the low water period which would concentrate whatever fish were present into the tightest band.

So back we went again, only this time straight to the spot just before low water with half inch pieces of worm retrieved at a greater pace to get the lures up closer to the surface, and this time we must have had twenty or more fish.

As you do, we were constantly refining the technique all the time. After a visit to the local tackle shop for example, lighter bodied Jenspin lures which came up in the water better enabled us to make an even bigger jump forward, though fish nipping at the baits but not taking the hook was still a frustration.

What we did start to notice was that the vast majority of takes would come towards the end of a retrieve. This could have been due to the lure being closest to the surface at that point. But equally, it could also have been a sub-conscious speeding up towards the end to make another cast, or the fish thinking the bait was about to get away. Possibly even a combination of all those factors.

Whatever the reason, by the last weekend when Steve came back down for the boat, we were averaging forty to fifty fish per morning in just a couple of hours. More still when he joined us.

Pleased with the result, back home I started looking up everything I could find regarding thin lipped grey mullet. As I've said, there was no Internet, so information was hard to come by, and getting it took time.

One snippet I did come across was the fact that the boat slot on the British record fish list was open to claims at two pounds, a weight which most of the fish we'd caught that summer had well topped.

The problem was that those which weren't kept for eating had all gone back, so the evidence required to make a claim and put a tick at the side of British record on my fledgling bucket list was no longer available. But the following summer it would be. And this time, Trevor Housby, who in the intervening period had been up at my place to do some char fishing, asked if he could join us.

Despite living nearby in Hampshire, he too was completely un-aware of the potential. So one early morning he met us at the slip, and again following the now established game plan, we very quickly racked up quite a sizeable catch.

I remember doing a photo session with him afterwards on a gravel bar close by, which may well even have been used by him as the basis for a magazine article. My writing was still in its infancy back then, so probably I would have bowed to his superior rank.

All I was bothered about was hanging on to the best specimen and popping it into a sealed plastic box filled with formaldehyde for the journey back home so that we could make that claim.

On arrival home, the instruction given to me by the British Record Fish Committee was to send the fish to Plymouth for formal identification, which I did. I then had to wait for confirmation. In fact, I waited and and I waited, but heard nothing back.

In the end I rang the chap whose name I can't now remember, to which he replied, "what mullet". He said he hadn't received the package. So that as they say was the end of that. We'd already been telling people about these record fish. Now all of a sudden it wasn't to be.

I can only imagine the scepticism that must have been going through peoples minds. It was already our second season on these fish, and despite well topping the record qualifying weight on many dozens of occasions, there we were still unable to back up all the rhetoric. That however would not be the case at the third attempt.

By this time my son Ian was about seven years old and was having the odd trip out with us, as my daughter Dawn who is 18 months younger. That year from the very first run down the river it was business as usual. Lots of fish, though not unfortunately this time round as big as in previous years.

All of us still topped the qualifying weight dozens of times every session, but the best specimen, which was initially caught by Dawn and later bettered by Ian, could only pull the needle around to two pounds seven ounces, a fish which did eventually become the record, though we also took several 'near misses' back home with us as reserves, just in case that one also went missing in transit, which obviously it didn't.

Once the word got out, the record progressively climbed by regular increments as more and more people started repeating what we'd previously done, both at Christchurch, and increasingly further afield.

Thin lips it seems were not as localised as initially thought, with reports starting to filter through to the east of Dorset through Sussex on into Kent, though I shouldn't have thought this was an expansion of their range so much as a realisation they were there, because thin lips had been known from rivers like the Rother and Medway for many years.

Now, suddenly, with an easier way of catching them, they were starting to turn up all over the show, with specimens well in excess of 8 pounds having been caught from an ever expanding geographical range from Llangenech in Wales to Oulton Broad, and not unexpectedly the Channel Islands too.

In fact, Guernsey now sits very much in pole position. Greg Whitehead is keeping the ragworm baited spinner technique alive from his own boat 'Bluefin', with two records to himself and Ollie Stensen in two days during 2015.

Cork harbour in south west Ireland also has a population. Only the Scot's it seems have yet to record the species.

#### GOLDEN GREY MULLET Liza aurata

**Bucket List status – result**

It's difficult sometimes to be sure about the catchability status of some species of fish, and in that regard, the golden grey mullet could well be one. A fish which at a glance could very easily be mistaken for the visually similar and not quite as rare thin lipped grey mullet which seems to prefer harbours and estuaries, as opposed to the more open surf beaches favoured by golden greys.

Even so, there almost certainly will have been some honest but needless mis-counting, which is a pity really, because while the thin lipped grey and golden grey are very similar fish with two widely spaced dorsal fins, small lips, and several darker longitudinal stripes over a blue to grey back and upper flanks, it doesn't take a lot of effort to separate one from the other.

As the name suggests, golden greys have golden spots on the cheek and gill cover. But I've also had thin lips with the same sort of marks which I was convinced were golden greys, only to find out by checking the length of the pectoral fin that they were not.

Simply fold the pectoral fin forward towards the eye. If it fails to reach or just about touches the outer margin of the eye then it's a thin lip. If it well passes the eye margin, then it's a golden grey.

Though I have un-intentionally taken a couple of golden grey mullet on tiny pieces of ragworm slowly twitched in on a tiny spinner in the Mudeford Harbour area just below Christchurch, I passed up on a very real chance of targeting them deliberately, when after a trip to Namibia, Dave lewis set up a group reunion with some fishing for golden greys from one of his local beaches, which due to other commitments I unfortunately couldn't make.

A pity really, because they do well for them from the open surf beaches along the South Wales coast, particularly throughout August and September, despite it being quite a rare fish, and one which for the most part you are lucky to catch by accident under normal beach fishing circumstances.

The lads who do deliberately try for them obviously fish small, light, and with baits not anchored hard on the bottom. One approach in particular they use is to put a small drilled bullet onto the main reel line stopped by a micro-bead above a swivel, with a three foot hook length tied up from eight pounds bs fluorocarbon armed with a size six hook.

The bait, which is typically a bunch of tiny harbour rag or 'maddies', is flicked out maybe twenty to forty yards and allowed to be moved by the surf, trying so far as is possible to keep a tight line and close contact with the lead in order to feel the often gentle plucking bites.

Like the thick and thin lipped grey mullets, golden greys will enter harbours and marina's such as Brixham, Christchurch, and in Ireland, Cork, where they also catch thin lips. The fact that the Scots have only a shore record for the species from Fairlie on the Clyde at a mere eleven ounces caught back in 1972 suggests to me that they don't see too many of them that far north.

#### RED MULLET Mullus surmuletus

**Bucket List status – result**

Yet another potentially confusing name, because the red mullet isn't in any way related to the previous three grey mullet species. In fact, it isn't even a mullet by any stretch of the definition.

It actually belongs with the goat fishes, so red goat fish might perhaps be a better name. Certainly less confusing. But we are where we are, and so for the moment at least it's the red mullet, which as the name suggests is a bright red fish, in this case with a particularly blunt facial profile and large scales.

There are obviously other key features to be aware of, but to save time, simply look for two very long back pointing barbels hanging beneath the lower lip which it keeps tucked away when not being used in the search for food. No other home waters marine species has this particular feature.

This is a very special fish to me. It was my one hundredth species; it was deliberately targeted, and it came on the very first cast of the first evening of a three day shore fishing stint with friends Peter Frise and Joe Gomez at Guernsey, who while they weren't seeing red mullet regularly back in the 1980's, were certainly still getting their share.

So with me a none shore angler, and them both ardent shore match specialists, who better to team up with. And while red mullet were very much at the top of the my visit list, that wasn't necessarily the expectation that first evening when we fished from the rocks at Havalet Bay just to the south of St. Peterport harbour wall.

I remember it well. It was quite late in the year and therefore dark fairly early. I don't recall what Peter and Joe were after, but I can remember them telling me to fish small and hard on the bottom with ragworm. I can also remember Joe climbing down the rocks with his head-light on to lift up what until that point could well have been anything, then shouting back up "I don't bloody believe it. It's a red mullet".

I couldn't bloody believe it myself either. But there it was. I'd done it. Not only a species I had long wanted to catch, but the completion at long last of the main strand of my bucket list project, the catching in home waters of one hundred species of fish listed by the various record fish committee's.

Since that time, red mullet it seems have not only become more regularly caught, but also more widespread, though the south coast is still the place to be, with the north coast of the west country across into South Wales running it a close second.

Odd specimens have even turned up as far north as Scotland. On the other hand, in some areas such as Falmouth Bay, commercial fishermen are now targeting them with small mesh monofilament gill nets, though these reportedly kill more un-wanted by-catch species than red mullet, and should therefore under the regulations be classed as illegal.

Percentages there depend to no small degree on sea conditions, with warmer summers on into autumn producing more than in cooler years.

Also working against good codes of practise is the fact that as they grow larger, red mullet appear to prefer deeper water, making the smaller, possibly immature fish most vulnerable. The same is probably also true of angling, as most specimens are caught from the shore in areas of sand, mud, and gravel in that order.

Don't however assume them to be restricted to large areas of open clean ground. Any soft substrate, even patches between rocks will do. Even so, their availability to anglers is not easy to assess. With shore fishing in the most productive areas more widely practised there than at a lot of other locations, plus the fact that where there are boats available, these tend to fish out deeper and for bigger stuff, then this is perhaps an unbalanced view.

As regards tactics, simply placing the baits hard on the bottom is going to be in with as good of a chance as anything. My choice was for a two up short dropper rig with size 1/0 hooks and ragworm, though without doubt other baits would also catch. Live shrimp for example would be an item from the fishes regular diet.

### THE MACKERELS AND TUNA'S

Mackerels and tuna's do have anatomical differences which set them apart from each other, though not enough to take them out of the same family, which is scombridae. Tuna's for example have a lateral keel either side of the body which the mackerels lack.

Otherwise, a family of fishes of vital importance on a number of levels, ranging from human consumption and food for other predatory marine species through to angling for pleasure, and angling as a source of tourism income in some corners of the world.

It also contains some of the largest fish on the planet, several of which have been caught around the British Isles, not to mention some of the hardest fighting fish it could ever be your fortune or mis-fortune to hook up, depending on which species and how big.

Having caught various small to middle range tuna and related species over the years, I can honestly say that currently at my time of life, I would not want to hook up a big treble figure tuna, and most certainly not a giant blue fin.

You can pay far less to have the same level of pain and suffering inflicted on yourself by hooking up to one of the many sado-masochism sites that currently advertise on-line instead.

#### TUNNY or BLUE FIN TUNA Thunnus thynnus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Not that many tuna species visit the British Isles, and none, other than the blue fin tuna, has evolved the physiology to generate sufficient internal body heat, not only to withstand, but to thrive in the cooler water temperatures at our latitude. So on that basis alone, confusion with other similar species is most unlikely to be a problem.

Size and rarity are also going to be a determining factors. This is the largest of the tuna's, and is infrequently caught by anglers at weights low enough to allow cross species confusion to creep in. For completeness however, the back is dark blue changing quite rapidly to greyish white above the pectoral fin extending down to the underparts where it becomes more silvery white, often showing a good scattering of silvery or even colourless spots and lines. And while the two dorsal fins don't actually touch, they are very close together, with only a small distance of separation.

The only other home waters tuna species with a similarly small dorsal inter-space is the long fin tuna or albacore. A fish with a very long pectoral fin stretching way back to below the mid point of the second dorsal fin above it. In blue fin tuna the pectoral fin is short, reaching only about half way along the first dorsal fin.

Scientists also use gill raker count comparisons as a further means of verifying speciation. But for anglers this won't be necessary, with size, colour and positioning of the dorsal fins being sufficient, on top of which, the likelihood of catching one (or any tuna species) accidentally is low in the absolute extreme.

A tunny, or blue fin tuna as they are now preferentially called, tipping the scales at 851 pounds caught in 1933 holds the British record for the species, making it the largest fish officially caught on rod and line in the United Kingdom. But it isn't the largest individual fish ever caught in the UK, and nor is it the largest fish or even the largest species of fish caught around the British Isles.

The heaviest blue fin in home waters is an Irish fish caught by Adrian Molloy in 2001 off Donegal weighing in at 968 pounds, while the largest fish, again Irish, is a six gilled shark listed at 1,058 pounds taken out of Carrigaholt on the Shannon estuary.

The actual largest British fish, which is another big tunny caught off the Yorkshire coast in 1949, marginally beat the 851 pound Mitchell-Henry record but was rejected, arguably because of petty politics and the 'old boys' network.

Bearing in mind that tunny fishing in those days out from Scarborough and Whitby was a rich man's pursuit done in the main by influential people who not only liked to catch impressive fish, but as importantly, liked to be seen to catch them, with all the prestige that goes with it.

So when Lincolnshire farmer John Hedley-Lewis comes along and beats the lot of them at their own game by a mere whisker, it isn't hard to imagine that feathers were going to be ruffled, which they most certainly were.

Complaints were made that the rope around that fishes tail used to hook it on to the scale was wet, therefore artificially adding enough to the weight to pip the record.

Sour grapes – most definitely. But sufficient reason it seems back then to those connected enough to cast doubt and put this 'outsider' well and truly in his place, all of which is a great shame.

Even if it had truly been marginally smaller than the Mitchell-Henry record when the weight of the rope was subtracted, it was still a magnificent fish. The second biggest British tunny ever in fact. And now it's a fish not only potentially cheated of record status, some would say without good reason, but largely forgotten too as a result.

That piece of information came to light during a conversation with the late Bill Pashby at his home in Scarborough back in 2010. Bill was the last surviving person with any first hand experience of this particular incident and countless others between the 1930's and 1950's, the likes of which are unlikely ever to be repeated off the Yorkshire coast. Yet amazingly, it wasn't a lack of tunny numbers that brought the episode to a close. Rather, it was a shortage of herrings.

The east coast herring drifters, along with boats from Scandinavia just across the North Sea, had collectively driven the herring population to such a low level that in 1956 an emergency symposium agreed a moratorium on herring fishing, and it was this that brought the rod and line tunny fishing to a grinding halt.

To catch tunny, the angling boats, which were themselves commercial vessels chartered for weeks on end by people who could afford to cover the cost of a crews wages, would shadow the herring fleet, which when they hauled their long drift nets, would lose lots of dead, dying, and in some cases healthy fish as the net came up the side of the boat, which in turn would often chum up pods of big tunny to pick them off.

In a situation of mutual gain, boats encountering tunny would radio over then flash their lights to indicate their position to the tunny anglers, who on nearing the action, would be taken across to the side of the drift netter in a small rowing boat where a bait on a short wire trace would be thrown at the tunny, and in a fourteen foot boat with no engine often many miles out on the North Sea, you can probably imagine what followed.

Bill Pashby was the oarsman in one such a boat lowered down from his fathers trawler 'Courage'. Meanwhile, as the action took them away from the nets, his dad would then nudge in with a crate of beer or a couple of bottles of whiskey as a thank you for the tip off. But once the herring netting was stopped, the ability to locate the tunny was also lost.

Tunny fishing started back in the 1920's with commercial herring boats regularly reporting sightings of big fish around their nets as they hauled. So much so that in 1929, Henry Stapleton-Cotton decided to charter a boat with a view to fishing for them, resulting in the hooking up of two fish, both of which were subsequently lost.

The following herring season, which started off Scarborough in August, he was back out there again. But by that stage he wasn't the only person interested. Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry had also decided to take up the challenge, ultimately becoming the first angler to catch a tunny on rod and line in British waters that year with a fish of 560 pounds.

Four other tunny were also taken during the 1930 season, weighing in at 392, 591. 630, and 758 pounds, the biggest of which fell just short of Zane Greys world record at the time from Nova Scotia, which was finally broken in 1932 by Col. E. T. Peel with a fish of 798 pounds, and again by Mitchell-Henry the following year with the 851 pounder which still holds the British record to this day.

Eclipsing these efforts in terms of angling feat are Cpt. Cyril Hubert Frisby VC, who over five consecutive days took twelve fish, five of which weighing between 461 and 658 pounds came out on the same day.

Equally creditable was Harry Weatherley fishing with Bill Pashby, who boated fish of 545, 589 and 748 pounds, plus one other smaller fish of unspecified size one morning before breakfast, and while he was on the boat, which could be for up to three weeks at a time, he lived in a tent on the deck, fearful of going down below because of sea sickness.

It was also Harry Weatherley, again fishing with the Pashby's aboard 'Courage' who caught the last ever North Sea tunny on rod and line in 1954.

But that wasn't to be the end of the story. Now calling them blue fin tuna, a small group of Irish enthusiasts enjoyed a successful if unfortunately rather short lived series of big fish encounters off the west coast between Westport and Malin Head, in the main fishing out of Downings and Killybegs. Coincidentally, another story which starts with small bait fish and accidental commercial encounters.

Tuna had quietly been going about their business of running along the Atlantic coast of Ireland on up around the west then north coast of Scotland probably for thousands of years without anybody really realising they were there. Then, in the mid 1990's, one of Killybegs pelagic super-trawlers fishing for herring picked up around a dozen of them which caused quite a stir when landed, but were very soon forgotten about.

Much of the pelagic fishing in that area at that time was for mackerel from October through to April. But when an opportunity came along to fish for scad to satisfy a new demand from Japan, the fleet made the switch, which then required them to fish from August through to November.

This as it would turn out coincided with the tuna running through, though still nobody realised that fact, until suddenly the pelagic pair trawlers started bringing in a few tuna every night as by-catch, which they didn't want as they were too big for the pumps used for the scad, and it was this that planted the seeds of rod and line fishing in the minds of three people – Michael McVeigh, Adrian Molloy and English ex-pat Alan Glanville.

In effect, the race to catch the first Irish blue fin tuna was on, though at the time, none of the trio realised this, as they were independently embarking on the same quest.

To cut an otherwise long story short, Michael McVeigh had a brand new boat ordered, which he intended to kit out for the attempt. Through Kevin Linnane and Clive Gammon, he eventually made contact with commercial rod and line tuna fisherman Dan Shannon, who while he lived and worked out of Boston on America's east coast had Irish roots, and agreed to come over for a few days to show Michael the ropes when the boat was eventually ready in September 2000.

Unfortunately, trolling out of Killybegs a few weeks prior to Dan's visit, Alan Glanville had already done it by boating a tuna of 353 pounds, followed the next day by an even bigger fish of 529 pounds. Shortly afterwards, Dan and Michael went on to boat a tuna on live-bait, at which point Adrian Molloy picked up the reins by perfecting his trolling technique, and eventually boating his 968 pound Irish record fish.

As I've already hinted, that run of fish unfortunately turned out to be quite short lived, as several years later the boats were forced to remove their fighting chairs and outriggers due to the fishery slipping into decline. But yet again, that still isn't the end of the story, as between 2013 and present, which is late 2015, blue fin tuna have made a dramatic reappearance at a number of venues.

The first of these reports concerns Scottish boat skipper Angus Campbell, who in 2013 targeted and caught a blue fin tuna on rod and line working well off to the west of Scotland's Outer Hebrides, which coincides with the migration route mentioned earlier.

The following year, American outdoor channel's 'Monsterfish' series sent over tuna expert Fred Lavitman, along with a film crew, to team up with Angus Campbell, and this time they had one on camera with the program subsequently going out to something like thirty nine million US TV viewers.

On subsequent occasions, Angus reports seeing huge numbers of tuna out there, but as with the Irish skippers, it can take time to locate the fast moving pods and keep up with them, a problem which the Scarborough boats didn't have, as the herring drifters chummed them up ready for the catching, as evidenced by some of the spectacular statistics reported earlier.

To bring the Tuna story right up to date, just as I was preparing to publish, reports started filtering through of sightings of literally hundreds of blue fin tuna off the coast of Cornwall, presumably moving up from the Mediterranean to follow their traditional migration route up Ireland's west coast on around Scotland into the North Sea.

Regular sightings had also been reported by the Welsh sharking boats fishing way off over the Celtic Deep out from Milford Haven. So much so that 'White Water II' skipper Andrew Alsop had earlier predicted that sooner or later a big blue fin would pick up a shark bait and be caught in much the same fashion as the commercial tuna fishermen catch them along the eastern seaboard of the the USA, and he wasn't wrong

First amongst these was Mike Steer fishing from the private boat 'Full Monty' who caught and released a fish of around 300 pounds. Then three days later, Chris Bett had a tuna of around 500 pounds on the leader at the side of Andrew Alsops 'White Water II' which eventually managed to part the reel line. Not that anyone was bothered,. It still counts as a catch under IGFA rules, and was destined for release anyway.

Finally, arguably the best catch of them all. I am a dinghy angler who fishes from a Warrior 175. A make of boat with a cult following to the point of having an un-official Warrior owners club who organise trips and share catch reports, much of which I receive either by email, the Internet, or through Facebook.

Towards the end of September 2015, one such a report came my way from Alastair Wilson fishing alone aboard his Warrior 165 'Viper', trolling out from Teelin just to the west of Donegal, who over three consecutive days had three blue fin tuna hook-ups.

The first of these was a brief encounter resulting in the hook pulling free. The second was a fish with the leader out of the water and the fish in view lost due to fraying of the reel line, and the third, a fish of around 300 pounds, was successfully brought back to shore. Two days later he caught and released a further two tuna at the boat.

Whether Alastair should have killed that fish at the boat is another matter. I know he took some stick for doing so, not knowing that the species is now heavily regulated, though not totally protected, and as such he regrets killing it, hence the two further releases at the boat. But in terms of pure angling – what a feat, to target, hook up then land a fish of that size alone in a small trailed boat.

Associated audio interview numbers: 14 and 124.

#### BIG EYED TUNA Thunnus obesus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Due to its very close likeness to the yellow fin tuna, the big eyed tuna is a difficult fish to positively identify. This can be achieved in one of two ways. Internally, the livers of the two fish differ in that in the big eyed it is serrated, whereas with the yellow fin it is smooth edged.

Gill raker counts on the first gill arch also differ, with eighteen to twenty two for the big eyed, and twenty seven to thirty three in the yellow fin. Understandably, in both instances, not something most anglers would want to get involved in reliably checking out I'm sure.

Externally however there are also small differences, though mainly of a comparative nature, which really needs both species to be present to feel confident about drawing conclusions from. So not much help there either, but let's do it anyway.

The two dorsal fins of the big eyed are shorter and closer together than in the yellow fin, with thirteen or fourteen spines in the first and fourteen to sixteen in the second. Colouration is a deep metallic blue on the back becoming white on the lower sides and belly, with the anal and second dorsal fins being a pale yellow, and the finlets between those two fins and the tail being bright yellow and edged in black.

On the plus side, yellow fin tuna have yet to be officially caught on rod and line around the British Isles, and with only the one big eyed reported thus far, I don't think any of the potential pitfalls regarding identification are going to be much of an angling issue. Besides, if one or other does end up on the end of a line, it will very likely be coming ashore anyway, so professional advice could easily be sought and would under the circumstances I'm sure be willingly given.

A tropical and sub tropical fish with a liking for foraging at great depth, hence the size of the eye, where water temperatures drop considerably, which the big eyed can handle on account of its ability to regulate its body core temperature within certain parameters. Grows to around five hundred pounds, and a species inclusion here with a bit of an unusual story behind it.

So far as I can ascertain, this is a one-off catch, which while it could theoretically be repeated, it is very unlikely to be, particularly from the shore, as the lone specimen responsible for placing it on the list was taken from of all places inside Newlyn Harbour in Cornwall back in 1985 by Alan Pascoe, who at the time was fifteen years old.

In an interview I recorded with veteran west country angling journalist Mike Millman, amongst many topics discussed, this particular fish crops up. Apparently, for reasons yet to be explained, the fish in question had been seen by numerous people swimming up and down inside the harbour, and as you might expect, some optimistic individuals, obviously Alan Pascoe included, set about trying to catch it.

I use the word optimistic here on two counts. First off, because this is an open water species which uses the deep water column as part of its normal daily feeding regime, it wouldn't be unreasonable then to expect this particular individual to feel distressed, and therefore be un-willing to feed if it felt 'trapped' inside a harbour.

Even if it did have an interest in food, which clearly this specimen had, what are the chances of actually landing such a large and extremely powerful fish from the shore in the confines of such a place.

I've caught all sorts of tuna species on heavy gear from the boat which at even half that weight have been a real handful. Yet Alan Pascoe stalked it, persuaded it to take, and ultimately got it in, which has to be one of the most incredible shore angling feats of modern times.

Very impressive, and not one likely to be repeated I'll wager. Probably not even from a boat. But just in case, the British Record Fish Committee in their 'wisdom' have set a thirty pounds minimum qualifying weight for record claims.

Now how ridiculous is that. Surely the biggest example of any fish caught fairly on rod and line has to be the record, and to potentially bar such a rare fish of under thirty pounds shows just how far these 'dinosaurs' are out of touch with the real world.

Associated audio interview numbers: 86 and 87.

#### LONG FINNED TUNNY Thunnus alalunga

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

One of the smaller tuna species, the long finned tuna or albacore is not exactly a scarce fish in European waters to the south of the British Isles where it is of immense commercial importance.

The bad news is that it has a marked preference for deep water out towards the edge of the continental shelf, though it will on occasion come closer to the shore when temperatures in the upper waters layers warm up sufficiently later in the year.

When it does, pelagic fishes such as mackerel and herring form the main-stay of its diet, whereas out over deep water, epipelagic species living down to perhaps a hundred fathoms below the surface will feature, which means that at such times it will be far less readily available to be targeted by rod and line.

A fish which, other than in terms of growth potential, is not that dissimilar to a blue fin tuna, except for one major distinguishing point. As the name suggests, of all the tuna species, this one has the longest pectoral fins. So long in fact that they extend almost to the posterior edge of the second dorsal fin.

Colouration is deep blue, often with a brownish tinge on the upper back, and maybe even showing faintly on the lighter lower parts too.

Unlike us Brits, the Irish prefer the name albacore, and for any realistic chance of catching one around the British Isles, Ireland is the place to be heading for. South west Ireland to be precise where the water warms most quickly and there is access to the deeper open oceanic stuff that the albacore seems to like best.

Even then it's often a long hike off from ports between Cork and Kerry, where a number of Irish enthusiasts have made something of a speciality there of successfully targeting them, with Nick Dent and Derek Noble right there at the fore front of the investigative work.

So it is to them that all the recognition here must go. I merely report their findings, because like most home waters anglers, I've never seen an albacore let alone caught one, even beyond the British Isles.

In summary, the fish arrive later summer when the water is at its warmest, and have probably been doing so for many years, feeding quite a lucrative commercial fishery which is often conducted way beyond what can be described as angling reach.

However, over recent years, pioneers like Dent and Noble, fishing beyond the thirty mile mark trolling with six to seven inch self weighted skirted lures at around six knots have on occasion found themselves good numbers of fish, with pink and white being the most favoured lure colours.

Being so fast, and a fish driven by strong migratory urges, means that the angling boats don't find them every time. But when they have, on some days they have taken in excess of twenty specimens, with the record standing at a touch over sixty six pounds.

More than likely the boat caught British record standing at four pounds twelve ounces from the Salcombe estuary was a chance encounter with a lone vagrant that had wandered way off course.

#### PELAMID Sarda sarda

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

For some strange reason, at the time of writing, the British Record Fish Committee have _Sarda sarda_ listed twice as separate inclusions under the names pelamid and bonito. As pelamid are also known as Atlantic bonito, this might explain the confusion. Something to be aware of, though this obviously could change.

A hard fighting small tuna species unlikely to go more than around ten pounds in weight in our waters, though you could be forgiven for thinking it to be a very much bigger fish by the dogged effort which I can vouch for that they will put in.

Colouration and markings should be sufficient to set it apart from any other small tuna's. The back is an azure blue and the under parts silvery. Above the lateral line is a series of oblique or diagonal stripes starting above the corselet and going all the way back to the tail, the corselet being a clearly defined area of different scales starting at the gill cover and surrounding the pectoral fin. The upper jaw also reaches back just beyond the rear extremity of the eye.

Pelamid are said to be the most abundant and certainly the most widespread of the tuna's found in northern waters. Potentially the most catchable too as they will stray into coastal waters, and therefore in theory at least, more frequently to within angling range.

Unfortunately, this is only really true from the Bay of Biscay heading south, though obviously with a reasonable amount of scope to push north towards the west country and southern Ireland during favourable summers, the crucial limiting factor being water temperature. This needs to be above around fifteen degrees C, which theoretically could bring in quite a large chunk of the British Isles.

The British boat record not unexpectedly came from Torbay, though the shore record resides in Wales from the Pembrokeshire Coast, on top of which there have been several un-specified reports of specimens also having been taken around the Channel Islands.

Normally, a shoaling species with well-developed migratory urges encouraging it to push northwards whenever conditions allow. When feeding in deep offshore waters, herring, mackerel and even scad are pursued and eaten. However in shallower coastal waters, demersal species such as pouting and whiting are also taken.

My experiences with the species come from the other side of the pond, both in Florida and around Cape Cod, where at both locations they were picked up on soft bodied lead-head lures, one of which was shocking pink.

Specimens caught on rod and line in home waters have without exception been accidents. But where the fish is known to be shoaling and feeding, any small trolled lure such as a rapala or some skirted pattern fished at or just under the surface could add a deliberate dimension to the fishing.

#### MACKEREL Scomber scombrus

**Bucket List status – result**

While the thick lipped grey mullet is arguably the most frequently observed saltwater fish on the home waters scene, the mackerel has to be the best known. Certainly the most widely caught, if only for bait. So maybe a full blown identification is un-called for. Then again, maybe it is, at least for consistency on my part.

A torpedo shaped fish then with aqua-dynamic streamlining for continuous swimming. So much so that the fins retract neatly into concave recesses when travelling at speed to reduce drag and energy expenditure.

Continual swimming also pushes more water over the gills to satisfy a greater than average oxygen demand, while at the same time allowing the fish to maintain its position in the water column without the need for a swim bladder, which it lacks. There are also two inconspicuous keels at the base of each tail lobe, though it lacks the full lateral keels found in the tuna's.

As any mackerel angler will testify, the scales are small, slippery, and easily dislodged. However, colouration and patterning are the real clues to identification. The underlying colours are metallic green on the back and upper flanks merging into silvery white ventrally. When fresh, a rainbow sheen showing hints of purple can reflect from the lower flanks.

Across the back running from the head to the tail are a series of curved black zebra like stripes reaching down just beyond the lateral line. Viewed from above against a dark sea, or from below against a light sky, the perfect camouflage.

Most anglers, particularly boat anglers, see mackerel not so much as a fish in the sense that they want to catch them, but more as a source of bait, and therefore need to catch them. So despite the supposed lack of interest, it is probably one of the most sought after and regularly caught species on the summer boat fishing scene.

Less so perhaps from the shore, though shoals can come within reach of rock marks, harbour walls, and piers in warm settled weather. Sometimes even right up to the beaches, and under those circumstances they are probably treated with a little more respect.

I personally love the things. If I don't go home with half a dozen feathered up at the very last minute and popped into my little cool box on summer trips then I'm disappointed, as this is my number one favourite eating fish.

That said, and possibly contrary to what a lot of anglers might think, though they make excellent bait for a very wide range of species, they don't feature naturally on the menu of as many species as you might perhaps think.

For large open water predators willing to feed well up off the bottom such as blue sharks and tuna, they do play an important role. For the rest, they will at best be an opportunist treat, and at worst, never eaten at all, unless some angler puts a lump onto a hook and drops it down in front of them.

But when anglers do that, providing the cut is suitably sized and from a freshly caught specimen just before going on to the cutting board, mackerel is right up there with the finest of baits.

Fished live for larger predators such as tope or bass, at times there can be nothing better. So as much as knocking out a good supply may be seen as something of a chore, the time invested in doing so will usually be more than amply rewarded later.

On that basis then, the quicker you can feather up enough for your needs, the less 'proper' fishing time you waste, so it pays to be good at catching them, which not everybody it seems is. For while they might at times appear stupid bordering on suicidal, that isn't always the case, and like most regular boat anglers, I have spent some very frustrating times struggling to get enough.

Essentially, three factors are at play here. First off, conditions need to be right. Settled weather with not too much colour or algae in the water not only suits the fish, but also their ability to see the lures. Poor visibility and heavy weather can play havoc with the shoals, particularly inshore where they can become split-up and fragmented. Even out deep it can still scatter them sending them right down.

The second factor is locating them. Even when the previous conditions are not doing their worst, don't expect to find them everywhere as was once the case. With numbers far lower to start with due to commercial pressure these days, in terms of distribution, they have the option now to be as selective as they might want to be, with areas of disturbed tide often an attraction to them.

It needn't be much. Any bits of headland close in to shore can do the trick. Equally, they can favour other types of location sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Charter boat skippers often have marks they stop off at where they both expect and usually get sufficient for bait for the day.

On my local patch, the area just off the end of Blackpool North Pier is always a reliable producer, though the ground there doesn't appear to be much different to that which surrounds it.

One day we literally went right up to the pier to try out a new side scanning sonar around the metal legs. There we found a shoal actually lurking underneath the pier itself. Spotters leaning over the rails were shouting down to us when the shoal came out allowing us to get right over the top of them, and we filled up a cool box in no time at all.

The third factor is knowing how to catch them which sub divides into two parts, the first of which is technique. There will be days when you can send a string of any type of feathers into free fall and the mackerel will be so keen and well grouped up that they will quite literally stop the gear in its tracks, six ounces of lead and all.

On days like that, getting it right probably isn't an issue. Getting it wrong would be more difficult. But of course, not all days are going to be like that, and often you will need to work hard for your fish.

That can either be as an individual not bothering with what anybody else is doing, or as part of a team, perhaps all using different colours or patterns of lures, and telling everyone else where in the water column you think you found your fish, which as we all know could be anywhere between the surface and the sea bed, though less likely to be the latter as water depth increases.

So a search technique is required, which is nothing more taxing than leaving the reel out of gear and letting the lures go a little deeper every minute or so by controlling the spool with the thumb until the feeding depth, or a few passing individuals if they are patchy, are located, after which it's all down to lure choice and being willing to work at it.

When I first started fishing, feathers were quite literally just that, sometimes white and other times dyed, whipped onto quite large heavy gauge wire hooks which were themselves whipped to short droppers fished in strings of six.

Even fresh from the packet they were of poor quality. The feathers often became pulled clear of the whipping; invariably they were too long and needed to be trimmed down to make sure fish took the hook instead of just nipping at the end, and after just one trip, in most instances, they needed to be discarded.

Blunt to start with, the hooks would quickly rust or themselves pull free of their whippings, and the heavy monofilament used to present them would often become coiled and useless.

In contrast, feather rigs today employ small needle sharp hooks, light monofilament, and come in a huge range of presentations. My particular favourites are shrimp rigs, sabiki's, and either the small red or the luminous green rubber shrimps marketed by Mustad.

Actual feathers, thankfully, have been pretty much consigned to history and nobody should be sorry about that. So there is a world of opportunity out there now in terms of choice, most of which is very good, and some of which is truly excellent. But as ever, that can vary on a day by day basis according to ambient light and prevailing sea conditions.

#### CHUB MACKEREL Scomber colias

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Previously known and recorded as the spanish mackerel, appearance wise, the chub mackerel is not so radically different from the mackerel we see around the British Isles, and as such, could very easily be over-looked.

The general body layout and size range is similar too. Features like the presence of a swim bladder, which chub mackerel have and 'normal' mackerel lack, carry little weight in terms of field identification.

Chub mackerel have nine or ten spines in the first dorsal fin whereas our mackerel have at least eleven. Chub mackerel also lack the two small inconspicuous keels at the base of each tail lobe which again are present in regular mackerel.

Colouration and markings, though broadly similar to those of the mackerel, tend to be made up of spots forming faint wavy lines, with the addition of more spots below them stretching all the way down the fishes side to the belly.

In addition, the scales around the pectoral fin and to the rear of the gill cover are larger than the rest and tend to stay attached, even when scales elsewhere are lost, almost forming a corselet.

Quite an unusual visitor to our patch of the Atlantic, though numbers increase noticeably along Portugal's Atlantic coast around into the Mediterranean, an area which supports quite a sizeable commercial fishery for the species, and it's around southern Europe and the Canary Islands that I have encountered them on a number of occasions.

I haven't actually caught one myself, because when I fish those venues I tend to concentrate on the bigger target species. But I do see chub mackerel in the boats brought on as bait in much the same way as we would use mackerel back home.

Those that do make it up as far as Britain are typically lone individuals that have probably become isolated from their own kind, and as you do when shoaling is an instinctive protection measure from predation, you team up with the next best thing which is a shoal of regular mackerel if you come across one and try to blend in.

Not that blending in will be difficult, as superficially the pair are very much alike. So much so in fact that I wouldn't be surprised if more specimens than people realise turn up and are over-looked in the frenetic action that ensues during a good mackerel bashing session when rushing to catch enough for bait.

Mass catches on the other hand in home waters are rare, though several were recorded over a period of a few days from Mounts Bay back in the summer of 1995. Possibly a shoal or a partial shoal and favourable weather conditions. Who knows.

Amazingly, a species which is absent at the time of writing from the Irish record list, though even more amazing, one that appears on the Scottish list, with a specimen taken way up the west coast off Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. So always it pays to be looking out for those spots on the flanks.

### THE JACKS

A huge global family with in excess of one hundred and forty species, including many of the best pound for pound fighting fish on the planet, distributed throughout all tropical, sub-tropical, and some temperate latitudes. Also a family which have what is known as an adipose eyelid that can vary between prominent and negligible, depending on the species in question.

Best known amongst those found around the British Isles has to be the humble scad. But increasingly, as sea temperatures climb, more and more of its warmer water relatives are also starting to head north to join it. So while at the moment it's just an odd specimen here and there, undoubtedly there will be more, and as anglers we should welcome that.

#### SCAD Trachurus trachurus

**Bucket List status – result**

Scad have large transparent eyelids which come in from the sides rather than the top and bottom of the eye. Visually more prominent still is a very noticeable line of bony scales or scutes over the lateral line, which again is a characteristic of some, though not all members of the family carangidae. These are quite soft above the pectoral fins, becoming progressively more raised and rough to the touch towards the tail.

Scad are quite a laterally compressed fish with a large mouth and two individual spines just ahead of the anal fin. Colouration is bluish grey on the upper back becoming white underneath, with yellowish tints on the flanks when fresh. There is also a small dark blotch on the upper outer edge of the gill cover.

By and large, scad or horse mackerel as they are also known, are open water fish which move into coastal areas during the warmer middle months before pushing back out as deep as two hundred and fifty fathoms during the depths of winter.

More often than not they will remain some way offshore over the medium to deep water boat marks, even during the summer, at depths varying between fifteen and fifty fathoms, where they can be found feeding anywhere between the bottom and the lower pelagic layers.

Distribution of their principle food fishes such as juvenile herring, pilchard, sprats, and small free swimming cuttlefishes or squids determines the level at which they feed. Once found, deliberately or otherwise, they are usually far from demanding fish to catch, especially from a boat.

Jigged feathers, baited feathers, small rubber eels drawn slowly from the bottom to the top, and various paternostered baits will all pick up scad if they are present. Even live sandeels drifted over offshore banks for turbot and bass will be taken. In fact, banks are a very good place to fish if scad are what you want, as when bottom feeding, sandy areas are particularly well favoured.

In angling terms, they are also a bit on an enigma. On the one hand, like a lot of people, I seem to catch them reasonably regularly, but on the other, I never ever seem to catch a lot, and rarely if ever more than the odd one usually followed by some degree of drought, despite them being described as a shoaling species, something I have never found them to be.

Not only that, I've either caught them myself or have seen them caught here, there, and everywhere around the country, and on all sorts of baits and tactics. So once again, no discernible pattern.

For me they simply pop up from time either on feathers, especially when fished baited from the boat, or when float fishing from rocks, piers, or harbour walls for other stuff, particularly if there are lights shinning on to the water at night to attract them.

If not, and you suspect they might be about and fancy giving shore fishing for them a try, then you will need to search for the correct feeding depth starting close to the bottom and working up.

It might also be an idea to retrieve slowly with pauses using float tackle causing the bait to lift as well as travel back towards to your advantage in the hope of grabbing ones attention.

#### GREATER AMBERJACK Seriola dumerili

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Some of my physically most painful angling encounters with fish have come from greater amberjacks. Huge things not far short of a hundred pounds taken off the Florida coast, where it was every drop a fish on both small live-baits and jigged lures, and where if one came off, within seconds there would be another lined up to take its place, so absolutely no respite.

Four of us we were drift fishing a deep water wreck off Key West, taking it in turns in pairs to drop down and hook up. Normally under those conditions, when it's your turn, you can't wait to get hold of the rod. Not so on that occasion.

Similarly at Islamorada where we took individual turns. Knowing the hard fighting endurance mauling that was about to come, there were regular arguments between all of us insisting it wasn't our turn again yet. You genuinely needed an R & R break with fish of that size and power, so it's good to hear they have finally made it, albeit at a very small size as yet, onto our home waters list.

More common in southern Europe, and in particular the Canary Islands where I most recently came across them, I suppose it was only a matter of time before they started pushing up into our latitudes. I don't however expect that we will see a lot of examples of any size, though it would be nice if we did.

You only have to look at a jack, and amberjacks in particular, to appreciate that these are powerful predatory animals. Confusingly, so too are a number of its similar close relatives, which for our purposes here means the guinean amberjack and the almaco jack, which collectively make for one big potential identification nightmare.

There are subtle external differences between the trio. Unfortunately, these are best picked out when all three species are present for direct comparison purposes, which in our waters, or any other waters for that matter, is rarely if ever going to happen.

To really settle the issue, and even this is not one hundred percent conclusive, you need to undertake a count of the gill rakers on the first gill arch, which while it can come up with a positive result, equally might be of absolutely no help whatsoever, as there is the possibility in all three cases for a slight overlap at the margins, which could in some circumstances see a fish killed and its captor still none the wiser.

The one plus in all of this is that because the three jacks in question are so rare in our waters at the moment, and therefore of interest to ichthyologists and fishery scientists too, you could probably get help in putting the issue beyond doubt by contacting say the British Museum or similar.

In this particular case we are talking about a fish whose lateral line is without an overlay of prominent sharp scales otherwise known as scutes. The tall front edge of the dorsal fin, known as the lobe, is approximately the same length or only slightly longer than the pectoral fin.

In terms of colour, I would describe the back and upper flanks as coppery or olive brown becoming silvery white below, though small specimens of the type we have been seeing in our waters can have five darker vertical bars on the upper flanks and back, with a sixth tight up to the start of the tail.

Running the length of the fish from snout to tail passing 'though' the eye and along the body at roughly the mid point of each flank is a diffuse amber stripe, with a second more distinct stripe, again passing 'through' the eye, this time from the mouth to the start of the dorsal fin, which I have heard described as a dusky mask. The gill raker counts are as follows.....

Greater amberjack 11 to 19.

Guinean amberjack 19 to 23.

Almaco jack 22 to 26.

#### GUINEAN AMBERJACK Seriola carpenteri

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Not a fish I am familiar with, though judging by the fact that it has both a boat and a shore record inclusion from The Lizard in Cornwall and Herm in the Channel Islands respectively, perhaps it is a species which both myself and other sea anglers ought to be familiarizing ourselves with.

A warm water species more normally found from Angola north to the Bay of Biscay where it feeds in coastal waters on squids and small fish. But as with a growing number of previously unseen species around the British Isles, one that is probably going to be encountered with increasing regularity as sea temperatures continue to climb.

Unfortunately, as with the greater amberjack and almaco jack with which I am familiar, again it's small specimens only at the moment, though still well capable of being a bit of a handful, as are all members of the jacks family carangidae.

Potentially, a bit of a handful to identify too, being very similar to both the greater amberjack and the almaco jack about which I have already said that if it is important to know the exact name of the fish you've caught, it might be better to hang on to it because of the destructive gill raker count required to separate the three species, and even that unfortunately isn't conclusive as there are slight overlaps.

On a more positive note, and again as previously mentioned, fishery scientists should be only too happy to see such a rare fish from home waters, and will therefore probably be equally happy to help.

Superficially, a powerful looking fish without lateral line scutes, the back and upper flanks of which are a coppery bronze becoming silvery white below, with a diffuse straight amber stripe mid flank passing 'through' the eye to the tail, plus a darker strip, again passing 'through' the eye, from the mouth to the base of the first dorsal fin, and again in the juvenile fish there can be five darker vertical bars. The gill raker count should be between 19 and 23.

#### ALMACO JACK Seriola rivioliana

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Almaco jacks, greater amberjacks, and guinean amberjacks all look pretty much identical and share very similar life styles. Certainly when they are juveniles. Only when the AJ's really start piling on the pounds taking them way bigger than the potential maximum for the other two does picking that particular species out become less of a problem. It's in the lower cross-over weight category that accurate identification can be a nightmare.

All three are a coppery to olive brown on the back and upper flanks becoming off-white to silvery below, with a dark bar running up from the mouth 'through' the eye towards the base of the first dorsal fin, plus a diffuse amber stripe starting in front of the eye and running 'through' it along the flank to the tail.

Physically, the almaco is a slightly shorter fish than the two amberjack species, with the first few spines of the second dorsal fin standing around twice the height of the rest of the fin, which should be quite noticeable. However, in smaller fish of the type we've seen at out latitude, which in this case can have six darker vertical bars on their flanks, the differences are far less obvious.

That being the case, option one is that as all jacks other than scad caught by anglers around the British Isles are worthy of note and would be of specific interest to fishery scientists, destructive identification is perhaps a little more easy to take.

This involves counting the gill rakers on the front gill arch, which in this case number 22 to 26. The greater amberjack has 11 to 19, and the guinean amberjack 19 to 23, so there is some potential there for overlap.

On the other hand, if identification doesn't matter too much either way, then why not put the fish back, which is what I did fishing out from Puerto Rico in the Canary Islands, and more recently from the shore around Ascension where they are prolific up to around double figures.

At Puerto Rico on Gran Canaria where we had a few small almaco jacks, while I know there are some good amberjacks to be caught around the island too, I was happy enough when the skipper said it was an almaco to take his word for it. That was good enough for me, and I don't doubt that the fish would also have approved too, even if we had actually got its name wrong.

#### BLUE RUNNER Caranx crysos

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Another warm water fish typically ranging between latitudes corresponding with Angola to the south and the Bay of Biscay to the north on both sides of the Atlantic, which occasionally finds itself on an anglers hook around the south and west of the British Isles. In this case the record inclusion came from a shore mark along the north Cornish coast.

I personally have never come across them over here on our side of the pond. But I have caught them on many occasions while fishing in Florida. Not so much as a deliberate target, though they are regarded very highly as a light tackle game fish willing to take all manner of baits, lures, and flies.

My experience is of picking up small ones on scraps of squid trotted away from the boat under a small float in a chum slick put out to attract any small fish that might come along to fill up the live-bait wells.

Like Scad, they are tough little fish as well as game fighters, and make excellent long lasting live baits. A fish which when you locate them can be particularly numerous, and very quick off the mark when it comes to finding and taking a bait.

Taking account of the sparsity of catches in home waters, it's more probably an occasional tail end straggler un-intentionally finding itself this far north following an extensive bout of favourable conditions, but none the less, worth keeping an eye out for anyway.

Typically jack-like, even scad-like in appearance, though with a slightly deeper body profile, and generally more powerful build, particularly around the shoulders and head. The mouth is large, the tail very strongly forked, and the second dorsal and anal fins are of roughly balanced size and layout.

As with the scad, but not the two amberjack species mentioned previously, the lateral line comprises a series of obvious bony scales or scutes numbering 46 to 56. These become more pronounced from where it curves over the pectoral fin towards tail.

In the scad, the first dorsal fin is taller than second. With the blue runner the reverse is true. A blueish green to olive green fish on the back and upper sides becoming silvery grey below, with a dusky spot, though this may be indistinct, on the upper gill cover.

#### PILOT FISH Naucrates ductor

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Most people, including none anglers, will be familiar with pilot fish, having seen them shadowing sharks on TV documentaries. Sharks tolerate them as equal partners in a symbiotic relationship in which the pilot fish rids the shark of various ecto-parasites in exchange for scraps of food, protection from predators, and an understanding between the pair that it doesn't ultimately feature on the sharks menu at some stage, all of which seems to work quite well.

So well in fact that pilot fish hate to be without their 'partner', and as such have been said to shadow boats, which is suggested as one reason why they turn up around the British Isles where very occasionally they are caught on rod and line, one of the latest examples having turned up in Carmarthen Bay.

Thankfully, at last, a jack that is easy to identify. One in fact that is slightly different in shape to the more familiar scad in that it is a little heavier built with a rounded face. Also there are three to five short individual spines replacing the more familiar first dorsal fin.

Two similar free spines are situated in front of anal fin on the underside, and there is a distinct scale-less keel following the run of the lateral line from just before the back edge of the dorsal and anal fins reaching to the start of the tail fin, none of which really matters a jot as colouration and markings should settle the issue anyway. Pilot fish are blue grey with between five and seven broad darker vertical bands.

### THE SEA BREAMS

As with the jacks, the wrasses, and the tuna's, the sea breams are essentially a warm water family at the northern edge of its range at our latitude, but one which looks destined to continue to spread in terms of diversity and geographical limits as sea temperatures continue to rise.

Already we are seeing that, not only in terms of new species such as the couches and pandora breams being added to the home waters list within my angling life time, but also the push northwards over the past several years.

It is now possible to fish Luce Bay in Scotland and successfully target black bream in good numbers, a species which barely ventured much further north than Cardigan Bay in Wales not that long ago.

A family characterised by laterally compressed, often deep body profiles, a single dorsal fin comprising sharp spines then softer rays, rough scales, and in many cases an almost metallic look.

Also a family in which sex changing can occur. And as was the case with the mullets, there is an imposter in there too, the rays bream, which is no relation to the true sea breams of the family sparidae. It unfortunately just happens to share the word bream in its name.

#### BLACK BREAM Spondyliosoma cantharus

**Bucket List status – result**

A typical bream-like fish with a laterally compressed oval body, single continuous dorsal fin comprising a spiky first section and a softer second section, a small mouth, rough scales, plenty of sharp finger threatening spines, and a rather metallic looking sheen to its overall visual presentation.

Helping separate the black bream from its many close relatives is its colouration, which can be quite dark, and in some individuals, as the name suggests, bordering on black, though often as a colour wash over a silver metallic looking back ground, particularly lower down the flanks.

Some individuals can also have several broad darker bars along their flanks. There may even be hints of blue or gold patterning here and there too, which, as with the darker bars and depth of dark colouration generally, in some fish can be quite variable, though the tendency is that most individuals coming from a particular location will all be similarly marked.

Black bream are also a nest building species with some particularly interesting gender habits. Most members of the sea bream family sparidae are thought to be hermaphrodites; that is animals born with both sets of sex organs. Protandrous hermaphrodites mature as males, some of which later change to females, whereas protogynous hermaphrodites do things the other way around.

Whilst not conclusive, research suggests that black bream mature as females, some of the larger of which, according to need, later become males displaying the characteristic humped shoulder and iridescent blue band between the eyes.

Black bream and Sussex were synonymous when I first read about angling for the species. The Kingmere rocks in particular. All those late spring to early summer stories of huge catches of fish to six pounds and more, plus a dipping of the toe into the world of light tackle fishing allowing fish to show what they're made of instead of subduing them with overwhelmingly heavy gear was particularly inspiring reading back then.

Ironically, more than forty years would elapse before I would catch my first Sussex black bream on a run out from Chichester eastwards along the coast towards Selsey aboard Graeme Pullen's Wilson Flyer. There we took quite a few very nice specimens on ultra light fixed spool outfits, finally fulfilling the dreams of all those years ago.

That of course wasn't my first black bream encounter. There have been many over the years, and from a whole string of venues, which in a way have mirrored the species expansion northwards, marking them out as another of those rare fish to have enjoyed some measure of success in the face of all the ills fish population numbers more generally have suffered over recent times.

Ironically, despite the increasing expansion, the species has still suffered numerically along the south coast where they once prospered. Also in terms of its breeding grounds which are being destroyed commercially, and last but not least, a decrease in their average size due to increased commercial interest in the species.

The first black bream I ever saw was on a planned bream fishing trip, but not one targeting black bream. As will become clear in the red bream account, I have spent a lot of time dropping small mackerel strips on 2/0 hooks to short droppers right into the thick of the Eddystone and its adjacent reefs aboard boats fishing out from Looe in Cornwall.

Red bream were far and away the most common species there back then, to the point that I was actually surprised one day when a couple of nice sized blacks also made the frame.

It wasn't me that caught them unfortunately. I was still a black bream virgin at that stage. But determined that wasn't going to remain the case, by the end of the trip, still with no black bream to my credit, I decided that I would do something about it, which fortunately was shaping up to be achievable a good deal nearer to home. Mid Wales in fact.

It seems that having bypassed the remainder of the west country and south Wales in respect of swimming over what appeared to have been suitable ground in places, black bream had decided to set up shop in Cardigan Bay.

Yet another example from a whole line of similar incidents where fish push northwards into new territory, seemingly ignoring potentially suitable ground as they go, when the ultimate goal of their journey, which presumably is finding something better, is never guaranteed.

Yet still they do this, as have the smoothhounds into Scottish waters and the trigger fish in the Heysham nuclear power station intakes. A fact which never ceases to amaze me.

Aberystwyth and Aberdovey were both starting to make their name as black bream hot spots during the 1970's, which despite all the ills mentioned previously that have befallen the species, continues to be the case, though no longer as this species most northerly outpost.

Picking up on what I said earlier about ignoring heavy reefy ground along the north Devon, north Cornish and South Wales Coast in favour of pressing on, you can't help but wonder what it is that really drives a species northwards in this way, motivating it into pioneering mode.

The reefs off the south Cornish coast are in many ways a mirror of those along the north coast. Then you throw into the equation the fact that while we did catch blacks out from Looe, it was just the odd one mixed in amongst so many reds.

So were the reds simply beating the blacks to the baits through shear weight of numbers. I think not. The answer to that one lies in the evidence, with still only small numbers of black bream out there long after the red bream population spectacularly nose dived.

There had to be another factor, which it you reject water temperature on the basis that Cardigan Bay is quite a bit further north than the English Channel, only really leaves terrain preference, and it is this that appears to be the most likely candidate.

Along the Susses coast, the preference is not for heavy ground per se, but for areas of more mobile loose material such as gravel adjacent to chalk reefs into which the males can excavate a nest for spawning purposes.

Cardigan Bay also fits this particular requirement very well, because it has several extensive fingers of 'reef' which are actually loose stones and other rubble, supposedly the remains of long since deposited glacial moraines.

A glacier is for want of a better definition a river of ice. A long narrow ribbon which builds where the snow falls, gravitationally creeping slowly towards lower altitudes, which generally means the coast and ultimately the sea.

As they flow, for a variety of reasons, debris in the form of stones, boulders, and even soil from the surrounding valley slopes falls onto and become consolidated into the glacier, which then carries the material along until ultimately it melts, leaving ridges or flat planes of loose material depending on the type of glacier and moraine in question.

It is this process that is said to have formed the various fingers of reef currently accessed from ports like Aberystwyth, Aberdovey, Porthmadoc and Pwllheli, all of which attract vast numbers of black bream throughout the summer months.

Obviously, the black breams arrival here will be a little later than might be expected along the south coast due to the extra time required to press further north from their southerly over-wintering grounds. But the link between West Wales and black bream should at least be easier to understand. It's the substrate that is key.

Water temperature and food availability are also determining as well as controlling factors in the overall picture, but must work alongside as opposed to independently of the fishes other needs.

I mentioned earlier the noticeable size reduction in black bream over recent years, and nowhere has this been more evident to me than in Cardigan Bay. I once did a feature for one of the mags back in the late 70's to early 80's out from Aberdovey, where not only did we have an absolute beano of a day numerically, but also in terms of the sheer quality of the fish, many of which topped three pounds, with several topping four pounds.

One even came within an ounce of the Welsh record at the time. Not the six pounders of the early Kingmere days. But they weren't seeing that quality of fish there any longer by that stage either.

The fishing along that middle stretch of Cardigan Bay over the moraines was quite outstanding, and while that sort of quality can no longer be expected, I was none the less given a lesson in black bream fishing there quite recently that has been well and truly etched on to my brain.

This was a trip out from Aberystwyth in 2011 with Dave Taylor aboard 'Aldeberan' who I'd fished with many times over the years and who was about to retire, the idea being to produce a feature on the man and the fishing, plus record a well deserved audio interview for archive.

On board that day was local school teacher Jeff Thomas who was fishing with a tiny fixed spool outfit and was about to give us a master class by catching more black bream than everyone else on the boat put together.

Bream are relatively small fish with equally small mouths, and quite often, problems in catching them tend to be of anglers own making. I learned a long time ago that scaling down was the key to success with bream, not only in terms of hook size, but also bait.

I've seen bream come up on size 6/0 hooks loaded with bait aimed at say conger. Stories of fish which should never have been caught are always going to crop up. But these are the exceptions. The result of sheer determination on the part of the fish, and dare I say it, bad fishing on the part of the angler in not noticing something was happening down at the business end of things earlier.

I've had it happen to me on more than one occasion, so nobody is immune. It's the conversion ratio of bites to fish caught that is the true barometer, and to improve on that with bream, you really need to be scaling things back to meet their specific requirements.

Giving them something bite sized on a short dropper fished above the lead both to keep the hooks away from snags and have the bait very clearly on show has always been important to me. But Jeff on this occasion took that to a whole new level by fishing a string of sabiki lures which are made from fish skin whipped to size ten hooks baited with a tiny sliver of squid, which even a modest sized bream would have had no difficulty wolfing down in one go.

No need there to miss bites through interested fish being forced to nibble the bait down to a manageable size. If they wanted it, they had it in one go. And while this might have been marginally less interesting to some fish on account of the bait being so small, with bite to hook up conversion rates so high, Jeff was able to race away in terms of fish numbers.

The following spring I was fishing over in Florida where I spotted sabiki's on sale, and recalling Jeff's master class, I bought several packs before heading out fishing from Cape Coral.

Once out, the first thing we needed was bait. Live-baits are always handy over there, so I put the sabiki's down and came back up with a never ending supply pretty much to order, which meant we didn't need a live well.

When I wanted a live-bait I caught one, and when I didn't, to avoid hooks lying about in the boat, I simply left the gear static at the bottom, and still the sabiki's caught, despite there being not a breath of breeze to rock the boat and move the lures. That's how good they are. They didn't even need to be jigged up and down.

So it was back to the shop on the last day to stock up ready for home, because the following spring I had a Sea Angler feature trip planned out from Pwllheli fishing one particular moraine known as St. Patrick's Causeway. A long fairly narrow pile of stones and boulders, quite close to the surface in places, covered with black bream over the top, and usually plenty of huss and tope in the deeper water along its edges.

Jason Owen aboard 'Hal Aled' was our skipper, and although it was flat calm on a bright sunny day, it was still early season following on the heels of a long spell of wind with Jason not quite sure how the day might go.

With hind sight, he needn't have worried. It met up to all our expectations and more. We found the mackerel on the way out, then with swim feeders loaded with mackerel guts attached to the lead beneath the sabiki's, Charlie Pitchers and I proceeded to knock seven bells out of the bream.

The other lads were catching a few. Then having cottoned on to our tactics and found themselves some shrimp rigs and the like, were very quickly up to speed themselves.

It was around this point that the tope started to move in, biting the swim feeders off, and nicking the bream from the hooks. The sabiki rigs were constantly shrinking one hook at a time until they were all gone.

Then unfortunately it was back either to more conventional gear, or to heavier duty flowing traces which produced dozens of tope to forty eight pounds. What a good day.

Sticking with Pwllheli for a moment, another bream trip I took part in for a magazine feature some years earlier was aboard Dave Carey's boat 'Judy B'. Besides it being a beautiful day and producing lots of decent fish, two things in particular stand out about that trip.

The first was that as the tide died away and the fishing started to tail off, Dave produced a huge container of boiled rice with he put into a mesh bag tied to the side of the boat so that it was just lapping in the water, slowly releasing the rice grains, which in the slack tide fell by gravity out of view a short distance from the anchored boat.

This was sufficient to revive the flagging attentions of the bream which came right back on the feed again, though not with quite the same intensity as earlier. And when they came up they were bursting to the gills with rice grains.

It's not as if we were using rice as hook bait, so just why it should trigger that level of response is difficult to say. The important message here however is that it did.

Dave also had another trick up his sleeve to winkle out a few more extra fish. A sliding float rig with a one ounce drilled bullet lead stopped by a swivel around twelve inches above a size four hook baited with tiny sliver of mackerel.

The bait was allowed to plummet dragging the reel line through the centre of the float until it touched bottom. A small piece of elastic band was then tied tightly around the line to act as an adjustable stopper and slid down until the float was holding the bait a couple of inches clear of the sea bed.

What little tide there was could then be used to slowly trot the float and bait away from the boat, imparting just enough movement to get the bream interested again.

I spent half an hour fishing the same way myself, and I have to say that the excitement of watching the float bob, plus fighting the instinct to strike every time it twitched, made for some of the best edge of the seat fishing I've enjoyed in many a long time.

On my local patch, over the past several years, an odd black bream has been picked up over the boulders along the Lancashire coast and further up over similar ground around the southern edge of Walney Island. But not in a way that could be regarded as with either regularity or predictability. Genuinely, just odd ones.

Charlie Pitchers and I also had a few out from Caernarfon in our boat, which should come as no surprise as they had been about in a couple of localised holding areas around Trefor and Dinas for quite a few years. And we again had a good session on them in the same area aboard Andy Owen's boat 'Morgan James' out from Port Dinorwic.

I've also caught black bream from my own boat well up inside the Menai Strait, and more recently, Tony Parry has discovered quite a small but prolific hot spot for them off Rhyl. All part of what could be argued is a progressive advance northwards since those early days back in the 1970's when Sussex ruled the roost.

What clinched that line of thinking for me was when Ian Burrett, who I often fish with in and around Scotland's Luce Bay, called to say that he'd found them in quite big and reasonably predictable numbers at a couple of marks higher up in the bay when putting the boats in at the village of Ardwell up towards Sandhead, where on one exploratory visit, between his three small boats, they'd taken in excess of a hundred fish, all of which, in true Ian Burrett style had been returned to the water unharmed.

So who knows what the future holds in terms of northerly migration. With much sparser boat fishing activity further up along Scotland's west coast, they may already have progressed up there too as yet un-noticed.

Boat fishing obviously has been my main focus of attention so far, but is by no means the only approach. Rock perch fishing can also produce black bream, dependant of course on where and how you choose to fish. Some of the steep shingle beaches along the south coast also turn up the odd one here and there too.

I'm no shore angler as I've made clear elsewhere already, so my experience in that regard can at times be limited. That said, I do have experience of catching black bream from the shore. From the rocks in fact around Herm in the Channel Islands on various baits, including ragworm and sandeel strips fished deep under a sliding float in a trail of rubby dubby made up from boiled sandeels, bread, and pilchard oil, spooned into the water to attract and hold fish in our swim.

Associated audio interview numbers: 40 and 162.

#### RED BREAM Pagellus bogaraveo

**Bucket List status – result**

A deep bodied bream with a noticeable hump between the eye and the start of the dorsal fin, the eye itself being large, hinting at its deep water offshore preference, which are just two of several points of anatomical detail useful for identification.

For our purposes though, simply look out for a deep bodied laterally compressed fish with a wash of red colouration over the back and upper flanks of an otherwise silvery grey background, with a very prominent diffuse dark blotch just above where the lateral line starts close to the top of the gill cover.

A fish which is a protandrous hermaphrodite, meaning it starts life with both sets of sex organs eventually maturing as a male, some of which switch over to being females as or when required.

Personally speaking, this is my favourite bream species, and a fish I have invested a lot of time, effort, and money into fishing for, particularly in the 1970's and early 1980's when the long run south from Lancashire to the west country was regularly rewarded with some quite spectacular light tackle fun fishing, plus some excellent meals later when I got back home.

The Eddystone reef fishing out from Looe was the main focus there, though we also had them off Mevagissey over the rough round, plus some particularly good ones when anchoring the wrecks at slack water out from Plymouth. Guernsey, and Newquay.

The last red bream I saw caught came from one of the reef marks out off Newquay. Then suddenly, they were gone. Not just thinned out, but to all intents and purposes, from my perspective at least, they might just as well have been driven to a point of sudden mass extinction.

How could such a prolific offshore fish nose dive in so spectacular a fashion. Angler pressure was mentioned, though if I'm honest, while I was particularly interested in catching them, with such good wreck and reef prospects for all manner of other stuff around the West Country back then, I don't think too many other anglers were that fussed.

Then by pure chance one evening while chatting with Sid Pender down at Penzance, what may well have been the cause, or at least a good part of it, suddenly came to light when he commented on an incident involving a large Scottish commercial boat which was either a mid water trawling, or a partner in a pair, out looking for mackerel close to the Runnel Stone. This boat brought in six thousand stone of 'unidentified' by-catch which turned out to be adult red bream, pretty much wiping out the entire breeding stock. In the twenty years following that incident, Sid caught just two red bream.

In the lead up to chatting through that body blow incident, the same conversation also made mention of how the small local inshore boats at the end of the mackerel feathering season would cut their feather rigs down in terms of hook numbers, add pieces of mackerel to those that were left, and again around the Runnel Stone, have a good couple of months hand-lining for red bream, which pretty much sums up arguably the best outline terminal tackle approach for catching them.

I started off fishing baited feathers out over the Eddystone, but quickly realised that as versatile as this approach can be across a very wide range of reef species, there were better ways of achieving a much improved similar end.

Building on the feathers pattern, because let's face it, most terminal rigs are little more than variations on a very small number of basic themes, we adapted the three droppers above the lead idea by using much stronger sharper hooks, and built ourselves a bream trace that could cope with pretty much anything, with the added bonus that it also brought other species into the mix for those occasions when the bream weren't feeding too well.

It was an all monofilament rig comprising a main spine of sixty to eighty pounds breaking strain with three lighter droppers tied to swivels trapped in position by beads, and because we didn't have crimps to fix their position back then, using such strong mono for the backbone of the trace meant that we could simply tie a knot either side of the beads and trap the dropper that way, knowing the trace would still be strong enough for conger or ling should they come along.

To help ensure that one might, the bottom dropper was tied at around three feet in length with a 6/0 hook to the same heavy mono with two shorter lighter droppers above it, the middle one with a 2/0 hook, and on the top dropper a size one to ensure we had all options covered. The only proviso was spacing the droppers such that they couldn't self tangle on the drop, and it was a very productive rig.

Some might say that the small top hook was a wee bit flimsy for what might come along. Even when baiting it with the tiniest of mackerel strips. And while there were occasions when it did manage to bring up big fish, on others it didn't last the distance. The thinking behind it though was plainly and simply ticks on the bucket list, which was still in its infancy back then.

Out over the Eddystone, though it possibly wasn't potentially as species rich as it might be today in the wake of rising sea temperatures, there were still interesting and unusual fish to be had, the most memorable of which was a relative of the bass, the beautifully patterned comber.

Talking to people in the south west, both anglers and commercials, as you might expect, it seems that the Scottish trawler(s) working the Runnel Stone that fateful day didn't quite scoop up the entire breeding stock, though the encounter certainly made a massive dent in it.

Over the past few years, particularly around the Channel Islands, there have been signs of this slow growing late maturing bream species tentatively but steadily struggling to make something of a measured comeback.

Mainly small fish for the moment, known locally as chad's, with a few middle range specimens dotted about here and there. But gone still are the days when you could fill a fish box with four to five pound red bream, and out over the wrecks, not unrealistically set your sights much higher, with the biggest ever specimen brought to the scales dragging the needle round to over 9½ pounds on Mevagissey harbour.

The shore record not unexpectedly is a Channel Island fish. Aldernay to be precise. The best specimen landed in Welsh waters, though small by comparison to the south west is still a creditable fish considering the circumstances, weighing in at a touch over one and a quarter pounds from Amlwch on Anglesey, which is more like a chunk of Cornwall dropped into the Irish Sea than it is the rest of Wales.

Surprisingly, the Scots too get in on the act with a more than creditable fish of four pounds ten ounces caught off Ardnamurchan on the western mainland looking south towards the Isle of Mull.

Associated audio interview numbers: 104.

#### GILTHEAD BREAM Sparus aurata

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Having a blunt steeply rising facial profile is a distinct characteristic of the gilthead, which is both a euryhaline species tolerant of fluctuating salinity levels, providing these are not extreme or sudden, and a protandrous hermaphrodite, which means it starts life with both sets of sex organs eventually maturing as a male, some of which switch over to being females as required.

What they most definitely cannot tolerate are sudden dips in water temperature which will push them out deep to more stable conditions, a point worth bearing in mind perhaps early season.

Positive identification is made easy by a highly conspicuous golden curved bar bordered by darker markings across the forehead. There is also a dark patch at the base of the pectoral fin, plus a second at the beginning of the lateral line running onto the gill cover, the edge of which can be scarlet.

General colouration is otherwise metallic grey above becoming silvery below, then white. A beautiful powerful looking fish, which by any definition it most certainly is.

Despite an extremely limited home waters potential geographically speaking, gilthead have a very real and at times obsessive following along the south coast of England, and increasingly also over in Ireland, particularly amongst shore anglers.

Some are caught from boats, especially small boats working the same areas that the shore lads fish. But we are predominately talking shore fishing here, which for a powerful migrant from afar makes quite a refreshing change.

Said to be an extremely rare inshore vagrant north of the Bay of Biscay, and even within the confines of the bay itself, this is now a species that is increasingly turning that supposed wisdom on its head by becoming something of a regular star attraction in some areas.

The Salcombe Estuary in particular, though other adjacent West Country estuaries and harbours both north and south of Lands End, some Channel Island harbours such as St. Sampson on Guernsey, and similar areas around the south and west of the Irish Republic are also getting in on the act, which between them throw up a number of themed clues.

Coastal shallows in the extreme south west, preferably with some freshwater influence or a harbour are favoured, with a first appearance in the spring followed by a disappearance either offshore or by dropping back to the south towards the end of the summer would on paper at least appear to sum things up.

But as ever when collating scientific data, there are always those un-explained troublesome outliers. Blips on an otherwise perfect distribution map, which in the case of the gilthead are the semi-puzzling Welsh record from Llandwyn Beach on Anglesey, and the inexplicably puzzling Scottish record from Dunnet Head, which is about as far north as it's possible to go on the British mainland.

I have caught giltheads on a number of occasions, though mainly at the smaller end of the size range, and always well outside our home waters boundaries.

Chief amongst these has been the southern Mediterranean from the North African beaches of Tunisia where they proved to be not only the most dominant, but at times apparently, the only species within casting range. So it's not really my place to talk with authority on gilthead fishing on the home front.

Saying that, I am privy to a good deal of quality information on the subject by way of an audio interview I recorded with gilthead bream fanatic and Sakuma tackle MD Alex MacDonald, the basic content of which is summarised as follows........

Predominately Salcombe which holds both British records, boat and shore, with fish up to just a touch either side of the ten pound mark, though the Exe, Teign, Taw and Torridge estuaries should also be in reckoning. So potentially a big as well as structurally a powerful fish, even by bream standards, which needs to be geared up for specifically.

This is not shore fishing in the traditional sense of firing out baits towards the horizon pinned in place by wired grip leads. The recommendation here is to carefully place baits along the established run of hard bottomed clearly defined estuary channels, which depending on where these are situated, could require no more than a good lob.

In that regard, a sturdy fixed spool reel loaded with braid and with a quality drag suitably set for what hopefully is to come, paired with either a heavy duty spinning rod or stepped up carp rod capable of handling two to three ounces of lead is ideal.

Lead pattern is obviously a matter for personal choice. Alex tends to use a three ounce pear lead hammered flat to lie on the bottom and not catch too much flow.

Good chemically sharpened hooks are also recommended and must be constantly checked for sharpness on account of the hard interior of the giltheads mouth, which besides the normal teeth, comes armed with hard crushing plates to deal with molluscs and crabs which are its favoured food.

Peeler crab in particular is a highly rated bait when the main crab moults are under-way, switching to lugworm as the summer progresses, then back to crab later in the season, though shellfish still in their shells are a favourite elsewhere in Europe, along with smashed up shellfish catapulted in to a swim as ground bait. With that in mind, shellfish farms might also hold some attraction.

Invariably, any fish caught tend to be relatively isolated catches or from small groups moving up and down the estuary with the tide. In so far as they coincide with previously established feeding times within a tide, early morning and late evening sessions are preferred, along with a willingness to move, which means travelling light, on the one hand if nothing seems to be happening, and on the other after a fish has been caught, trying to second guess where they might move to next in order to be there when they arrive.

Associated audio interview numbers: 161.

#### COUCHES BREAM Pagrus pagrus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Couches bream is one of the typically deeper bodied species, but with a noticeably flattened blunt facial profile. The other `red' bream species such as the pandora and true red bream lack this sudden change of profile angle above the eye.

Colouration is basically silvery with a slight tinge of pinkish red washed over the upper parts and fins. A species belonging to the protogynous hermaphrodite category of having both sets of sex organs, maturing as a female, only for large specimens to switch over to being males as and when the need requires them to.

My experience of the species is of catching them on small fish baits out over moderately deep water off Puerto Rico at the southern end of Gran Canaria, and off Gibraltar, where if you fished small enough, in the company of other 'UK exotics', they were fairly easy to catch.

The mid 1990's saw quite a number of reported occurrences, including rod caught specimens, from around the Channel Islands, and Guernsey in particular, where they are now thought to be quite firmly established, and may even be breeding both off there and along the Cornish Coast. One more indication perhaps, if ever it were needed, of rising sea temperatures making their mark.

Quite a large growing fish with weights up around fifteen pounds potentially attainable, though it has to be said that in today's commercially pressured climate, those sorts of weights are rarely achievable, particularly as this is a species on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) endangered list.

Sandy or patchy ground is generally favoured where a diet of crabs, prawns, shrimps and small fishes is pursued.

#### BOGUE Boops boops

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Bogue are a long shallow bodied shoaling species of sea bream, commonly found in very shallow coastal areas over rocky ground where a variety of suitably sized crustaceans and some algae form the basis of their regular diet.

Colouration is greenish blue with golden or silvery flanks and three to five longitudinal golden stripes. There is also a small and at times diffuse dark spot at the base of the pectoral fin.

A fish which can quite happily live anywhere from the sea bed to the surface where they may form quite extensive shoals after dark, a point not lost on southern European fishermen who attract them with bright lights on the bows of their boats in order to net them.

Another species which falls into the protogynous hermaphrodite category of having both sets of sex organs, initially maturing as a female, only for large specimens to switch over to being males as and when the need arises.

As ever with the more exotic bream species, my experience is of catching them around the Canary Islands, both when float fishing small baits from the rocks and harbour walls, and by the bucket load on tiny pieces of prawn at the bottom out in the boat.

Though anglers have occasionally picked them up for as far back as I can remember off south Devon and Cornwall, there are now increasing reports of bogue being more regularly caught around the Channel Islands, the west country generally, and the south west of Ireland, probably resulting from a concerted northerly push.

#### PANDORA BREAM Pagellus erythrinus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

As with the white, axillary and saddled breams, one of an ever growing number of sub tropical species more inclined towards a life spent south of the Bay of Biscay, which now occasionally creeps beyond its normal range, presumably encouraged by rising sea temperatures, ending up usually around the Channel Islands or along adjacent parts of the south coast.

A fish which could at a glance be readily mistaken for the more common red bream _Pagellus bogaraveo_ which it quite probably has been confused with over the years. Particularly around the western English Channel and along the coast of south-west Ireland before the red bream slipped into decline and the presence of both the pandora and the couches bream was realised.

Shallow water down to perhaps thirty fathoms in the vicinity of rocks are its normal haunts, though at times it may also feed over sand. Either way, it is not an uncommon fish and can be caught using exactly the same baits and tactics as for red bream, adding even more to the potential for confusion.

The key point in distinguishing between the pair is the dark blotch on the shoulder just above the gill cover which red bream have and pandora lack. The facial profile also lacks the steep vertical angle and rather blunt appearance of the similar looking couch's bream.

Colouration is red on the back and upper flanks, changing to a pinker red, then silvery below. Small blue spots may also be present on the upper flanks. A protogynous hermaphrodite in which mature females become males as and when required.

Another fish I have caught on a number of occasions while on holiday over the years, the first one of which was brought back to the UK from Majorca as part of a mixed species consignment of artwork specimens for Dr. Dietrich Burkel who was illustrating the Angling Encyclopaedia back in the 1970's.

#### WHITE BREAM Diplodus sargus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Also known as the sargo, as with the pandora, axillary, and saddled breams, one of an ever growing number of sub tropical species more inclined towards a life spent south of the Bay of Biscay, which now occasionally creeps up beyond its normal range, presumably encouraged by rising sea temperatures, ending up usually around the Channel Islands or along adjacent parts of the south coast.

This is a deep whitish or silvery greyish fish with quite a sizeable dark blotch on the top of the tail stalk, and five narrow dark stripes running down from the upper back onto the flank separated by lighter coloured stripes which may or may not be visible. A protandrous hermaphrodite in which some males can switch to being females as required.

Much of its natural feeding is directed towards hard shelled creatures such as small crabs and molluscs which are dealt with readily by its powerful teeth, echoing my own experience of the species which we caught off Gibraltar using shellfish still in their shells as bait.

#### AXILLARY BREAM Pagellus acarne

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Also known as the spanish bream, as with the pandora, white, and saddled breams, one of an ever growing number of sub-tropical species more inclined towards a life spent south of the Bay of Biscay, which does now occasionally creep beyond its normal range, presumably encouraged by rising sea temperatures, ending up usually around the Channel Islands or along adjacent parts of the south coast.

A slightly shallower bodied bream than the more familiar species, and one with a slightly more offshore preference than many of its small southerly vagrant relatives, a fact hinted at by the large size of the eye.

A fish said to have a preference for soft substrates from the shoreline down to maybe a hundred fathoms, though most are encountered between ten to fifteen fathoms.

Colouration is a pinkish red on the upper body, perhaps becoming darker over the head, and more silvery below.

The clincher however is a dark red spot at the base of the pectoral fin, which like the other fins is light pink with darker edgings. The inside of the mouth is orangey red. Another protandrous hermaphrodite starting life with both sets of sex organs, maturing as a male, some of which switch over to being females as required.

A fish I have only come across once while out boat fishing off Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, and then, on account of its rather small size, probably only because I was fishing small pieces of prawn on size 6 hooks hooks in a deliberate attempt to patch up a few of the gaps in terms photographs for this book.

Quite a small growing species, and one which appears only on the British record list in the mini species section with a specimen taken off Guernsey.

#### SADDLED BREAM Oblada Melanura

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

A very small but equally very common little fish familiar to all holiday makers popping a telescopic rod into their suit case for a southern European holiday, where they appear to be virtually everywhere around rocky harbours. But an unlikely vagrant at our latitude, with the fish which put it on the bucket list here being a small specimen taken at St. Austell in Cornwall.

Perhaps not quite as deep in body profile as the more regularly caught bream species, but one that is readily identifiable by having a base colour of silvery grey with a single large black blotch surrounded in white where the body narrows just in front of the tail.

Another protogynous hermaphrodite born with both sets of sex organs, which after initially maturing as a female, can where necessary switch to being a male.

#### RAYS BREAM Brama brama

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Rays Bream are not members of the family sparidae to which all the aforementioned sea breams belong. But superficially, in terms of appearance, not unlike them by virtue of having a rounded laterally compressed body shape. In this case however it's much more like a rugby ball with a tail. A noticeably deeply forked tail in fact.

The pectoral fin is also very long. But it's the steep rounded facial profile that immediately grabs the attention, and the fact that as with the true sea breams, there is just a single dorsal fin, though it doesn't start off with a sharp spiky section followed by a softer second section. This one starts very tall before plunging quickly in height and feels the same throughout. The anal fin, though not quite as long, is visually similar.

In the fish I have examined, the back and upper flanks were reddish brown becoming silvery on the sides and under-parts, with hints of yellow in the pectoral fins. An open oceanic deep water fish often found feeding well up in the water column. Off the Portuguese coast where deep water lies close to the shore, ray's bream are extensively fished commercially.

Angling boats have also occasionally encountered them around the British Isles. In the main, these have been off Ireland's Atlantic coast adjacent to deep water. Some years ago however, an angling boat which put out to fish the edge of the continental shelf from north west Scotland encountered a huge shoals of ray's bream feeding just beneath the surface at night, where dozens were caught on fish baited feathers.

When I first started sea fishing seriously in the 1970's, reports of rays bream were not that un-common, while at the same time, still unusual enough for specimens to be mentioned in the angling press.

Occurrences of fish typically in the five to seven pound bracket would start maybe mid summer off the south and west coast of Ireland, progressively moving up the extreme western extremity of Scotland, then around the northern tip including Orkney and Shetland on down into the North Sea, which is where most of the press reports would eventually come from around the onset of winter, all of which is (or was) part of a routinely predictable pattern.

The problem for these fish was that this migration pattern takes time. So much time in fact that as they reached Scotland, and later England's east coast, sea temperatures would be starting to fall away.

Caught out, instead of reversing their original route, some individuals would continue pushing south looking for the warmer deeper waters of southern Europe which they were never going to find, a proportion of which, for whatever reason, would struggle inshore seemingly 'stunned' by the cold, some taking anglers baits occasionally from the boats, but more usually from the shore, and more regularly still simply washing up on the beaches towards the end of the year either dead or semi-comatose.

A friend of mine Ken Robinson from Whitley Bay collected me a few specimens to photograph and examine, plus several lumpsuckers also stranded on the bouldery beaches over there.

Year after year this pattern would be repeated, as evidenced by the current record list inclusions, which are all from the 1970's taken either on their round the top of Britain migration route, or more usually in the middle section of the North Sea. Then suddenly, no more reports. Maybe the winters just aren't cold enough to affect them in the same way any more these days.

### THE WRASSES

Like the sea breams, a collection of species more commonly found around the rocks and harbours of southern Europe and Mediterranean North Africa, where holiday anglers with their telescopic rods which they've hidden from the wife in the bowels of their suit cases regularly catch them in many different guises.

In home waters, when I first started fishing, attention was paid mainly to the ballan and cuckoo wrasse. Some of the lesser species such as the corkwing and rock cook were no doubt also there, but being so small and ballan-like, would for the most part slip by un-noticed.

Not anymore. Increasingly anglers are aware of what they are now catching, and every credit to them for that. But they'd better have those identification field guides ready, because the influx of exotic visitors has already started, with no doubt many more still to come.

Also like the sea breams, wrasse as a family have the potential for sex switching, though unlike the sea breams, the direction and extent of this appears to be somewhat less clear, except in the cuckoo wrasse where the sexes look so very obviously different.

#### BALLAN WRASSE Labrus bergylta

**Bucket List status – result**

Despite being heavily built, powerful looking fish, ballan wrasse don't like to get the sort of buffeting and bouncing around which heavy seas coming in on to permanent water rough ground stretches of shore line can experience, preferring instead to tuck themselves away into more sheltered gullies, or to simply lie low out of trouble if suitable shelter cannot be found, which is also going to be true of the other similar smaller species.

Fortunately, as ballan wrasse have the potential to hit double figure weights while all the similar looking smaller species are measured usually in ounces, an identification cut off figure in the region of half a pound is probably about right here.

Everything bigger than around half a pound, and certainly a pound, irrespective of colour or markings, unless of course it's a cuckoo wrasse, is going to be a ballan, whereas for anything under half a pound, if in doubt, it's worth checking it out a little more closely.

All the wrasse species so far found in home waters have a long spiky first dorsal fin which merges into a shorter softer spined second dorsal fin, giving the impression of one long continuous run. Similarly, all are, in relative proportions, heavily built fish with quite large powerful tails, prominent lips, and short canine like teeth.

For identification purposes, you can immediately rule the cuckoo wrasse and the goldsinny wrasse out of the reckoning based on their bright orange, blue, or yellow colouration, plus their distinctive upper back dark spot markings.

Only the ballan, corkwing, rock cook, baillon's and scale rayed varieties are likely to pose any similarity problems, and even they can be readily separated in most instances, with ballan wrasse said to be protogynous hermaphrodites in which some females can switch to being males as required.

Ballan wrasse are highly variable in colouration and patterning depending on location. Best then to check out the pre-operculum, which is the first flap of the gill cover. If this has a serrated edge it is NOT a ballan wrasse. The rock cook, corkwing and baillon's all have a serrated pre-operculum.

It then becomes a case of looking for a single dark spot below the lateral line and in front of the tail for it to be a corkwing; a dark crescent shaped band on the tail fin which will also be lighter in colour at both its edge and its base to make it a rock cook; and no tail pattern or dark spot near the tail, but with red tinged fins for it to be a baillon's Wrasse. The scale rayed wrasse is self explanatory with scales extending onto its fin membranes.

As regards maximum sizes, both the British boat and shore records, plus the Irish record which makes no distinction between boat and shore, all come in at over nine pounds, leaving the two Scottish records trailing way back in their wake at between five and six pounds. Still very good fish, and probably with a lot bigger yet to come.

The fact that temperature controls wrasse movements as well as having an effect on food intake to weight conversion rates may well be a further factor here, particularly when temperatures take on sudden as opposed to gradual change. A prolonged very severe cold spells during the winter of 1962/63 for example resulted in the deaths of many wrasse.

As wrasse are long lived slow growing fish, it then took many years for fish of specimen proportions to start showing in regular numbers again, so maybe we still haven't seen the record peak just yet.

The famous explorer and angler F H Mitchell-Hedges was for a long time credited with four huge ballan wrasse all over ten pounds taken from around Looe Island, the biggest of which, quoted at twelve pounds twelve ounces, held the British record for quite some time.

It was long known that the quartet had been mounted and glass cased, and eventually this case turned up in a tea chest stashed away in a loft on the Isle of Wight.

Closer examination of the proportions of its contents however lead to the supposed weights being declared in-accurate, and for Mitchell-Hedges record to be removed from the list.

The biggest of the four was put at around nine pounds, and the others not far behind that weight. Still a magnificent haul taken long before the severe winter mentioned earlier. So the fact that the record keeps creeping on up and may yet continue to do so was always on the cards.

Wrasse have always been a fish of mixed patronage. In my early days there used to be shore wrasse specialists who would openly sing the species praises in the press. Then that all seemed to subside, and ballan wrasse were relegated to being more of a by-catch or something you fished if there was nothing else, or needed one in a species match.

From the boat it was even worse. I do recall reading the odd article extolling the virtues of using a small boat to get in over inshore marks which couldn't be fished from the shore, in the main because of impossible or dangerous access. So once again, wrasse were being projected as something to target for a change, but never as part of any ongoing enthusiasm.

I think what I'm trying to say here is that ballan wrasse have never been fully valued or taken seriously as a single species obsession for as far back as I can remember. But over the past couple of years, that situation has very definitely started to change, with people both appreciating their hard fighting qualities and their inshore availability, though no longer fishing for them in the time honoured ways of old, which has both elevated their standing, and made them even more catchable than ever before.

But before we start digging too deeply into the present and the future, let's first do a little bit more raking over the past.

Ballan wrasse have long been looked upon primarily as a shore anglers fish, which quite simply is not the case. They are not in the strictest definition of the term even a shore loving fish. What they like is permanent shallow water down to around forty feet with lots of heavy kelp, weed, and other rough ground cover, which just happens to bring them in close to some sections of the shore.

On the other hand, it could just as easily be around some isolated piece of drying offshore rock or shallowing reef. The wrasse neither knows nor cares what the exposed bits are used for, and some of the best wrasse fishing I have taken part in has been from boats fishing offshore.

I remember one day anchoring off Peninnis Head in the Isles of Scilly and having an absolute burster fishing short dropper rigs with lugworm baits, catching dozens of hard fighting ballan's to just short of five pounds as we struggled to keep them from power diving back into the snags and kelp.

Another memorable occasion, though we weren't specifically fishing for wrasse this time, was a patch of reefy ground in around thirty feet of water in some pretty nasty weather conditions fishing ragworm baited feathers out from Wexford. There wrasse in the three to four pound bracket were really in feeding mood.

Those are just a couple of examples of red letter boat trips, though there have been numerous other occasions when we caught well whilst not necessarily always specifically targeting wrasse, and could probably have had a whole lot more had we made the effort, which for a variety of reasons we didn't do.

One such a venue is Holyhead. There are good ballan wrasse close in all the way around the coast from the breakwater down past Rhoscolyn and beyond. The 'Fangs' just off Trearddur Bay can produce some very good specimens where they are typically either deep reddish in colour, or a beautiful lighter greenish-yellow.

Over in the North Sea, particularly from around Amble up into Scottish waters where there is more of a tendency to fish small baits over really heavy ground within the right sort of depth range, they tend to be darker and more drab.

West country fish on the other hand are often bright red with pinkish tints and lots of lighter spots, whereas those taken off the south west of Scotland show more of a leaning towards deep unmarked red. So potentially very variable depending on location. What never changes for me is their power and willingness to make a contest of it once hooked.

From the boat, it pays to fish hooks in the size one to 1/0 range baited with crab or worm on short simple monofilament droppers with something disposable weak linked to the bottom of the trace to take it down.

Any bits of metal will do. One good trick is to cut thin strips from old lead flashings and roll them like a swiss-roll through a loop at the bottom of the trace, which, if it becomes snagged, will often unwind itself without loosing everything.

The closer down into the rock and kelp you drop, the better in terms of fish potential interest, but the less time you have to bring a fish under control as it power dives for snaggy cover. That said, my best ever boat caught ballan wrasse was taken on anything but that approach.

We'd just finished filming a fly fishing for pollack video off the Mull of Galloway, so I decided to work a long thin strip of mackerel belly close to the bottom on a six foot monofilament trace to see if I could interest a pollack or two. First drop, bingo, a take.

So there I am winding in, certain I have a fish, only to see a large red blur under the surface quite a way out from the boat which I thought was a small pollack covered in kelp. But it wasn't. It was a ballan wrasse of five pound ten ounces, a couple of ounces bigger than the then Scottish record.

Suitably weighed and photographed, we then put it back down on the hook to shoot some video footage of it, whereupon it promptly got away. Not that it mattered. The policy on Ian Burrett's 'Onyermarks' is that all fish, including some IGFA pollack world records on the fly earlier that day, must go back. So it was always destined to be released without charge.

Funnily enough, my best shore caught ballan wrasse came under similar circumstances. I was photographing a feature looking at shore competition fishing on Herm in the Channel Islands with my friends Peter Frise and Joe Gomez from Guernsey, and so as not to get in their way, I rigged up a short spinning rod with a boat style dropper rig baited with ragworm and let it go straight down the front of a rock face at my feet.

That fish tipped the match scales at a shade over six and a half pounds, marginally bigger than specimens I'd taken on previous visits to the Channel Islands, again fishing over on Herm, that time at the landing steps where the ferry drops its passengers. In fact, the whole expanse between the Rosaire Steps and St. Peterport is littered with prime ballan wrasse, black bream, and bass holding marks.

So much so that I approached the Guernsey tourist board with regard to taking my dinghy over to more fully investigate this entire piece of sheltered water, only to have the plan scuppered by the local Coastguard on the grounds that it wouldn't be safe to have outsiders racing about there with so many dangerous protruding and sub-surface rocks. I was disappointed, but I took his point. Maybe then a slowly paddled kayak would be a safer approach.

Just to round things off, Graeme Pullen and I once spent a week exploring Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, which is normally closed to angling. We'd read that it was the best shore based spot in Britain to target huge and potentially even record ballan wrasse, and as such were expecting monsters galore.

Unfortunately it wasn't like that. I can only conclude that the people responsible for all the hype were assuming great things without ever having had the chance to actually try it. We had plenty of ballan and cuckoo wrasse, both legering and fishing slider floats, but nothing bigger than around four pounds.

I was similarly disappointed with the Scilly Isles too from the shore due to the depths at some of the best accessible marks, though the boat fishing within casting range of some of the less accessible pieces of shoreline was excellent.

There are going to be good shore marks right throughout the west country, particularly along the rocky north coast. But for me, you would need to go a long way to beat the Channel Islands, where the current boat record of nine pounds seven ounces by Jersey based charter boat skipper Tony Heart was taken, and possibly the Mull of Galloway where I know there are some very big fish, but where few boat anglers ever seriously try for them.

Jumping forward a decade now into the modern era, ballan wrasse have suddenly become highly fashionable targets once again. Not so much a case of the wheel having turned full circle, or even a new generation discovering the species, because as we all know, angler numbers are dropping away all the time, and young new blood coming in to replace them is so desperately lacking.

One thing and one thing only has brought about this revival in interest, that being the development of Light and Heavy Rock Fishing, LRF and HRF, and the sudden realisation that many hitherto neglected species are actually worth fishing for, with a few added surprises along the way.

Both LRF and HRF are variants of the same approach, the light and heavy component relating to the size of rods, reels and lures, plus the areas in which they are deployed.

LRF tends to employ ultra light tackle and the smallest of lures worked around rocky harbours and inlets, targeting anything and everything at the lower end of the size range, bringing into the frame quite a few species which might previously have been over-looked.

HRF on the other hand requires that heavier, though still not over heavy hand tackle and larger lures be used, and is probably aimed more at pollack, bass, and now as it would turn out, ballan wrasse along deeper, open, more exposed stretches of rocky permanent water coast line.

One of the key practitioners of HRF is north Devon shore angler Danny Parkins who I have chatted with at length on all aspects of the topic.

Danny is quite open about the fact that he got the idea from Channel Islander Keith White, then developed it based on what's known as the Texas Rigging method of using a self weighted head with an offset hook carrying a soft plastic lure into which the hook is embedded so that it won't be a snagging threat, but will cut through the lure body and hook a fish when a take followed by a strike comes along.

Key to this is the use of none stretch braided line for instant feedback allowing a quick response, not only to set the hook, but also to help avoid a fish going to ground when it feels the point.

Working in water typically between twelve to twenty feet in sheltered gullies over the snaggiest terrain imaginable with drab natural looking lures in the three to four inch range tweaked slowly along the bottom, the success rate with wrasse, and in particular big ballan wrasse, has been nothing short of phenomenal.

In response, ballan wrasse have shown a whole new actively predatory side to the their feeding which no other approach is able to tap into, nor in numerical terms it appears, comes even close to matching.

Associated audio interview numbers: 167.

#### CUCKOO WRASSE Labrus mixtus

**Bucket List status – result**

I remember a time when many anglers thought, and possibly some still do think, that male and female cuckoo wrasse are different species of fish. Understandable I suppose in some ways as they do show extreme sexual dimorphism, which is the scientific way of saying they are very obviously visually different based on sex.

Male cuckoo wrasse are strikingly beautiful fish with blue heads and blue patches on the sides of their body. These can often appear like stripes. Blue edges can also be found on the fins, the remainder of the colouration being a striking orangey yellow, with perhaps some white on the top of the head if the individual is in breeding condition.

In contrast, the females are a plain deep orange to red with three prominent dark blotches on the upper back between the end of the dorsal fin and the tail. As with the males, expect these colours to be especially vivid around breeding time.

Like ballan wrasse, cuckoo wrasse are protogynous hermaphrodites, all starting life as females with the ability to change sex when required, such as when the ratio between the sexes becomes disproportionate, or when the male in a small localised group dies, whereupon the dominant female changes and takes on the role. This metamorphosis is thought to take place over just a few days, and even more amazing is supposedly reversible.

Other features include both dorsal fins being joined creating a spiny first part followed immediately by a softer second section; very prominent lips, and short sharp canine like teeth.

While I have caught cuckoo wrasse from the shore at a number of deep water rock marks, this is predominantly a boat anglers fish, preferring depths of between twenty and forty fathoms over rocky, reefy ground, anywhere from the far north to the deep south, though at a much lower level along North Sea coasts.

Left to their own devices, crabs, prawns and other small crustaceans are probably their primary food source, though the frequency with which they are found inside lobster pots also suggests that fish and scavenging are equally acceptable given the opportunity, which fits in nicely with how most are taken by anglers.

Small cut fish baits, and to a lesser extent squid strips presented at or close to the bottom are as good as anything, though ragworm will also take its share. As for trace construction, this will depend on whether you are fishing at anchor or on the drift.

At anchor you can place baits on the bottom without much risk of loosing everything to a snag, unlike drift fishing, where it pays to go for short droppers above the lead like a feather rig, allowing it to just touch bottom and lifting it clear at the first hint of a hang-up.

Monofilament breaking strain isn't crucial to beat teeth or anything here, though I find that twenty to thirty pounds breaking strain does give a better presentation, and as importantly still won't put fish off. Size one hooks are probably about right.

Thinking back to the venues I've caught them at, and looking at the spread of venues quoted in the various home waters record lists, this should not prove a difficult fish to find, and providing the bait and hook sizes are right, not a difficult fish to catch either.

We used to see a lot out over the Eddystone reef, around the Holyhead area of Anglesey, and up into Scottish waters as far north as the Pentland firth. I've seen some particularly big ones fishing out from Scrabster which holds the current Scottish record at three pounds, though for some reason not the British record which is more than half a pound lighter, despite Scotland contributing to the overall British record List.

The Isle of Man too can produce a lot, and we also used to get quite a few when boat fishing along the south and west coast of Ireland.

From the shore, Lundy Island and Rhoscolyn Head on Anglesey have been my most productive marks. A fish you shouldn't have to try too hard to tick off the list, but at the same time, one you can enhance your chances of encountering simply by scaling down accordingly.

#### CORKWING WRASSE Crenilabrus melops

**Bucket List status – result**

If you regularly fish moderately deep areas of heavy ground over-looked by safe rock ledges, or the bouldery bases of deep harbour walls using small pieces of ragworm on size six or eight hooks under a sliding float straight down the face, if you then carefully examine all the small 'ballan wrasse' this will deliver, you are almost certainly going to find other previously over-looked small growing wrasse species mixed in amongst them, the most common of which is going to be the corkwing wrasse, which closely fits the ballan wrasse description given earlier to the point of easy confusion.

For deliberately targeting them, there is no need to change anything tactically other than to keep fishing worm baits and make them a readily manageable size. Then simply look for the giveaway eye sized single dark spot below the lateral line just in front of the tail.

There are other less obvious things to check for such as a serrated pre-operculum or first gill cover. But quite frankly, why bother, as no other home waters wrasse species has this particular spot marking. A species that is thought to be a protogynous hermaphrodite with the ability to switch from female to male as required.

A common inshore fish throughout the English Channel, Western Britain, and Ireland, becoming progressively thinner on the ground as you progress up into Scottish waters, though with continuing sea temperature rises, that could so easily change.

My own catches have come from the Channel Islands, the Scillies, Lundy, Anglesey, and the Luce Bay area of Scotland. Grows to around six inches.

#### GOLDSINNY WRASSE Ctenolabrus rupestris

**Bucket List status – result**

As with the corkwing, fish all the usual wrasse shore based haunts with small baits and hooks where you find plenty of cover and moderately deep permanent water. But equally, also expect to see them when fishing the same small baits from boats out over mixed heavy ground.

My personal experiences extend to both boat and shore, though like most people, I will never know just how extensive that might ultimately have been because of the bigger hooks and baits we tend to use in the normal course of events when fishing offshore.

Fishing small baited feathers over the mixed ground to the south end of Walney Island once saw three come up in quick succession. I've also had them while float fishing tiny pieces of ragworm from the rocks at Rhoscolyn Head on Anglesey when my children were younger, and have seen them brought up in trawls working the edge of Lune Deep out from Fleetwood.

So expect them anywhere and everywhere when the terrain is right and the baits are small enough, though most especially along the western side of the British Isles from north to south. And if you do hook one there should be absolutely no doubt as to its identity. Along with the cuckoo wrasse, this is one of the easiest and most obvious species to pin the right label on.

A small fish with a typically wrasse like profile, but one coloured plain reddish brown to bright orange with a dark spot at the start of its dorsal fin, and a second at the top of the body immediately in front of the tail. Another wrasse species thought to be a protogynous hermaphrodite with some females switching to being males as required. Grows to seven inches.

#### ROCK COOK WRASSE Centrolobrus exoletus

**Bucket List status – result**

Also known as the small mouthed wrasse, with the obvious angling connotations that brings. Again, as with the corkwing, a fish almost identical to the ballan wrasse described in full detail elsewhere. Taking the corkwing out of the equation is easy enough by checking for the presence of the dark spot just in front of the tail. If that's absent, the next thing to look for is a serrated pre-operculum or first gill cover.

If serrations are absent then its a small ballan wrasse. But if they are present, look for a broad dusky coloured crescent shaped mark across the tail along with a lighter band at both the base and outer edge of the tail fin. Rock cook also have five very strong spines at the start of their anal fin.

In my experience, they appear to have hints of blue on the fins and upper flanks along with blue lines around the head. A fish with more of a northerly bias than the other small wrasse species, and one with more of a preference for water depth.

Accurate information regarding sex changes in this species has been difficult to come by, though the suggestion is of it being a protogynous hermaphrodite switching from female to male as required.

Scotland and the west coast of Ireland rate highly on its distribution map, though I have caught them at Anglesey on more than one occasion whilst float fishing small pieces of ragworm with my children when they were younger from the rocks at Rhoscolyn Head, where on one several occasions we caught five species of wrasse in a single session. Grows to around six inches.

#### SCALE RAYED WRASSE Acantholabrus palloni

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Yet another small wrasse species to be aware of when baits and hook sizes are small enough, though unusually for wrasse, one with more of a tendency to place itself out of reach of shore anglers, preferring depths down to around sixty fathoms.

The scientific wisdom suggests it to be a solitary fish commonly found as far north as Norwegian waters, but only rarely around the British Isles. Yet rod and line specimens have been taken from as far afield as the Eddystone Reef and Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. So always worth keeping an eye out for.

Again, typically wrasse like in basic body layout, though a little more elongate than some of the other small wrasse species. A fish whose large scales extend onto the fins, particularly the short soft posterior section of the dorsal fin, anal fin, and the tail, hence the name.

Colouration is some shade of deep greyish green to brown with a dark blotch on the upper edge of the body just in front of the start of the tail, plus a second at the junction of the soft and spiny rays of the dorsal fin.

Accurate information regarding sex changes in this species has again been difficult to come by, though the suggestion again is of it being a protogynous hermaphrodite switching from female to male as required. Grows to around ten inches.

#### BAILLON'S WRASSE Crenilabrus bailloni

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Also shown in some texts as having the scientific name _Symphodus bailloni,_ this is the latest addition to our home waters wrasse family. The big question is, was it already here but previously over-looked, as it is not a fish that immediately stands out from small specimens of other more common wrasse species, or has it only recently arrived here having been tempted northwards due to rising sea temperatures.

If a scientific paper produced by M R Dunn and M J Brown **.** J. Mar. Biol. Ass. UK (2003), **83,** 875-876 is anything to go by, then it has probably only recently arrived. This was based on the results of a 2002 CEFAS Bass survey of The Solent and adjacent harbours which turned up eighty nine baillon's wrasse.

Shortly afterwards, my old Boat Fishing Monthly editor Jim Whippy, who is a species addict, reported catching quite a few of them on rod and line in the same area and to the east along the Sussex coast.

The current British record, which is the only home waters inclusion for the species, was caught at Bournemouth, suggesting a very definite link between the species and that particular mid section of the English Channel.

So again, worth keeping an eye out for by checking all small wrasse for obvious spot markings, which unlike the corkwing, goldsinny, scale rayed, and female cuckoo wrasse, the baillon's wrasse lacks. Male cuckoo wrasse with their blue and yellow markings also immediately rule themselves out of the reckoning. This leaves just the ballan wrasse and rock cook.

Baillon's wrasse have a serrated pre-operculum or first gill cover which ballan wrasse lack. This however is present in the corkwing which also has the distinguishing tail spot mentioned earlier. That leaves the rock cook with its distinctive lighter and darker tail markings which baillon's wrasse doesn't have. And finally, thankfully, a feature which baillon's wrasse has all to itself, which is a very obvious red tinge to its fins.

Accurate information regarding sex changes in this species has been difficult to come by, though the suggestion is of it being a protogynous hermaphrodite switching from female to male as required. Grows to around eight inches.

### THE GURNARDS

A small group of bizarre but at the same time compellingly attractive fishes about which I've never heard a bad word said. They are actually very good to eat after you've struggled with the sharp spiny head and spiky fins, though these days, most people are only too happy to put them back, and I can only concur with that.

The four rod caught species we have around the British Isles, plus a couple of potential deep water species which may or may not pick up a hook bait at some stage or other, all have the first three rays of each pectoral fin free of any connecting membrane, allowing them almost to finger tip walk along the sea bed, and most certainly raise themselves up off it for a better field of view, both for hunting and to help avoid predation.

#### TUB GURNARD Trigla lucerna

**Bucket List status – result**

A fish with a blunt facial profile, armoured bony plates, and spines on and around the head, with the first three rays of each pectoral fin free of any connecting membrane, resembling fingers, both in terms of appearance and of usage.

In the case of the tub gurnard, a fish of widespread distribution east and west right up into southern Scottish waters, though more common on southern and west facing coasts, particularly those of Wales and Ireland. Also the largest growing of the gurnards, capable of reaching well into double figures.

As is the trend with most of the gurnard species, this a red coloured fish. But unlike the true red gurnard and the rarer streaked gurnard, a much richer and deeper shade bordering almost on reddish brown. Not that this is in any way crucial to pinning the right name on a specimen.

What gives this particular fish away is the beautiful blue edging to its large pectoral fins, which occasional specimens I have caught and seen have also had a small centrally placed pectoral ocellus or eye spot made up of small blue and even black spots.

The other key feature, and one important in identifying all four home waters recorded gurnard species is the lateral line, which in this particular case is slightly raised, but perfectly smooth to the touch when the finger is brushed along it in either direction.

In my experience, few people deliberately fish for gurnards. Yet by the same token, few are disappointed when one of any species or of any size comes along. Such is the esteem they are held in by many sea anglers who see them as beautifully fascinating creatures which, despite their good eating qualities, deserve to go back unharmed and invariably do.

If more people did deliberately target them with smaller baits and hooks over the summer and autumn months, there is no doubt that more would be caught, though to be in with a real shout, some areas are obviously better than others on a species by species basis.

Putting the where and when aspect aside just for a moment, the how applies pretty much across the board, with small static baits fished at or just off the bottom being an excellent approach. Baited feathers can do this as well as most rigs, and let's not forget the feathers un-baited and working in their own right as well.

My most cherished tub gurnard memories come from north of the England-Scotland border. Loch Ryan to be precise back in the early 1970's where I took the Scottish record while fishing with the legendary Davy Agnew out from Lady Bay.

But while we also picked up a few other nice specimens both there and just around the corner in Luce Bay, I think for pure numbers and potential specimen size, you need to move down to Merseyside where the long standing British boat record comes from.

Dinghy fishing all along this stretch of coast from Gut Buoy at the southern entrance to the River Ribble to the other side of the Welsh border down around Rhyl is about as consistent a tub gurnard area as you are ever likely to find.

You will still see them popping up right throughout Welsh and Irish waters, though the tendency is for tubs to give way a little more to reds from the Bristol Channel through the English Channel and on into the southern North Sea, mainly out over the inshore boat marks.

I've no doubt, like anything else, that it will be possible to catch an odd one from the shore where the water is deep enough, including some big ones as evidenced by a monster of twelve pound seven ounces at Langlan Bay in Wales which must have come as something of surprise, albeit a pleasant one, to its captor. Generally speaking however, gurnards of all species do tend to be boat anglers fish.

I've mentioned Merseyside and I've mentioned mackerel baits. But probably the best gurnard haul including reds, tubs and greys I ever took part in came on an exploratory trip out of Rhyl fishing aboard Tony Parry's boat 'Jensen II' on which we were trialling a synthetic bait shaped like a ragworm called Gulp from American tackle giant Berkley.

The actual shape probably didn't matter other than making it possible to break it up into small hook sized portions which we put down on two and three hook dropper rigs, and at times were coming back filled to capacity with gurnards on virtually every drop. Mickey Duff in particular was having a field day.

We did catch a few other species on it including dabs and rays, but the gurnards simply couldn't get enough of the stuff. The problem then is that in the heat of such action, you can tend to loose concentration during handling which will lead to sore hands.

Extreme care is needed as both the bony head and the gill cover are lethally sharp. So too is the spiky first dorsal fin which needs to be flattened down with the hand as you take a firm grip if you want to avoid shedding some of your blood.

Gurnards are said to form small loose shoals within which individuals can keep in contact with each other through clear audible sounds created by muscular contractions forcing air through chambers in their swim bladder.

You can often hear them grunt during disgorging if squeezed too hard around the mid body region just behind the pectoral fins. In fact, the name gurnard is said to be derived from the French word grogner, which means to grunt. This loose aggregation suggestion however is said to be more prevalent with greys, and to a lesser extend tubs than with the other species.

Natural feeding also varies slightly from species to species, with shrimps, small crabs, hermit crabs and small demersal fishes being the common denominator, in all cases sought out by the slow methodical search technique of using their free pectoral rays almost to walk along `feeling' and even `tasting' for their food before perhaps flushing it out, then making a darting grab as the victim flees.

Blunt head shape and the positioning of the eyes suggest this to be a likely mode of hunting. Those free pectoral rays are also used to raise the gurnard up higher as if standing on its finger tips to increase its field of view.

#### RED GURNARD Aspitrigla cuculus

**Bucket List status – result**

Very similar to the other gurnard species in terms of blunt sharp bony head and three free pectoral fin rays. Unfortunately, a fish with a name that is bound to create confusion on account of two of our other home waters gurnard species also being red, with even the grey gurnard sometimes having a reddish tinge, depending on where it lives and what it's been feeding on.

In this particular case however, red really does mean red. The colouration here is a very bright clear red. Again, not that this makes a whole lot of difference when you can check the pectoral fins for blue edging, which if present indicates that the fish is in fact a tub gurnard. Better still, there is always the lateral line to fall back on.

Gurnards can be readily identified by appearance and feel of their lateral line, which in this case is not smooth like that of the tub gurnard, but has short soft lateral extensions. In addition to this, the pectoral fin only just reaches as far back as the vent. A fish perhaps best identified by checking for the features it hasn't got which the other species have.

Though their distribution potentially encompasses the entire British Isles, red gurnards tend to be less often caught than the tubs and greys on account of their preference for slightly deeper water, which very often goes hand in glove with being further off-shore where the use of small baits likely to attract them is very much more limited.

We're talking here of twenty fathoms minimum over sand, and particularly offshore banks, which in areas such as Devon or Cornwall, and in particular around the Channel Islands, is where I have come into contact with them most.

I have seen a few caught well offshore over open ground in both north and west Wales, plus the odd one around the West Country. Western Scotland too should offer good prospects, though in all honesty, I personally haven't seen them caught there.

Not unexpectedly with so much deep water about, I have seen and caught them over on the west coast of Ireland. That said, for me, the banks around Guernsey and Aldernay present the best opportunity. But you need to be offering baits small enough to give these fish a chance, which with bass, turbot and brill about in good numbers, is never an easy thing to bring yourself to do.

#### GREY GURNARD Eutrigla gurnardus

**Bucket List status – result**

A text book grey gurnard, while having the same blunt facial profile as the other gurnard species, is a beautiful metallic grey, often with a liberal scattering of small white speckles. But, and not infrequently the case either, if an individual has been feeding heavily on small crustaceans, particularly shrimps, the basic grey colouration can begin to look decidedly red tinged. So don't take colour as an absolute guide.

As with all the gurnards, go to the lateral line for positive confirmation, which in this case is a series of sharply pointed back facing scutes with a rough prickly feel when brushed against the grain from tail to head. A prominent dark blotch on the membranes of the first dorsal fin will also help put the issue beyond doubt, as will the length of the pectoral fins which reach the vent.

The smallest, most abundant, and best distributed of the four home waters gurnard species. Also the one most likely to be found closest to the shore. But again, not a species you would realistically go out and target. More a case of if you fish small enough and often enough over clean through to quite mixed ground, an odd one must eventually come along.

Some of the better ones I have taken have been on feather rigs baited with small strips of mackerel belly fished at the bottom. I've also had plenty of smaller specimens just on the feathers themselves. In fact, we often pick up really small ones in quite shallow water on shrimp rigs just off North Pier at Blackpool, an area which for some reason attracts lots of mackerel, which is why we go there, looking for a quick supply of bait.

#### STREAKED GURNARD Trigloporus lastoviza

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

As with all gurnards, a fish with a tall blunt facial profile, though in this case noticeably more so than the others, and another red coloured species, which because it isn't a particularly large growing fish maxing out at around a couple of pounds could lead to it not getting noticed or being mis-identified, which may help explain why so few are reported on rod and line.

Another reason however is most certainly its rather patchy south westerly offshore distribution, though having said that, authenticated specimens have been taken from the shoreline of Loch Goil on the Clyde, and aboard boats out around the Isle of Mull.

Again, the lateral line is key to its identification, in this case having skin ridges running out along the flanks at right angles to it. As mentioned previously, the base colour is red, sometimes with darker blotches, and with rows of blue spots around the greyish edges of its pectoral fins, but not a continuous blue band as in the tub gurnard.

Although I've never caught one myself, I do have experience of this species around the Wexford area of Ireland from where the Rosslare small boats festival has been fished ever since the mid 1980's. As this is a species competition, understandably, competitors need to make themselves aware of everything in terms of identification, always looking to get one over on the rest of the field.

On one occasion when I was over there I saw a trawler unloading boxes of gurnards, and when I sorted through them, all four species were present. Needless to say, not long after that, streaked gurnards started featuring in the species count and have done so ever since, though very likely others will have been caught in the past on small hooks and fish baits and were missed. Yet for some reason, the species doesn't feature on the Irish record list.

Interestingly, while reading a report on monofilament gill netting for red mullet in Falmouth Bay, identified amongst the by-catch by fishery scientists over a three week period were 254 streaked gurnards, which suggests that perhaps anglers down that way either don't fish small enough to catch them, or when they do, are not fully appreciating what it is they are catching.

### THE GARFISHES AND SKIPPERS

Only recently did the record lists go from having one garfish species to two, and now there's a third. However, it's not certain at the moment just how widespread or numerically well distributed that latest addition _Belone svetovidovi_ actually is.

Only time and some eagle eyed identification will tell. As for the skipper, though it looks like a garfish, actually it isn't one, but to avoid confusion, this is most definitely the slot where it needs to be discussed.

#### GARFISH Belone belone

**Bucket List status – result**

It's probably fair to say that any sea angler worth his salt should know what a garfish looks like. An elongate bodied fish with dorsal and anal fins set well back towards the tail, while at the other end, the jaws have formed a long pointed beak. Colouration is green or sometimes blue on the back, becoming lighter then silvery on the lower flanks and underside.

A fish prone to losing its scales during disgorging, which rather interestingly have a green tinge to them reminiscent of oxidised copper which is also repeated in the bones. So no identification problems there to worry about. Or so you would think. But actually, nothing could be further from the truth, as over recent years, two further 'garfish' species have appeared in the angling record lists.

The skipper I already knew about having seen one in the flesh alive, though at that time it wasn't recorded on rod and line. The other species, the short beaked garfish, is a more recent discovery and may well have been taken mixed in amongst other gars for who knows how long. Nobody is quite sure.

What fishery scientists are sure of however is that we see it fairly regularly now in home waters, so as with the skipper, and after much difficulty getting comparative identification information which is so minuscule that difficulties are bound to arise, the key points of identification are listed below which suggest possible differences in feeding.

Garfish _Belone belone_ \- vomerine teeth, the vomer being pads on the roof of the mouth, are present in larger mature specimens. Teeth in the jaws are comparatively large and well spaced.

Short beaked garfish _Belone svetovidovi_ – vomerine teeth, the vomer being pads on the roof of the mouth, are absent. Teeth in the jaws are competitively small and well packed. Has a more compressed body.

Skipper _Scomberesox saurus_ – Though not a true garfish, none the less, typically garfish like in body layout, but with a series of five finlets between the dorsal fin and the tail on the top of its body, and seven finlets between the anal fin and the tail on the bottom side of its body which neither of the other two garfish species have.

**NOTE:** Finlets are best described as a row of tiny easy to miss mini fins which for reference are also present in mackerel.

Essentially, garfish are open water fish, living at least part of their lives well away from the coast. Then, as coastal waters start to warm during the late spring and summer, quite an extensive inshore migration gets under-way at or close to the surface, with only occasional specimens taken at depths exceeding thirty feet, which is probably why angling catches are not reflective of the numbers of garfish available. A case then of our baits being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Like most people, I've picked up an odd one here and there over the years on feathers and small baits in the normal course of my fishing without deliberately trying for them.

Occasionally one comes along as you are winding in, and that's how it is. But when I have consciously set out to catch them, this has always involved the use of rubby dubby or chum, both from the boat and from the shore.

I first became aware of garfish as near surface offshore targets when fishing for blue sharks out from Looe. Often when we shook the rubby dubby bags we would see gars darting about picking off the bits in the slick. So I started free-lining tiny pieces of mackerel belly, and bingo.

On later sharking trips I took along a light float rod, and I remember Graeme Pullen having a similar experience, only with a fly rod. Great fish to catch on light tackle with the their speed and aerobatics. The nearest thing we have here in home waters to marlin fishing, but obviously on a very much more modest scale.

Some years later I had a similar experience drift fishing inshore around Guernsey taking dozens of the things on free-lined and float fished baits.

Elsewhere, I've taken them around Wales and occasionally off Blackpool where in calm weather we used to see them playing, at times jumping over the anchor rope just where it came out of the water.

So you can expect to see them in most places from the Channel to the Shetlands, both east and west, though from personal experience, west facing open oceanic coasts are always the best.

All my shore fishing experience for gars comes from the Channel Islands where they are a major player on the local match fishing scene.

Most rock marks can be persuaded to produce them, one of the favourites being St. Martins to the south of St. Peterport, whereas with the boats, rubby dubby, or shirvey as they call it locally plays a vital role.

This comprises boiled sandeels, bread, and fish oil made into a sloppy porridge like mix which is spooned into the water on a little and often basis, drawing in the garfish from far and wide. It also draws in grey mullet, for which reason a second mullet rod is often also rigged up ready.

For the gars, or long nose as Peter Frise and Joe Gomez who I fished with call them, it was a simple fixed or sliding float rig set to fish no more than a few feet down with tiny pieces of sandeel on a say a size four hook, and they would catch literally dozens of the things.

#### SHORT BEAKED GARFISH Belone svetovidovi

**Bucket List status – catch status uncertain**

How the hell this species ever came to light is beyond me. I have no doubt at all that it has been caught by anglers in the south west on many more occasions than reports suggest, where due to it's almost identical appearance to _Belone belone_ , that's what people quite naturally would have thought it was.

That was until 1990, when eagle eyed angler Mr. A.C. Cass caught several garfish in Mounts Bay, one of which he thought looked slightly different to the rest and therefore was sent to the Marine Biological Association for examination, resulting in the first ever report of _Belone svetovidovi_ on rod and line in British waters. They are also now recorded from Irish waters too.

From an angling perspective, they are still just garfish. So in the interests of non-repetition, read the Garfish _Belone belone_ account above. You'll also find the key comparative identification features there too. Other than that, check out any garfish you catch, for this is not as rare a fish it seems as previous records might suggest.

#### SKIPPER Scomberesox saurus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A fish I know as the saury pike. I haven't actually caught one but did handle and examine a live specimen some years ago which I picked up flapping about at the waters edge one very rough back-end day while beach fishing over on the west coast of Ireland.

Almost identical, though not directly related to the garfish, the skipper is more of an open oceanic fish, and therefore more likely to be caught around the south west of Britain and Ireland.

Not a fish you should expect to see on rod and line, but it can happen, so as with the short beaked garfish, give all garfish-like fish the quick once over, which in the case of the skipper is very quick and easy by checking if it has finlets or not. If it has then it's a skipper. See the garfish account above for a more detailed explanation.

**NOTE:** Finlets are best described as a row of tiny easy to miss mini fins which for reference are also present in mackerel.

### THE HERRINGS

The herring is another of those fish people tend to think of as a stand alone species, which on the one hand it is, while on the other it is also the father figure of a family of species of which five have been recorded on rod and line around the British Isles, including two, the allis shad and twaite shad, which are now officially classed as critically endangered.

#### HERRING Clupea harengus

**Bucket List status – result**

A small pelagic shoaling species and potentially major prey item for numerous large predators around the entire British Isles. A fish with a prominent lower jaw and up-pointing mouth, enlarged easily detached scales, and no ridged keel formed by the scales along the belly line which other similar family members have.

Colouration is dark blue on the upper back lightening through to silvery white on the lower flanks and belly, occasionally with golden tints. Primarily a planktonic feeder, but occasionally caught on small feather type lures such as sabiki's and shrimp rigs. Grows to around sixteen inches.

Probably one of the best examples of over-exploitation of an aquatic resource ever, leading in the mid 1950's to a moratorium on fishing for them which brought the pursuit of the so called 'silver darlings', along with a complete way of life for many fisher-folk along the North Sea coast, to a very abrupt and hard hitting close.

The knock on effect would also signal the end of rod and line fishing for tunny off Scarborough, which is detailed fully elsewhere, but mentioned here to give something of a flavour of just how abundant, how important, and eventually how vulnerable the herring as a species was, and to some extent continues to be.

Those herrings that are caught these days on rod and line tend to be taken accidentally while feathering for mackerel with small lures. Personally, I've picked them up and have seen them caught mainly as odd ones here, there, and everywhere. North Wales immediately springs to mind, though it could just as easily be elsewhere, which given time and plenty of feathering, it probably will be.

#### PILCHARD Sardina pilchardus

**Bucket List status – result**

Identification here is pretty straightforward. In the pilchard both jaws are equal, while the related anchovy has a short lower jaw and the herring a protruding lower jaw. As with the herring, the scales are large and easily dislodged.

Colouration is usually a deep greenish blue on the upper body becoming silvery beneath, sometimes with one or more lines of dark spots along the upper flanks. When still alive, the silvery scales can appear to have a golden and sometimes even a rainbow glint. The gill cover has three to five bony ridges radiating downwards from an area just behind the eye. Grows to around eight inches.

A small shoaling fish historically responsible for the Cornish blue shark fishing scene, which in some ways helped financially compensate one-time commercial pilchard netters at ports like Looe when the shoals began to thin out.

Constant problems with sharks damaging the pilchard nets back in the 1950's grabbed the attention of the early pioneers of west country shark fishing such as Brigadier Caunter. Unfortunately this didn't do much for the pilchard fishery itself which went into sharp decline shortly afterwards, though in recent times, stocks have started showing some signs of recovery.

In the normal course of events, pilchard tend to keep themselves out of most angler's way, preferring open waters in excess of forty fathoms in which feeding depth will vary with time of day.

Like most pelagic feeding fishes, they will move closer to the surface towards evening and on into the dark, triggered by the upward migration of the pelagic food chain driven by the vegetative phytoplankton moving up to grab the last of the fading sun's rays to drive their photosynthetic processes.

As with the herring, you can pick up an odd one here and there on small feathers while fishing for mackerel, particularly towards the south west of the country. I've both caught and seen maybe half a dozen over the years, and always out from either Plymouth or Looe.

#### ANCHOVY Engraulis encrasicolus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

At our latitude, the anchovy could hardly be described as common, despite there being the occasional flurry of commercial interest when for whatever reason, large enough numbers decide to invade our side of the western approaches to the English Channel as they did in back 2009.

This probably was as a consequence of prevailing local climatic conditions linked to climate change more generally, as the anchovy is not a common fish in our corner of the world.

This, together with its smallish size which rarely exceeds eight inches makes its interest to anglers minimal, though it does willingly take small baits and feathers.

Its normal geographical range more or less mirrors that of the pilchard to which it is related, though it lives very much closer to the shore during the summer months.

Anchovies are elongate slender fish with a more rounded body than the other members of the herring family. The mouth is large extending well back beyond the eye, with the upper jaw protruding noticeably further than the lower.

Colouration is green on the back and upper sides and silvery below, the two colours being separated by a greyish band.

A fish I have caught on small baits in the Mediterranean while collecting illustration specimens off Majorca back in the 1970's for artwork done by Dr. Dietrich Burkel.

#### TWAIT SHAD Alosa fallax

**Bucket List status – result**

Like the herring and sprat, the twaite shad has formed a number of geographically localised races, one of which has become permanently landlocked in Lake Killarney in south west Ireland where it is known as the goureen. Elsewhere, the species can be identified by colouration and markings, though this is not an entirely reliable approach.

The upper back is a brilliant deep blue becoming yellowish, particularly around the head, giving way to silvery white below. There are usually several conspicuous dark spots running along each flank starting just behind the gills, with the operculum or gill cover having a number of radiating ridges on it.

Unfortunately, the flank markings may not always be present, allowing the fish to resemble the allis shad which has either a single dark mark behind the gill cover, or in some cases, no mark at all.

The only fool-proof method of identification is a gill raker count on the first gill arch which will contain between forty and sixty gill rakers. However, due to the undoubted damage this would cause, and their current protected status, this now is no longer an option.

Unusual among marine fishes, the shads are anadromous, which is to say they live out the bulk of their lives at sea, but need to enter freshwater to spawn.

In times gone by they probably ran all the river systems of northern Europe. Now sadly, rivers that still see them are the absolute exception rather than the rule.

By and large, man-made obstructions are to blame here, though to a lesser extent with the twaite shad than the allis, the latter preferring to migrate further upstream and therefore is more likely to encounter weirs and similar man made barriers which fish like salmon are better able to negotiate.

Speaking of salmon, likewise, shad are also said not to feed during their brief stay in freshwater, though they are not infrequently caught on rod and line. Ironically, often by salmon anglers fishing either the river Severn or the Wye.

Whether the feeding strike is through frustration, irritation, or out of hunger is difficult to say, though to be honest, it makes little difference from an angling perspective if in the case of the bucket list all you want to do is tick it off a species list.

At sea, shad are a very rare catch indeed, in part due to their current scarcity resulting from an inability to access suitable spawning sites, but as much to do with them preferring a pelagic offshore lifestyle, much of the time placing them beyond regular angling reach until it comes time to run up into freshwater, which can take them through harbours and past jetties that are based on river estuaries.

Offshore, a very occasional one will turn up out of the blue on feathers. Early summer, mainly around Kent and Sussex, and much further west, the upper reaches of the Bristol Channel, a few more will be picked up on small baits or small spinners as they prepare to head inland.

But we are talking here of extremely low numbers compressed into a very short seasonal window of opportunity, other than which, I can think of just a couple of specific locations where I used to catch them in very big numbers, though that is no longer possible, as both species are now legally protected and must therefore be avoided or returned immediately wherever possible.

As it's no secret where they used to be caught, I don't feel I'm setting them up for potential illegal exploitation here by looking at some historical detail based on my own experiences.

Both twaite and allis shad were predictably found at two locations I am aware of and fished, my first encounter being a drive down to Tewkesbury on the River Severn one day in May back in the 1970's where large numbers of mainly twaite shad, plus a few allis shad, were being held back waiting for heavy rain to take them over Tewkesbury weir.

It was Des Taylor who first introduced me to the spot, after which we trailed a small rowing boat down on a number of occasions. Tiny lightly weighted fly spoons were the in thing back then, and if I'm honest, as we had to take turns fishing from the boat and the bank, we probably had just as many fishing from either, and fantastic fishing it was too.

It was rather like hooking a mini tarpon. They would clear the water time after time, never giving up until enveloped by the landing net. What a pity then it is that anglers now are prevented from fishing for them instead of removing the many obstacles most rivers have these days which are responsible for keeping their population numbers so low.

My most recent encounter with shad, again mainly twaites but potentially also the odd allis too, was fishing with Dave Lewis at the mouth of the tiny River Monnow just prior to its confluence with the River Wye, where again, a small shiny spinner would produce hit after hit.

Having caught both species before, and knowing exactly what to expect, on that occasion I also packed a seven weight fly rod paired to a floating line and a selection of small gaudy silver streamer lures.

It was a bit difficult casting due to the location with its tree's and other vegetation, but when the lure went out on a decent line, again, it was every egg a bird.

Unfortunately, as I say, those opportunities are now gone, which I fully appreciate and support. I'm just glad I was able to legally sample what both species had to offer before the necessary restrictions were put in place.

#### ALLIS SHAD Alosa alosa

**Bucket List status – result**

All that needs to be said with regard to the allis shad has already been discussed under the twaite shad heading above. So in the interests of none repetition, that will not be explored again here. One thing however which does need to be discussed is the identification protocol, as colouration is broadly similar to the twaite shad with blue on the upper back and silvery white below.

Allis shad, if they have any markings at all, have just a single dark spot behind the gill cover. Unfortunately, absolute identification can only be made by the destructive process of counting the gill rakers on the first gill arch, which for an allis shad will number between eighty and a hundred and thirty, and for a Twaite Shad, forty to sixty.

### THE GOBIES

Potentially quite a large family of small, often coastal fishes, which are probably better known from the stomach contents of predators such as cod and bass than as specimens dangling on the end of a line.

Gobies, blennies and the like are not fish normally targeted by anglers. Certainly not serious anglers other than in species competitions, where people often find that they actually present more headaches in the finding and identifying than many of the better known more regular species.

To the rest of us, they are just small fish, which if you go often enough using small baits such as scraps of worm, mackerel or squid on small hooks such as a sabiki rig from the boat, which can also be lethal for breams and wrasse, or LRF gear from the shore, then you are pretty much bound to encounter one of them, plus other small species sooner or later in some form or other, depending of course on where it is you fish.

Not exactly an angling prize then, but interesting, attractive, and often obliging little creatures, still deserving of the same respect and conservation minded thinking afforded to other better known species.

Rock marks, weedy reefs, the base of harbour walls, and even rock or sand based harbours generally can make good deliberate areas to search. Otherwise, fish small enough, and depending on the ground and where in the country you are, be it boat or shore, eventually some of the so called mini species are bound to cross your path.

#### BLACK GOBY Gobius niger

**Bucket List status – result**

The only time I can ever remember mini fish fever taking hold was during one of the Wexford small boat festivals quite a number of years back which was cancelled day after day due to poor weather. So on one of the days, a team shore based species competition was arranged, and off we all went to see what we could find along the rocks, beaches and estuary marks.

For dinghy anglers who rarely fish from the shore, our team was actually doing quite well to the point that with several species to our credit, we actually started to fancy our chances of a win, especially when we then managed to get ourselves inside Rosslare Harbour.

There we split our tactics between exploring the open area of the harbour itself and dropping down the inside of the wall, which was my designated duty. A task which amongst other things including various small wrasse, caught me quite a sizeable round bodied little fish with big lips and bulging eyes perched on the top of its head.

Both its tail and its pectoral fins were rounded, and both its dorsal fins were touching each other, joined at their base by the fin membranes. Colouration was a greyish brown with darker blotches and spots, patterned by diffuse darker patches over the upper flanks and back, with both dorsal fins having light lines running along their length, which can at times be hard to pick out.

A black goby as it would turn out, taken on a scrap of ragworm nicked on to the smallest hook we could find, which was probably something like a size four. A fish caught down the face of the wall on the muddy sand around its base which this species prefers over heavy ground. So it can be done.

Unfortunately, despite catching thirteen species in total, we still failed to win the match, as many of our fish were ruled in-eligible based on minimum landing sizes which was a bit much. But interesting none the less.

#### COMMON GOBY Pomatoschistus microps

**Bucket List status – result**

As the name suggests, an extremely abundant round bodied little fish, and one with a preference for soft substrates, plus a tolerance of reduced salinity of the type found around estuaries where it feeds on small worms and crustaceans.

Typically goby-like with big lips, large eyes set into the top of the head, rounded pectoral fins and tail, and in this particular case, a very obvious gap between the two dorsal fins, quite a long reach from the back of the second dorsal fin to the start of the tail. Colouration varies between deep grey and sandy fawn, with some irregular dark spotting and pale saddles across the back.

Breeding males can have up to ten vertical bars on their flanks extending on to the dorsal rays as well as the dorsal membranes, and may well be darker than at other times of the year.

There may also be a dark spot towards the rear of the first dorsal fin. Instead of bars, the females can have spots. Both sexes have a dark mark on the upper edge of the base of each pectoral fin.

Found throughout the inshore shallows of all our home waters where I have come across the species at many locations in shallow sandy bays and inlets, and while fishing with my children, having taken them on baits from venues as widespread as St. Mary's on the Isles of Scilly and Anglesey. Grows to around three inches.

#### ROCK GOBY Gobius paganellus

**Bucket List status – result**

Quite a thick set round bodied typically goby-like fish with big lips, large eyes set into the top of the head, and rounded pectoral fins and tail which is found exclusively around the intertidal and low water regions of rocky stony shores. More so on southern and western coasts than in the east,

For identification purposes, its most important physical feature is the fact that the upper pectoral fin rays have become divided and separate from their connecting membranes over much of their length. This fin reaches almost to the origin of the dorsal fin. Has five or six finger-like protrusions from the nostrils.

Colouration varies between reddish brown occasionally through to black, and mainly without markings on the body, though it can show some blotching or mottling. The top third of the dorsal fin also carries a distinctive lighter banding which can even be orange in breeding males.

Otherwise, colouration tends to become more pronounced generally during the early to mid summer breeding season. More a fish of the English Channel, Western Britain, Ireland, and Scotland. My personal encounters have been around Anglesey and in Luce Bay. Grows to around four inches.

#### SAND GOBY Pomatoschistus minutus

**Bucket List status – result**

Another typically round bodied goby-like fish with its big lips, large eyes on the top of the head, rounded pectoral fins and tail, and in this particular case, slightly more slender elongate body profile than the common goby with which it also shares a long reach from the rear of the second dorsal fin to the start of the tail, though in this case the two dorsal fins almost touch.

In terms of colouration and markings, typically sandy brown to grey with five reddish flecks along each side, plus a conspicuous blue-black spot towards the back of the first dorsal fin. Adult males can also have four rather indistinct vertical bars on each flank.

A common fish over sand and mud in shallower water down to maybe sixty feet throughout all home waters where small crustaceans form the basis of its diet. Grows to around four inches.

#### GIANT GOBY Gobius cobitis

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

As might be expected from the name, this is the largest goby to be found in home waters with lengths potentially approaching twelve inches. A deep round bodied bodied, stocky looking, typically goby-like fish, with big lips, moderately large well spaced eyes on top of the head, plus rounded pectoral fins and tail.

Key identity points to look out for include scales on the nape and none on the cheek, and pectoral rays which are well developed.

An inhabitant of rock pools, particularly those well up the shore, and a lover of rocky weedy shores down to around thirty feet along suitable areas of the south Devon and south Cornish coast, the Scilly Isles, and the Channel Islands.

Colouration varies from dark grey to greenish brown mottled with lighter shades and some small darker spots or flecks. The second dorsal and tail can show a banded lighter edging, particularly during the breeding season. Feeds mainly on small crustaceans and also eats green algae.

#### LEOPARD SPOTTED GOBY Thorogobius ephippiatus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

To mark this species down as typically round bodied goby- like with big lips, large eyes on the top of the head, plus rounded pectoral fins and tail might offer some help to identification. But in all honesty, as soon as you look at it, colouration and markings will immediately set it apart, not only from the other gobies, but from most other species too.

A fish covered in large dark spots on a pinkish brown background which can become silvery pink on the lower flanks and underparts. And as if that wasn't enough, the fins are edged in blue.

A fish fond of shallow sandy substrates with lots of cover in the form of rocks or weed fringed harbour walls in home waters, mainly along west facing Atlantic coasts where it feeds on small crustaceans and worms. Grows to around five inches.

### THE BLENNIES

As with the gobies, a family of small, mainly coastal species, which on account of their proportionately large mouth size have a higher probability of being caught, particularly when fishing small hooks and baits in rocky areas for wrasse.

The ones I have listed here, despite being called blennies, are not all members of the same family. They actually belong to four different families, with the catfish or wolf fish _Anarhichas_ _lupus_ being only distantly related to the group.

#### TOMPOT BLENNY Parablennius gattorugine

**Bucket List status – result**

Blennies, gobies and the like, are not fish that are regularly targeted by anglers, certainly not serious anglers, but in my own experience, blennies with their quite large mouths probably rate amongst the more regularly seen of the so called mini species to turn up accidentally on a baited hook, especially when fishing for wrasse in fairly shallow water.

The tompot blenny in particular where there is plenty of rock and weed cover, such as when Graeme Pullen and I spent a week based on Lundy Island where every day we managed to squeeze in at least a couple of hours fishing from the rocks. I had my first ever tompot there on a piece of shellfish as other baits were hard to come by.

If my memory serves me well, it was fished quite close in to the rocks under a float. Since then however, I've had them while float fishing at Rhoscolyn on Anglesey, and from similar types of rock marks around Guernsey.

In common with the other blenny species, a powerful, thick set little fish, with both its dorsal fins merging into one continuous run, and a face which is blunt and rounded with big lips.

In this particular species there is a ragged looking tentacle above each eye, which the butterfly blenny also has. To distinguish between the two, the butterfly blenny has an exceptionally tall first dorsal fin with a single large white edged dark spot which the tompot doesn't have.

Colouration is variable according to location and time of year, but typically some shade of green, light brown, or fawn, and possibly a blend of all three, with six or seven deep brown vertical bars along each side.

During the breeding season, which is late spring to early summer, colouration darkens to a deeper brown. Quite an aggressive predatory fish for its size if its willingness to take anglers baits is anything to go by. Grows to around twelve inches.

#### SHANNY Lipophrys pholis

**Bucket List status – result**

In common with the other blenny species, a powerful thick set little fish with both its dorsal fins merging into one continuous run, and a face which is blunt and rounded with big lips. By far the most abundant and widespread blenny in northern coastal waters, and one separated from the tompot and butterfly blenny by having no tentacles above the eyes.

This is an extremely common intertidal and shallow water fish on rocky shores right throughout home waters. Also, a fish frequently found as well as caught by anglers when bait gathering under boulders, weed fringes, or in rock pools, and equally happy in shallow permanent water where it will nibble away at any soft baits intended for bigger fish, sometimes even managing to take them inside the mouth if the hook is small enough.

But beware its teeth; a small fish which can give quite a nasty nip as I know to my cost at a number of locations where I have caught them, including Lundy, Anglesey, and while wrasse fishing in and around Luce Bay.

As with the other blennies, colouration is variable according to location. Normally it will be some shade of brown with green and yellowish patches or spots, and five or six darker vertical bars. Males in breeding livery will be darker still with conspicuous lighter coloured lips. Its feeding takes in a wide range of small invertebrates including quite large numbers of barnacles. Grows to around six inches.

#### BUTTERFLY BLENNY Blennius ocellaris

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

As with the other blenny species, a powerful thick set little fish with both its dorsal fins merging into one continuous run, and a face which is blunt and rounded with noticeably big lips.

A visually striking fish which will immediately stand out as something out of the ordinary due to the height of its first dorsal fin section, this being marked just beyond the midway point by an extremely obvious dark blotch edged in white.

As with the tompot blenny, there are short ragged tentacles above each eye. General body colouration varies between brown and grey with several darker vertical bars on the upper sides extending on to the dorsal fin.

Not a fish likely to be caught by shore anglers fishing for wrasse on account of its offshore preference for water in the thirty to sixty foot range, though this could include deep water harbours right down the face of the concrete walls.

A fish more likely found in and around the western approaches, south west Ireland, and the Channel Islands, over mixed ground with some areas of coarse sand or grit where it feeds on whatever small invertebrates it can find that will fit into its mouth. Grows to around eight inches.

#### BLACK FACED BLENNY Tripterygion delaisi

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

I must confess that I had to research this one completely from scratch, as I'd neither seen nor heard of it in home waters before writing up the bucket list. A fish which, like the yarrell's and viviparous blenny, despite the suggested clue in the name, is not a true blenny at all, belonging instead to the the family tripterygiidae, the threefin blennies.

At species level however, the clue really is in the threefin blennies family name, because unlike the true blennies, the black faced blenny has three separate dorsal fins instead of the two joined dorsal fins found in the shanny, tompot and butterfly blenny. In light of what else is to come, not exactly a point that will either help or hinder identification.

Black faced blennies present themselves in two distinct colour forms, both of which, again using the name as a clue, have a black face. The females and non territorial males are grey with five broad dark vertical bars, the last of which forms a spot onto the tail.

Territorial males on the other hand have bright yellow bodies which makes their black head appear even more prominent. Both versions have blue edged fins and a bright red fluorescent iris to the eye.

A rare and highly unusual fish as far north as the British Isles which has been found in the Fleet Lagoon at the back of Chesil Beach. Eats small bottom living invertebrates and rarely exceeds a couple of inches in length.

#### YARRELL'S BLENNY Chirolophis ascanii

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Though it carries the name blenny, this fish is in fact a quite distant relative of the true blennies. That said, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise on the basis of its blunt face, continuous dorsal fin and ragged appendages above the eyes, with further smaller tentacles in front of them, though the body itself is both narrower and more elongate than the true blennies discussed previously. The tips of the first few rays of its long continuous entirely spiny dorsal fin are also fringed.

Those features alone should set this fish apart from similar species. Colouration varies between greenish yellow and reddish brown with darker transverse bars. A fish with a dark ring surrounding the eye, an offshoot from which also reaches to the corner of the mouth.

Again, not exactly an anglers fish, but with the potential to reach a length of twelve inches, always a possibility, though to counter that, a species found in small isolated pockets around the western approaches to the English Channel, the northern Irish Sea, and along the mid North Sea coast, where even at those locations it is said to be very thin on the ground. A coastal but not shore loving fish found over mixed and rocky substrates where it feeds on small invertebrates.

#### VIVIPAROUS BLENNY Zoarces viviparus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

The viviparous blenny, or eelpout, which is probably a more suitable name as this helps separate it from the true blennies to which it is only distantly related, is most commonly found along North Sea coasts through into Scandinavia and the Baltic.

An unusual but very straight forward fish to pin a name to due in the main to the arrangement of its fins. The long continuous dorsal fin and not quite as long anal fin meet at the point where there should be a tail, but there isn't one, giving the impression of a continuous wrap around the fishes long narrow body. And just before the point where that missing tail should be, the dorsal fin has a shallow but noticeable depression in it reminiscent of a portion having been nipped out of it.

Colouration varies with habitat, but is usually yellowish to greyish brown with rows of dark blotches along the dorsal fin and upper flanks. The pectoral fins are edged in yellow. Unusually, this is also a fish which, as its scientific name _viviparus_ suggests, gives birth to live young.

Reputedly a very common fish over on the eastern side of the North Sea, whereas here on our side, despite its size and diet of crustaceans, molluscs and small fish, anglers don't often see it, suggesting much lower population numbers. Grows to around twenty inches.

### CATFISH Anarhichas lupus

**Bucket List status – result**

I've listed the catfish or wolf fish as it is also called immediately following on from the blennies, because in terms of blunt facial profile and body layout, it superficially resembles them. A fish with a single long dorsal fin and shorter anal fin, both of which terminate at quite a small rounded tail. The pectoral fins are large, deep, and also rounded.

A very dark blue-grey fish over its entire body with even darker vertical bars along the flanks running up onto the dorsal fin, and some of the most serious looking dentistry you are ever likely to come across, including in sharks.

It is actually a distant deep water relative of the blennies. But that is where any similarity ends. A predominantly offshore fish said to be found throughout all Scottish waters, and over on the east coast throughout pretty much all of the North Sea down to around the Wash.

The reality however is that from an angling perspective you need to be fishing from Yorkshire north to Aberdeen to have any real chance of picking one up, which sadly these days is becoming an ever declining opportunity due to over fishing and by-catch landings.

The first one I caught was out from Hartlepool in the early 1970's. I'd seen pictures of them previously and desperately wanted to catch one, but didn't really ever think I would.

We were out a few miles off drifting worm, squid, and fish baits for cod and haddock from Tom Williams boat 'Famous' when this black shape appeared at the surface on the end of my line.

For the reasons already explained, I knew exactly what it was, so it was with a huge amount of relief that I saw it scooped up out of the water in the landing net and dropped on to the deck where I just couldn't stop staring at it. What an amazing looking fish.

Unfortunately, try as I may at a number of ports along that stretch of the North Sea from Bridlington through to Stonehaven, I didn't see another one caught on rod and line until I fished Iceland, and later Norway. But I did encounter it again off Hartlepool while out for a day observing aboard the fly shooter 'Adaptable' working within sight of the coast.

I sometimes spend time out on commercial boats, because as a scientist and a keen photographer, that is the only way you get to see certain species of fish in pristine condition. On the day I'm talking about here, amongst many other species, we put anglerfish, forkbeards and hagfish in front of the lens. Fish I might not otherwise have seen had I not gone.

As importantly, the net also brought in literally dozens of cats, giving me the opportunity to learn a whole range of facts about them, including the extent and gripping power of their incredible crab and sea urchin crushing jaws.

To demonstrate this, one of the crew picked up several cats and got them to bite on one of the overhead ropes, where once they were clamped on, they wouldn't let go. He even started swinging it round like a skipping rope taking them through a full 360 degree's, and still they stayed clamped on.

This prompted the relating of story about a deckhand on the boat some years earlier who had a habit of pushing fishes heads against his body while he gutted them. Unfortunately, he did this once too often with a cat which took a firm hold of his wedding cluster and refused let go.

As you might imagine, he was screaming and panicking. In the end, one of the other crew members grabbed the deck shovel and smacked him around the back of the head with it as a sort of make shift on the hoof anaesthetic, as that was the only way they could keep him still for long enough to cut the catfishes jaws free.

My Hartlepool fish was caught on lugworm bouncing along the sea bed on the bottom hook of a triple snood dropper rig designed to keep the baits from actually touching the bottom and getting stuck in the rocks or weed and becoming lost.

Catfish supposedly don't eat fish. Certainly not regularly. Yet surprisingly, quite a few are, or should I say were, taken on pirks both baited and un-baited from many ports including Bridlington, Whitby, Hartlepool, Amble, Burnmouth, Berwick, Eyemouth, Arbroath and Stonehaven to name but a few. Anywhere in fact along that stretch of the coast where there is mixed hard ground.

It doesn't have to be excessively deep either, though in fairness, most are taken from the boats. That said, they are (or again were) also caught reasonably regularly from some of the deeper rock marks, and from the longer stone piers they have over that way, particularly as you progress further up into Scotland, with the biggest recorded so far from the shore weighing in at over twelve pounds coming from Stonehaven.

But unfortunately, not recently, as both commercial as well as angling reports of the species slip ever further into decline. Not surprisingly, there are no records listed for Ireland or Wales.

## THE REST

All the other home waters species which either appear as stand alone individuals, or are not worth grouping together in family units such as the sea scorpions and weevers because of the low species numbers or distant relationships involved.

### CONGER EEL Conger conger

**Bucket List status – result**

The clue here is in the name. The conger is an eel that lives in the sea. Everyone knows what an eel looks like, so what more is there to be said in terms of identification. Well, actually, some so called freshwater or silver eels also choose to spend their entire lives in saltwater, and all eels when sexually mature must return to the sea if they are to complete their life cycle.

On the basis of that, both for situations in which small eels are caught at sea, and for completeness, it's probably best then that the finer points of species differentiation at least get a superficial airing.

We're talking long fish here, which besides having pectoral fins on either side of the body butted up to the gill cover, has just one long single wrap around fin which trebles up as dorsal fin, anal fin, and tail. Both species share this fin layout. What both species don't have are identical mouths, eyes, and dorsal fin starting positions.

If it's a conger, the eye will be large, the upper jaw longer than the lower, and the dorsal fin on the back of the fish will start pretty much level with the tip of the pectoral fin, whereas in the silver eel the complete opposite is the case. The eye is small, the lower jaw protrudes beyond the lower, and the dorsal starts way back behind where the pectoral fin ends.

Colouration generally in conger is quite variable and dependant upon a range of factors including water depth and favoured ground, but is usually some shade of brownish grey through to almost black on the back and upper sides, becoming much lighter beneath, and with quite an abrupt transition between the two.

In both species, when the call to seed the next generation comes, certain physiological changes start to occur which will ultimately result in the death of the fish. A process which starts with a cessation of feeding coinciding with tooth loss as the skeleton slowly de-calcifies.

Lack of food also means that the bodies internal repair mechanisms can no longer properly function and the wasting of certain internal organs follows, though not those used for reproduction.

This preparatory process, along with the maturation of the eggs can take up to a year, giving the fish sufficient time to migrate along the coast then out in to open water through the middle layers of the deep north Atlantic, in the congers case en route for an area to the east of the Azores.

Unfortunately, as no sexually mature specimen has ever been caught, some of the conger's breeding behaviour is still based on well educated guess work. They are said to spawn in mid water over depths of fifteen hundred to two thousand fathoms during mid summer where particularly large females can release as many as fifteen million eggs.

These are bathypelagic, which means though they float off the bottom, they are still more than three thousand feet beneath the surface. Then, when they hatch, as with the freshwater eel _Anguilla anguilla_ , distribution is passive, with the fry allowing themselves to be carried back towards the coastlines of north Africa and Europe by wind and currents.

During this period, which can last up to two years for those transported the greatest distances, young conger bear no physical resemblance to their parents, instead being laterally flattened, shaped rather like a poplar leaf, and transparent, going through a stage in which they are known as leptocephalus.

Only as they near coastal waters do they change into their familiar eel shape, which because of the time variations involved in getting to different locations, is thought to be triggered by the sudden decrease in water depth.

Geographical positioning is also important in order to intercept the leptocephali as they drift on the currents. West facing coasts of Biscay and the British Isles intercept the most. Some do get into the North Sea and set up home over suitable terrain on both sides there up to a line drawn across to Norway from the top of Scotland. Iceland lies at the northern extremity of the conger's range, though some are carried to its southern shores by prevailing water movements.

A lot of guff based on second hand old wives tales and urban myth has been written about conger fishing over the years, though in fairness, much of that was in the far less enlightened past.

Stories of them wrecking boats, biting lumps out of boats or fisherman's boots, and generally attacking people in every manner possible have made less well informed people understandably nervous of them to put it mildly, in the same way that the film jaws spelt hatred and death to all sharks.

Yes, conger can be a handful. Dangerous even if not treated with some level of respect. But so too can many of the other fish we catch, the vast majority of which don't have anything like the growth potential of a big conger eel.

Based on personal experience, I would say that if you don't need to have a conger in a small boat then why do so. It's not good for the fish, and potentially it might not be good for you.

Not so much in respect of the damage it can do as that which the occupants might bestow upon themselves through in-appropriate panic or concern. That being the case, take the trace in one hand, a T-bar disgorger in the other, and release the fish in the water.

Besides having the ability to spin like a prop shaft, which can be off putting when wielding the disgorger, conger also have the remarkable ability of being able to swim backwards, which is why trying to get one into a landing net can be such a pain.

In fear of imminent danger to itself, if a fish can back away from that danger, understandably it will do, and conger can. So usually there should be no fear about it suddenly lunging forward or anything silly like that. It will be putting the required tension on the trace by back peddling, which is good news in getting the T-bar disgorger to work better.

I have had conger in my own small boat many times without even a hint of a problem. There was in fact a time back in the 1980's while fishing for the jumbo cod which visited Lancashire's Fylde coast back then, when we used to catch conger all the time during the late autumn to early winter months.

Fishing over rough ground in maybe thirty feet or so of water, they would regularly grab small whiting which had been inadvertently left un-detected for too long.

If you wanted, you could catch maybe half a dozen in a session late afternoon on the edge of darkness, and if you didn't want them, well, you still got some anyway.

I don't know what happened there, but I haven't seen a conger out that way quite literally for years. But as I say, we did see them up to maybe twenty pounds, we would deal with them, and to my knowledge no problems ever occurred.

Most people didn't actually want the things, so they were back over the side as quickly as they'd come in. I have however been out in small boats were congers were being targeted and kept. For example, on the four hour evening conger trips from Looe out around the island which I used to go on many years ago, where everything was kept for pot bait.

A plastic dust bin with a lid on it into which the fish were dropped with the trace still attached would sit in the middle of the boat. A new trace was then tied on and the old one retrieved later when death had adjusted the eels attitude sufficiently well.

The big problem was that each time the lid was lifted for a new lively specimen to be dropped in, it was like opening a jack-in-a-box full of snakes. Enthused by the latest addition, the other incumbents would suddenly all make a break for freedom stopping the lid from going back on.

On the larger boats such as when we went wrecking, particularly with Dave Ellworthy aboard 'Anjonika' out from Plymouth, all fish as they fell clear of the hook using the T-bar disgorger would drop down into the fish hold below decks, and you wouldn't see them again until you got back in. But not every large boat I fished on was built that way. Even so, I still don't recall ever having any problems.

Generally, a fish would slither off into some dark corner out of the way and sulk. If not, it was given something to sulk about with a base-ball bat. Cruel and totally un-necessary I know. I'm not condoning any of it, merely telling it as it was.

Thank goodness in these enlightened times, the first thought is often of release, which is as much an individual gesture towards that fish as any sort blow struck through conservation against dwindling conger stocks. And conger fishing was very big business. Actually, more so as wreck fishing started to loose its edge in terms of fish numbers and huge catches than when it was at its peak.

Big eels were still caught way back then, but even bigger ones came later after the bait robbing ling had slipped into decline. Otherwise, it was a case of spending most of the day thinning the ling out sufficiently to give a big eel even half a chance of finding the bait, and sometimes it would take a few sustained days of effort to do that, which is why so called 'fished out' wrecks neglected out there in deep water are often more likely to produce the very best conger fishing.

Most of the mid Channel wrecks would have big conger, some even bigger than the record. But if the ling were on the baits first, that counted for nothing.

Tactics for ling and conger fishing over wrecks and reefs can be both the same and different. Ling are better fished for on the drift with fish baits or squid on a short heavy duty dropper above the lead to minimise hangups, whereas conger are best approached with a static bait at anchor, though each tactic will still work to an extent for the other.

Specifically targeting big conger on a wreck is pretty much exclusively done at anchor, which for the skipper is a massive skill set in itself. Some of the legendary wreck skippers were incredibly good at it. Others less so, preferring to stick with the pollack and coalfish on the drift.

John Trust and Ernie Passmore aboard 'Our Unity' out from Brixham set the standard. But far and away the person most adept at positioning a boat over a wreck at anchor for me was Guernsey based Dougal Lane, who could scream up to a wreck, lob the anchor overboard without any trial positioning runs, and bingo, we were over fish.

A man who could think and visualize the world in terms of Decca lanes, though just how that converts over to GPS I wouldn't like to say. He was good. But anchoring is a short term slack water affair where the dying run, angle of breeze, and predicted swing angle on the rope as the new tide kicks in all have to be considered in the calculations.

Despite the fact that conger aren't dentally blessed to the same extent as sharks, in the early days, wire traces were seen as must. Nowadays heavy commercial monofilament of maybe two hundred pounds breaking strain is widely used for a lot of fish with teeth, and could easily suit conger fishing when used to make a short flowing 10/0 hook trace baited with either a whole mackerel offered as a flapper or with its tail removed to prevent spinning; a whole cuttlefish or squid, or best of all, and one from the congers regular menu, a pouting presented as a flapper, which can usually be caught to order on baited feathers over most wrecks.

Some years ago we used to dinghy fish the wrecks out in Liverpool Bay. There doesn't seem to be much on them these days, besides which, as the water is quite shallow and many of the wrecks have either broken up or become silted up, they were never a patch on similar marks elsewhere in deeper water over heavy ground.

But, they were all that we had, and conger fishing at anchor was something we occasionally tried. The difficulty was, not being regulars at it, we couldn't do a Dougal Lane and get it bang on right first go every time. So what we did was approach it in pairs.

The first boat would anchor up at the calculated point. After settling up, the second boat would run around it checking its position, then, taking any required errors of judgement into account, make a more accurate drop, at which point the first boat would up anchor if necessary and settle in alongside. Not quite the same skill set as the west country masters, but effective none the less.

Not quite so promising in other ways either as the mid channel wrecking in that when the boat did eventually swing out of position in the breeze; as the tide died completely, or as the new tide strengthened taking the baits out of the heavy stuff placing them onto any sand piles built up by the tide tight in to the iron work, we would catch dogfish, or at best bull huss.

Conversely, in the English Channel, they would be in with a very good chance of huge turbot, and hitting the same spots on the drift with lures bouncing bottom, also some of the biggest angler fish on record.

Reef fishing for conger is to a certain extent a scaled down version of wreck fishing, though without the same level of precision and short term effective time period. Closer in to shore, it's also better done if not after dark, then at least later in the day when there is less light penetration.

You can catch them on a slow drift, but it's far from ideal trying that. Much better to put the anchor down followed by a well scented bait such as a fresh mackerel fillet or flapper hard on the bottom in the knowledge that there is no reason why it should get hung up and broken off.

Often, though not necessarily always, reef conger, particularly shallower water inshore reef conger will be smaller than their wreck counter-parts, say in the twenty to forty pound bracket, which all boils down to food availability.

The reason why wrecks are potentially such reliable big fish producers is their ability to concentrate resources, particularly wrecks lying on sand which must act like an oasis in the dessert. The problem is that with the very biggest conger, this can eventually also be one reason why you don't catch them.

Commercial landings and reports from wreck divers clearly show that the current British & World record conger of 133¼ pounds taken off Torquay, while huge, falls some way short of what else is down there, and on occasions, some of these monstrous fish must be hooked.

The main reasons why they are not landed are twofold. Size obviously, and the congers ability to make it difficult for an angler some two to three hundred feet above it to physically drag it from its lair.

But also in some instances, not only an inability, but an impossibility to drag it clear to fight things out in open water, as in some cases, if a conger gets itself into an enclosed ambush point with particularly rich pickings, as it grows, it could well find it impossible to get back out when the one way ticket to the Azores finally comes through, and presumably in light of the physiological changes that accompany that ticket, it will die shortly afterwards, and not as has been suggested, stay put, feed on, and wax even fatter still as a result.

This brings us very nicely round to the topic of shore fishing for conger where the same getting trapped problem is rumoured to be the case for old harbour walls riddled with holes. In particular at locations with an endless supply of food for ambush predation, or stuff dropping from adjacent commercial boats tying up nearby.

I don't know how true any of that is, but it is a story often bandied about. Certainly harbours with permanent water and commercial fishing boats are a good starting point.

Graeme Pullen was the man who got me into fishing these. On the Irish Sea Safari's, which we'd get invited on most years way back when under the 'guidance' of Paul Harris, Graeme would insist we fished down the sides of the walls amongst the moored trawlers after dark.

I say 'guidance' from Paul Harris, but actually, looking back, that should read as mis-guidance. Some of the pranks and scrapes we got in to.....well, you can imagine. A set of a dozen young(ish) blokes away from home just fishing and drinking is bound to trigger a reversal back to childhood.

All the usual stuff such as roped door handles so you couldn't get out; cling film over the toilet bowl, and mackerel strapped to the cars engine or exhaust pipe regularly took place.

I remember going to the loo one morning only to find a huge spider crab trying claw its way up the porcelain. Not good in a communal bathroom shared with other non angling guests.

On another occasion, someone had broken into my room (presumably by climbing in through the window), stacked all my clean T-shirts up with lugworms sandwiched between each, then hammered down on the top of the pile. Needless to say, I was wearing evil smelling uniquely patterned tie-dyed T-shirts for the rest of the week.

Anyway, back to the conger fishing. Courtmacsherry is one location that sticks in my mind. At some venues it was a toss-up whether to fish or to hit the pub. Not so at Courtmac. The pub was actually on the edge of the harbour, so we'd take it in turns at going back for another tray of drinks. But unfortunately, too much alcohol and commercial harbours with lots of quayside mooring ropes don't necessarily mix well.

Bearing in mind that it was also dark, on the trip in question, one of the lads tripped over a rope and quite literally disappeared over the wall. It's a good job there was the deck of a trawler down there to break his fall. The fact that it almost broke his back, yet still he fished on, is testament to the medicinal and anaesthetic properties of Guinness.

Later, still on the same trip, I came back from the bar only to find my rod missing which I'd left lying on the harbour top. The obvious conclusion was that somebody had hidden it insisting it had been dragged in by a fish.

Anyway, a good hour went by without me finding it. It was only when Graeme landed a conger with a second hook to line in its mouth which we started to pull in that my rod and reel emerged from the water.

So don't leave rods un-attended without first tying them down. And equally, don't under-estimate the potential of harbours, which while they might look barren and un-interesting by day, can produce some excellent conger fishing once the sun goes down, particularly if you hang rubby dubby bags down the sides of the wall and leave them there throughout your stay to work their magic.

Of course, shore fishing for conger isn't only about harbours or jetties looking out onto rough ground. There are numerous deep water rock marks equally capable of turning up not only conger, but big conger too, as the record lists very clearly show, all the way from the top of Scotland to the Channel Islands, though as with many species of fish, often the further south you go, the better the prospects are of bigger fish.

The rocks at the side of Castle Cornet at St. Peterport on Guernsey are one hot spot I remember, where friends of mine Peter Frise and Joe Gomez always used to do well with fish sometimes going up into the forties.

As I've said many times throughout this book, I'm no shore fishing expert. I get some great shore caught fish, but usually as a result of guidance by others who do know what they're about, which in the case of big conger, don't come any better qualified than Devon angler Roger Beer.

The only man ever to catch a conger in excess of fifty pounds from the shore and one hundred pounds from a boat. An ex-British shore record holder to boot who has put a lot of thought and effort not only into the catching, but also the landing and handling of huge shore caught eels, which is probably the biggest part of the battle.

I caught up with Roger at his home in Ivybridge back in 2012 where we talked through the whole process with the voice recorder running. Needless to say, he tells it far better than I could hope to summarize it here.

Associated audio interview numbers: 76

### ANGLER FISH Lophius piscatorius

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Not a fish anyone is ever likely to mistake for anything other than what it is. A laterally compressed pear shaped predator with rounded, almost pad-like pectoral fins behind which are small inconspicuous gill openings.

The first dorsal fin has three rays with short connecting membranes though there are other free rays ahead of the eyes, the most forward of which just above the upper jaw carries the notorious lure used to entice small unsuspecting fish within grabbing range. A second dorsal fin is also situated close to the tail.

A fish with an extraordinarily large mouth containing sharp back facing teeth which are hinged inwards to facilitate easy access for prey while at the same time offering little in the way of escape potential should a victim try to struggle free.

The best one line description I ever heard came from a fellow angler Ray Cattoor who compared it to a 'rent mon's bag with teeth'. In addition, the skin has no scales and appears loose, which along with fringed appendages around the front end resembling seaweed fronds, helps break up its outline on the sea bed.

Colouration and patterning are highly variable depending on terrain, but usually comprise of a camouflage pattern of browns and greens with spots.

A fish likely to be found anywhere from the low water area down to depths in excess of fifteen hundred feet, though most commonly around the three hundred foot contour. Said to be common throughout home waters, it can grow to lengths of over six feet.

Numbers of angler fish caught on rod and line, which are never great, and the locations at which they are caught, which can be scattered far and wide, depend almost entirely on the degree to which lure fishing is practised.

Having studied catch reports over many years, there is a direct correlation between bottom bouncing fish imitating lures and hook-up rates, the reason being that angler fish feed on live prey.

There have been occasional reports of angler fish on bait too. What we don't know is how that bait was being presented, and therefore what it appeared to be to the angler fish that took it. It may well have looked as though it was alive if fished from a rolling drifting boat.

As their anatomy suggests, angler fish feed in a very specific way and are reliant on small living fish approaching them as opposed to regular opportunist scavenging, which explains why they never do well in aquaria, where in most instances they eventually starve to death.

Yet clearly, they will pick up baits from time to time, as evidenced by shore catches from the various national record lists, with some very sizeable specimens having been caught, which is difficult to explain away in light of what has already been said, so I won't even hazard a guess.

My only query would be, was the bait fished static or on the move. That said, I once saw and photographed an angler fish swimming at the surface in Lerwick Harbour as fish scraps were being shaken out of trawl net. Whether it was the fish bits that attracted it or the other small fish mopping them up is impossible to say. Either way, not something I have witnessed either before or since.

Reports suggest that angler fish catches were more common some years ago when anglers fishing for cod in the mid section of the North Sea, particularly along the Yorkshire Coast, did so with pirks and strings of muppets.

More recently, that trend has given way to shads, which are small soft bodied lures on four to six foot monofilament droppers with a separate lead taking them down, though still fished with the same type of lift and drop action that pirks have. So the link is still there.

The mimicking of a small fish darting up and down close to the bottom covering ground as the boat drifts taking the lure within grabbing range of a concealed angler fish, is almost certain to trigger an instinctive response from a concealment predator reasonably widespread enough in deep water to make this a potentially productive technique at many locations around the country.

The main reason why it isn't used at many locations, and therefore possibly why fewer angler fish end up in the boat, is undoubtedly a lack of other more numerous and sought after species about to make fishing these lures worth while.

West country wreck fishing bouncing lures over the sand accumulations created by tidal disruption around clean ground wrecks has been another major source of specimen angler fish over the years, including the previous record shown here taken by wreck fishing legend JJ McVicar.

The big question has to be, which angler fish are we talking about here. It has been known by the fishery science community for quite some time now that two similar species exist in what I term here as home waters, these being _Lophius piscatorius_ and _Lophius budegassa_.

All current records are assigned to _L. piscatorius_ , but with the actual bodies in many cases no longer available for re-examination, how can people be sure, a point I have chatted about with BRFC chairman Mike Heylin.

For a long time, even fishery scientists were un-aware of the situation, despite the geographical overlap, though _L. budegassa_ is thought to be much thinner on the ground at a ratio of 45:1 to _L. piscatorius,_ and with more of a preference for west facing coasts.

If you ask the question what are the various record fish committee's intending to do about the situation, the simple answer would appear to be to ignore it in the hope that it goes away. But it isn't going to go away.

Yes, the problem is a difficult one to solve retrospectively without throwing all past records out and starting again. On the other hand, getting things absolutely right and squeaky clean is what these organisations pride themselves on.....supposedly.

The major points of difference are as follows....

1. _L. piscatorius_ has a tentacle on the upper margin of the eye, while _L_. _budegassa_ has none.

2. _L. piscatorius_ has a club shaped nostril, while that of _L_. _budegassa_ is flat at the tip.

3. _L. piscatorius_ has a broad fringed lure with a central free stalk, while that of _L. budegassa_ is bilobed and without central stalk.

4. The edge of the pelvic fins of _L. piscatorius_ are dark edged or dusky on the upper surface, while those of _L. budegassa_ are clear white, possibly tinged with grey or brown in large specimens.

5. The second dorsal fin of _L. piscatorius_ has 11 to 12 rays, while that of _L. budegassa_ has 8 to 9 rays.

6. _L. piscatorius_ has 29 or 30 vertebrae while _L. budegassa_ has 25 or 26.

7. _L. piscatorius_ has a light coloured peritoneum, whereas that of _L. budegassa_ is dark.

**NOTE:** The peritoneum is the thin membrane lining the inside of the body cavity and is therefore only available for investigation in dead specimens.

Associated audio interview numbers: 134 and 135.

### OPAH Lampris guttatus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

With relatives like the incredible looking deal fish and ribbon-fish, it would not be unreasonable to expect something visually spectacular from this species, and in that respect, the opah doesn't disappoint.

A laterally compressed, deep bodied, almost circular fish, the upper back of which is a deep blue shading to green, with glints of purple, silver, lilac and gold giving way to a pale watery pinkish red below. Its sickle shaped dorsal, pelvic and pectoral fins are a deep purplish red, and its entire body is covered by large oval opaque silvery-white spots.

A fish well capable of weights well in excess of a hundred pounds, and one of those species that if you did catch one you would most certainly know about it due to a combination of its potential size and spectacular appearance. But don't hold your breath. I wouldn't be so bold as to say it's not going to happen, but in reality, that is the most likely outcome.

Since the late 1960's, I can only recall a couple being brought ashore by anglers, which when they are caught are almost certainly going to make the angling press, if not the national press, though I have seen the odd one or two brought in to Fleetwood over the years before the distant water trawling fleet was banished from Icelandic waters.

I have to say though that I am surprised the species doesn't appear on the Irish record fish list due to the circumstances normally surrounding its capture.

Both the specimens I recall reading about were taken off the Cornish coast in the western approaches, which fits in well with its normal distribution and life style as an epi to meso-pelagic solitary oceanic fish found over very deep water, which in layman's terms means it feeds in the middle to upper layers way offshore.

But apparently, not always, as the two fish in question both took baits fished under a float just below the surface aimed at catching blue sharks, which is why you might have expected an odd one to turn up off the south or west of Ireland.

### SUNFISH Mola mola

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Nobody is ever going to mistake a mature sunfish for anything other than what it actually is. A huge head with a small beak like mouth and long steep narrow fin top and bottom towards the back-end close to what purports to be a tail, all of which in truth looks more like the left over from a shark attack on some poor unfortunate more conventionally proportioned fish.

With a possible length of ten feet, and weights in excess of one and a half tons bandied about, potentially a real giant of a fish. Most however will be some way short of those proportions, though we were on one occasion in fear of having one of that sort of size hit our small boat while striped bass fishing off Cape Cod. It came slowly towards us laid on its side, and thank goodness, just managed to dip under the hull at the very last moment.

Usually the ones I see off Cornwall and Ireland in the summer are a fraction of that size. It's rare, though not impossible, to see them away from Atlantic facing coasts, and occasionally, specimens are both spotted and hooked up from deep water rock marks along west facing shores. Colouration is greyish or greenish brown on the back and upper sides becoming a lighter silvery grey below.

Irish fishery scientists and fish recorders say that because the sunfish feeds mainly on items other than can be used by anglers for bait such as medusae, ctenophores, and salps – in layman's terms, all variations on the jellyfish theme, it therefore cannot be caught on rod and line using fair angling means, and as such they have removed the previous incumbent from their record list.

British and Welsh fish recorders and their advisor's however take a different view and continue to list it both as a current record, and for future claims. Fortunately for the Scots, they never had it listed in the first place so don't have the problem.

Who's right and who's wrong is not for me to speculate, and by including it here doesn't mean I am taking sides. By my own set of bucket list rules, I have no other choice but to include it and deal with it.

Who ultimately wins the argument, we will have to wait and see. But for my money, the Irish have a good case. On the other hand, anglers do appear to catch them on all sorts of baits including baited feathers, though whether they take through hunger or agitated provocation is again something I won't, or more to the point, can't comment on here.

All I can say is that if you do come across one at the surface, then give it a go and see what happens, as the following tale told to me by Graeme Pullen demonstrates.

It was during a fishing expedition out from the port of Crookhaven, ironically in Ireland. A large sunfish was spotted lazily finning along at the surface, which they often like to do, presumably hunting for jellyfish or similar prey.

Not being entirely certain as to how best to approach the situation, it was decided that the 2/0 hooks being used at the time for red bream would suit the situation. So, using a small lead, the bait was cast at the fish.

The sunfish repeatedly responded, but could not keep pace with the bait as the lead took it out of reach too quickly on the drop. So the lead size was eventually scaled right down to the point where the bait could be trailed just ahead of the sunfish's nose, whereupon it took it immediately.

Other anglers report similar experiences, and of sunfish grabbing at baits on the way up. That particular fish turned the scales to over seventy seven pounds, but like all that have gone before, including some very much bigger fish, it not unexpectedly failed to impress the Irish officials.

### TRIGGER FISH Balistes capriscus

**Bucket List status – result**

The name trigger fish comes from the front spine of the first dorsal fin which some people say is shaped like the trigger of a gun. When this is held erect in the upright position, it can only be dropped by releasing or unlocking a short 'trigger' spine to the rear of it, which is another potential explanation for the name, and by locking this sharp spine in position, trigger fish hope to dissuade larger predators from eating them.

A fish with an almost diamond shaped laterally compressed body profile similar to that of a bream covered in a mosaic of heavy scales. The large head has its small eyes set well back, and terminates in a comparatively small mouth with large guillotine like teeth top and bottom.

The gills are another very noticeable feature in that trigger fish don't have a conventional lift up gill cover. Here it has been reduced down to a small slit just in front of each pectoral fin. The pelvic fins are absent, and the outer most rays of the tail fin form elongate filaments.

Colouration can be quite variable, though is usually some shade of greyish or greenish brown with blue bands and spots on the dorsal and anal fins.

Very much a fish of the English Channel, west country, and south west of Ireland, though one which may well be spreading northwards as sea temperatures rise, with at least one specimen recorded washed up dead on the shore of Scotland's Isle of Mull.

A bit of an enigma in that according to the literature, trigger fish are feeble swimmers, yet they are rated by anglers in some quarters, and California in particular, as one of the best pound for pound fighting fish in the sea, comprising some forty or so different species spread throughout the tropics and sub tropics all around the world.

I've caught them along Mexico's Pacific coast, Florida's Atlantic coast, Ascension Island, and from the west coast of India. More importantly, from UK waters too, where although they are still caught, so far as being a regularly reported species in the way they once were, things seem to have gone a bit quiet over recent years.

Whether that's down to a lack of fish or simply lack of interest is difficult to say, though I don't see falling numbers as necessarily being the problem.

The reason why I say this is because I believe they have been in our home waters both for longer, and at a greater density than many people realise, something I'm basing on one particular experience of mine way back in the early 1980's before they became a widely reported species.

Nobody had, or for that matter still has so far as I am aware, ever taken a trigger fish on rod and line off the Lancashire Coast. But they are most certainly there, and have been in some numbers for at least the past thirty years in the vicinity of Heysham harbour near Morecambe, where two nuclear power stations have their cooling water uptake points, and where bubble screens supposedly keep fish from being drawn up into the system.

We know this doesn't deter fish through my work for the Inshore Fisheries Conservation Authority who are constantly trying to get access to the plant following disturbing reports of literally tons of fish across a huge range of species being sucked up, filtered out, and disposed of by the skip load, and repeatedly IFCA have been refused on security grounds.

This dumping is known to go on from a number of sources. I myself have spoken with Heysham workers while out fishing who, un-aware of my IFCA position, have given me chapter and verse. So something needs to be done, not only at Heysham, but at all power stations operating similar systems, and IFCA needs to flex its muscles and demand access as a statutory fisheries governing body.

Many years ago, when security was much more relaxed than it is today, I managed to get myself an invite into the power station water intake screening room, which if my memory serves me well, was a sort of large rotating circular metal cage designed to collect solid matter before passing the water forward to cool the reactors. And there amongst the other fish and weed were literally dozens of trigger fish.

When I recount the story, it often draws comments like "obviously they must be there because of the warm water". But how does a trigger fish travelling north know that if it grits its teeth and puts up with the gradual temperature decline en route, eventually when it reaches Heysham harbour, everything will be okay.

Yet there they were, and to this day, not a single one has turned up and rod and line, which in some ways I'm not that surprised about as it does help to specifically target them, while on the other hand, enough are caught along the south coast all the way around Cornwall up into Welsh waters to suggest that at least an odd accidental encounter should have taken place. But it hasn't, which poses the obvious question of just how numerous and widespread the trigger fish actually is.

Reports from as far east as Sussex of a few showing up in lobster pots date back to the 1960's. The same is true of other locations to the west and around the Channel Islands. But still, by that stage, these were rare news-worthy fish, remaining so until the early 1980's, when increasing numbers of accidental angling encounters started persuading people to work out just what their requirements were and have a go at specifically targeting them.

This eventually lead to the catching of specimens from the shore where the water was reasonably deep, and from boats fishing close in to the shore during the summer and autumn months, the start time of which would be affected by how soon the spring and summer got under-way, and whether or not the winter had also been mild enough to give things an extra early season boost.

It was also quickly sussed out that trigger fish like to congregate and patrol around specific features with shelter, such as wrecks, piers, and suitable rock marks, examples of which include the wreck of the Royal Adelaide along Chesil Beach, and the mark where I first encountered them in South Wales back in 1995.

Dave Lewis has long had a similar species target objective to my bucket list. I'm not sure what his specific criteria are, but racking up as many species as possible is certainly a central part of it, and from time to time in that regard we lend each other a helping hand.

I took him char fishing for example, and he reciprocated with a session after trigger fish around a mark I already knew quite well, though if I'm honest, wasn't aware was a trigger fish hot spot.

I'd dinghy fished out of Oxwich Bay in South Wales on quite a number of occasions, and not too far off on the way out I had noticed the wreck, which at low water is clearly visible above the waves, and for high water fishing, there was a large white letter 'W' as I recall painted on the nearby cliffs to line up with.

I stayed down at Dave's place and we fished from his orkney longliner, casting peeler crab baits around the outer edge of the wreck rather that fishing over it. But you have to be quick as they hit hard and are soon gone if you don't react accordingly, as I was to find out.

I can't remember what we finished up with, but it must have been something like a dozen triggers, plus of course other fish which will crop here and there under their appropriate species headings elsewhere in the book.

Trigger fish are not overly demanding fish, but they do still make some demands, particularly in terms of bait size, hook size, and snood material. That guillotine like set of teeth can make very short work of monofilament hook lengths unless they are at least twenty to thirty pounds breaking strain.

Going off at a slight tangent, I found a whole heap of triggers around a small pier in Mexico where I'd gone with my little telescopic rod and fixed spool reel loaded with eight pounds bs monofilament which also had to double up as a trace.

I wasn't expecting much, and that was all I had with me. The problem was that most of the triggers nipped through the mono a few seconds in and were gone. In fact, some even managed to bite the hook off without even registering a rattle.

The following morning I went back and added a couple of inches of very fine wire to the trace, but they simply wouldn't touch it. Switch back to just nylon and they were on the bait immediately biting off the hooks. I did land a few when I managed to hook them in the scissor. But a very rapid learning curve.

So heavy mono or even fluorocarbon for the hook lengths with small size one or size two hooks in the strongest patterns you can find. As for filling the hook, I don't think I've found a bait they wont take, though crab and squid are probably the most consistent takers.

### PUFFER FISH Lagocephalus lagocephalus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Puffer fish are said to be one of the most poisonous vertebrates on the planet. I assume this applies only to the eating, because on a number of occasions I've been both spiked and nipped by various puffer fish species around the world while trying to get my hooks back, thinking they were harmless to handle, and so far thank goodness I've suffered no ill effects.

I was however aware of their rather dubious culinary qualities, which if not prepared and presented properly for sale as they like to do in certain Japanese restaurants, can lead to paralysis and death. So I think I'll give that one a miss thank you.

The name comes from this fishes ability to pump its body size up by taking on water in the hope of being too big to be taken by predators, which when they later relax, squirts back out again from what appears to be a smiling face as their lips are pulled back revealing the four guillotine like teeth from which they take their family name tetraodontidae, tetra being the Greek word for four.

A rare fish in northern European waters, though the odd specimen is reported from time to time in the western approaches to the English Channel. These are thought to be occasional migrants encouraged by a combination of high water temperatures and passive distribution on favourable currents.

Evidence of this distribution, and their willingness to take an angler's bait has been shown with specimens taken as far north and east as Chesil Beach on the Dorset coast. The fact that it is a pelagic feeder when in coastal waters may however be artificially suppressing the true picture, though very likely, not by any great margin.

Visually, the puffer fish should be an interest raising catch with its rather flat dorsal profile and deeply rounded abdomen which is covered with distinct spines up to a line from the anal fin to the chin, unlike the upper part of the body which is spine free and feels smooth.

When alarmed, as the name suggests, it will inflate its body to some degree (though not as much here as with some tropical varieties) causing the spines to stand off erect.

Both the anal and dorsal fins are short and placed well back towards the tail. The mouth has two teeth in each jaw giving the impression almost of a beak. Feeding is mainly directed towards small fish, crustaceans and squids. Colouration is deep greyish blue over the upper surface, giving way suddenly to a distinctive white below.

A very rare fish at our latitudes, though increasingly common further to the south. My only personal experience of this particular species is from specimens we caught on small baits while boat fishing off the coast of Gambia in west Africa.

### LUMPSUCKER Cyclopterus lumpus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

This is another of those species which nobody is really likely to confuse with anything else. A fish with an almost pre-historic look. The body shape is not unlike that of a mis-shaped, scale-less, over inflated rugby-football armoured with bony plates, the largest being arranged into four distinct rows on each side of the body, one of which is sited on top of the hump in front of the dorsal fin in mature fish.

On the underside between the pectoral fins, the pelvic fins have fused together to form that famous and highly efficient sucker disc from which the species takes its well deserved name.

Colouration is usually a dull deep greyish green with paler lower regions when offshore. However, during the breeding season, which is when most lumpsuckers will be seen by anglers, the males become more blue on their back and upper flanks, shading to orange-red on their lower flanks and underparts.

Distribution extends throughout all home waters, though it is said to be sparser in the English Channel, with the females having the greatest growth potential and a weight capability of maybe as much as twenty pounds.

A curious, yet strangely interesting fish to scientists, if not to the angler, the lumpsucker with its mis-shaped body profile, abdominal suction pad, and unusual parental habits, is not something out of the regular fish mould.

Essentially, it is an offshore fish which makes predictable annual migrations into the rocky coastal shallows where specimens not infrequently become stranded and die.

The north east coast in particular used to see a lot of them, and indeed, Whitley Bay angler Ken Robinson once collected a whole load casualties for me in that area a number of years ago where the driving force behind this phenomenon in the late winter-early spring time is to reproduce.

Lumpsuckers live out most of their lives in deep water often well beyond angling range, with depths well in excess of a hundred and fifty fathoms recorded.

Their reproductive cycle however brings them to the other extreme, with the mature fish coming right up to, and at times inside of the spring low water tide line, which can over a tide cycle, leave them vulnerable to attack by sea birds and possible stranding.

After a period of courtship, the male persuades his mate to deposit her clump of eggs in a rock crevice or other similar nesting site which he will then stand guard over.

After depositing the eggs, she immediately heads back to the safety of the depths, leaving her mate to anchor himself to an adjacent rock where he will stay put for perhaps several weeks until the eggs are ready to hatch.

Aggressive advances by other inshore fishes are defended with bold retaliation from the devoted parent. Invertebrate predators such as sea urchins are also shown short shrift, and throughout the incubation period, the eggs are guarded diligently.

At times of reduced water movement, the male will even fan the eggs with his pectoral fins or tail, both to deliver oxygen, and to prevent suffocation by sediments coming out of suspension. Jets of water may also be blown over the eggs from his mouth.

Only when the eggs eventually hatch and the emerging fry are blown clear of the site will the male head back into deep water where the females have been for perhaps a couple of months.

On the one hand, such parental attention can reap high rewards with perhaps a full one hundred percent hatch, while on the other, losses due to parental stranding and persistent attacks from bands of small fish such as wrasse, can easily wipe out a whole family in a way which free floating pelagic eggs would not be subjected to. A lesson to some extent taken onboard by the emergent fry, which take up sanctuary in rafts of loose weed.

So the next time you fish out a clump of floating weed offshore, take a closer look at it. On quite a number of occasions, I've found tiny half inch long lumpsuckers tucked away between the fronds where they feed initially on plankton, later switching to small crustacea and anything else that is available.

Later, they become demersal, where their bottom feeding again takes in more or less anything that is available, with molluscs, worms, crustaceans and small fish featuring regularly. This means they will take virtually any sort of a bait put in front of them.

In the egg guarding period, baits would need to be dropped quite literally on a fish's nose where mainly it will be the smaller males which are hooked, and perhaps more regularly than anglers are actually aware of.

Some of those `snags' encountered during the spring over heavy ground might actually be a nest guarding lumpsucker attached to a rock. In fact, I once read a report of one boat angler cod fishing in Scotland who thought he was into a real monster, only to haul up a small lumpsucker firmly anchored to a big rock.

Those fish collected by Ken Robinson I mentioned earlier were individuals that had for various reasons died during nest guarding, and were so regular an occurrence that we confidently arranged to make the collection the year before.

I don't know to what extent it still happens. But not being of any real commercial interest will, hopefully, see numbers holding, making all rocky areas, and in particular small rocky harbours at least worth a look.

Unfortunately, that can't be said of everywhere, with my most vivid memories of the lumpsucker coming from Akranes in southern Iceland.

I was over there fishing when I was introduced to a man who seasonally gill netted them inshore at spawning time for their eggs which was marketed as a cheap caviare.

Not exactly an ecologically sustainable fishery. He had literally dozens of them on the boat, and to demonstrate their eating qualities, he turned one upside down, trapped it between his knee's, then opened up its body cavity and scooped out some eggs which he started eating raw his bare hands before passing the thing to me so that I could do the same.

### JOHN DORY Zeus faber

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A bizarre looking and therefore very easily identified fish with a deep oval laterally compressed body, exaggerated fins, and a single large dark spot circled in yellow on each side of the body just below the lateral line and to the rear of the pectoral fin. This supposedly is the apostles thumb print, hence the occasionally used alternative name of St. Peters fish.

The head is large, as is the mouth which is protrusible. The first spiny section of the dorsal fin is tall with exaggerated long filaments stretching from the connecting membranes. Down on the underside, the anal fin starts off with four very sharp spines, and along the sides at the base of both the anal and the dorsal fins runs a series of short double spines.

The thumb print spot which I've already mentioned, is placed onto a background colour of dirty brownish yellow which becomes lighter towards the lower part of the body. This may or may not be lightly patterned with yellowish lines, which if they are present, will follow the outline shape of the body.

A fish capable of reaching weights into double figures, potentially found anywhere from the eastern English Channel to the Pentland Firth from where the British and Scottish records respectively were taken.

Just because anglers don't regularly catch a particular predatory species of fish doesn't mean its rare. A prime example of this is the john dory. A fairly widespread fish north to south from the shoreline down to a hundred fathoms fathoms. Yet the average person will probably never see a single specimen throughout their entire angling life.

The reason why so few turn up on the end of anglers lines is down to the way in which they feed. These are solitary, slow stalking stealth predators, which make full use of their laterally compressed thin body profile to slowly edge close to their victims, skilfully manoeuvring whenever necessary to remain edge on in order to conceal their true size and intentions.

Prey can be any fish small enough to fit in what is actually quite a large cavernous mouth. But that's not all. The whole mouth is protrusible and can quickly be shot forwards bridging the gap between predator and prey when an unsuspecting sandeel, small pollack or whatever fails to recognise the danger and allows the john dory within striking range.

In a nutshell then, this is a specialist predator of small live fish, and therefore anything other than live prey, or some item of bait or lure which fails to convince the dory that it is grabbing at a live fish, will usually be ignored, thereby perpetuating the illusion of the species being rarer or less widespread than in reality it actually is.

Reports, often showing quite sizeable fish, are not that uncommon in the angling press from marks ranging between offshore wrecks, banks, and reefs, to all things in between. But never it seems actually from the shore, a fact also reflected in the various home waters record lists, which surprises me, as the base of harbour walls attract so many small fish.

Maybe it's a live bait thing again. I don't doubt that the odd will have been taken by shore anglers, but that isn't what the facts are saying.

When fishing from a drifting boat over an offshore bank with sandeel for bass or turbot, or working a wreck with small fish imitating lures, feathers, or moving baits, the illusion of a living fish straying within striking range, is often more than any john dory worth its salt can resist.

But it would have to be virtually on the fishes nose. There won't be any sort of predatory chase. Slow painstakingly deliberate movements are the evolved mode of attack here.

As for personal experiences, I've seen an odd one here and there in the Channel Islands take a small live sandeel baits fished around the edges of offshore and inshore sandbanks.

We also had one in my dinghy on a mackerel baited silver tinsel feather being fished over mixed broken ground quite close to the shore while looking for bait during one of the Wexford small boat festivals. But, like most anglers, my experiences of this fish are limited.

Other than seeing half a dozen small ones come up together in a trawl while collecting diseased flounders along the edge of Lune Deep off Fleetwood, plus a few quite sizeable specimens trawled up off the Scilly Isles, I'm as much in the dark as the next man. And while it is a fish I would dearly love to catch, if only because they are one of the best eating fish ever, not one I expect to be putting a tick against any time soon.

### BOAR FISH Capros aper

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

From personal handling experience, I have to say that I am very surprised at having to cover this particular species here. I remember having dozens of specimens to examine and all afternoon to examine them in one bright sunny day spent trawling just a few miles off Peninnis Head in the Scilly Isles aboard Dave Thompson's boat 'Swan Dancer'.

Lots of other goodies too, more of which in their appropriate slots. But the boar fish, or zulu as it is also sometimes called, was especially intriguing, particularly as we also had quite a few john dory onboard too which they kind of superficially resemble to make a direct comparison to.

Nobody would ever confuse the pair, but they do share a similar rounded, laterally compressed body profile with a protrusible mouth which shoots out forming a bridging tube. In this case a very small tube for sucking in tiny crustaceans.

Obviously, they must also take a bait, though getting one in front of a feeding specimen would be quite another matter altogether.

Getting back to the identification, the first dorsal fin is both tall and spiky, joining directly on to a second soft dorsal fin. Similarly on the underside, the anal fin starts off with a few short sharp spines then a softer section. There is also a single strong sharp spine at the front of each pelvic fin, in addition to which the eye is noticeably very large denoting a deep water life style.

Colouration to some extent depends on water depth, being yellowish at the shallower locations around the fifty fathom contour, becoming yellowish red, then completely red with several faint darker or sometimes lighter vertical bars on the flanks as the depth increases to around one hundred fathoms or more, usually over mixed ground and coral with even deeper water close by.

So you see what I mean about getting a bait in front of them. But seemingly not impossible as the record list shows. The western approaches to the English Channel, which includes the Scilly Isles, and the extreme south west coast of Ireland where the species is landed commercially for fish meal, probably offer the best opportunities, though it needs to be pointed out that at the time of writing, a Porthleven fish is the sole representative across all the four home waters national record lists. Grows to around six inches.

### NORWAY HADDOCK Sebastes viviparus

**Bucket List status – result**

A mis-leading and somewhat unfortunately named fish, the norway haddock neither looks like nor is related to the true haddock, which is a member of the cod family. Norway haddock, along with bluemouth, belong to a family known as the scorpion fishes, which again is unfortunate as this is not the same family as the sea scorpions.

Confusing I know, so perhaps it's best if I refer to them as the red fishes, which does at least reflect their physical appearance, all of which prefer very deep water where red is actually the best colour of camouflage, as that is the first wave-length of colour filtered out of the light spectrum as it enters the water.

Below around thirty feet red appears as black, which at depth, with little if any light penetration, is exactly what you need for camouflage.

A perch-like fish in general shape and body layout, with large eyes, and for its size, quite a large mouth. Colouration and patterning is red with some darker patches, again sometimes forming perch-like vertical bars on the upper back.

A row of very noticeable backwards pointing spines mark the edge of the pre-operculum or first gill cover, and unusual amongst bony fishes, as its scientific name _viviparus_ suggests, a fish which gives birth to live young.

Norway haddock are the smallest, commonest, and most shallow living of the red fishes. At one time they were not too uncommon offshore in the North Sea down into English waters, occasionally even as far south as Essex, with both the British boat and shore records coming from Southend back in the 1970's.

I would add though that I can't ever recall any reports from English waters, and with climate change now pushing most species up to even higher latitudes, I doubt if we will do ever again.

My own personal encounters have all been in the deep water around Shetland on small fish strips fished on hooks with shiny metallic bodies fitted to them which were popular back in the 1970's. Not that that probably matters, as I've caught them on just plain baits fished on short droppers like mackerel feathers over in Iceland too.

I even had quite a big one on a pirk in the northern Norwegian fjords which came as something of a surprise. And while the species has occasionally also been caught from the shore, don't expect to see this repeated any time soon.

### BLUEMOUTH Helicolenus dactylopterus

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

Bluemouth are both related to and in many ways also visually similar to norway haddock, but with a preference for very much deeper water, where if you find them, they can be about in plague proportions.

A red, spiny, large eyed, big headed fish. The main point of difference between it and the norway haddock is that as the name suggests, the interior of the mouth is blue.

There are other easily checked out features too, one being that the connecting membranes of several of the lower pectoral fin rays do not extend to the end of the rays, giving the fin a sort of 'gurnard-like' quality.

Colouration and markings, which are a lighter shade of red with more obvious darker banding, can also help set these two fish apart, though unless you have both species to hand for comparison, this might not always be immediately obvious.

In home waters, fishing not necessarily in, but certainly very close to deep water is an absolute must. At the time of writing, the British record is held by a Stornoway fish, which if my memory serves me well is a port that has turned a few others up over the years.

In Irish waters, the west facing Atlantic coast offers the best prospects. Back in 2009 I had a report and pictures sent through from Irish angler Sean Palmer who caught good numbers of them well out from Dingle.

Further support for this area being a 'hot spot' comes from the Irish record which was taken just the other side of the bay out from Caherciveen.

As for my own personal encounters, these have all come from southern Europe, showing the huge range of distribution this fish has, providing the depth is right.

I picked a few up in seventeen hundred feet of water on small fish baits off El Hierro in the Canaries while fishing for six gilled sharks. But far and away the most I have ever seen fell to the same tactics off the southern tip of Gibraltar where we were specifically targeting them.

### GREATER WEEVER Trachinus draco

**Bucket List status – result**

A long, narrow, somewhat laterally flattened fish, which unlike its smaller relative the lesser weever, has a smaller mouth and its eyes set into the sides of its quite small head.

An incredibly beautiful fish when plucked straight from the water, with grey, yellow, and even purple narrow angled lines on its back and flanks, plus of course that venomous short black first dorsal fin, the spines of which, like those on the gill covers, can pack quite a nasty punch.

These are hollow and connect to venom sacks, which when handling pressure is applied to the spines causing a puncture wound, forces venom into the blood stream with painful, though very rarely fatal consequences, unless the venom ends up exacerbating some other dangerous pre-existing medical condition.

They say that immersing the wound in water as hot as you can bare it can help break the toxin down. What they (medical advice columns) also say is that if the pain persists for more than an hour, then medical assistance should be sought. The same advice is also true for the lesser weever.

The key physical differences between the two species are the greater body length and side positioning of the eyes, plus the black pigmentation of the first dorsal fin not reaching the back of the membranes in the greater weever. In the lesser weever the pectoral fins are rounded at their tips, whereas those of the greater have a concave notch missing from their upper edge.

Greater weever have a preference for moderately deep water starting at around ninety feet, which makes it quite a rarity on rod and line from the shore. They are not however a rarity from the boats. Where they are abundant, such as out in Cardigan Bay, they can be especially numerous. Some would even describe it as nuisance proportions.

Drop a set of feathers, baited or otherwise too close to the bottom and they will invariably be grabbed by greater weevers, which on occasions have tipped the scales at a couple of pounds.

Aberystwyth for me was always the number one location while feathering for bait out over clean ground, though any of the ports in that area could just as easily put you over them.

The Cornish coast is another noted producing area, though not so much from the boats as some of the deep water rock marks looking out onto sand.

An easy fish to catch on marks where they are found, but despite supposedly having a widespread distribution, from an angling perspective, they are patchy and rarely seen elsewhere. Also a fish with quite a high price on its head for the table in other parts of Europe.

The French I'm told have a particular liking for them, though that's no recommendation for a nation that savours frogs legs and snails. I did once eat a greater weever though. The back end portion at least, well away from the venom sacks. It was okay. A bit like whiting, but nothing to get excited about.

### LESSER WEEVER Echiichthys vipera

**Bucket List status – result**

A small, short, but still rather elongate bodied fish with a large up-pointing mouth and quite large eyes situated almost on top of the head, typical of an ambush predator that likes to almost totally conceal itself itself in the soft substrate and attack from below.

Colouration is probably the key to instant recognition. When alarmed or threatened, its black first dorsal will repeatedly shoot up erect. Otherwise, the back and upper sides of the body have a very fine mottled patterning of yellow, black and brown, while the lower body is quite a striking white. The edge of the tail also has a dark banding.

The lesser weever differs from its bigger relative by its eyes being set higher up on the top of the head, an entirely black first dorsal fin, and by having completely rounded pectoral fins.

A locally abundant small fish in inshore waters where it poses as much risk to bathers as it does anglers. Because of its relatively large mouth, also a fish that many anglers are likely to encounter over clean sandy ground at some point or other.

I come into contact with them quite regularly off Blackpool when feathering with shrimp rigs or sabiki's too close to the bottom when after mackerel for bait.

We also pick up a lot at the entrance to the River Ribble on worm baits, and again see quite a few out in Morecambe Bay when flattie bashing.

So expect them anywhere over shallow clean ground, around estuaries, and over offshore banks the length and breadth of the country both east and west when the hook sizes and baits are small enough for them to manage.

A common fish, and one which everyone should familiarize themselves with as they can so easily be mistaken for a small whiting and grabbed by un-suspecting hands, with painful, though rarely fatal consequences. This causes venom to be injected into the wound up the hollow spines of the first dorsal fin and gill cover, forced through by handling pressure applied to the fish, or by inadvertently standing on one.

Hot water supposedly helps the body break this toxin down, or hot coffee in the case of my boat parter Dave Devine who got spiked by one close to his thumb as a passing shot while the culprit was swinging about on the end of his line. And very painful he said it was too. So much so that if it persists, the advice normally given is to seek medical assistance.

### SHORT SPINED SEA SCORPION Myoxocephalus scorpius

**Bucket List status – result**

As with the dragonet, another unfortunate fearsome sounding name given to two otherwise quite harmless inshore fishes, the long and the short spined sea scorpions.

Granted, they do look a little handler un-friendly, but they're not. But even the sharp spine on the gill covers from which they derive their name is nothing to worry about and is easily avoided. And while the two species may look very much alike, they don't take a lot of separating, and will most certainly stand-out from anything else caught.

Both species have large mouths and heads, often made to look even bigger when agitated as they flare out their gill covers.

Colouration and patterning depends on a range of factors including terrain, sex, and breeding condition, but will be some mix of greens, browns, yellows, creams, and even purples, arranged into patches, saddles, spots, and at times broad vertical bars. Ripe females will also be orange along their underparts.

Size is another potential consideration. Long spined sea scorpions rarely get to more than a few ounces, whereas short spined sea scorpions can achieve weights of a few pounds.

To clinch a positive ID, the short spined sea scorpion has a flap under its throat formed by the joining together of the gill cover membranes, whereas the same membranes in the long spined variety are joined to the throat leaving a slight gap, and therefore fail to create a flap.

Short spined sea scorpions can be caught at a wide variety of suitable locations, which means heavy ground, usually offshore, but not too deep, and predominantly in the northern part of the country, starting at a line drawn across from The Wash to the Bristol Channel.

From personal experience, while I've seen the odd one caught in the Menai Strait, the inner Clyde, and off both the Lancashire and Cumbria coasts, far away the biggest concentrations of rod caught specimens seem to come when fishing baits over heavy ground in maybe twenty to fifty feet of water from around Whitby, right up the North Sea to the very northern most tip of eastern Scotland.

The last big one I saw was while bait fishing for cod over the inshore reefs around Coquet Island out from Amble where they call them granny fish.

I've no doubt many of the deep water rock marks, and certainly some of the large concrete piers up and down the east coast borders region also regularly produce a few, particularly to LRF tactics on account of their quite predatory nature and the size of their mouth. An amazingly beautiful though slightly bizarre looking fish.

### LONG SPINED SEA SCORPION Taurulus bubalis

**Bucket List status – result**

At a glance, a very much smaller but quite similarly coloured and patterned fish to its near relative the short spined sea scorpion above, the main distinguishing feature being the gill cover membranes under the chin, which in this case are joined to the throat leaving a slight gap between them. Those of the short spined sea scorpion do actually meet forming a very obvious flap.

A fish barely able to achieve six inches in length with a nationwide distribution found very close to the shore over mixed to heavy ground. But because of the size of the mouth, a small fish which can and will readily take most small to medium sized baits, and which no doubt would also respond to LRF, providing the lures are small enough.

Any rock mark could potentially turn one up. That said, the best concentrations I have seen have come from the base of bouldery weedy harbour walls where kids tend to drop their baits. There is however one particular encounter that sticks very clearly in my mind.

I caught a cod of several pounds off Rossall one winter, which immediately before taking my bait had also eaten a long spined sea scorpion that had in true fashion flared out its gills and got itself lodged in a stalemate position at the back of the cod's throat.

So I pulled it out, and as it was clearly still alive, put it back in the water and watched it swim away. One very lucky little fish delivered quite literally from the jaws of death.

### BLACKFISH Centrolophus niger

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

In terms of body profile, this is quite an elongate fish with a blunt rounded face. The dorsal fin, which begins further back than the origin of the pectoral fin below it, starts off low in height, building quickly before losing height again more gradually in its single quite long run towards the back of the fish.

The anal fin follows a similar pattern but is shorter, starting further back, and ending at the same point as the dorsal fin above it.

Colouration can vary from russet through to deep brown, and even a dull bluish black on the upper flanks, back, and fins, becoming more silvery beneath.

So far as food goes, blackfish are thought to eat more or less anything that comes along, which is known to include crustaceans, fish, ctenophores (Comb jellies) and medusa (jelly fishes).

Unfortunately, there are a number of factors potentially working against anglers seeing more of this fish, the main one being its favoured life style.

Something of a lone wanderer, the blackfish is variously quoted as having an epi-pelagic, a meso-pelagic, and a bathy-pelagic life style, meaning that it can live out in open water down to a hundred fathoms; from one hundred to five hundred fathoms, or from five hundred to two thousand fathoms, depending on which version is correct, and always well up off the bottom.

So for the blackfish to be reported as being potentially not that un-common over the deeper areas of the European continental shelf, it is likely going to be an epi-pelagic fish, that is to say found within the one hundred fathom band, which is a rarity for anglers to be fishing in around the British Isles.

But, as can be the case, deep water vagrants across a wide range of species do occasionally stray closer to shore than the scientific wisdom suggests they are supposed to, and when that happens, the odd specimen is occasionally caught on rod and line.

### CORNISH BLACKFISH Schedophilus medusophagus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

At our latitude, the cornish blackfish is a much scarcer species than the blackfish _Cenrolophus niger_ , being classed as a very rare inshore vagrant, though not uncommon well out over deeper water to the south west of Britain and Ireland along the edge of the continental shelf. So unusual in fact, that when one was caught in a gill net in twenty feet of water off Guernsey in 2010, it even made the news.

Even more unusual is the fact that the rod and line specimen responsible for placing it on the bucket list here was taken from Cefn Sidan Beach in Wales. So not a fish that is likely to create identification problems on the basis that the vast majority of us will never see one throughout our entire lives.

But just in case, this species is almost identical fish to the blackfish _Cenrolophus niger_ detailed above, though with a narrower body profile, and most important of all, the dorsal fin starts a lot further forward, pretty much in line with the outer edge of the gill cover and the base of the pectoral fin, whereas that of _C. niger_ starts at a point half way back along the pectoral fin. Colouration, though still very dark, tends more towards greenish brown with some darker mottling.

### BARRACUDINA Paralepis coregonoides

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Like one or two of the weird and wonderful inclusions here, the Barracudina is a fish I had never even heard of prior to drawing up this species list, so your guess is as good as mine. It sounds like it should be related to the barracudas. It even looks like it might be too, though it isn't in any way related to them.

A long slender fish with a large mouth full of teeth, but whereas barracuda's have two dorsal fins, the barracudina's have just the one, plus a tiny fleshy flap on the back just in front of the tail known as an adipose fish, a feature very few fish other than Salmonids possess.

There are actually something of the order of fifty similar related species worldwide belonging to the family paralepididae, so just in case, count the pectoral rays, which should number fourteen to sixteen, and the anal fin rays, of which there should be twenty three to twenty five.

A silvery grey fish which can grow to around twenty inches, most commonly found leading a bathypelagic life style in the upper water layers along the edge of the Atlantic continental shelf. Yet amazingly, the catch that placed it on the bucket list came from Newton Shore at Ayr in Scotland.

### BUTTERFISH Pholis gunnellus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Identification here should present no problems at all. An extremely elongate laterally compressed little fish with a single long dorsal fin, shorter continuous anal fin, and small tail.

A fish which when handled shows a blatant refusal to keep still, continually forcing itself into a letter `S' shape, that is if you can keep hold of it for long enough, hence the name butterfish.

It's tiny embedded scales have given it a very smooth slippery feel, which coupled to that refusal to keep still, also help make it a very difficult fish to collect as bait.

Colouration is sandy brown with a series of a dozen or so black blotches circled with white along the upper back just touching on to the base of the dorsal fin. Darker vertical bars may also be present along the length of the flanks.

Rocks and boulders from the mid shore down to around fifteen fathoms are its preferred terrain, where it will force itself into tightest of crevices to avoid predation, though not always successfully if the number taken by larger predators is anything to go by. Feeding is predominantly on small worms, crustaceans, and molluscs.

My personal encounters have always come either when turning rocks over looking for crabs, or in the stomachs of cod when I gut them to see what they've been feeding on.

It has never even crossed my mind that anyone either could or would catch one on a baited hook, but the LRF lads certainly seem to pick up a few, so it can be done, though not something I will be looking to repeat, tick or no tick on my species list. Grows to around ten inches.

### CONNEMARA SUCKER Lepadogaster candollei

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

I once made quite a concentrated effort to find and catch suckerfish or clingfish as they are also known. Not on rod and line, but by turning over scores of huge back breaking loose boulders and popping any fish I could find into a bucket for transfer into a marine photographic tank.

Weeks of low tide searching spent at Guernsey, the Scilly Isles, and around Anglesey, and the only species I ever came up with was the cornish sucker _Lepadogaster lepadogaster_.

I've never seen either a two-spotted sucker or connemara sucker. Yet it's the latter that's found its way onto a baited hook, and therefore onto the bucket list, which is surprising on two counts.

The first is being so small that it has ever happened at all, the other that when one was eventually caught, it's the rarest and most localised of the three regular home water species that has turned up.

Quite a scarce fish found mainly around the western approaches to the English Channel, and south or west Ireland, and even there in localised pockets. The lower shore and shallow water down to perhaps fifty feet with areas of big stones, boulders, and kelp, are its principle domain.

This particular species has a somewhat elongate shallow wedge shaped head. The dorsal and anal fins, though finishing very close to the base of the tail, do not quite reach it, whereas those of the cornish sucker are joined to the tail, and the two-spotted sucker's dorsal and anal fins are both noticeably very short ending well clear of the tail.

Colouration in all three species is some shade of red, which doesn't help here. However, the cornish sucker also has a very conspicuous single blue spot edged in red behind each eye which the connemara sucker lacks, while the two-spotted sucker often has flecks of blue, brown, and yellow, though the layout of the fins should be sufficient to avoid confusion. Grows to around three inches.

### DRAGONET Callionymus lyra

**Bucket List status – result**

Quite a common little fish over clean to lightly mixed ground in shallow water all around the British Isles. Yet despite its relative abundance, its growth potential of twelve inches for males and eight inches or so for females, plus a willingness to eat the kinds of things anglers like to put on hooks, providing they are small enough, it is still none the less a species in my experience that is rarely caught.

A fish with a rather flattened body giving the appearance of its eyes being located well up on its head. Colouration is particularly striking in mature males which are sandy brown with irregular blue blotches and long blue strips on the extremely tall first dorsal fin, which when flattened down almost reaches to the tail. These markings will also be present on the long second dorsal fin.

Females and immature males on the other hand are far less eye catching, being marked with three brown saddles on the upper back, and lacking the exaggerated height of the first dorsal fin.

In both sexes there are four small tightly grouped spines on the pre-operculum or first gill cover reaching out towards the operculum or outer gill cover itself.

As with the sea scorpions, a rather fearsome name for such an innocent, attractive little fish. The mature males in particular with their tall blue and yellow striped fins. But for the most part, not a fish you really get the chance to deliberately target.

I've picked a few up, including some quite large male fish, while drifting worm baits for cod out over the mixed to bouldery ground along the seaward side of Walney Island.

I've also had them in Wales. In fact, my first ever specimen came from Aberystwyth, and more recently I have seen the odd one caught around Anglesey when baits and hooks have been small enough.

By far the biggest numbers I have ever seen came on tiny baits after a straight drop down the side of the inner harbour wall at St. Mary's on the Isles of Scilly.

I was fishing for wrasse and plaice, leaving my son Ian and daughter Dawn, who couldn't have been much more than seven or eight at the time, amusing themselves catching all sorts of mini species there, except that one afternoon, Dawn suddenly started shouting for help, and when I got there she had a 3¼ pound plaice at the surface on a tiny fixed spool outfit.

Fortunately, I was able to hand lift it up the side of the wall, and later back at the tent we had it for tea.

### GREAT PIPEFISH Syngnathus acus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A long, eel-like fish, whose body appears to be made up from segmented body rings with an elongated trunk for a mouth. As the name suggests, one of the larger, though not the largest species of pipefish species on the home waters scene, with a potential length of around eighteen inches. Colouration is mid to light greeny brown, with small noticeable brown spots on the snout and head.

This particular species has pectoral and anal fins as well as a complete tail which not all pipefishes have. The main species it could be confused with is nilsson's pipefish. To help ease that confusion, the great pipefish has a bump on its head just behind the eyes and lacks a ridge along the top margin of the snout, which comprises more than half of the overall head length. One of the pipefish species in which the male has a brood pouch.

Having seen and handled many pipefish species over the years, including some quite big great pipefish, I have to say that I just can't imagine either how or why anybody would catch one on rod and line. Like so many of the smaller fish species, this must be the result of deliberately targeted effort with the smallest of hooks and baits.

Probably best to be looking around deep water harbour walls or jetties, though to be honest, as with many of these smaller species which very few people other than fishery scientists are normally interested in, in truth I'm only guessing.

A coastal fish found out over sand, mud, and even amongst sea weeds, where it feeds on tiny crustaceans including small shrimps and crabs, plus small fish species and fish fry of an appropriate size throughout the English Channel northwards in the west right up to the very top of Scotland.

### SNAKE PIPEFISH Entelurus aequoreus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

As with the other pipefish species, all of which are related to the sea horses, the snake pipefish is a long eel-like fish whose segmented body rings in this case are barely detectable in live specimens, though they are still present.

Again, the mouth comes in the form of an elongated trunk or snout. This particular species has no pectoral or anal fins, but does have a slight trace of a tail fin if you look hard enough. No other potential home waters pipefish species has this fin combination. Male snake pipefish can carry up to a thousand eggs on their abdomen.

By all accounts, a very much rarer species than the great pipefish and the rest of the clan, with less of a tendency for anglers to come across it due to its favoured deep open water life-style, only rarely making it into inshore waters, and usually only then when caught up in weed rafts that are themselves delivered inshore by the wind or the tide.

Not exactly a collection of facts which should make any difference on the angling front. Again, I'm absolutely amazed it appears on the list in the first place. But as ever, if it's included there, then it also has to be included here. Grows to maybe sixteen inches.

### POGGE Agonus cataphractus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

An unusual fish in appearance, having a complete external body armour made up from overlapping bony plates. At the tip of the snout there are two upward facing hooks, while the underside of the head has many short barbels extending from the bottom jaw to the operculum or gill cover. Colouration is generally a drab brown with distinct wide slightly lighter coloured vertical hoops around the body.

Now this is one small fish I as very familiar with. We see lots of them up here along the Lancashire coast, both in the shrimp nets and in the stomach contents of cod, suggesting they are just as much at home over mixed as well as clean sandy ground where they are quite active little predators in their own right taking small crabs, shrimps, worms, and even fish fry or eggs.

A common fish throughout all home waters from the English Channel up to the Shetland Islands and beyond, ranging from the coastal shallows during the summer, seaward to depths in excess of a hundred fathoms over the cooler winter months.

Not a fish which anglers in the normal course of events are likely to pick up. With a growth potential of at best six inches, any catching would need to be deliberately done with tiny hooks and equally tiny baits.

### RED BAND FISH Cepola rubescens

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Most people winding in and finding a red band fish on the end of their line, while they probably wouldn't have a clue as to its actual identity, would still be very much aware that they had caught something well and truly out of the ordinary. The lone representative of the family cepolidae to be found in our home waters, where throughout the entire region, it rates as rare to non-existent.

A striking little fish whose long thin laterally compressed dark red to orange body has a single long anal and dorsal fin tapering out at a point close to what purports to be a tail.

The eye is noticeably large, as is the mouth which points upwards, suggesting a hunting technique which involves ambush from below, as would be the case when hiding in a mud burrow which these fish like to construct.

So, orange to red on the upper parts with a silvery sheen along the flank giving way to a more yellowish red ventrally, usually with a single red blotch on the dorsal fin. A length of around two feet represents its maximum growth potential, fed by a diet of small crustaceans and their larvae.

The south west corners of Britain and Ireland present the best opportunity of finding one of these amazing yet enigmatic fish, though it does increase in abundance further to the south throughout the Biscay area.

Having said that, where you find one, chances are there will be more of them. Many more in fact. Particularly at or beyond depths of thirty fathoms over soft substrates of fine sand or mud into which they can burrow.

The whiting Grounds off Rame Head on the Devon–Cornwall border are known to have produced a few over the years. Andy Jackson also tells me that there is an odd one or two in the depths of Scotland's Loch Sunart, while divers report seeing them quite regularly in around twelve to fifteen fathoms of water over the mud around the eastern fringe of Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel.

If you want to catch them virtually to order though, then get down to Weymouth, where Colin Penny, who operates the charter boat 'Flamer', has a patch of muddy ground that is virtually alive with the things

A case of small baits, particularly ragworm at Weymouth, or either plenty of patience and an incredible dose of good fortune elsewhere is what is called for, none of which I personally have had in any measure when it comes to this particular species.

### GREATER SANDEEL Hyperoplus lanceolatus

**Bucket List status – result**

Despite their small size, sandeels are fish which anglers do regularly target with small feathers such as shrimp rigs and sabiki's as a very important source of bait for a huge range of predatory admirers, ranging from pollack and bass through to turbot, brill and rays. Live, dead, whole, or cut, they make excellent baits, particularly when kept alive in aerated or sea-water pumped live well systems.

They can get quite big at times too. I've had a few real 'snakes' over the years when drifting offshore banks and sand-waves fishing specifically for them as you can around the Channel Islands and Isle of Man.

Easy fish to catch by the bucket full if you choose the right areas to feather. Less so when they come up as odd ones out of the blue mixed amongst mackerel, which they fairly regularly do around the Mull of Galloway, Anglesey, and a few other areas I've fished.

This is the largest growing sandeel species, which can on occasions exceed twelve inches in length, and as such is the one most likely to be caught on rod and line.

In fact, at that sort of size they become active predators in their own right, well capable of and willing to take smaller sandeels. A species with a coastal distribution throughout all home waters, though nowhere is it as abundant as some of the other smaller sandeel species.

A long slender fish of typical sandeel layout with a long continuous single dorsal and anal fin, forked tail, and noticeably protruding lower jaw.

Apart from its potential size, the main distinguishing feature of this species is a distinct dark spot on the snout in front of the eyes. The upper jaw is not protrusible. Colouration is bluish green above, becoming silvery below.

### CORBIN'S SANDEEL Hyperoplus immaculatus

**Bucket List status – result**

Exactly the same as for the greater sandeel in terms of catching and basic elongate appearance, but a species with a much more localised distribution, favouring the western approaches including the Channel Islands, extending northwards to the southern tip of Ireland, then re-appearing along the west coast of Scotland, where in all cases it is an offshore species usually found well away from land.

Like the greater sandeel, the upper jaw is not protrusible, which is what sets these two species apart from all the others. Then to separate it from the greater sandeel, there must be no dark spot on the snout.

Colouration is greenish blue on the back, and silvery white ventrally. Grows to around twelve inches. A species I have caught and identified mixed in amongst greater sandeels around the Channel Islands on odd occasions.

### FIFTEEN SPINED STICKLEBACK Spinchia spinachia

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A small, elongate, wholly marine species, with fourteen to sixteen short spines on the upper back ahead of its short dorsal fin. Other features include a rather thin elongate caudal peduncle (tail stalk) with a very small rounded tail.

Colouration varies and can be matched to the type of terrain it lives in, though usually it will be either green or brown, perhaps with darker markings.

A fish predominantly found in shallow weedy areas where a diet of small fishes, fish eggs, crustaceans, and any other small invertebrates is pursued.

As with its freshwater relatives, this is a nest builder which makes use of available vegetative material bound together with kidney secretions. Again, the eggs are guarded and fanned by the male.

Though common, this is not a fish frequently seen either by anglers or caught by children with nets, in the main because of its somewhat solitary lifestyle, particularly along west facing coasts from around the Isle of Wight up to Scotland's Cape Wrath.

Some call it the saltwater stickleback, but this isn't strictly true. It is a stickleback in every sense of the word, and it does live in saltwater, but it's not the only one. The so called freshwater three spined stickleback is also equally happy in both brackish and fully saline waters. I've even seen them netted many miles out from the shore.

As ever with a lot of the smaller species of fish, I find it difficult to get my head around the fact that not only has somebody caught one on a baited hook, but that somebody probably actually wanted to.

I wouldn't even call it a LRF target. With a maximum length of eight inches at best, plus a tiny mouth only capable of allowing it access to the smallest of food items or baits, it's going to take a particularly determined and deliberate angling shot.

As for my experience of the species, that comes from dabbling around in the deeper weedier rock pools on Holyhead Island with the kids and their little nets collecting specimens of anything and everything with fins to set up in my marine tank for photographic purposes.

### ARGENTINE Argentina sphyraena

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

The argentine is a member of a prestigious group of fishes which have a small fleshy fin-like lobe on their back just in front of the tail known as an adipose fin. All salmonids and related species have this feature.

Quite where this places those totally marine species such as the argentine and smelts in terms of relatedness is difficult to ascertain, though I did read somewhere that the adipose finned fishes are a group in transition, either from freshwater to the sea, or in the other direction.

The reference wasn't specific, the suggested link being that on the one hand you have totally freshwater species such as the grayling, while on the other there are fish such as the argentines living offshore in very deep water along the edge of the continental slope, plus all stages in-between, with smelt which like to enter estuaries, and salmon and sea trout which alternate between saline and fresh, though always returning to the the upper tributaries of the rivers in which they were spawned to breed.

Just how related these species all are, and how much credence should be given to that particular suggestion, I don't know. But it does pose some interesting, if not a little speculative questions.

So the argentine is a small deep water fish which on occasions comes close enough to the shore to find itself on a small baited hook. Arrochar on Loch Long is the only home waters rod caught record I can find, which in some ways isn't surprising, as the Clyde sea lochs are deep(ish) water venues with even deeper water close at hand outside. So as inshore venues go, that part of Scotland probably deserves a mention on the home waters 'most likely' list.

Otherwise, an elongate silvery fish prone to readily losing its scales when given any sort of rough handling. The eye is quite large in proportion to the head, hinting at its deep water life style.

The fact that it has that adipose fin will automatically set it apart from 99.9% of other saltwater species. The only remotely possible confusion could come from the smelt, which is a coastal species with an adipose fin, a large head and mouth, and a first dorsal fin set well back pretty much directly over the pelvic fins, unlike that of the argentine which starts well forward of the pelvic fins.

Colouration in the argentine is a greenish grey on the upper back becoming greyish white below, with a silvery stripe along the flanks separating the two other colours.

My own experiences here are rather limited. I have caught a few when fishing small hooks baited with tiny fish strips in very deep water when curious to see what was might be down there. In the main this has been around the Canary Islands, and in particular at the bottom end of El Hierro where water depth was typically around 1,700 feet or more.

### SMELT Osmerus eperlanus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Another species, as with the argentine, that has a small fleshy adipose fin on the upper back just in front of the tail which is characteristic of salmonids. A further feature it also shares with some freshwater salmonids, grayling and schelly in particular, is a distinct cucumber smell after death.

A small marine species rarely found too far away from the influence of freshwater, particularly in and around large estuaries where it mixes with saltwater, creating the type of brackish environment to which the smelt has become adapted, and to which adult smelt migrate from the nearby coastal shallows at the height of winter in preparation for a more concerted push on to the higher reaches, maybe even as far up as the brackish limit, to spawn as winter gives way to spring.

After spawning, the adults drop back, with the smaller fish following on after their first summer, though they don't actually need saltwater to survive as there are completely land-locked populations in Scandinavia, and once, many years ago, also in Rostherne Mere in Cheshire, before going extinct in the early part of the twentieth century.

As the smelt and the argentine are almost certainly never going to end up in each others company, suffice to say that the smelt has a small eye, a large mouth, and its dorsal fin is situated directly over the top of its pelvic fins, plus of course, that adipose fin to avoid confusion with pretty much everything else that swims in the sea.

Colouration is green on the back and upper flanks becoming silvery white below, with a distinct silvery stripe from head to tail along each flank.

The combined home waters record lists show only one inclusion taken by Geoff Idiens in the Wyre Estuary out from Fleetwood at just under seven ounces, a fish I witnessed and helped get through the recording process, and which I have to say, I was surprised to see still there having been caught way back in 1981.

### SAND SMELT Atherina presbyter

**Bucket List status – result**

Other than both being fish with a name suggesting they could be taxonomically close, the two sand smelts and the smelt _Osmerus eperlanus_ have absolutely nothing in common, as they belong to two completely un-related families.

Sand smelt are at their most abundant in and around the western English Channel, with some degree of northerly migration, perhaps even as far up as western Scotland is warmer years.

A small shoaling species attracted to water of low salinity where it can at times be found in huge numbers, particularly in docks and harbours built on estuaries.

On Guernsey, the islanders specifically catch them for eating in St. Peterport Harbour, and at St. Mary's on the Isles of Scilly, my own children caught them by the bucket full straight down the side of the inner harbour wall on tiny pieces of worm fished on size six hooks.

When they were present, it was quite literally a fish a drop. Then we wouldn't see them for days, or even all on some of our visits. Aberystwyth harbour in West Wales has also produced them in the past.

A long narrow little fish that will struggle to exceed six inches in length, with a blunt face and quite large mouth in relation to its overall size. Both dorsal fins are short and well separated, the first of which starts just after the pelvic fins below it, with the second more or less directly over the anal fin.

Colouration however is a much more reliable identifier, it being green on the back and upper flanks and silvery white below, separated by a narrow bright silvery line running the whole length of the fish from its gill cover to its tail. Tiny black dots may also be found edging the scales around the head and back.

Almost identical to it is the very much rarer big scaled sand smelt _Atherina boyer_ i which has a slightly bigger head and eye, facts only of value when a direct comparison can be made between the pair.

Otherwise, it's a case of counting the scales in the lateral line between the base of the pectoral fin and the tail, which in _A._ _presbyter_ number fifty three to fifty seven, and in _A. boyeri_ should be between forty four and forty eight.

### BIG SCALED SAND SMELT Atherina boyeri

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Everything that has been said about the sand smelt _Atherina presbyter_ above applies here, right down to the basic identification features. Only a scale count along the lateral line from the base of the pectoral fin to the tail can reliably be used to separate the two, it being fifty three to fifty seven in _A. presbyter_ , and forty four to forty eight in _A. boyeri_.

Both share the same love of low salinity harbours and docks. But, we are talking here of a species which under normal circumstances shouldn't be found at out latitude, primarily because of our lower temperatures, though with global warming, that may now be starting to change.

It seems that at the few isolated locations where the species is known, man-made factors may well be coming to its aid in the form of artificial warming of the water due to certain industrial processes. These locations include Cavendish Docks at Barrow-in-Furness, Swansea Dock, Pembroke Dock, and the Leys at Aberthaw.

Just how it got to these locations in the first place is another matter, one suggestion being its sticky eggs becoming attached to the hulls of boats, though more likely, it has made its own way into our home waters in favourable years and found it possible to stay on and breed at specific locations.

### COHO SALMON Oncorhynchus kisutch

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Bucket list status not achieved, and in home waters probably never will be. Like the walleye in the freshwater list, a one off incident resulting from introductions coming here from across the Atlantic. In fact, across the entire continent of the America's, as this is a Pacific species normally ranging from California to Alaska, and from Japan to the former Soviet Union.

That said, when the current record was caught from the rocks at Petit Port on Guernsey back in 1977 at the comparatively small weight of one and a half pounds, there were others caught of similar size in the same area at the same time, suggesting some sort of escapee incident from a fish farm perhaps rearing them for the table, probably somewhere in France just across the way from the Channel Islands.

So not a likely repeat prospect for the future. But for completeness, positive identification is quoted as being achieved from an internal examination and count of the pyloric caeca, these being finger like projections located close to the junction between the stomach and the intestines, of which in this case there should be forty five to one hundred and fourteen.

The same source quotes Atlantic salmon as having forty to seventy four, which means that unless a specific individual has more than seventy four, the degree of over-lap is such as to be of absolutely no help whatsoever.

Thankfully, the gums at the base of the teeth are also said to be noticeably white. Not that any of this matters, because unless there is another mass break out, a repeat catch just ain't going to happen anyway.

## FRESHWATER SPECIES

As a specialist sea angler, and in particular a boat angler, it would be both unwise and unrealistic for me to offer advice in any measure on a branch of fishing I frequently take advice on myself, for which reason I intend to do nothing more than recount my own personal experiences here, such as they are.

There will however also be some observations and comments which strike me as being relevant at the time, in addition to which, cross referencing is made to a number of species related audio interviews with a range of nationally renowned experts in their various fields in which tactical information is provided.

There are however two specific exceptions to this, both fish with adipose fins, and to my way of thinking therefore both game fish species, where I feel I have sufficient expertise to offer a more definitive account, these being the char and the schelly.

All record listed freshwater species are discussed, including those which for whatever reason are currently suspended from further claims. But not within species coarse fish variants such as mirror and common carp as shown in the Welsh record list, both of which are _Cyprinus carpio; g_ host carp also listed by the Welsh which is a hybrid, nor any of the roach-rudd-bream hybrids listed by the Irish.

It will be true species only, with just a passing mention of the sea trout, and no mention at all of the lake, river and slob trout listed by the Irish, all of which again are _Salmo trutta,_ and as such within species variants of the brown trout _Salmo trutta,_ and therefore not separate species in their own right, despite what purist game anglers might have to say on the topic.

### CARP Cyprinus carpio

**Bucket List status – result**

Carp need little in the way of identification detail, particularly when they get over five pounds in weight, which tends to rule out our other similar indigenous species. I say indigenous species, but actually, carp are an introduced Asiatic species which were initially tended by monks in the middle ages for their traditional eating of fish ritual on a Friday.

What is particularly important about this piece of information is that the British Record Fish Committee not only would like to see all none native species removed from their record list, but also from the country, and that includes carp. Whether that would ever be achievable, or more to the point, tolerated by a tackle industry so heavily reliant on the species is another matter.

Only really the crucian carp should present any potential for identification confusion, which besides having a slightly different shape and colouration, lacks the two barbels either side of the mouth which are present in _Cyprinus carpio_.

As for mirrors, commons, leathers and all the rest, these are just scale variations of the same fish which some record lists for whatever reason include separately, while others with more of an interest in accuracy, don't.

Several years ago, Graeme Pullen and I decided to put together a short series of carp fishing videos for YouTube, demonstrating a range of techniques on small still day ticket waters in Hampshire, Surrey, and Devon, where anybody could simply turn up and repeat the same.

The first of these was entitled 'Close Encounters', and to make it work, we deliberately left it until mid afternoon before turning out, the intention being to get there a short time before people traditionally start packing up to see exactly where they'd been fishing and with what.

It wasn't specific tactical guidance that we were looking for. The idea was to allow them to do all the costly work of conditioning the fish into taking certain baits and to concentrate them up for us, but in a way few anglers are likely to have witnessed, by virtue of the fact that the fish we were after had become suitably aware of anglers habits, one of which was that they instinctively knew when people were packing up and leaving.

They also knew the sound of surplus particle baits going in at the end of a session, and that if they waited for the people throwing them in to go home, they could safely get in there afterwards to clean it all up.

All we needed to do was see what was being dumped, where it was being dumped, then have a wide enough selection of similar particles ourselves to 'match the hatch', which was everything from hemp and sweetcorn through to hot-dog sausages and maggots.

When we first arrived we did a quick sweep of the banks chatting to everyone, singling out the likely candidates simply by looking at the baits they had on display. Obviously there were a few of the high protein boilie brigade there too, which besides catching very little if anything at all, would be doing us no favours either.

Eventually, at maybe five or six in the evening, we pretty much had the fishery to ourselves. Time to walk the banks, again at a safe distance so as not to spook those carp which were starting to gather up in discrete pockets where the surplus particle baits had been dumped into the margins.

We're not talking about an odd fish here, or necessarily all small ones either. It involved a good cross section of the population, often dozens at a time, and so close in to the margins that their backs were well clear of the water as they grubbed about nosing under the stones eager to grab every last available morsel. Except of course earlier on in the day when anglers were present and there were hooks in the baits.

Graeme then stealthily crept down the bank with a single maggot below a small split shot and lowered it literally onto the noses of the fish which took it pretty much instantly, then on feeling the hook would dart off into deeper water leaving the others completely un-phased still grubbing about.

I can't remember how many fish we had in that last couple of hours, but it was measured in dozens, with weights probably just about into double figures.

Our next trip took us to a small multi-lake complex on the Hampshire-Surrey border. This time we chose to fish a quieter period to give us more scope to have the type of peg we wanted. Thankfully there weren't too many other anglers about, and those that were there had already set up camp in their bivvies with their boilies out and their bite alarms switched on.

What we did was try to get away from everybody else in a nice little swim with fringing reed beds just either side of a wide enough gap between some tree's and bushes where we could put some feed in, then drop the hook baits quite literally in over it with little or no casting involved.

We would be float fishing with the baits just at the bottom along the reed margins, Graeme on one side, me on the other, and the bait would be bread flake.

We did have a few other options with us just in case, particularly hot-dog sausages which also caught a few fish later on. But it was using the bread flake that was the primary objective, this time with the whole day in front of us, and it didn't take long to get the first few fish in close and interested. The start of a chain reaction in fact that resulted in sheer carnage.

At one point I was trying to film as my rod was disappearing into the lake which I had to put my foot on or risk losing. On other occasions, we couldn't film each other at all, simply because there was so much going on.

As with the previous session in the margins, I couldn't say how many fish we ended up with, but again it was many dozens into low double figures. Meanwhile the boilie lads sat across the way watching us and waiting for their alarms to sound off appeared not to catch anything at all, never thinking to ask what we were doing or attempting to switch tactics.

The third session wasn't a pre-planned carp fishing trip at all. We'd trailed the boat down to Boscastle in Cornwall to fish for porbeagle sharks, but due to technical difficulties, didn't go afloat. So appreciating that we wouldn't be going out over the subsequent days, and having already travelled all that way, as you do, we started looking for alternatives.

What we came up with was Anglers Paradise owned and operated by a friend of Graeme's, Zyg Gregorek, offering so many lakes to choose from and so many different species that we spent the first couple of hours just walking and talking, trying to get a feel for what we should try and do, and more to the point, try to film.

Again, we came across the obligatory bivvies and boilies. Then late afternoon on one particular lake we saw quite a few carp topping, picking up bits of floating bait that somebody long gone must have put in.

That was it. We would film a demonstration on fishing floating crust and dog biscuits, which we concentrated on over the next couple of late afternoons and evenings, and as previously, with stacks of fish into double figures.

It was fantastic, and for me the most exciting aspect of freshwater fish going. Real edge of the seat stuff, particularly when you can see fish working their way through a scatter of freebies in the direction of your bait.

And when those ripples or that bulge in the water suddenly appears under your offering, followed by a great big pair of lips to suck it in, the old adrenalin pump really starts working in hyper-drive. Surely there is no better way of catching carp.

Okay, so we're not talking here of monster fish. Mainly fish in the high single to mid double figures category. But it's all relative really, and on light tackle, fish of that size are still well capable of giving fantastic sport.

I can see the attraction in catching monster fish and having trophy shots that may have come as the final reward for days of sitting around playing the percentages game. Unfortunately, I don't have that sort of patience, and on balance would go for the numbers rather than individual weight. But each to his own.

As nice as it would be to catch that carp of a lifetime, for my money, they don't have to top twenty pounds to be worthy of bothering to tackle up for, or over thirty pounds to warrant getting the camera out. Fishing is a challenge to be met and enjoyed, whatever the opponent might be.

With that in mind, in the final analysis, other than three very different days of end to end arm aching enjoyment, as a none carp angler, the main thing I took away from what I'd seen was if there was a common thread here, it has to be the futility of simply lobbing out high protein baits, probably on self hooking rigs, then endlessly waiting around when there is alternative action to be had.

Carp need not be difficult fish to catch. Often it's anglers who make it difficult. On the one hand by bombarding them with more high quality food than it's healthy for them to be eating, while on the other, as a result of being caught repeatedly on those baits or similar, failing to show flexibility, not so much to think outside the box, but to try other tested approaches which may have slipped from favour over the years.

Let me quote a couple of examples. Graeme and I once spent a week on Lundy Island exploring the shore and boat fishing options there for the Landmark Trust.

One particular day, we'd yomped over the peat encrusted tops to try for wrasse from some rock ledges on the far side. Being so rocky, steep, and wild, bait was always a problem, and all we could muster was a few limpets prised from the rocks and a couple of soft mackerel from the previous day out in the boat.

On the way back we must have taken a slightly different route, because we stumbled across a craggy little indentation filled with pea green water on top of the cliffs that we hadn't seen previously. Obviously it was freshwater, and the colouration was due to algae. Then we saw something create a bulge under the surface.

Unable to see exactly what it was due to the discolouration, we sat down and watched, and it happened again. In fact it happened several more times, but still without giving away what was causing it, though surely it must be some sort of fish.

Intrigued to know what they were, we dug out the lightest monofilament we could find and tied a length to the end eye of our shore rods, then using the smallest hooks we could muster, baited up with mackerel strip on one and limpet on the other, we laid down on the rock edge and lowered them in. That afternoon we finished up with around thirty small carp.

The next example is a video made by Graeme himself. This wasn't the first time he'd done what I'm about to recount. In fact, I recorded an audio interview with him on the topic, then persuaded him to repeat it on camera, which he later did.

It involved popping into a super-market and buying a roast dinner ready meal comprising all the usual stuff such as slices of meat, potatoes, veg and gravy. This was then taken to a local carp water where every element of that meal was used as bait to catch carp, including even the serviette which he'd soaked in the gravy.

Okay, so it isn't serious fishing. It's a joke. But what it does is very clearly demonstrate, as with the Lundy example, is that carp need not be difficult fish to catch and are there to be enjoyed rather than get all secretive and serious about.

What Dick Walker might have made of the current 'serious' carp scene is anybodies guess. Talking to carp historian Chris Ball, who probably has a better handle on what the great man might have made of his legacy than most, the suspicion is that Walker would probably have been appalled.

Granted, Richard Walker was from a very different era, but is still held in sufficiently high regard even by today's anglers to be taken note of.

So much so that having had the privilege of handling the original Mark IV No. 1 carp rod used by the great man himself to catch Clarissa, when later that evening I mentioned this fact to a couple of carp fanatics, they wanted to shake my hand. As they put it, to touch the hand that had touched the legendary rod.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in no position to criticise anybody for the way they go about getting their angling enjoyment. As a sea angler who merely dabbles in freshwater, though I can still have opinions, it would hardly be fitting for me to poke my nose into a business I know so little about.

In addition to that, and rather ironically, my biggest carp have all come to either boilies or tiger nuts while fishing some of the larger irrigation reservoirs on Gran Canaria with carp fishing guide Dave Beecham.

We didn't break any pots. The biggest would have been in the high twenties, though it's always nice to catch a PB. But not nearly so nice as picking out individual fish which you can see actually taking your bait at the surface, then having to deal with them on suitably light tackle. To me that's what carp fishing is all about.

Associated audio interview numbers: 79, 89, 94, 134, 135, 160 and 185.

### GRASS CARP Ctenopharyngodon idella

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Though I've never caught a grass carp, I do have some experience of the species, both as an angler and as a scientist. First the angling. Graeme Pullen hooked and landed one of around fourteen pounds on a piece of floating bread crust from one of the weedier lakes on Zyg Gregorek's Anglers Paradise complex a few years back while we were there doing some filming.

Despite having a deformity towards its tail, it still went like stink. So I can fully appreciate what anglers love about the species, which despite it being an alien, is no major threat to anything else because it can't breed at our low temperatures, and can therefore simply be allowed to die out through natural wastage if people don't want it in a water any more, which brings me very nicely on to my scientific involvement.

When I teamed up with Rod Taylor back in the 1980's to work on perfecting coarse fish farming techniques for the then National Rivers Authority, during my initial guided tour of the site, I was taken into a long poly-tunnel with an equally long narrow pond inside it which contained grass carp.

Apart from feeding them on a regular basis with dandelion leaves and lettuces, we didn't do anything with them for ages. Then one day a directive from above said that we needed to get them to spawn. So into the quarantine tank they went, and later, after a great deal of hard work catching them again, into a preparation tank where artificial lights were set up on a timer to increase the day length by four minute increments, while at the same time slowly cranking up the temperature to simulate the onset of summer.

This obviously took some time in which we were always careful to lift the lid just sufficiently to throw some food in and do our regular water quality checks in case they tried to escape, which we managed well enough. Until that is the day came to anaesthetize and inject them with pituitary hormones to encourage their eggs and testes to fully ripen.

We're talking here of a dozen fish averaging between maybe five and eight pounds apiece which needed to be caught in a large landing net and dropped into a bath of MS222 to quieten them down.

Sensing something was about to happen, they started racing around the edge of the circular tank like wall of death riders, then having built up speed, when the lid was fully opened and the net went in, out they shot like a volley of polaris missiles.

One actually hit the breeze block wall leaving a small blood stain on it. What a fiasco. We obviously were doing all within our powers to ensure their wellbeing, but they weren't having any of it.

Eventually we did get them all into the MS222, injected, and back into the big tank for a few days where normally, injected fish are checked on a daily basis for progress, but not this lot.

When we thought they'd had long enough, we plucked up courage, and with our previous experience to fall back on, gingerly managed to get them into the MS222 again for checking, where would you believe it, they all turned out to be males.

The first large scale introduction of grass carp in the UK as a biological control agent was to the Lancaster Canal just up the road from where I live, where the idea was to have them control weed growth.

Following on from what was perceived to have been a success there, they started to be introduced elsewhere, attracting the attention of anglers for a variety of reasons.

Initially it was thought they couldn't be caught on rod and line. But that myth was very quickly dispelled, as it's now known that they are receptive to all the usual baits and tactics employed to catch carp generally, though particle baits it seems do tend to have an edge, with surface baits also very popular when the weather has warmed up, bringing the fish well up in the water column.

Anglers however tend to have mixed views on the species. Not only with regard to introducing them or their potential for over-cropping the weed, but also as a sporting fish.

Some argue they don't fight at all, least ways not so much in the water, though they can suddenly come to life at the net and on the bank. Conversely, others concur with my experience at the fish farm of an out of control sub surface missile taking to the air.

Either way, The British Record Fish Committee as part of their displeasure regarding alien species, closed this particular record to further claims back in 2007.

The record at the time, which was 44½ pounds, still stands, though it could well be that bigger specimens have subsequently been taken, but for obvious reasons not claimed and recorded.

While it's no longer possible to make a record claim, positive identification is still of value, particularly to species hunters like myself.

Here, we're looking for an elongate torpedo shaped fish in carp terms. Having a slightly under-slung mouth and dark greenish brown back fading gradually to silvery white on the under-parts, plus its potential size should set it apart from other similar fish. But to be certain, the lateral line scale count should be between 40 and 42.

### CRUCIAN CARP Carassius carassius

**Bucket List status – result**

From a visual perspective, I love looking at crucian carp. I don't tend to catch too many of them these days, generally on account of the types of freshwater locations I fish and how I approach things. But I've had my days.

Mine mainly have been small fish in ponds and small lakes. So if I find fish of that calibre impressive, I can only imagine what it must be like to get amongst some real specimens, both visually, and in terms of the account they give of themselves.

A powerful looking, deep bodied, laterally compressed fish with a humped back, though not as obviously humped as that of say the bronze bream.

As with the other carp species, the dorsal fin is quite long, in this case with slight serrations on the third spine. Crucian carp also lack the barbels either side of the mouth which are characteristic of _Cyprinus carpio_.

Some sources quote the colouration as ranging from olive green through to reddish brown. My experience has always been at the redder end of the scale with more of a golden colour from the mid flank down, and a darker bronze wash over the fins.

There is also a rounded dark spot near the base of the tail, but often this will be indistinct as it merges in with the other colours present, and in some fish, it may not even show at all.

### BROWN GOLDFISH Carassius auratus

**Bucket List status – result**

The brown goldfish, prussian carp, or gibel carp, call it what you will, is another Asiatic import now common across Europe, and the closest living wild relative of the many dozens of different breeds of goldfish you see in garden ponds and aquarium shops today.

In some ways it's like the relationship between wolves and the many modern breeds of dog whose form has been engineered by specific trait selection during mating.

Personally, I prefer the term prussian carp, as brown goldfish is a two word contradiction. But that's the British Record Fish Committee for you.

As regards identification, simply imagine a typical fair-ground prize goldfish in a dark olive brown livery. Adding a bit of fine detail to that, a fish with a slightly more elongate and less heavily built body layout than the crucian carp to which it is related.

The key points to look out for are strongly serrated spines at the start of the dorsal and anal fin, plus no diffuse dark mark towards the base of the tail which the crucian carp, certainly at the smaller to mid-range sizes typically has.

A fish known to do well in poorly oxygenated waters, which links in very nicely to my experiences of the species.

While discussing the common carp earlier, I recalled a day when Graeme Pullen and I stumbled across a small rocky hole filled with pea green water on top of a cliff on Lundy Island where we saw evidence of fish, though not the fish themselves, and allowed our natural curiosity to take over.

The problem was that we were on Lundy investigating the sea angling potential, and at that stage on our way back from wrasse fishing a rock ledge with just a few limpets and day old mackerel left overs, coupled as you might expect to a complete lack of anything even remotely resembling freshwater terminal tackle. So we cobbled together what we could and ended up catching around thirty small carp which amused us greatly.

So much so that we laughed about it with some of the islanders back at base who then told us of another even bigger pond and drew us a map, which the following morning, still armed with our shore tackle, because it was all we had, we followed up on, taking with us some bread rolls from breakfast, and a wicker bin from the room which we lined with a plastic bag to act as a keep net.

It took us some searching to locate it. Then suddenly, there it was. Quite a healthy looking piece of water with shallower margins and even a few low wind swept bushes dotted around it here and there.

Again our approach was Heath Robinson to say the least, but as at the other pond the previous day, we quickly caught lots of fish, with some of the carp going up to around the five pound mark.

One in particular I remember because it had a deformed back-end and could barely swim. And it wasn't only carp. Least ways, not only common or mirror carp. Mixed in amongst them were golden orfe, and some small dark brown carp-like fish which we later found out were prussian carp.

I'd never heard of them before. Yet there we were with a lined wicker bin full of the things. Where they came from and how they got there is anybodies guess. And until I looked at the British record list in connection with this project, I never heard mention of them again from that day to this.

So obviously not an important fish on the freshwater angling scene. But important enough for me to place another tick on the species list.

### ROACH Rutilus rutilus

**Bucket List status – result**

Superficially similar to a rudd in appearance, there are key indicators to readily set the two species apart, the most available of these being the positioning of the dorsal fin in relation to the pelvic fins beneath it. In roach the dorsal fin begins directly above start of the base of the pelvic fins, whereas in rudd, it starts well behind the pelvic fin base.

There are other features too such as fin ray counts which are not good in that they require keeping the fish out of water for longer than might be good for it, plus comparisons of the pharyngeal teeth, these being the crushing teeth found in the throat which require intrusive investigation that would definitely not good for the fishes wellbeing.

Colouration can also be very helpful. Not so much the basic body colouration, which in roach is bluish to greenish on the back fading to silvery white below with a noticeable golden wash over the flanks, but the iris surrounding the pupil in the eye.

In the case of roach this is very obviously red, whereas in rudd it is yellowish orange. However, the lads on the bank just need to look at the mouth to make an at a glance identification. If its up-pointing it's a rudd and if not it's a roach.

When I first started fishing back in the 1960's, roach were the iconic freshwater angling species in much the same way that carp have become in more recent times.

Big roach were the stuff of dreams, and specializing in roach fishing was the crème de la crème. A fish that completely epitomised what coarse fishing was all about in the true Mr. Crabtree style. So what has changed.

Roach as a species generally have not suffered in the way that rudd have, and big roach are still available on some rivers and certain still-waters for those who care to seek them out.

For my money it comes down to two factors. A move away from large scale interest in matches and the smaller silver fish species, and linked to this, the rise in fortunes of the stock controlled commercial fishery where other species such as Ide are used for bulking up match weights, or carp for those more inclined to pleasure fish.

It would inaccurate to say that as a result of changing angling trends, roach have suffered. That would be the wrong choice of words. More like 'slipped off the radar', though I am quite sure they could very easily slip back onto it again if interest levels were re-kindled.

There are still some very knowledgeable and successful big roach specialists out there, one of whom is Professor Mark Everard who I put all of these questions and more to during a recorded interview recently.

For reasons given already, the main one of which is my tendency to target carp, barbel, and the larger predatory species when I dabble in freshwater, roach are not a fish I would normally expect to catch, so my experience with the species over the years has been mainly with small specimens as a source of live-bait from rivers and canals.

That said, I have both seen and collected some excellent specimens to over two pounds in weight from the River Ribble in Lancashire for use as fish farm brood stock in my National Rivers Authority days.

Two exceptions to all of that are a day spent trotting with maggots and casters on the River Trent at Burton Joyce, and a day trotting maggots through a number of slower swims on the upper Avon in Wiltshire, both of which produced quite a number of small to medium sized roach which were well appreciated and enjoyed.

Associated audio interview numbers: 143.

### RUDD Scardinius erythrophthalmus

**Bucket List status – result**

Superficially similar to roach in appearance, there are key indicators to readily set the two species apart, the most available of which being the positioning of the dorsal fin in relation to the pelvic fins beneath it. In rudd the dorsal fin starts well behind the base of the pelvic fins, whereas in roach it begins directly above the pelvic fin base.

There are other features such as fin ray counts which are not good in that they require keeping the fish out of water for longer than might be good for it, and comparisons of the pharyngeal teeth, which are the crushing teeth found in the throat, and therefore require intrusive investigation which would definitely not be good for the fishes wellbeing.

Colouration can also be very helpful. Not so much the basic body colouration, which in rudd is bluish to greenish on the back fading to silvery white below with a noticeable golden wash over the flanks and orange red on the fins, but the iris surrounding the pupil in the eye.

In the case of rudd, this is yellowish orange, while in roach it is very obviously red. However, the lads on the bank just need to look at the mouth to make an at a glance identification. If its up-pointing it's a rudd, and if not it's a roach.

Talking to coarse anglers who would, given the chance, expect to see decent rudd in the normal course of their fishing, it seems that the species has suffered a marked decline over recent years. And for this, small commercial fisheries with their controlled stocking policies it seems must shoulder some of the blame.

Carp colouring up the water preventing rudd successfully breeding appears to have been a major contributor. But even in the less controlled environments where rudd once thrived and should still be readily available, their appearances have become fewer and further between. So much so that I struggled to get the necessary photograph to use here.

I personally have a rather contradictory angling history with the species. Although I've probably caught many thousands of the things, my experience of them is still none the less limited in the extreme.

This is because I used to catch them from small farm ponds, firstly as a kid getting in to fishing, then later for use as live or dead-baits for pike and zander.

To be honest, outside of that, this isn't a species I've come across much, and I dare say that a lot of today's serious coarse anglers are in a similar position.

Probably the quickest fix would be to fish some of the larger still-waters and canals over in Ireland, where the species seems to be making something of a comeback. Otherwise, a fish you need to identify specific locations for, then target in much the same way as you would with roach.

### BRONZE BREAM Abramis brama

**Bucket List status – result**

A deep bodied laterally compressed fish with a noticeable hump on its back just ahead of the dorsal fin. Here the anal fin lies around a third of the way in to a line dropped down from the end of the dorsal fin, whereas in the silver bream, the anal fin starts just behind the dorsal fin.

A greenish brown to greyish brown fish on the back and upper flanks, becoming paler lower down, with a silvery sheen and white on its underparts. Also a fish with a slimy feel to it which I personally don't particularly like.

If I was to say I have a soft spot for bream, that would probably be defined as being a hole in the muddy margins where I would bury the lot of them. Either that or my tackle if there was nothing else left to catch.

Perhaps I'm being a little bit unkind here, but for such a potentially large fish, they put on a particularly poor show when hooked, coming in little better than a raft of weed.

Needless to say then that all my bream encounters, except for the earliest ones when I didn't know any better and needed one to put another tick on my list, are now accidents, usually while carp fishing, which allows a direct comparison between the two on the day, further emphasising the extent of disparity in fighting ability between the pair.

Yet from a photographic perspective, I can understand the attraction in perusing specimen bream, particularly when they get up around the high teens to twenty pound mark, and I know a lot of people do make a speciality out of targeting them.

Match anglers love them too, as all they are interested in is bulk on the scales at the end of a session.

For my part, I needed to catch at least one which I've done on many occasions, so it wouldn't bother me now if I never caught another in my entire angling life, which means that I probably will. That's sods law for you.

### SILVER BREAM Blicca bjoerkna

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Due to its rather patchy and often localised distribution, a fish I have rarely ever seen let alone caught, though there was a time when I had plans in the making to find a suitable location and see if I could tick it off my species list.

Appearance-wise, not as deep bodied, and definitely not as hump backed as a bronze bream. A fish with noticeably larger eyes than any other species resembling it, and with the start of its anal fin behind the last ray of the dorsal fin above it.

In the bronze bream, the anal fin lies around a third of the way in to the dorsal fin, and in the bleak, to which it also bears some resemblance, the anal fin starts on a line with the last three rays of the dorsal fin.

A greenish brown to greyish brown fish on the back and upper flanks becoming paler lower down, with a silvery sheen and white on its underparts.

### TENCH Tinca tinca

**Bucket List status – result**

One of the most readily recognisable coarse fish species, tench are powerful fish, aided to no small degree by having such a wide 'wrist' to the tail which itself is equally wide and well able to generate a great deal of paddling power.

A small scaled fish with both looks and feels slippery and slimy, with a small but noticeable barbel at each corner of the mouth. The dorsal and anal fins also catch the eye in that they are short based and tall.

Colouration too is a major factor, which while it can be quite variable according to location, still greatly differs from that of its close relatives, ranging from dark green or brown to almost black at times with a golden sheen on the flanks.

It's also rare to find tench living in running water. Another species we used to induce to spawning condition in my National Rivers Authority days for re-stocking purposes.

At around the age of twelve, a small group of us used to cycle with our fishing rods fastened to the bike cross bar from Leyland to Bamber Bridge to fish the now extinct terminal of what I assume was the Leeds and Liverpool canal.

Known locally as the summit, this was where the canal came to an end in the form of three weedy prongs, rather like a table fork, which we'd heard were good for bream and tench, two species we rarely if ever bothered fishing for, but which for some reason we had got into our heads that we wanted to catch.

I can't remember how many visits we made, but it wasn't many, and it was there that I caught my first ever tench. My only tench in fact until 2011, when Graeme Pullen and I spent a few days at Anglers Paradise in Devon after abandoning a porbeagle shark hunt at nearby Boscastle due to problems with the boat.

Each day we would target something different in the hope of coming away with a short series of angling video's, one of which by pure chance turned out to be fishing for golden tench.

We were sat in a swim on one particular lake where we could see fish flashing in the margins close to the weed fringes quite literally less than a rod length out. Curious to see what they were, Graeme put a bait on their heads and immediately came up with a golden tench. A farmed genetic colour variation on the standard tench in the same way that fish farms turn out golden rainbow trout.

That was it, our video target for the day. A session which produced literally dozens of the things, sometimes at the rate of a fish every drop on float fished maggot. A very enjoyable session and re-acquaintance with the species, even though it was over fifty years in the waiting.

### GOLDEN ORFE leuciscus idus

**Bucket List status – result**

The species _leuciscus idus_ is known to coarse anglers in two forms, one being the golden orfe, the other being the ide. Two visually different presentations of the same fish.

Golden orfe have long been popular with anglers, particularly on some of the Cheshire waters for as far back as I can remember. Ide on the other hand, which are the none golden variety and looking superficially more like a roach, are a more recent phenomenon.

Ide have exploded in popularity with both anglers and commercial fishery owners due to the way they feed, the ease with which they can be caught in matches, and their resilience, making them a tough hardy fish which has to be good news for everyone concerned.

Quite a heavily built fish too with a noticeable hump between the top of the head and the dorsal fin, though nowhere near as deep bodied as the bronze bream or crucian carp. That said, the feature which most stands out to me is the snout, which is particularly rounded and blunt.

In terms of colouration and markings, the Ide version is greyish on the upper flanks and back becoming more silvery below, with all the fins other than the dorsal having a reddish tinge.

The golden version on the other hand will be more immediately recognisable, having a very bright reddish pink wash over an under lying silvery background, and very obvious bright red on the fins. Some specimens might even look yellowish orange. Either way, a million miles away from anything else.

Though I don't coarse fish much, I have caught both varieties. The golden orfe was one of the species Graeme Pullen and I picked up on Lundy Island back in the 1980's while fishing for carp and prussian carp with our sea fishing gear, because it was all we had with us at the time.

We had some very nice specimens there too. Beautiful fish. But it would be a good thirty years before I would encounter the species again, this time in its silvery form as the ide.

I'd read about a huge match weight of ide coming out of a small commercial lake called Highfield not too far from me over on the Fylde Coast at Hambleton, so I decided to take a ride over there to see what I could gather in terms on information for my website Fishing Films and Facts.

Fishery manager George Wilson recorded an audio interview on the topic, then introduced me to match angler Nathan Lumb who held the fishery match record with 138 pounds of ide taken in five hours.

Nathan also agreed to record an audio interview, then later, we met up again to film a video on still-water match pole fishing for YouTube, where again, ide were the main featured fish.

Loose feeding casters from a pole cup and allowing the hook bait to do a slow natural drop was the killing technique, sometimes lifting it for a second drop if it wasn't taken first time, as he had them feeding just under the surface and was knocking them out for fun.

Video demonstration over, I asked if I could have go. Technically, I had caught the species before, but as I've said, only the golden variety. So having watched very intently while I was filming, and never having previously tried it, I also wanted to feel what pole fishing was like first hand, so Nathan and I swapped places.

Watching is one thing. Doing it yourself is very different matter. The pole Nathan was using at just short of £3,000 was one of the best. Even so, with sixteen metres out, and hardly a breath of breeze, I still found it not as easy in practise as it had looked to me as an observer. So what it would be like to handle on a windy day I can only guess.

Still, it worked, and I bagged myself a few nice ide, coming away from the place well satisfied on a whole range of fronts.

Associated audio interview numbers: 34 and 38.

### BARBEL Barbus barbus

**Bucket List status – result**

Sheer size alone should separate the barbel from any other species even remotely similar to it in appearance. But just in case it doesn't, this is a long powerful streamlined fish designed to do well in fast moving shallow water, with a strongly serrated first spine to its dorsal fin, which as anglers will know only too well can be a pain when it gets stuck in the mesh of the landing net.

There are four barbels present around the mouth. One in each corner, and a further one either side of the snout. Colouration is typically greenish brown on the back becoming lighter on the flanks, with hints of a golden sheen. The base of the pectoral, pelvic and anal fins is red. The eye of the barbel has a gold coloured iris.

Ten minutes up the road from where I live runs the River Ribble, which in my adult life-time had been devoid of barbel and is now one of the best barbel rivers in the country.

To qualify that remark, last season, the man who coached me on the how, where, and when of Ribble barbel fishing, Mike Winrow, had fifty seven out in a single session typically averaging between six and seven pounds apiece.

There have been quite a few doubles too, though top weights do seem to have dropped away slightly, having levelled out in recent times.

The reason why the Ribble is now a barbel producing river at all is solely down to illegal introductions by anglers, particularly during the late 1960's and early 1970's, when some of them were actually caught in the act and later prosecuted by the then North West Water Authority fishery bailiffs for releasing them at the M6 bridge close to the Tickled Trout at Preston.

Ironically, these fish had been transported north from the River Severn, which had itself been given a helping hand as part of a project promoted by Angling Times back in the 1950's to see more barbel in that river too.

The barrister representing North West Water in their prosecution described the barbel as a vile and useless coarse fish. In light of where we are today, I wonder if he would still see those words as being appropriate.

After the first few early spawning years, as so often happens with an alien introduction, even of an otherwise indigenous species, initially there were small fish everywhere, and it was around that time, fishing up near Samlesbury, that I managed to tick the species off my wanted list with a brace of around a pound apiece.

Since then, the correct level of balance between the barbel and the rivers other co-inhabitants has been achieved. Yet still the Ribble is a major producer both in terms of numbers and of size.

Obviously there must be something about the length from Preston through to Ribchester that particularly suits the species. Generally speaking, it's quite a shallow stretch over rocky substrate with a good mix of shallow banks and glides, the exact position of which changes all the time as water levels fluctuate according to how much rain falls over the Pennines further inland.

Not that long ago, barbel topping fifteen pounds were coming out, with plenty of other doubles and a good healthy younger population waiting in the wings. More recently however, those ceiling weights seem to have declined.

There are still good doubles about, but not so the fifteen pounders, which Mike Winrow puts down to an ageing population from that initial introduction being followed through by a completely different balance in which more five to ten pound fish sharing the resource could well be tending to keep replacement top weights in check.

No doubt there will still be the odd monster either already out there or coming through. But the days of high expectation may well be giving way to more moderate expectation, with lots of good sized average fish to make up the sport short fall.

So I caught my first Ribble barbel shortly after they went in, and despite having them on my door step, for the next thirty five years I did nothing about trying to catch one again. Nothing that was until I was introduced to Mike Winrow with a view to recording an audio interview on the Ribble population, which sparked my current interest.

Here I thought was a useful alternative to beach fishing on those days when there was too much wind to get the boat out on the sea. The perfect alternative to fishing controlled by the weather. Or so I thought, little appreciating how the river can change so quickly, and the knock-on effect this would have on the fish.

In addition to that, Mike also had the freedom to fish pretty much the entire barbel stretch through his membership of both Prince Albert and Ribchester and District Angling Clubs, whereas I would be confined to a handful of day ticket pegs to the east of the Tickled Trout.

I did however get to fish some of the club stretches on a day ticket where I was shown how to identify potential barbel swims, plus all the tactical stuff, after which I was on my own.

Armed with a few mental pictures of where to put baits around fast shallow glides where barbel potentially lie, and after putting my hand deep in my pocket for a suitable outfit, it was off to the Gregson's Farm stretch of the river, where on my first visit the farmer came along in his tractor, and after a bit of a chat, sat me in the cab and drove me to pegs I would otherwise never have found, pointing out where all the best fish had come from.

Tactically speaking, though the approach used on the Ribble will be widely used elsewhere, unlike barbel fishing I have seen on parts of the Severn and Hampshire Avon, plus what I've read about on the Wye, our tactics up here are very simple, and rarely if ever stray away from the same basic pattern.

As I've already said, the Ribble is a rocky river. No place then for finesse. It's twelve to fifteen pounds breaking strain line straight through, with an open end cage feeder free running on the reel line, and a two to three foot tail to a size eight to ten hook. That way at least if you do snag up, or if a fish runs the line under a rock, there is half a chance of staying in touch.

Obviously, the feeders vary in weight according to conditions, with fifty to eighty grams being the typical range. Trout pellets are put into a small bucket immediately on arrival and covered with water, allowing them to suitably soften as you tackle up. The excess water is then drained off and these are used to load the feeder, with a ten to twelve mm halibut pellet located by a band on the hook.

My preference is for the John Roberts pellet bands with the small lip though which the hook is inserted rather than a plain band looped over the hook which you tend to loose every time the pellet comes free.

Otherwise, it's very much like beach fishing. The rods are propped up high either on their rests, or better still, due to the rocky ground, using a tripod, and you sit back until the tip is dragged over.

There have been occasions when takes have been so violent that the rod rest has actually gone over, and rod itself has started creeping along the bank.

As result, my best fish weighed ten pounds six ounces in the head of the landing net, which while it's no world beater, is a very good fish considering all the limitations that such a small number of day ticket opportunities imposes.

Associated audio interview numbers: 113.

### CHUB Leuciscus cephalus

**Bucket List status – result**

I've described dace below as looking like small chub, so it goes without saying that chub look like big dace. The problem comes when they are both the same size.

Both are elongate fish, and while it will be possible for regular catchers familiar with the pair to recognise the difference at a glance, the rest of us will need to look at the positioning of the dorsal fin on the back relative to pelvic fins below to help sort things out.

If the dorsal fin has a convex upper edge and starts behind a line dropped down to where the pelvic fins start, then it's a chub. If however it starts directly above the origin of the pelvics and has a concave upper edge, then its a dace.

Chub also have a larger mouth. Colouration is usually a dark green to brown on the back, fading down the flanks to silvery yellow underneath.

I have fished deliberately for chub, and I have caught them in good numbers in the past on the River Ribble, River Trent, and occasionally in some of the small commercial still-water fisheries where they can be particularly popular.

Indeed, the current record of nine pounds five ounces is a still-water fish. These days however, chub are a bit of a by-catch for me, and if they are half decent, a bonus by-catch at that.

This normally happens when I'm fishing for barbel with ten to twelve mm pellets and a large open ended cage feeder loaded with softened trout pellets. But bear in mind, I'm trying to pick out barbel swims, not hot spots for chub.

More towards the back-end however, on the River Ribble at least, bread in the feeders and on the hook can bring some quite good chub sport, and in the summer months, a lot of very good chub are caught further up on the fly, particularly sedges in the evenings by anglers fishing for brown trout.

### DACE Leuciscus leuciscus

**Bucket List status – result**

To me at least, looking like a small chub, dace fortunately are not easily confused with the other riverine coarse fish species, so it should be a straight forward 'either-or' identification. They can readily be distinguished from chub by having a much smaller mouth, and a dorsal fin which starts directly above the base of the pelvic fins below it.

In chub, the dorsal fin begins behind the start of the pelvic fins. The top edge of the dorsal also offers another clue. If it's convex then it's a chub, or concave then it's a dace.

In addition to this, dace tend not to be as darkly coloured as chub either, with more of a leaning towards bluish green on the back and silvery down the flanks becoming off white underneath.

Some years ago, I spent a day videoing a friend of mine Mick Southworth putting on a demonstration of catching winter dace on the River Ribble just upstream of the bridge on the bend at the Shaws Arms going in to Preston.

At the end of the session there must have been a good sixty to seventy pounds of dace in his keep-net. A recollection that I would put to good use some years later when we needed dace brood stock during my fish farming days at the National Rivers Authority.

Looking to draw together data and experience across a wide range of coarse fish species, I went back to the Shaws arms cadging mature dace from anglers. We didn't need a lot. But we sure as hell got a lot of eggs out of them.

So many eggs in fact, that I decided to run a series of small batch experiments taking the incubation temperature up by 1 degree increments above the norm to see if we could bring them through quicker, thereby freeing up capacity in the future for other things.

Unfortunately, pushing them too far led to weaker fry, which at the highest temperatures could barely break out of their egg cases. So some limited scope for re-thinking the previous wisdom, but in the knowledge that things hadn't been too far away from ideal in the first place.

Normally when I fish rivers it's with a specific objective in mind. I'm not one for big bags of small silver fish. I would much rather target say big chub or barbel, which means that dace are always going to be an unusual and occasional by-catch for me.

To my knowledge, the only dace I have caught came during a match on the River Trent, and during a session Graeme Pullen and I had on the upper Avon at Durrington in Wiltshire where we were given the whole stretch to do with as we pleased for a day, including the famous stretch where legendary fly fisherman Frank Sawyer developed and perfected his upstream nymphing technique.

We were told that we could even trot maggots through the various swims, which amongst a nice mix of roach, grayling and brown trout, also produced some very good dace.

### BITTERLING Rhodeus sericeus

**Bucket List status – result**

An invasive alien, though probably harmless cyprinid species, easily over-looked on account of its very small size, but at the same time, readily identified by anyone wanting to know what it is they have just caught.

In terms of body shape, it follows the silver bream-bleak general body profile and layout. The key distinguishing feature, other than its small size of course, is its very short lateral line, which barely runs the length of the pectoral fin.

Colour-wise, the back is greenish grey becoming lighter on the flanks and silvery below, with hints of orange on the fins, and an almost neon metallic diffuse stripe where the lateral line should be towards the tail end of the body.

At breeding time, these colours will be enhanced, particularly in the males, which is what originally made it such a popular aquarium fish, some of which, either deliberately or by accident, found their way into the wild, the earliest observations of which were around the 1920's, where at the time they were confined to one specific area of Lancashire and Cheshire.

I first became aware of the species when a match angling friend of mine, in the company of many other match-men in our area, started catching a small unidentified fish in the Lancaster Canal just to the north of Preston. So I went along and caught a few myself.

Mostly they were up to around an inch or so in length, but very obviously not one of our indigenous species on account of the short length of lateral line and the metallic sheen mentioned above.

A quick check with my fish ID books confirmed them as being bitterling. As a result, it seems I may have made a few queries with fishery scientists. I don't know. It's that far back I can't honestly remember.

I must have said something though, because before long I was collecting specimens for the British Museum, and later putting a large plastic dustbin fitted with an aerator carrying quite a few bitterling and swan mussels on to a train at Preston station, labelled for the attention of the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol who wanted to film their amazing life cycle.

The female deposits her eggs by way of a long ovipositing tube into the gill chambers of swan mussels which are then fertilized by sperm inhaled by the same swan mussel which the male releases adjacent to it.

Looking at recent reports of catch locations, it seems that bitterling are either much more widespread or simply recognised for what they are than they were forty years ago.

With such a small fish it's often hard to know. For the same reason, it seems unlikely that anyone would either want or be bothered to go to the trouble and risk of prosecution of deliberately spreading them for angling reasons.

Most likely they are spread inadvertently by anglers fishing for tench with swan mussels that have already been used by bitterling for brooding purposes, the unused living left overs of which are thrown into the waters in question, ultimately seeding them as an accidental consequence.

That's my take on it anyway, backed up by observation on at least one fishery near me where I know swan mussels from the Lancaster Canal were used as bait, and which has subsequently developed a bitterling population.

### GUDGEON Gobio gobio

**Bucket List status – result**

Probably one of the more readily identifiable freshwater species, particularly to a novice coarse angler like myself. Quite a long narrow bodied little fish, the most striking feature of which is a conspicuous barbel at each corner of the mouth.

Colouration is typically green to brown on the back shading to more of a bluish hue on the mid flank region, with a row of darker blotches running along each side which can be very obvious in some specimens, but indistinct in others.

In terms of distribution, a widespread commonly caught species in canals, ponds and rivers. But as with several other small freshwater species, only if you fish for them, which generally speaking I don't.

If I'm putting time in on a river, it's usually for something I consider worthwhile, and as such, small species rarely come in to the reckoning. But there was this one time many years ago when I did find myself fishing for smaller fish with deliberate intent.

A very successful match angler, Dave Trafford, who back then I worked with, and his cousin John Roach who I also worked with, were giving me a hard time about sea fish being stupid and easy to catch, and with a similar dose of gullibility, I took the bait myself and somehow managed to get drawn into accepting a challenge to fish a full length coarse match between the three of us at Burton Joyce on the River Trent.

Not only did I not fish in freshwater much back then, I also had absolutely no concept of trotting a float from a closed face fixed spool reel, or of loose feeding a swim.

Thankfully, Dave give me a talk through what was going to happen. He also explained how the reel worked, how to keep the float travelling properly, and how to feed little and often.

In fairness too, he loaned me the tackle, and even set it up for me. After that I was on my own, pegged between the pair of them, with five hours ahead of me in which to put up or shut up, and a steeper learning curve I have yet ascend. But ascend it I did.

As expected, Dave far and away led the field. But amazingly, I somehow managed to come second, and interestingly, gudgeon along with small roach and dace helped give me quite a respectable weight, not to mention lots to mouth off about all the way home from Nottingham back to Preston.

### BLEAK Alburnus alburnus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

If you read the account above about the coarse fishing match I was duped into taking part in on the River Trent at Burton Joyce, amazingly, amongst the many small roach, gudgeon and dace I somehow managed to catch, I equally amazingly managed not to catch a single bleak, despite the fact that the other two anglers I was fishing against and had positioned either side of me taking several each.

That is the only time I have ever even seen a bleak, and had Dave Trafford, one of the anglers I was fishing against and a River Trent regular not been present, I wouldn't have realised that there were even bleak in the catch, which for a Trent regular like Dave can probably be picked out at a glance.

For the rest of us, identification features to look out for are a small quite narrow bodied fish whose body profile tapers gradually and continuously from its widest point to the snout, giving it a rather pointed head, with the lower lip slightly more prominent than the upper.

The anal fin is also longer than in the most likely candidates for confusion such as small dace, and there is a sharp scale-less keel between the pelvic fins and anal fin. The back and upper flanks are blueish green lightening to silver on the underparts, with hints of orange present in some individuals on a set of otherwise greyish fins.

### PERCH Perca fluviatilis

**Bucket List status – result**

Arguably one of the most recognisable freshwater fish species in the British Isles. So much so that it is regularly used for comparative purposes, even amongst marine species such as the comber and norway haddock which are described as being 'perch like', plus species generally with dry rough scales which are said to be percoid.

Let's start with the feel of the fish on account of those scales which are known as ctenoid or toothed scales because they feel quite dry and are noticeably rough to the touch when brushed against the grain from tail to head.

These are a key feature of the family percidae, which for our purposes here also includes the zander and the ruffe, and I suppose for completeness the walleye too, which for reasons explained elsewhere is unlikely to be caught in home waters ever again.

Perch are deep bodied fish with an almost humped back, and a sharp, spiny, to be avoided at all costs first dorsal fin, followed immediately by a softer second dorsal fin. That said, colouration and patterning are the more usual key identifiers.

A fish that is typically greenish brown becoming much darker on the back and lighter below, with hints of golden yellow, plus a series of very obvious darker vertical bars on its flanks.

Red is another colour which features strongly on the pelvic fins, anal fin, and lower part of the tail. There is also a dark blotch to the rear edge of the first dorsal fin.

As a school kid fishing back in the 1960's, along with rudd, perch were the species I was brought up on. They were everywhere; they were easy to catch, and they were necessary, because in the learning phase, youngsters need to be catching fish regularly to keep their interest levels high, which back then, with no electronic distractions, was far less of an uphill struggle than it is today.

Even so, we had to specifically go out looking for perch. Fortunately, the north west of England is blessed with a good canal network, lots of reservoirs, and of course the vastness of the Cumbrian Lakes. At that time, all strong holds of the perch.

I remember, along with a school friend Maurice Wynn, having fishing as my hobby for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme, and regularly catching the train to Windermere where we would float fish worms from the wooden boat jetties, catching perch as fast as you could throw baits at them. Then suddenly they were gone.

I'm not sure as to the exact timing nor how long it took to go from prolific to the brink of extinction, but it wasn't long. Shallow ulcer disease took out a good ninety five percent of the UK's entire perch population, and had it not been for a few isolated pockets and some inevitable genetic resistance which you get in any epidemic, it would quite literally have taken out the lot, and for many years, that continued to the the case.

During the 1970's I became obsessed with fishing for char and schelly, which while this is a story in its own right, also gave me a first hand insight into the extent of the perch problem and the subsequent painfully slow recovery that followed.

This regularly took me to Windermere, and more especially to Coniston, both of which are in south Lakeland. Also to Ullswater in the north where perch had previously been abundant in the extreme, and where in the early days after the outbreak we didn't see a single one.

Granted, we weren't specifically fishing for perch. Char fishing would see us placing our baits pretty much at the limit in terms of depth where chance perch encounters were likely to occur. But not so fishing for schelly from the bank. Yet not even a single lone straggler showed up at either lake for many years.

Then, possibly in the late 1980's or early 1990's, we finally started to pick up a very occasional small pressure blown perch out over the deep water boat marks on Coniston, though oddly enough, still nothing from Ullswater, where you would have had more of an expectation of seeing a few.

Obviously then, the different lakes were hit and subsequently went about their recovery in different ways, all of which today are back to their pre-disease levels, allowing us to pick perch up now pretty much every visit. More so even than the trout, char and schelly, whose population levels have also changed, possibly in response to the shift in balance brought about by the increase in perch numbers once again.

The balance of power on the specimen scene between perch and other competing species has also most definitely changed. Lakes and rivers which were once renowned for their big fish, even record fish, which while they retained the theoretical capability of re-establishing those reputations, have not in all cases come out of the ranking process as strongly as their pre-disease perch history might suggest they should.

Now there is a new kid on the block in the guise of the small commercial mixed fishery. These have grown in popularity to such an extent that many of the more traditional waters have either been neglected, or turned over to other aspects of fishing such as carp, catfish, or fly fishing.

One common thread here is that for most people, perch these days are quite a low interest species, which has pretty much allowed them to go about their business as something of an unknown quantity.

This is particularly true on small commercial fisheries, where feed of all descriptions, and particularly high protein feeds, are pumped into the place continuously, followed by baits targeting anything other than perch, which has at some waters both allowed and encouraged the perch to grow big. Very big in fact. Some even to record size.

England more so than Ireland, Scotland or Wales is the home of the small commercial fishery, and it is only England that has so far managed to produce perch in excess of six pounds.

Wales has a few commercial waters. But Scotland, and in particular Ireland, less so, being more reliant on large natural water bodies, which while they might have less of a propensity towards producing those truly huge fish of English specimen proportions, to a lot of people offer more creditable catches because they are wild fish. A debate which as a sea angler I have no intention of becoming embroiled in here.

The fact that lots of high quality feed is being put onto the plate of fish that few people seem overly interested in perusing, coupled to the greater conversion rate of food intake to growth in the warmer south of England, has to give perch anglers down there a clear edge. Or at least you would think so. But others up here in the north west might want to take issue with that, and not only local anglers.

There are big perch specialists who are so inspired by the quality of perch fishing here in the north west, and so convinced that the record is also up here waiting to be taken, that they are willing to travel huge distances on a regular basis to fish one lake in particular, that being Bassenthwaite, also known as Bass Lake, just outside the Cumbrian town of Keswick.

So, keen to see what all the fuss was about, and equally keen to bag myself a big perch, as a birthday present in 2013, my wife Dawn booked me a fishing day on Bassenthwaite with professional fishing guide Eric Hope, a day I shared with my long-time freshwater fishing pal Bob Fitchie, who like me was up for seeing some big stripeys, and we weren't to be disappointed.

Without wanting to give too much away, the first mark was within casting range of a shallow submerged weed bed where water was exiting the lake.

A large split shot was placed onto the line maybe a yard up from the hook. A small red worm was then nicked onto that hook, cast towards the weed bed, and slowly twitched back to the boat in the same way you might do at sea with a soft lure for pollack.

Contrasting slightly with this, the second hot-spot was alongside a gravel bar, this time where a small stream was coming into the lake. Tactically, we approached this mark in the same way as previously, and while it produced more fish, these typically were of smaller size.

Total catch for the day was somewhere in the region of seventy perch spread across a roughly equal three way split in terms of size, with fish up to a pound, fish between one and two pounds, and fish over two pounds, the best of which would have been approaching three pounds. Eric and his clients had previously also had fish to well over four pounds.

Other than catching them in situ over the years to use as live-baits for pike, that is my personal experience of perch fishing. I did however record a very interesting audio interview on the topic of big perch and tactics, particularly for the south of the country and from rivers, with Mike Winrow.

Winter fishing and fishing after dark on small commercial fisheries also get a bit of a looking at. Particularly how to pick the right fishery, and the required tactics to be in with the best chance of success.

Associated audio interview numbers: 117.

### RUFFE Gymnocephalus cernuus

**Bucket List status – result**

A small perch-like fish not capable of bettering around five to six ounces in weight, and frequently far less than that, in which one of the most obvious differences between it and the perch, which has distinctly separate first and second dorsal fins, is that in the ruffe the two fins merge one into the other, with a spiky taller first section followed by a softer second section.

Colouration and markings generally comprise of a greeny brown back and upper flanks becoming marginally lighter below, with numerous irregular dark spots, particularly on the dorsal fin and tail

Not a fish most people other than perhaps match-men and pike anglers would be interested in catching. But as they are abundant in the Lancaster canal heading northwards out of Preston, a species I was able to target and tick off the list in a single visit where a bloodworm fished under a light float close in to the weed margins did the trick.

For match anglers, anything that contributes to their overall weight is fine by them. With pike anglers it's a slightly different story, and not one with such a happy ending, because ruffe make excellent live-baits, which in the good old days before the EA imposed restrictions on the transportation of live fish, was a species which would be hauled all around the country, including to that legendary Scottish big pike water Loch Lomond, and as such, either as escapees or deliberate releases, suddenly found itself as an alien species in a system that had not evolved to cope with it.

As small as they are, ruffe are predators, and one of the things they will eat with great relish is the eggs of other fish, which in the case of Loch Lomond unfortunately includes the powan, a species which is protected as endangered under the Wildlife & Countryside Act.

So a lesson there for all of. As important as this is, the ban on the transportation and release of live fish isn't only about disease control. Noncompliance can have other, more sinister consequences, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it the case of Loch Lomond, there really is no way of every getting it back in again.

### ZANDER Sander lucioperca

**Bucket List status – result**

Not long after their initial release into the Fens when zander were really just starting to spread, pile on a bit of weight, and grab the attention of a few budding would be specialists, I contacted John Watson who would go on to do great things on the pike and zander scene. John was still living in Blackpool at the time and commuting to the Fens at weekends.

In equal measures of wanting to tick a new species off my list, and see this alleged 'terror' in the flesh, I asked him to point me at a spot where I might be in with half a chance of zander success, and he came back saying I should try the Middle Level Drain at Outwell.

I'd obviously never seen a zander up to that point. But with such a readily recognisable fish with its elongate body, large mouth armed with very obvious canine teeth and upper jaw extending to the back of the eye, plus its spiny first dorsal fin followed immediately by a softer second dorsal and its lightly barred markings along each flank, I couldn't wait for the opportunity.

I'd never been to East Anglia before either, so I looked it up on the map, caught the recommended small rudd dead-baits, then headed off down the motorway at four in the morning with a list of road numbers to follow as there was no GPS back then, arriving at the designated spot sometime around eight am.

I remember looking along this long straight featureless cut in the ground thinking to myself, where do you start. At some point obviously I put the tackle box down, sliced off a rudd fillet, then lobbed it out along the margins as a free-lined offering.

Not being a freshwater angler, sophisticated tackle was non-existent. An open bale arm and a piece of paper looped over the line with a coin on it placed on top of a rusting tin box was my bite indicator. I then sat back and promptly nodded off.

At some point shortly afterwards I was very rudely awoken by a sort of scraping noise which turned out to be the coin being dragged along the rusty tin lid. Minutes later I had my first cast first ever zander on the bank. A fish of at best two pounds, after which we didn't see another thing all day.

I later somehow managed to lock my car keys in the boot, hot-wired the car to get it to start, then found that the steering lock was still active, though that's another story. But with regard to the fishing, in the words of Julius Caesar, veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw and I conquered. So many thanks to John Watson for that.

I've done quite a bit of zander fishing in the years since, ironically with a similar sort of background story to it. I was sat at home one evening when John Wilson rang. He needed some photographs of char for a book he was working on. So, never one to miss an opportunity, I quizzed him about some decent 'X' marks the spot zander fishing in return to cut out any long range trial and error time wasting, and he came up with Three Holes where the Sixteen Foot and Middle Level Drains come together close the road bridge.

Anywhere up along the Middle Level would do fine he said for pike or zander in the day time, and more specifically for the zander as the light started to fade late afternoon on into the evening. So down again we went.

It must have been back-end, because although the day was beautiful, come evening time I remember it was very cold. Eel portions were the bait, and while we tried to free-line them, on some of the several subsequent visits, this wasn't always possible due to the water flow if the pumps were operating after heavy rainfall.

Fishing two rods, one close in to the margins of each bank, we took literally dozens of zander to maybe six pounds, plus quite a few nice pike. In fact, on one day in particular I had pike of seventeen and nineteen pounds in successive casts.

Later that afternoon, we also saw a zander of thirteen pounds six ounces caught just up from where we were fishing taken by Steve Loades. The biggest Zander I've ever seen in fact, and a very creditable fish back then, as was anything making it into double figures.

Over the years, zander have come in for a lot of stick – some of it absolute rubbish, some of it circumstantial, and some of it probably deserved. The local coarse fishing world down in that neck of the woods was very clearly divided between those who couldn't get enough zander, and those couldn't cull enough Zander.

Allegedly, they were supposedly going to wipe out all the smaller coarse fish species, ripping them to pieces in merciless gang attacks, and just as worrying to the haters was the fact that regardless of culls, they were most certainly going to spread.

Well they were right in terms of the spread concerns, but in hindsight, wrong with regard to the total decimation of the smaller silver fish.

Looking at it from a fishery science perspective, if zander had wiped out all the other fish their food source would be gone, and not even the most aggressive predators can afford to do that to their supporting hosts.

So as in all situations in which a new alien predator comes onto the scene, after an initial explosion in numbers at the expense of other species, a balance is eventually found, which is the position we find ourselves in today.

What was unfortunate about this particular saga is that the coarse fish were already slipping into decline anyway due to poor agricultural practises leading to nitrification through run-off, a practise the Environment Agency was just getting on top of as I retired from visiting farmers in my own area to ensure their spreading activities were properly monitored and controlled.

Now with the Fenland coarse fish back, and the zander having found a workable predator-prey balance, with hindsight, the whole early zander controversy looks to have been something of an un-necessary storm in a tea cup.

What I'd like to do next, if for no other reason than historical record, is detail the zander introduction itself and the events leading up to it, and in that regard, I am in something of a privileged position.

A few years ago I met up with and recorded both an audio as well as a video interview with John McAngus, John being the last surviving member of the Great Ouse River Board fisheries team responsible for introducing the zander in the first place, though he was not a part of the team at the actual time of the introduction itself, on what he describes as "that fateful day". The day when the zander genie responsible for today's situation was let out of the bottle.

There had been previous attempts at zander introductions over the years, mainly to still waters, the most successful of which had been a consignment of German fish introduced to Woburn Abbey Lake sometime in the late nineteenth century.

Ironically, it was Woburn that provided the hundred or so six to nine inch zander netted in March 1963 by Cliff Cawkwell and others, the ninety seven survivors of which were introduced by Cliff to the Great Ouse Relief Channel on the express orders of fishery officer Norman MacKenzie, about which Cliff was told to say nothing to anyone.

Unlike today where there is complete accountability, fishery teams in the 1960's were autonomous, and fishery officers very much a law unto themselves. Teams were run military fashion, so Cliff Cawkwell did exactly what he was told, despite having strong personal reservations, and even complicity later in trying to reverse what had been done.

Despite ordering that nothing be said regarding the introduction, Norman MacKenzie then popped up on the radio the following day announcing to the world that an exciting new angling sport fish had been released in to the Fens, believing it would be contained within the drainage system, all of which slipped by fairly quietly with few if any eyebrows being raised at all.

It wasn't until the mid-1970's when the zander had very clearly bred and spread, and with coarse fish numbers throughout the Fenland system in free-fall, that the proverbial really started to hit the fan.

From the Relief Channel, the zander had pushed out into the River Ouse and on throughout the linked system to the point where, when John McAngus and the rest of the team conducted fish surveys, there was pretty much only pike and zander left.

Coarse anglers and clubs who would previously spend heavily throughout the area were up in arms demanding that action be taken, and after a study by Cliff Cawkwell and John McAngus, in 1981 through on into 1982, a pike and zander cull was called for, and reluctantly in many cases carried out by anglers throughout the middle system, resulting in many thousands of zander and a smaller number of pike being removed, which, in hindsight made absolutely no difference whatsoever. The zander was here to stay.

What this story hopefully does is under-score the need for anglers to think very carefully and ultimately pull back from making alien introductions, even of indigenous species, to locations where they are currently absent.

Yes, in terms of disease. But more especially in terms of balance, because as the zander has demonstrated, in open systems, there really is no going back.

Associated audio interview numbers: 19.

### WALLEYE Stizostedion vitreum

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

A fish not unlike the European zander, distinguished from it on the basis of subtle colouration and patterning differences, and not a fish I intend devoting anything in the way of time to here other than as a passing mention for completeness, as it should never have been here in the UK in the first place, and under current legislation, is unlikely to ever again.

A mistaken release as part of a batch of black bass eggs imported from America for a failed experimental release of that species into the Fens in Norfolk almost a century ago, containing the lone walleye we see in the British record fish list, a slot that has now officially been closed to claims, very likely as it had been the only surviving outcome of that whole sorry affair.

### PIKE Esox lucius

**Bucket List status – result**

The perfect example of a well-designed predator. Eyes high up on the head for forward vision and attack from below; large mouth full of sharp teeth; long sleek body profile for short burst speed, plus a colour and patterning scheme guaranteed to break up the fishes outline when hiding amongst weeds. A single rounded dorsal fin is placed well back towards the tail.

Colouration and markings are quite variable, though usually some shade or mix of green and brown, with golden yellow mottling, spots and even short stripes to help the camouflage work.

Not being a specialist freshwater fisherman, and with such a wealth of informed knowledge on the subject of pike out there available from people who do actually fit that definition, it's difficult to know where to start on this one.

I've caught literally hundreds of pike over the years, including lots of good doubles. But only ever one over twenty pounds, when, ironically, I wasn't actually fishing for pike. So I suppose that's as good a place as any to kick things off.

I had my ferox trout fishing head on that particular day and was slow trolling a small char dead-bait rigged up with a stiff wire inserted in through its mouth running the full length of its body, which I then bent like a banana to give it an exaggerated rotation. In in the past this has been good for big cannibalistic trout.

It never stopped raining all day as we trolled the western margins of Coniston in my small open boat. This eventually took us into Allen Tarn, which isn't really a tarn at all but the narrowing exit of the lake into the River Crake where you get quite a few yachts moored up along the reed fringed margins.

This was our turning around point ready for heading off up the eastern side of the main lake, when suddenly, the rod tip was dragged over resulting in a nice pike of twenty pounds two ounces.

Not exactly a fish to set the world alight. But sometimes we can all get a bit too carried away by the size of other fish we see in the press to the point of almost being apologetic at only managing a twenty pounder.

Twenty pounds is still a very good fish, and a PB is a PB. Needless to say, I was ecstatic. I still am very pleased with it, though an even bigger one certainly wouldn't go amiss.

Rather than get involved in the tactical specifics of pike fishing, what I intend to do now is high-light a few interesting incidents and observations made here and there on a take it or leave it basis, and with that in mind, I'd like to start with fly fishing.

Long before fly fishing for pike became fashionable, having seen a low double figure pike take a small fly in a trout competition on Esthwaite, I thought it might be interesting to see if it could be done deliberately.

With absolutely no information to be found to nudge me in the right direction, I tied up some gaudy lures to pennel rigs, got myself a ten weight rod, loaded up with a floating line tipped of with quite a beefy mono leader to beat the teeth, and off I went to a reservoir which I knew had lots of small pike in it where hardly anybody else ever seemed to fish.

The dam wall was my chosen mark because it had fairly deep water close in, and seemed to attract quite a few small perch and the like along its base which some pike would obviously prey on.

The floating line was selected because of the snaggy, bouldery nature of the wall down to the base. Ironically, this turned out to be one of the few times I ever saw anybody else fishing there, and when he got around to where I was, even more ironically, he too was fly fishing for pike.

His name was Craig Turner, and not unexpectedly, a sort of instant bond was there, so we talked. This wasn't his first visit, and he'd previously had a fair amount of success. So as you do, I took particular note of his set up which I was pleased to see was broadly similar to mine, though his lures were slightly longer and predominantly yellow and green, presumably to suggest perch fry.

Both of us caught a few jacks and arranged to meet up again. However, United Utilities who owned the water had a small office close by used by some of their field staff, who through my work for the Environment Agency, I knew quite well. So I quizzed them about the depths and general bottom features of the reservoir, and to a man nobody had much of a clue. Time then for a bit of opportunism.

Being the owner of a small boat fitted with an echo sounder, I offered to survey the lake depths and features for them in exchange for permission to also use the boat to fish from, and they agreed.

Being a public drinking water reservoir, they did however insist it would be by oar power only, which was fine by me, and on the allotted day, Craig and I set out across the lake taking soundings and casting pike flies, this time on sinking lines as the water was deeper and we were well clear of the snags.

If I'm honest, I doubt if there are any really sizeable pike in this place, but it was full of jacks, the best of which might creep up towards double figures. Even so, we had an absolute field day taking well over forty fish. Far and away the most pike I had ever seen in a single session by any method.

The next couple of experiences relate to Scotland's Loch Ken. We had a spell of spending back-end and winter weekends up there when we couldn't get out to sea. And again, as with the United Utilities reservoir, the place is stuffed with lots of small to mid-range fish, though it also has some very big fish too, particularly when fishing from boats.

The problem we found was that not knowing the water too well, we struggled to find the drop off's within casting range of the shore, and always seemed to be fishing shallow, fairly featureless pegs, the result being plenty of pike, though always the smaller fish. But, you can still learn things from experiences at the bottom end of the size range too.

Always we would fish with dead-baits. By that stage, catching your own baits and moving them between waters was frowned upon, so we tended to buy in from the Ammo frozen sea baits range.

Garfish was always kind to me. But on one occasion which we'd decided on suddenly out of the blue, the only frozen bait I had in was a couple of packs of Launce – jumbo sized sandeels, which I had no alternative but to try.

Having pike take them wasn't a problem, and fortunately due to the size of these launce, I was able to get three baits out of each.

Predators generally like to take their prey head first. It makes passage down the gullet that much easier as it runs with the grain of things like fins, scales, and spines, which might otherwise impede the flow.

This also appeared to be true of my sandeel portions. If I didn't present them with what would have been the head end of the fish at the bottom treble, in other words with the scales pointing the right way, the pike became finicky, sometimes playing with it, possibly even trying to turn it, I don't know, and as a result, a lot of those takes were missed.

It's as if they knew from the layout of the scales, as tiny as these are, that the grain wasn't right, which certainly seemed to put them off, though obviously, with only a small amount of data to work with over one weekend, other factors may also have been making them skittish.

Another trip to Loch Ken was as a journey break on the way back from the Sound of Mull with the boat in tow after calling time on a common skate trip that hadn't really turned out all that well. With a day still to go before we were expected home, we decided to call in at the loch on spec, knowing we would still have to fish from the shore.

Unfortunately, as this had not been our original plan, we were forced to use the lightest sea tackle we could muster, and grub about in the cool-box for whatever bait we might have left, which was lugworm, mackerel, and small whole calamari squid.

Dave and Paul went straight for the mackerel. But curious to see what might happen, I put on a whole calamari, and amazingly that produced the first fish of the day.

So I quickly learned to expect the unexpected, such as those occasions when good double figure pike are fairly hooked in the mouth by fly anglers fishing the smallest of imitative patterns, including tiny nymphs.

Then there was the day I was trolling a very small spinner on Coniston for char. As we passed a ridge of rock protruding out into the lake which obviously shallowed the water off and provided a very good ambush point for predators, I hooked up a pike which must have been high teens to low twenties.

I even managed to get it up to the landing net, which considering I was fishing four pounds bs line and no wire trace wasn't bad going.

The loss, when it finally did come, was at the net. Trying to bend such a big fish into such a small net at the surface was the final straw. All that thrashing and crashing, then it was gone.

Perhaps the most unusual pike fishing I've ever come across, more of which in Part 2 looking at venues outside the British Isles, was in the Baltic Sea.

Without giving too much away here or repeating myself later, in the Baltic, the less dense freshwater floats on top of the more dense saltwater, which in the shallower areas brings two very different worlds closer together to the point that on the same day within a very short distance you can catch pike, cod, garfish, salmon and sea trout. How amazing is that.

For us, not big pike unfortunately. But some of the boats and guides who were specifically targeting pike were seeing fish which in anybodies book were truly monstrous. Something a little different then to stimulate the appetite.

And something a little different back on home soil was a recorded conversation I had with Somerset pike enthusiast Danny Parkins, who talks in great detail about lure fishing for pike after dark, which in his opinion is a better option than fishing the same marks during in daylight.

Similarly, a very detailed interview looking at tackle and tactics for big pike on the fly with pike guide and multiple world fly fishing champion John Horsey.

Associated audio interview numbers: 48, 98 and 166.

### SILVER EEL Anguilla anguilla

**Bucket List status – result**

Not a fish that is going to trouble freshwater anglers in terms of identification, though it might lead to a bit of confusion with small conger eels at sea. Conger have a large eye, an upper jaw that is longer than the lower, and a dorsal fin which starts pretty much level with the tip of the pectoral fin.

In the silver eel the reverse is true. The eye is small, the lower jaw protrudes beyond the upper, and the dorsal fin starts way back behind where the pectoral fin ends. But while there shouldn't be a problem pinning the correct name to it, silver eels can most certainly be a problem to freshwater anglers in other ways.

Like most people, I've endured the repeated misfortune of having eels take my bait then wrap themselves up into a snotty knot, completely destroying the end tackle in the process. Is it any wonder then that so many anglers hate them, and that only a very few specialize in deliberately trying to seek out the bigger specimens.

The only time I have ever consciously fished for eels, and I've done this on a number of occasions, is in the River Gilpin in Cumbria just before it passes under the main A590 above its confluence with the River Kent close to Arnside.

It's still a narrow muddy small river at that stage, probably devoid of all species other than eels. We would spend the whole day there legering worms to catch as many as we could to freeze down in sections for pike and zander baits so that we wouldn't need to go back again for a while.

For a whole range of reasons you couldn't do that these days. For one thing, they are no longer about in the numbers they used to be. So much so that the EU has compelled all member states to enact protective measures, which in the UK means that it is illegal to deliberately catch eels, and as such, all eels taken by anglers, including those at sea, must be immediately returned to the water unharmed.

Another reason for not repeating our eel activities on the River Gilpin is that it is now against the law to fish with fresh water dead-baits transported to a water from elsewhere in an effort to prevent the spread of disease, which I can understand.

The fact that there are so few eels about is another matter, and just one more example of locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. I mean, it's not like nobody saw this coming. It's rare for any animal to decline to the point of needing Europe-wide protection over a single generation. Surely then somebody must have anticipated it.

Commercial over-cropping, as is the case with so many species on the slippery slope towards oblivion these days, is a major factor here. What can you expect when licenses were being issued by the Environment Agency to commercially catch them at a couple of inches in length as 'fry' in effect, as they arrive on our shores many years before they even think of heading back to the sea to reproduce.

It's madness, and not unsurprisingly, elver catches, which feed the highly lucrative aquaculture trade, have crashed to the point that the eel is now classed as a critically endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

It is believed that in Britain alone, numbers are down by around seventy percent, with a global decline of nearer ninety five percent.

That to me goes beyond the definition of decline. It sounds more like the brink of extinction. But over-cropping is not the only factor here, though aquaculture is again in part to blame.

When commercial quantities of European elvers started declining, the aquaculture industry brought in supplies of the Japanese species _Anguilla japonica,_ some of which were infected with the parasitic nematode _Anguillicoloides crassus_ which infects the swim bladder and can lead to it rupturing and ultimately death.

This is now a widespread problem in eels all across Europe, in addition to which, hydro-electricity dams, flood defence systems ,and other barriers to upstream migration have exacerbated an already serious decline, not to mention global warming and its effects on the direction of the Gulf Stream coupled to natural changes to how the Gulf Stream affects northern Europe, which as we will see shortly, plays a major role in the life cycle of the European silver eel.

The reproduction and life cycle of silver eels has long been a source of fascination, misunderstanding, and study. Today the picture appears to be reasonably clear. But the story took much pains taking unravelling.

Throughout their lives, eels make just two migrations, one of which is passive, the other driven by reproductive motivation.

The passive migration is their distribution from their spawning grounds in the Atlantic to colonise Europe's freshwater systems, with the reproductive aspect reversing that journey as a onetime only return to those spawning grounds where they reproduce and die.

This takes place in a slowly rotating slack eddy of the western Atlantic to the east of Florida, south of Bermuda, and to north of Cuba, known as the Sargasso Sea. It's from this rotation that the ocean current known as the north Atlantic Drift or Gulf Stream originates.

In the Sargasso, eel eggs are shed during the spring and early summer months at depths of around two hundred to three hundred fathoms, where on hatching, the larvae maintain that level within the water column before undergoing a deep lateral body flattening process.

At this stage, they are known as _Leptocephali,_ which was at one time thought to be a completely different species of fish known as _Leptocephalus brevirostris._

As _Leptocephali_ they rise closer to the surface where over the next couple of years they grow progressively longer as they are slowly carried around by the rotation in an ever increasing radius from the point where the eggs were initially shed.

The north Atlantic current eventually leaves this rotation at a peripheral tangent. When the _Leptocephali_ become caught up in this they are carried passively towards northern Europe, the Iberian coast, and some to the Mediterranean.

On approaching the European land mass at a length of around three inches, a metamorphosis takes place transforming the deep bodied leaf shaped fish into a miniature transparent replica of its parents. This is the elver stage, by which time the young eel could be between two and three years old.

Millions of elvers used to enter Europe's river systems via their estuaries under cover of nightfall. Around the British Isles, this was usually over a couple of sets of big tides during the spring, though the actual timing is staggered according to latitude, starting towards the end of the year in the Bay of Biscay and getting as late as April in Scandinavia.

Soon afterwards, and in some cases even before actually running the rivers, a second metamorphosis takes place caused by the activation of pigment cells which give the tiny transparent elvers their more typical olive green colouration ready to start their migration upstream.

Actually, not all eels make this leg of the migration. Some, usually males, choose to remain close to or even in the sea.

Those that do press on upstream face many dangers from predation, netting, and obstacles, navigating ditches, streams, and even short stretches over-land after dark looking for a more permanent home where they can grow on to maturity, which for males can take up to twelve years and females as much as twenty years, at which point the distant Sargasso beckons, bringing with it certain physical changes.

At this stage, colouration becomes more silvery and the gonads begin to grow, as do the eyes for vision in the dark distant depths. Then, after leaving coastal waters, the jaw begins to weaken and the gut atrophies or wastes away, both of which point to a cessation of feeding, after which on reaching the Sargasso Sea, they complete their cycle and die.

Much as many anglers despise eels, nobody I'm sure would wish the current situation upon them, if only because it is symptomatic of so many other commercially viable species, particularly at sea, and the live for today sod tomorrow mentality of those who see fish as little more than a commodity to be used and abused for financial greed.

Let's also not lose sight of the fact that there are anglers out there who are fascinated by eels, devoting themselves to understanding and fishing for big eels to the exclusion of all else.

One such a person is Brian Crawford, who I have talked to at length and recorded an audio interview with on the subject of specimen eels, in which he talks about what makes a good eel water, and more importantly, what leads to certain waters being more inclined to produce monster specimens than others.

More often than not, these are going to be female fish which have a maximum growth potential of around twenty pounds, though the current record is much nearer half that weight. There have however been bigger rod caught fish, which for reasons best known to the British Record Fish Committee, have failed to satisfy all of their rules.

It's said that lakes and ponds, which obviously are easy for an eel to get in to, but when the time comes potentially more difficult to get back out of, make for the most promising big eel locations.

Fishing these waters, in fact all eel waters, is best done after dark, as there is a very definite nocturnal feeding preference here. So not the easiest of pursuits putting in all those hours after night fall.

Dedication is a word that is so often over used these days, but one which would certainly be appropriate here. And if that's what people want to do, we should take all the necessary steps to ensure they have that opportunity at a political level, by learning to recognise impending disasters long before they occur, instead of reacting to them as is the current norm, usually on the verge of it being too late.

Associated audio interview numbers: 129.

### WELS CATFISH Silurus glanis

**Bucket List status – result**

Not a fish anyone is going to struggle to identify. For starters, being a specialist introduced species, chances are you will be already well aware of its presence long before even thinking of putting a bait of any sort into the water.

An elongate fish with a proportionately tiny dorsal fin starting on a line close to the edge of the pectoral fin, and a long low profile uniform anal fin spanning around half of the fishes total body length leading up to a small rounded tail.

There are of course more obvious features. The eyes for example are particularly small, which for a nocturnal ambush predator is not a disadvantage. Then there are the barbels or whiskers around the mouth area. Wels catfish have six in total, the longest of which, located just in front of the eye, can stretch almost as far back as the end of the pectoral fin.

Colouration can be variable dependant on location, typically with some shade of green through to brown on the back becoming lighter underneath, with a hint of mottling possible in some specimens.

I am told there are in excess of five hundred waters currently dotted around the British Isles containing wels catfish, well up from the handful in the Bedfordshire area when I first became aware of the species as a bucket list target.

The majority of these are in England. Such is the level and spread of interest in the species. Yet its record has now been suspended by the British Record Fish Committee (BRFC).

Such is the arrogance of this organisation, who instead of being there to serve have become self-serving. Relict's from a bygone era. Meanwhile, the catfish scene suffers.......or does it.

Thinking about it, possibly not. Catfish enthusiasts will still go about their business of targeting large specimens. The only people who might suffer are some of the more reputable fishery owners as the whole catfish scene comes under closer scrutiny due to the shenanigans of a perhaps shadier side to the catfish scene.

The problem is that unlike in many of the warmer parts of Europe where there is a better food intake to growth conversion ratio, our catfish are unlikely to reach the hundred pound mark without a substantial dollop of help, which means that many big cat enthusiasts, either totally or in part, are spending their money elsewhere.

Having said that, a report in Angling Times dated July 2015 credits River Severn barbel angler Neil Bridges with a surprise catch of a 94 pound specimen taken during an over-night session. So not that far short of the magical target ton.

Allegedly, according to the BRFC, to counter the lack of home waters natural growth, and satisfy the demand for big cats, specimens were being smuggled into the country from abroad, with all the health risks and elitist opportunities that entails, which is hardly a new phenomenon.

You only have to look at the wider game and coarse fish record lists to see a whole array of imports. And as for smuggling and elitism, what about the carp and trout fishing scenes.

Big carp are regular targets for theft and smuggling, while monster trout have been grown on for years for introduction into waters at record sizes on days when only selected 'high value' anglers are invited in order to get maximum press coverage.

So either reinstate the wels catfish or suspend the others. We need consistency here, hopefully introduced by a committee more in touch with what anglers want instead of being dictated to by a bunch of bureaucrats, many of whom are completely out of touch.

To date, I have only ever fished for wels catfish on two occasions. The first was a visit to Spain. Unfortunately at the time when the Icelandic volcano saw air travellers all over Europe stranded.

I was over there for reasons other than fishing, but as we'd flown in to Barcelona, with Tortosa on the River Ebro en route to where I needed to be, a two night stopover was inserted into the itinerary for a couple of days guided boat fishing on the lower Ebro for catfish.

Unfortunately it was April, which is perhaps a bit on the early side anyway, and especially so that year, which followed quite a severe winter with snow melt still affecting water temperatures. It was so cold in fact that at the end of the first day of sitting frozen rigid and bite-less in a small boat, I nipped into town and bought myself some extra warm clothing.

The second day wasn't much better, though we did have a half hearted take on squid which eventually came to nothing, while close by I saw a cat being hauled in by another boat, and that was pretty much was it.

A complete, though in some ways not unexpected blank. Then there was the fiasco of getting back home by bus, train and ferry, which cost me a planned trip to fish the Baltic. But we made it back, eventually, and some weeks later, myself and Graeme Pullen were down at Boscastle dinghy fishing for porbeagle sharks.

That at least was the plan. Unfortunately, technical problems put paid to going offshore, so we spent a few days at Zyg Gregorek's Anglers Paradise instead, where amongst many excellent fish, I saw a few catfish in the thirty to forty five pound bracket caught.

Very impressive. So much so that I went back down to one of the lakes after dark fishing with a couple of twenty two mm halibut pellets on a hair rig, and within the hour I had my first and only wels catfish on the bank.

A mere fifteen pounder, but still big enough and strong enough to give me a few tense moments. Again, very impressive, and I can totally see why people become addicted to catching them.

One of those people is Simon Clark, who besides owning 'Tackle Up' in Fleet, Hampshire, is also secretary of the catfish conservation group, and is an out and out big catfish specialist. So, on a subsequent angling visit to Graeme Pullen's place just a few miles down the road from Fleet, I paid Simon a call to record a pre-planned audio interview on all things wels catfish, and in particular tackle and tactics for the home waters scene.

What surprisingly stuck in my mind from that conversation was his top bait recommendation, which was lobworms. Something I will most definitely be trying when next I visit a UK catfish water, a couple of which I've recently discovered are not too far away from me up here in Lancashire.

Associated audio interview numbers: 75.

### BULLHEAD CATFISH Ameiurus melas

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

I can't understand why anyone would want to go to the expense and effort of introducing this particular fish to the British Isles, when there are so many other more favourable, bigger growing, and harder fighting species to choose from.

The Environment Agency has been working hard to develop strategies and implement actions to eradicate unwelcome finned visitors to England and Wales which they see as being of high risk, and the American bullhead catfish is most definitely on that list.

So much so that EA fishery staff undertook a rapid response eradication operation at the only fishery in the country known to have the species, that being Lake Meadows Fishery at Billericay in Essex.

At the time of writing, the record is still shown as open for further claims, though that should change, which is academic anyway if the only known population in the country is no more. For that very reason therefore, identification information is irrelevant.

The only other comment to add is a brief account of my own personal experience of the species. A small, slimy, greedy little fish with a particularly sharp nasty spine at the start of each pectoral fin and the first dorsal fin, all of which combine to make handling something of a problem as I very quickly discovered.

I was fishing a small surface water collection pond at the rear of a Florida villa I stayed in. Using worms bought at Wal Mart, I'd fish for an hour or so every morning until everybody got up.

Under the float it would be a mix of bluegills, tilapia and bass, whereas on the bottom it was guaranteed bullhead catfish. The freshwater equivalent of catching dogfish all day when trying for better things back home at sea. Need I say any more.

### STONE LOACH Barbatula barbatula

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Not a species I've ever come across on rod and line. I've never seen one caught either, though obviously somebody catches them, hence the inclusion here. I have however caught quite a few in my hand net in some of the deeper streams when collecting sticklebacks for research. And for me, that pretty much sums the species up.

A fish of clean streams and rivers, and occasionally found around the margins of lakes, just so long as there is plenty of cover in the form of rocks to hide under or weed to tuck into.

A small, long, narrow fish with its eyes placed quite high up on the head to aid peering upwards from under stones on the lookout for predators.

Three pairs of barbels are present under the lower lip, one pair of which is situated at the corners of the mouth, obviously with just the one at each corner, which readily sets it apart from all other indigenous species. Well, almost.

There is a second similar though rarer species of loach known as the spined loach _Cobitus taenia_ which has a smaller head and three pairs of noticeably very much shorter barbels. It also has a sharp spine on its cheek just below the eye.

Stone loach can be quite variable in colour dependant on location, with yellowish brown to dark brown being the typical range, sometimes with blotches and also spots on the tail and pectoral fin.

In contrast, the spined loach is usually a much lighter colour with lines of spots along the flank and upper back as well as on the fins.

### BULLHEAD Cottus gobio

**Bucket List status – result**

A freshwater relative of the saltwater sea scorpions, this is a rather elongate little fish with a short first dorsal fin, immediately followed by a longer second dorsal fin leading to a rounded tail. The eyes of the bullhead, or millers thumb as it is also known, are situated quite high up on its flattened down head, suggesting a life style which involves looking upwards from cover, which in fact is the case.

Colouration and patterning is usually dark and dull with mottling to provide camouflage, sometimes taking the form of darker bars along the sides, again to help break up its outline and keep it hidden from predators, including birds.

Not a true anglers fish. Not even of value as a live or dead-bait, and not a fish most freshwater anglers will see on a regular basis unless fishing moderate flowing, well oxygenated bouldery streams or upland rivers, plus some reservoirs or lakes with a bouldery base, providing refuge for this often skittish little fish. And in those locations, if hook and bait sizes are small enough, it will feed quite readily.

### MINNOW Phoxinus phoxinus

**Bucket List status – result**

A small fish in which both the dorsal and the anal fin are noticeably rounded at their highest point. Other key features include very small scales and a lateral line that is incomplete, though shape, colouration, and markings are probably better key identifiers for anglers.

A narrow bodied little fish which is dark olive green to brown on the upper back, giving way to a lighter, often golden sheen from the mid flank downwards, with darker blotches along the mid to upper flanks, which may even present as stripes.

Even more impressive is the colouration of the male fish at spawning time, when all the different previously mentioned colours seem to become enhanced, with the addition of patches of red on the under belly, and black around the throat.

A common little fish in clean upland areas, both still-water and flowing, which from an angling perspective I don't think I need spend too much time on here.

That said, it is a fish which some freshwater anglers not only will have caught, but often will have deliberately caught, particularly in large lakes and streams such as in the Lake District where you can see them, catch them, then use then as small live-baits for perch and trout.

You frequently see them knocking about in the margins and quieter pools of rivers, where a small maggot or piece of worm will usually suffice, though quite why anyone would want to pursue them or any of the other smaller freshwater species for record purposes is beyond me.

### THREE SPINED STICKLEBACK Gasterosteus aculeatus

**Bucket List status – result**

With, as the name suggests, its three dorsal spines, the first two of which are tall, sharp, and well separated from the dorsal fin with a smaller third spine butted tight up to the front of it, plus another long sharp spine below forming the pelvic fin, this is not a fish likely to cause naming confusion. As such, all the other physical features become irrelevant.

More interesting is the fishes versatility in respect of habitat, which is the main reason why I chose the species for my Ph. D research, on account of its ability not only to survive, but to thrive in water quality ranging from pristine to grossly polluted, which for me was vital in establishing it's credentials as a sub-lethal indicator of environmental stress.

When I was investigating fish kill incidents with the Environment Agency, if sticklebacks showed up in the body count, then you knew you had something particularly serious to get to the bottom of.

Not only that, they can also survive in both brackish and totally marine environments. In fact, I once picked one out of a shrimp trawl off Ainsdale on Merseyside which is many miles from the nearest freshwater.

One of the standard questions I tend to ask in most of the audio interview recordings I do is for the interviewee to give us a flavour of how they got into fishing and their progression through to the present day.

Most will refer back to being young kids tiddler snatching in some local pond or stream, which invariably means catching sticklebacks. We've all done it, and in that regard, this is a species which carries with it a great deal of nostalgia.

I'm not sure if was my first fish, but I do recall an early days trip to a canal with my dad where a lone stickleback was the only catch of the day.

Little did I know that some fifty years on I would devote several years of my life both to catching and studying the species for my research, an account of which is given in Part 4.

So other than to say that tiny baits on small hooks in most ponds, lakes, and slow moving streams or rivers will ultimately produce sticklebacks, that's it.

Fortunately for my studies, electro-fishing and a small hand net were far more efficient at catching the numbers I required.

### PUMPKINSEED Lepomis gibbosus

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Another small and seemingly pointless American import for the British Record Fish Committee to look down upon, and one which worryingly, could end up doing quite well out of climate change.

A species, I personally haven't come across in home waters yet, but one which I may well have caught in Florida, where I had all sorts of weird and wonderful small bright coloured freshwater fish out of the pumpkinseed – bluegill mould.

Had I wanted to target this fish in the UK, then Tanyards Fishery in Sussex was the location I had in mind. However, on further investigation, I started finding other suggested locations dotted around here, there, and everywhere, all the way from Hampshire to Derbyshire, and Cambridge through to Somerset, which suggests to me that its threat as an invasive species is already well under-way.

Whether that's down to fishery owners stocking them, which is doubtful, or the irresponsibility of anglers spreading them, is not for me to say.

The world record stands at less than two pounds, and the British record under a pound, so what is the attraction here. Granted, they are highly colourful fish, but that's about all they have going for them.

Any easy fish to identify then, and certainly a fish which will stand out from the crowd, even if you don't know what it is, with its deep bodied perch-like profile, spiky first section to its dorsal fin followed by a softer section, and its ctenoid scales, which again like the perch have a dry rough feel to them, particularly when rubbed against the grain from tail to head.

But it's the colouration and patterning here that are key, which when compared to our indigenous species, is spectacular in the extreme.

The base colour can be anything from green or brown through to blue or even orange, with prominent vertical bars containing lots of spots. There can also be orange spots on the dorsal and anal fins too, plus the tail, in addition to a bright orange spot on the edge of a larger black spot on the gill cover, with blue lines radiating out from the eye on to the head, cheek, and gill cover.

**NOTE:** The remaining freshwater fish in both the record lists and on my bucket list are all game species. That is, fish with a small fleshy blob on their back just front of the tail known as an adipose fin. All home waters freshwater game fish species have this feature, and in freshwater, here in the British Isles at least, no other fish does.

Included in the adipose finned species is the grayling, which for some reason has been referred to as a coarse fish species in the past, not to mention how some purists continue to think of it today.

Another is the schelly, which though its record has been suspended by the BRFC because of its protected status, still appears in the coarse fish list, even though it doesn't belong there.

It isn't a coarse fish, and neither is the grayling, which for the moment at least is managing to maintain its current status in the game fish species list. So what follows are the adipose finned game fish species.

### ATLANTIC SALMON Salmo salar

**Bucket List status – result outside of home waters**

If my bucket list was based on DNA sampling, then the answer here would be yes, I have caught an Atlantic salmon in home waters. But it isn't, so pride won't let me do that.

A session spent dry fly fishing a pool on the River Hodder when a sudden hatch of olives brought the entire waters surface to life with hungry salmon par where it was virtually a fish a chuck isn't exactly what I had in mind for my entry into the world of salmon fishing success.

On the other hand, despite their humble size, it's a lot more salmon DNA than many dyed in the wool regular salmon enthusiasts fishing worms, lures, or flies produce in an entire season these days.

So if the 'real' salmon won't come to you, then you must go to them, which could mean one of many things, such digging deep to buy that trip of a lifetime (if you can get in) at the best time on one of the famed Scottish salmon beats, then crossing your fingers for river conditions to be right on the day, or a flight over to Iceland or even to Norway.

I decided to take the flight option, but not to Scandinavia. I have a friend, Sven Hille who lives at Rostock in what was a part of the old east Germany.

When the Berlin wall came down followed by reunification, former east Germans suddenly found themselves free to fish from boats, particularly where Sven lives close to the old border, where they had previously been restricted in case they tried to escape.

So like a lot of people in that area, he used the opportunity to buy himself a boat, from which he now specialises in the art of offshore deep water trolling.

Fishing this corner of the Baltic is covered in detail in Part 2 under the sub-heading Germany. To cut a long story short, Sven invited me over to compete with him in the annual trolling competition from Schaprode on the island of Rügen where he moors his boat.

That trip unfortunately fell apart due to the grounding of all European flights during the Icelandic volcanic ash fiasco of 2010, and had to be re-scheduled some weeks later in the company of Sven of course, and Christian Bruckmer.

By then it was pretty much the effective end of the trolling season, so we weren't expecting much. The weather also looked as though it was going to put a spanner in the works. Then suddenly, it changed. The sea flattened, the sun came out, and we were away with open access to all areas.

There is a complete video demonstration of how the trolling is done on YouTube. I have also recorded an audio interview with Sven covering the same topic and more.

With so much specialised kit and so many different elements taking place at the same time to cover the greatest range of lure placing options, to try to explain it here in words would be very difficult. It's one of those things you really do need to see first-hand by going to YouTube.

Working so many lures in that way in such a small volume of water is very impressive to say the least. Thankfully, salmon to over twenty pounds and sea trout well into double figures were equally impressed, allowing me to get my first proper salmon, the best of which weighed in at twenty two pounds.

On the way back to the caravan we were staying in one afternoon, Sven dropped the biggest sea trout in at a restaurant where we would be dining later that evening. And joining us there was a chap I'd seen down at the moorings boarding his own small boat called 'dorsch express', which translated into English means 'cod express'.

This turned out to be German International fly angler Ulrich Schneider who we'd previously seen coming back that afternoon with three salmon, the best of which was forty two pounds, all caught while trolling for pike on light tackle at the back of Hiddensee Island quite close to base. So much then for it being the tail end of the season.

Other boats also came ashore with stories and evidence of various mixes of salmon, smaller sea trout, pike and cod. Yes, cod. But the important thing here is that they weren't all private boats. Small, fast, guided boats offering exactly the same mix of fishing as Sven enjoys are also available, with spaces up for grabs even in the trolling competition.

Theoretically then, anybody could go over there and enjoy the same thing, which despite my views on sea trout as a species, and to get around the lack of salmon over here in home waters, would be something I would most strongly recommend.

For identification purposes, in the salmon, the tail is concave at the edge, or put another way, slightly forked, whereas that of the sea trout is square cut and straight. The 'wrist' or caudal peduncle just ahead of the tail also differs between these two similar looking fish.

In the sea trout this is broader, and when used as a gripping point to pick the fish up will usually see it slip free. Salmon on the other hand are narrower and therefore easier to pick up and grip in this way. Sea trout are also often heavily spotted, some of which extend down past the lateral line which is not the case with salmon.

The maxilla, which is the bony plate along the upper jaw, extends beyond the eye in sea trout, which again is not the case with salmon.

A scale count from the adipose fin down to the lateral line is also a potential pointer, though unfortunately, this number can over-lap between the pair, with ten to thirteen scales in the salmon, and thirteen to sixteen scales in the sea trout. Great if the result is clear cut, but of little value in its own right if it comes out at thirteen exactly.

Associated audio interview numbers: 66, 83, 95, 99. 107 and 155

### HUMP BACK SALMON Oncorhynchus gorbuscha

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

The smallest of the Pacific salmon species, humpback or pink salmon as they are also known, are one of the main bread and butter fish along the north east coast of the United States on into Canadian waters, where they are exceedingly common and popular as an angling sport fish.

Just what a specimen might be doing visiting the British Isles is anybodies guess, but visit us it has, or should I say, they have, as there have been a handful of authenticated reports from as far afield as Scotland and Cornwall over recent years, dating back to a specimen caught in a bag net in the Aberdeen area in 1960, and formally identified at Pitlochry, then later the British Museum.

Other isolated occurrences in Scottish waters have come from Montrose where one was commercially caught, and from the River Tweed where a specimen of 3 pounds 8¾ ounces was taken on rod line by Louis Hunter in 2007, a fish which holds the current British rod caught record.

Why this should be the record I'm not quite sure, as a four pound humpback taken by Ivan Harris in Cornwall's River Camel was officially identified by Environment Agency fishery staff.

On the basis of all that, you shouldn't really expect to see one in a river near you any time soon. But you can't completely rule out the possibility either, as Ivan Harris and Louis Hunter previously demonstrated, and more recently, a mini invasion in September 2015 also clearly shows.

A total of eight Humpbacks were caught by a mix of anglers and commercial fishermen along the east coast and in both the rivers Tyne and the Wear. The suspicion is that a massive breeding program conducted by the Russians some 40 years ago led to vagrants first finding their way to Norway, then Iceland, and now appear to be crossing the North Sea to Britain's east coast. So watch this space.

Fortunately, a fish which when it runs into freshwater with spawning on its mind is likely to assume a physical appearance that will immediately catch the eye. Particularly the males which develop that characteristic hump below the dorsal fin, accompanied by a very prominent kype with teeth.

Both sexes change colour from metallic green with silver sides and a pinkish hue while at sea, to a much darker livery when in spawning condition, with the males also showing red and even yellow on their flanks.

Both sexes also have large oval spots on both tail flukes, which is said to be a key distinguishing feature between humpbacks and other Pacific species. Not that we are likely to have that sort of identification problem. With that in mind, Atlantic salmon typically have nine rays in their anal fin, whereas humpbacks have at least fourteen.

### BROWN TROUT Salmo trutta

**Bucket List status – result**

Theoretically, a very straight forward fish to identify. The one potential area where confusion might creep in would be amongst novices on small still-water fisheries where rainbow trout invariably dominate.

Unlike brown trout, rainbow trout have uniform small dark spots, which not only cover their back and sides, but also extend onto and cover their entire tail and dorsal fin, along with a characteristic pink band along the mid flank area.

Wild brown trout, more so than hatchery reared specimens, are beautiful fish to look at, with greenish brown backs becoming lighter on the sides, which certainly in Cumbrian tarn fish are golden yellow from the mid flank region down underneath their belly, are heavily covered with red and black spots on their back and flanks, sometimes appearing to have a lighter ring around them.

Brown trout are our indigenous trout species, and as such we should expect to find them everywhere. In that regard, they are actually more widely distributed than many people realise, more of which later.

Unfortunately, because they are more difficult to hatchery rear and grow on than rainbow trout, on top of which they are also often harder to catch, this tends not to endear them to small still-water fishery owners and many of the anglers frequenting such waters.

Yes, most anglers are happy to catch a nice brown trout, and on some waters there is a policy of compulsory release to maintain stock levels and availability. But the species is always a bit part player or support act. Never, or rarely there in the starring role.

There are a few exceptions here, both in general numbers terms and fish sizes, Kielder Water and Dever Springs respectively being good examples of each. Otherwise, the rainbow trout dominates the home patch still-water scene, because they are cheaper to rear, easier to catch, and grow on more quickly, which is a real shame.

Rearing brown trout for anglers, particularly for re-stocking or stock enhancement in rivers has a potential environmental down-side too, the main aspect of which is genetic integrity. Is it right to allow gene pool dilution with traits brought in from elsewhere between fish that have over time become specifically adapted to a particular environment and those that haven't.

It's one of those debates that has combatants on both sides. On some rivers, gene mixing historically reaches so far back in time that it would be a legitimate question to ask, what is the real genetic make up of the so-called indigenous population anyway.

Personally, I'm neither for nor against it. There are sound arguments on both sides. Fortunately, as a dyed in the wool sea angler, most of these are allowed to go right over my head.

I hinted earlier that brown trout are probably more widespread and therefore more available to catch than a lot of anglers think, and for that statement I dip into a couple of audio interviews I recorded with Dr. Paul Gaskell of the Trout In The Town project, and Mike Weaver MBE of the Wild Trout Trust, who between them discuss the subject at both extremities of the fishes distribution.

The Wild Trout Trust does a lot of work with small upstream stretches and wild fish populations, often located well away from urban and industrial inputs.

Paul Gaskell's work on the other hand, as the project implies, takes him right into the thick of the urban jungle, where the objective is to make urban and metropolitan environments attractive to brown trout, then make them accessible to anglers.

In many ways, both directly and indirectly, the two organisations are inter-linked. For once water quality issues are addressed by organisations like the Environment Agency and are not only brought up to an acceptable standard, but maintained at that standard, invertebrates and fish will very quickly respond and recolonise them.

A prime example of this is the River Mersey which I worked on with the National Rivers Authority during the 1990's. A time period when you would have struggled to find a worse example of historical pollution in Europe, and where it took a lot of people plus a lot of effort to peel back the many layers of indifference and neglect.

Like the often used onion analogy, you remove one layer only to find another and another. But eventually you get down to core, and within thirteen years, the Mersey went quite literally from running sewer to running salmon coming in from the seaward end, while at the same time, coarse fish and brown trout from isolated residual pockets in the higher reaches were able to penetrate downstream.

So it can be done. But in the case of the Trout In The Town project, local residents and businesses also need to be on-board, and stop seeing rivers and their banks as natural free dumping grounds.

Local anglers too by pressing for better access, with schools also getting in on the act by promoting a wider understanding of the aquatic environment.

After recording the interview with Paul on the banks of the River Irwell near Bury, we headed back to the car park where he donned his waders, got out his tackle bag, and prepared to grab an hour fishing.

The Irwell, despite being a vastly improved river, in places looked at best a tricky venue to fish due to the many huge boulders and rapid sections surrounded by tall trees. But one which I was assured had enough small pools containing enough small trout to demonstrate how urban angling can work.

Central to this was the technique of tenkara fishing, which by coincidence I'd recently been given a full demonstration of by Tenkara UK director, the late Mike Roden, on the upper River Ribble. We were shooting a demo video for his website and for YouTube which we followed up with an audio recording, after which I was given a tenkara rod to use and practise the lessons learned.

Unfortunately, not knowing we were about to embark on an urban trout tenkara session, I didn't have it with me. So I watched Paul picking his way up river from pool to pool enjoying a spot of wild trout fishing that was open to everyone. And therein lies one of the fundamentals of the Trout In The Town project.

Accessibility and appreciation for anyone and everyone wanting to grab an hour or so say at lunch time, or after work, which is where fly fishing, and in particular tenkara fly fishing comes in to its own.

Tenkara rods are telescopic. Perfect for struggling through town centre crowds, accessing difficult locations, and fishing small urban waters. Fly fishing also means not having to prepare bait. Everything you need can be there ready at the drop of a hat.

There is no back casting to be done either in tight or difficult situations, as tenkara is the fly fishing equivalent of coarse match pole fishing, with the line attached to the rod end via an elasticated link.

Switching attention to the Wild Trout Trust now, this organisation mainly, though not exclusively, works at the other extremity to the urban trout projects, by dealing with prospective enthusiasts and customers who sometimes shy away from this type of organisation on the grounds that these upland waters tend to be for rich syndicates, and only ever contain small fish, which is both correct and incorrect at the same time.

Many small rivers and streams on places like Dartmoor and in the Lake District are populated by smaller fish on account of the often nutrient poor status of that type of environment. But not all. There can be some surprisingly good fish in these waters too, with three pounders not unheard of.

Yes, they are a challenge requiring small natural 'match the hatch' patterns. Wild fish always are, and big wild fish don't grow to those proportions by being reckless in their feeding.

As regards syndicates or other restrictions on access, recognising this, the Wild Trout Trust can help with information on day tickets and free fishing, such as in many of the Cumbrian lakes, tarns, and streams, for example, which are the kind of place I regularly enjoy myself.

Although I do fly fish specifically for brown trout such as with the quality back-end sport to be had on lures while boat fishing the reedy marginal areas on Draycote, and have taken brown trout on the fly to well over six pounds from some of the smaller still waters too, plus ferox trout in excess of fifteen pounds on trolled dead-baits, my favourite brown trout fishing has, and always will be, Red Tarn at the base of Striding Edge on the final ascent up to Helvellyn peak.

Initially I was drawn to this small water filled glacial corrie by the prospects of catching a schelly, something we have done there on a number of occasions. But very quickly, as with many other wild locations all around the country, the quality and beauty of the brown trout this water also contains very quickly became apparent, and more than worth the two hour slog up 'the hill' from Glenridding.

It's just a pity that the tarn is so isolated, so nutrient poor, and so cold for much of the time that you never see fish taking food from the top. There possibly are times when hatches of small insects are blown on to its surface, but I've never witnessed it. So it's bait fishing I'm afraid, compensated for by the most beautifully marked fin perfect brown trout you are ever likely to witness anywhere.

Before closing, I'd like also to touch on 'other types' of brown trout. Currently, these are all classed scientifically as _Salmo trutta_. This is a very plastic species in the sense that it is highly variable at a number of levels to the point where some would argue that full species separation, or at least sub-speciation, has already taken place.

A prime example of this is the ferox trout, a term first coined by renowned angler Sir William Jardine in 1835. Similarly, some of the other large cannibalistic variations found in a number of the larger Irish Loughs.

RN Campbell (1979) offered a definition of ferox trout as being a long lived, late maturing, piscivorous brown trout, which in Britain and Ireland are often present in large, deep, glacier formed lakes containing arctic char or whitefish species.

Following a wide range of scientific observations and studies, others also see ferox as a separate species, with the name _Salmo ferox_ being suggested. I often think back to a statement made by Ferox 85 co-founder and author of the excellent book Ferox Trout, Ron Greer, who in an audio interview we did together said that in his opinion, all ferox trout are brown trout, but not all brown trout are ferox trout.

So make of that what you will. For me the jury is still out. But it isn't with regard to the sea trout, plus the slob trout, lake trout, and river trout from the Irish record fish list, all of which are little more than variations on the plasticity of _Salmo trutta_ , none of which deserve separate status, either in the record list, my bucket list, or for that matter any other list.

Associated audio interview numbers: 9, 15, 105, 125 and 130.

### SEA TROUT Salmo trutta

**Bucket List status – result**

As this is the same species as the brown trout discussed above, let me refer you to that account for precise identification information if required. As will become apparent, I don't subscribe to separate inclusion here, but then again, that's just my opinion.

The one concession I will make is a detailed look at separating sea trout from salmon, if only for the case of being able to correctly put a tick against the Atlantic salmon.

In the salmon, the tail is concave at the edge, or put another way, slightly forked, whereas that of the sea trout is square cut and straight. The 'wrist' or caudal peduncle just ahead of the tail also differs.

In the sea trout this is broader, and when used as a gripping point to pick the fish up will usually see it slip free. Salmon on the other hand are narrower, and therefore easier to pick up in this way. Sea trout are also often heavily spotted, some of which extend down past the lateral line, which is not the case with salmon.

The maxilla, which is the bony plate along the upper jaw, extends beyond the eye in sea trout, which again is not the case with salmon.

A scale count from the adipose fin down to the lateral line is also a potential pointer, though unfortunately, this number can over-lap between the pair, with ten to thirteen scales in the salmon, and thirteen to sixteen scales in the sea trout. Great if the result is clear cut, but of little value in its own right if it comes out at thirteen exactly.

If the bucket list was a roll call of names based on DNA sampling, then we wouldn't even be discussing the sea trout here. It's an artificial classification without any basis in science, put there simply to appease some anglers.

In every way imaginable it contravenes the rules (yet again) that the British Record Fish Committee have set for themselves, because so called sea trout are nothing more than one sub section of the brown trout population which for whatever reason has decided to run to the sea to feed, later returning to freshwater to spawn in the same way that salmon do.

If this distinction can be justified, then why not do the same for ferox trout which live many times longer than 'conventional' brown trout, don't breed as regularly, are reported as breeding true, and have a completely different diet based on small shoaling fish species such as char.

Some academics even support the idea of ferox being a distinct species. They are certainly more distantly removed from the classic brown trout than the sea trout is.

So let's see some consistency here. Or better still, for recording purposes, just list _Salmo trutta_ regardless of migratory, none migratory, or cannibalistic tendencies.

No doubt game fishing purists will disagree. If it were down to me, I wouldn't even be mentioning the species here, but feel compelled to do so out of completeness, because it is listed as a separate inclusion by the British, Irish and Scots, while in the Welsh list the slot is shown as vacant and open to claims.

Fortunately I once caught one while trolling for char on Coniston, so I'm covered either way.

### RAINBOW TROUT Oncorhynchus mykiss

**Bucket List status – result**

Because of the way things are on the home still-water game fishing scene, more often than not these days, identification comes down to a straight choice between brown and rainbow trout, which on a number of fronts makes for some very straight forward name tagging.

There are many points of difference you could look for, such as the base colouration, and pink sheen on the mid flank region of the rainbow trout, and most critically in both cases, their markings.

Rainbow trout for example have many small quite tightly packed black spots, whereas brown trout have fewer but larger black and red spots over a more yellowish to golden background, particularly in wild fish. The clincher however is the presence of spots over the entire tail, which rainbow trout have and which brown trout lack.

Both species are regularly bred as triploid fish, which as I will explain in due course, is important on a couple of fronts in having both a quality comprehensive rainbow trout fishery, and for the brown trout in maintaining genetic integrity when stocked hatchery reared fish are put into certain rivers.

The intensive aspect of rainbow trout breeding and rearing which has facilitated today's still-water trout scene boom, actually originated in Denmark, and was introduced to Britain some time during the 1950's.

The big problem back then was that when these fish were later reared for release into angling waters rather than going straight to the table, at breeding time, they would darken up and look grotty, which put a lot of people off.

This actually was a double problem, because two slightly different strains of rainbow trout were brought to the UK from America - the Kamloops, and the Shasta, both of which unfortunately coloured up at different times of the year.

This was eventually sorted out by manipulating their normally diploid eggs. These contain two sets of chromosomes, one of which is eventually ejected but can be 'persuaded' to stay put by gentle heat and pressure treatment, so that when the sperm, which itself contains one set of chromosomes, enters the egg to fertilize it, instead of it developing with the usual two sets, it ends up with all three, producing fish that are unable to reproduce, resulting in the clean, healthy, even faster growing sexless triploid trout used almost exclusively today.

It has to be said that rainbow trout are to no small extent the bimbo's of the freshwater scene. Attractive, stupid, and often way too easy to catch. Certainly they have become more attractive since the wider use of triploids eliminated the need for anglers to see those sad dark looking early season diploid fish going through their annual pre-programmed ritual of trying to breed.

Living in a three dimensional world, and sometimes pre-occupied to the extreme in their feeding adding accurately 'matching the hatch' to the list of potential angling problems, there are days when, not to put too fine a point on it, you could be forgiven for thinking them impossible fish to catch.

Then on other days, such as a visit I made one early season with Dave Devine to Arnfield reservoir in the Peak District, when standing side by side, we knocked out one hundred and six rainbows using anything you cared to throw at them over the duration of a four hour ticket.

Dave had many fish more than I had. Unable to stand it any longer, I packed up somewhere in the forties. But you couldn't call that pleasure. Sure, we all want to catch well, but that was akin to punishment. No challenge, no respite, and no energy left to be bothered with another throw.

So two extreme and opposite examples, with of course, a complete mosaic of situations in-between, ranging from small over stocked scrapes in the ground to huge public service reservoirs looking like vast inland seas.

The important thing here is that the introduction of rainbow trout as a fast growing, easily produced, not too fussed alternative to our indigenous brown trout, has not only paved the way to inclusion and expansion by bringing affordable fly fishing opportunities to the masses, but because of hatchery reared triploids, year round fly fishing too, and regardless of earlier jibes, the species has to be applauded for that.

My introduction to rainbow trout fishing came through seeing an early season advertisement in the angling press for an any method competition at Ffestiniog reservoir in North Wales, which was being operated as a recirculation hydro-electricity plant.

Keen to make fuller use of the facility, the Welsh electricity generators piled in loads of dark coloured diploid rainbow trout, which unfortunately was the norm back in the 1970's, then let everybody loose to do as they pleased for the next few hours.

Competitions have never been my scene, even at sea. But sometimes they can be a means to an end in opening up situations which might otherwise not be available. After all, despite being registered as a competitor, you don't actually have to compete.

For me Ffestiniog was one such an occasion. In the first six casts from the rocks just below where water coming down the mountain entered the lake, I took five fish on a silver mepps spinner from a peg, which while it was chosen at random, couldn't have been better suited to finding early season diploid fish which running water always seems to attract.

Not exactly the most auspicious start to what would evolve into quite an avid fly fishing career, but a launching pad none the less that would soon have me learning to cast, studying freshwater invertebrate biology, and travelling the country to fish many trout fisheries both large and small.

This included all the big midland reservoirs, plus the gin clear chalk stream fed fisheries of Hampshire such as Dever Springs and Avington with Graeme Pullen to shoot a couple of trout fishing video's for YouTube, where I was introduced to the art of selectively stalking individual big fish.

My intention here is not to explore the various facets and techniques generally of fly fishing for rainbow trout. There are many excellent books and video's out there done by real experts that will make a far better job of it than I could ever hope to do. That's not what this book is all about.

My mission here is to recount specific experiences, observations, and personal opinions on a take them or leave them basis, offered as an unapologetic bout of self-indulgence, and as such, my next piece of recall involves an encounter with Birmingham angler/tackle dealer Terry Eustace, followed by an angling visit to Esthwaite near Hawkshead in Cumbria.

Terry was doing a promotional talk pushing Berkley tackle which he was importing from the USA at the time. Amongst a wide variety of Berkley products handed out at the end of the presentation, I remember in particular being given two items. One was a floating fly line, which I have to say, having owned and tried pretty much all the big name brands up to that time, was the best I have ever used.

You could screw it up in your hand and immediately it went straight again like soft string. It had absolutely no memory at all. Perfect for keeping a tight line rather than having a series of kinks across the water surface as is so often the case when using a figure eight retrieve.

In complete contrast, the other handout goodie was a small jar of synthetically produced bright orange 'plasticine' like dough called Power Bait, which Terry made me promise I would use and report back on, otherwise I wasn't going to be allowed to take it away.

Not so much with Power Bait in mind as just fancying an easy day trout fishing on the tail end of a long, cold, hard winter's cod fishing, Dave Devine and I decided to take a run up to Esthwaite, which at that time was an any method fishery where we could just laze about on a small headland next to the car, bait fishing with our little cooker producing hot brews and bacon butties. A nice relaxing day out.

We were legering worm tipped off with sweetcorn popped up just off the bottom in conjunction with monkey-climber bite indicators, and very quickly, we each had our limit and were at the stage of putting fish back, when I came across the Berkley Power Bait in the bottom of my bag.

Despite my earlier promises to Terry Eustace, sub-consciously I think, I'd been avoiding using it. It looked ridiculous, it was artificial, and to my mind it was never going to catch fish. But, a promise is a promise. So I buried the hook inside a small ball of the stuff and out it went, then immediately found myself struggling to get the bite indicator set-up on the line wondering why it wouldn't settle down, little realising that a trout had picked up the bait within seconds of it going in.

So I wound in for another cast, only to find that I was into a fish. A pattern that was to go on and on and on all day. So hectic was it in fact that other anglers were coming over to see what I was doing so right in light of their meagre efforts, which resulted in me handing out blobs of the stuff, and instantly they were into fish too. It was ridiculous.

Shortly afterwards I was out on an assignment with a very famous and very capable fly angler doing a feature for Still Water Trout Magazine. It was a freezing cold bright sunny day up in the hills somewhere, where for £1 million, you honestly could not have bought a bite.

Finally, in sheer desperation, we took a smear of Power Bait and rubbed it onto the fly. Not so you could see it, but enough to give it 'flavour', and had three rainbow trout out in front of the camera in no time at all.

So, gob smacked by those two preliminary results, I went back up to Esthwaite to try it again, only to find that the other lads I'd given samples to had been out bought some, cleaned up, and it was now banned.

Back to the fly fishing. As you might have guessed, I've tried pretty much everything there is to try on that score, which is good in the sense that it affords you the privilege of being able to objectively make mental comparisons and form firm opinions regarding favoured techniques.

Top of my list for small waters is without doubt buzzer fishing on a nice warm overcast early summer morning or evening when the trout are mopping them up for fun.

Days when you can see ripples and bulges all over the surface, then placing your buzzer smack in the middle of it all and waiting for that sudden swishing noise as the line suddenly tightens sending water droplets into the air. From confident anticipation to adrenalin pumping action in less than the blink of an eye. Amazing stuff.

On the larger waters however, it has to be boat fishing doing one of three things. First off there is the general water coverage approach of drifting with the drogue out loch style fishing down the wind onto a lee shore with a team of flies, using whatever line is required on the day, actively looking for fish.

An excellent none specific approach which my fishing buddy and avid competition angling friend Ian Gaskell taught me. This is closely followed by fry feeding time on Draycote with sunken fry patterns, and finally, fishing some of the calmer bays on Rutland, also at fry feeding time using a suspender minkie, again with Ian Gaskell, out in the boat.

Floating minkie fishing is a bit like up-rated suspender buzzer fishing, where quiet patient anticipation again turns instantly into heart thumping action with visible takes at the surface.

Finally, despite having put a lot of time, money, and effort into rainbow trout fishing, I have to ask the question, should they be here at all. I say that not as someone who would like to see them go, but rather, in light of the British Record Fish Committee's known desire to see all none indigenous species not only removed from the record list, but also from the country.

That would include not only the rainbow trout, but amongst others, wels catfish, zander, and carp. Four species of fish which both the commercial fishery management industry and the tackle trade could quite literally ill afford to lose.

The likelihood of it ever happening to any, never mind all of them, it has to be said, is remote. It has already been tried with the zander in the form of an unsuccessful cull, though in the case of the rainbow trout, this they say could be achieved simply by a ban on re-stocking.

Or could it. After all, there are locations where escapee diploid rainbow trout from the pre-triploid era have somehow managed to set up small self-sustaining populations, one of which I came across over in Yorkshire.

It was another planned visit for a Still Water Trout Magazine feature with the same team as the Power Bait incident mentioned earlier. I can't honestly remember the name of the fishery, but it was way out in the sticks set in a picturesque valley, and I was fishing a shallow corner of the lake tight up to some reeds where I caught several half pound or less rainbows, which the fishery owner said were all wild fish.

So, if ever the BRFC do manage to enforce their alien species removal policy, the knock on effect to my bucket list would zero, as I have already caught wild rainbow trout here in home waters.

Associated audio interview numbers: 9, 12 and 78.

### AMERICAN BROOK TROUT Salvelinus fontinalis

**Bucket List status – result**

Like the rainbow trout, the american brook trout is a trans-Atlantic import. But unlike the rainbow trout, despite the implication in the name, it isn't actually a trout. It's a char, a fact readily picked out by the red under belly and lower fins at spawning time, and more especially by the white leading edge to the pectoral, pelvic and anal fins, and the lower fluke of the tail. A fish also characterised by having a noticeably large mouth.

Colouration is typically dark green to brown on the back and flanks, with a very distinctive marbled or mottled patterning comprised of lighter colours. This extends onto the dorsal fin and can be present on the tail.

A fish introduced to Britain as far back as 1869, and first recorded on rod and line a few years later in 1876, but one which only really took off in popularity when rainbow trout fishing caught on, opening fly fishing up to the masses in the 1960's and 1970's.

When I first started visiting small still-water fly fisheries, american brook trout, along with sterile hybrid cheetah trout which are a brook trout x rainbow trout cross, and tiger trout which are a brook trout x brown trout cross, seemed to be available everywhere. Yet these days there doesn't seem to be much if any interest in the trio at all.

The reason for this as I see it is that fishery managers are not too keen on investing money in stock fish they are unlikely to readily see coming out and earning their keep with the same level of ease as the more universally popular rainbow trout, particularly at times of recession and austerity. A case there of investment without any balanced level of return.

Brookies, when they go into a water, tend to head straight for the bottom and sulk. The knock on effect of this is a lack of interest in them from people buying day tickets. Anglers would probably enjoy catching them, but are unlikely to do so easily enough for them to be a consideration rather than just an occasional welcome bonus.

So adding them to a fisheries stocking policy merely adds in extra expense with no pull back in terms of attracting extra anglers, many of whom are just not interested. And of those that might be, most won't go to the trouble of hugging the bottom with big gaudy lures day in and day out in the half hope of picking up an odd brookie, when there are plenty of other more obliging hard fighting fish around to catch.

There are still a few small still-water fisheries dotted around the country stocking them, plus a few hatcheries rearing them for stocking and for the table, along with cheetah or tiger hybrids when requested.

A quick trawl on the Internet should throw up a list of which fisheries to target. A list that is likely to change over time, for which reason it isn't worth discussing it any further here. But generally, for the reasons given, interest in them does seem to have waned.

That said, if all fisheries stopped stocking them, theoretically the species would die out over here, and as would also be the case with the rainbow trout, that you would think would be the end of that. But again, like the rainbow trout, this isn't entirely true.

At most fisheries they would eventually become extinct. However, at a handful, particularly a few running water locations in the north of England, parts of Scotland, and at least one in Wales, escapees have established small self-sustaining wild populations, which while they might not successfully breed every year, do so with enough regularity to maintain an established, albeit small and rather localised resident inclusion to the local fauna.

So again, as with the rainbow trout, quite where this fact places the species in the minds of the British Record Fish Committee with its opposition to alien species, their total removal, and record list suspensions is far from clear.

There is a national record still for cultivated american brook trout, while the 'natural' slot, which escapee breeding populations could fill, is open to claims with no minimum qualifying weight.

Fortunately I caught mine at a time when there were plenty about, taking a small one at Foremark reservoir right at the start of my fly fishing journey, followed later by others at Twin Lakes in Lancashire, which produced more than a few decent specimens before it unfortunately closed down.

### GRAYLING Thymallus thymallus

**Bucket List status – result**

Not your typical salmonid species, but on closer inspection the link is there thanks to that small fleshy blob on the back just in front of the tail known as the adipose fin. A beautiful looking fish with a slightly under-shot mouth, which is one of the reasons why hooking them can at times be difficult.

Giving the identity game away here is the dorsal fin which is both tall and long, with rows of blue, red, and black spots. The back and upper flanks are silvery grey and covered with small black flecks, and like the schelly, the skin and flesh have a faint odour of cucumber or thyme, the latter being the source of its scientific name _Thymallus thymallus_.

In Grayling circles, I have to say that I am possibly one of the most privileged freshwater anglers in the UK. The River Avon at Durrington in the shadow of Stone Henge in Wiltshire, is a classic fly fishing water where to get a rod you have to wait for someone to die. Quite literally a case of stepping into dead-men's shoes.

This is the purist game anglers crème de la crème. The stretch where the legendary Frank Sawyer developed and perfected his famous upstream nymphing technique, then went on to tutor the equally distinguished late great Oliver Kite.

There is even a bend in the river named after him – Sawyers Bend, where reputedly he loved to practise his art.

Imagine then not only getting an invite to fish this famous beat, but for one day only, an offer to Graeme Pullen and myself of the entire stretch to ourselves to fish without restrictions, including the use of maggots which we could also loose feed and fish under a balsa bodied avon float for grayling and anything else that might come our way, which included some beautiful brown trout, roach, and excellent dace, plus of course a good sprinkling of grayling.

A once in a lifetime opportunity which also included trotting our floats down through Sawyers Bend. Even now I have to pinch myself to be sure it wasn't a dream, confirmed by watching the YouTube video we put together entitled 'The Upper Avon'. The Grayling there weren't huge, but what the hell. It doesn't get any better than that.

That wasn't the first time I had caught grayling. Funnily enough, my introduction to the species was almost on the same sort of level as our day on the upper Avon.

Back in the early 1980's I struck up a correspondence based friendship with grayling specialist John Roberts who lived over on the other side of the Pennines from me at York. I was heavily into in-situ photography of freshwater invertebrates at the time, and John being a renowned fly tier, we just sort of hit it off.

The upland rivers over that side, as well as on the Lancashire side, are excellent grayling country. But being a sea angler, I hadn't got the first clue how to go about fishing for them, or where. So one very cold day shrouded in freezing fog, Brian Douglas and I made the trip across the tops to meet up with John and Richard I'Anson to fish the River Ure if my memory serves me well.

Quite a narrow river with a mix of slow and fast water glides which grayling seem to favour, and as with the Avon, trotting maggots through the swims under a float, which in itself was quite an achievement to someone more used to lobbing out a six ounce lead down tide of a small boat for cod.

It was absolutely freezing. One of those days when, despite how well it went, and it went exceptionally well, it was good to be back in the car for the long drive home, with bright red faces struggling to stay awake as the heater blasted out at full bore.

That is the grand sum total of my grayling experience. Limited in the extreme, but in some respects to be envied I'm sure. So it would be foolish of me to say anything regarding tactics for grayling. What I can do however is have an opinion on other related matters and offer that instead.

These are magnificent fish. They fight well, are obliging both on bait and on the fly, and offer themselves as a worthy challenge for those times when other game fish species are for reasons of spawning seasons, off limits.

Why then are they so blatantly looked down upon in the way that they are, and why are they still classed in some circles as coarse fish. True, they spawn at the same time as coarse fish, which is what allows them to be fished for when trout and salmon are seasonally off limits, and at any time at all in Scotland where coarse fish have no close season at all.

At the same time, they possess an adipose fin which makes them a salmonid species. Yet on the southern chalk streams where they are regarded as vermin, they were regularly removed by all means possible and knocked on the head, supposedly to improve the brown trout prospects, though this has been shown not to be the case. An attitude that has only recently started to change thanks to persuasive pressure from the grayling society.

### CHAR Salvelinus alpinus

**Bucket List status – result**

Because char in the British Isles present themselves as stunted relict populations confined to deeper cooler lakes, identification gets a bit of a kick start here by virtue of the fact that only certain waters contain them, all of which, except for perhaps a few in the wilds of Scotland, are already known.

Elsewhere, particularly to the south of Cumbria, except for a couple of populations in the Snowdonia region of Wales, they simply aren't present, unless introduced as a novelty by still-water fly fishery owners which does happen from time to time.

Under normal circumstances then, in natural situations, identification is a case of is the fish a brown trout or is it a char. Wild trout with their golden flanks and black and red spots rule themselves out immediately. In breeding livery, char are bright vermilion red on their belly up on to their lower flanks.

This fades gradually once the spawning period is over, leaving the fish a dark greenish grey on the back and flanks, with a generous covering of pinkish white spots. The clincher however are the pectoral, pelvic and anal fins, all of which are very obviously red in colour with a prominent white stripe along their leading edge.

When I was a kid, I saved up my pocket money and bought myself a copy of the Observers Book Freshwater Fishes. In it was this mystical species, the arctic char, which at that time was thought to be around one hundred and forty or so separate species, one for each of the different lakes around the British Isles known to contain them.

As you'll see from reading elsewhere in this book, I don't have a lot of time or respect for the British Record Fish Committee as a collective, though I do have for certain individuals on the committee, not the least of which it's chairman Mike Heylin.

To their credit however, the BRFC was responsible (in part at least) for having a closer look at this ridiculous char speciation situation, and for once taking a common sense decision by lumping all the so-called different species together under the single heading of _Salveninus alpinus_ , the arctic char, and rightly so.

Although there are both physical as well as spawning differences between populations, these has come about purely through geographical isolation since the parent stock stopped running back to the sea as their Arctic cousins to the north of Britain still do.

In the British Isles they were prevented from undertaking these migrations by elevated temperatures several thousand years ago after the glaciers retreated, leaving both char and whitefish stranded as post glacial relict's in the cooler water still available below the thermocline in deep glacial ribbon lakes which thermally stratify during the warmer summer months.

So we're talking here of slight differences brought about by adaptation, and not a hundred and forty or so different char species initially running the rivers of Britain and Ireland, with one ending up in each different lake.

This however doesn't mean that given more time, these differences won't become more pronounced leading perhaps to sub-speciation, or eventually even full species separation, as evidenced by the effects of geographical isolation elsewhere in the world driven on by evolutionary adaptation.

If that is, UK char can manage to survive the current increase in global temperatures, plus creeping urbanisation, the result of which is often eutrophication or nutrient enrichment, adding extra pressure to populations already teetering on the brink.

A lot of work has been done, and continues to be done, in completing an accurate representation of char as a species in the British Isles. Splits within populations in terms of feeding and breeding strategies are constantly being discovered, particularly in Scotland by scientists working at the Fascally lab near Pitlochry, one of whom, and a friend of mine, was ferox trout specialist and char researcher Ron Greer before he retired.

A good practical example of this comes from the southern most English Lakes of Windermere and Coniston, which are currently in Cumbria, but when I first fished them for char back in the early 1970's, were still a part of Lancashire until we had them stolen from us in the 1974 county boundary reorganisation. In fact, some of the older char fishermen at Coniston still regard themselves as Lancashire folk, but that's another story.

The char in Coniston spawn in deep water in the early spring, while elsewhere in Cumbria they are autumn spawners at the mouths of small shallow rivers. All that is except for Windermere, which for some inexplicable reason has populations of both spring and autumn spawning char.

So you can see how complicated this is, and how far from being completely understood lake dwelling arctic char as a collection of discrete populations are here in the British Isles is, which strongly impacts on angling in terms of where you can find them, and when you can fish for them.

My first encounters with char were at Windermere around the Low Wood area. This looks out onto some very deep water within shore casting range and used to turn up quite a few pound plus fish early season to anglers fishing worm on the bottom for brown trout.

Unfortunately, there were never a lot caught. So I turned my attention to Coniston, where a chap I worked with said he knew 'X marks the spot' for catching numbers of char, particularly if fished for from a boat, which I just happened to have.

The spot in question was the Brantwood headland on the eastern shore, which had both incredibly deep water close in and a small stream cutting across it where the char would come to spawn in March.

Being green, we didn't fully appreciate the spawning side of things back then, even though all the fish we caught were beautifully coloured up with crimson red bellies. That was the way they were shown in books, and as far as we were concerned, that was how they always looked.

So, using a big bag of rocks to anchor the boat in the soft bed substrate just beyond shore casting range, we would catch dozens of the things on small hooks and paternoster rigs with either pieces of worm or caddis grubs as bait.

Not nearly so well though as some of the more unscrupulous elements fishing with maggots, both on the hook and fed in as freebies, which due to the trout being in season from mid-March onwards and the coarse fish being out of season, was a banned bait.

As soon as a bailiff in a boat came anywhere near, the maggots all went over the side and the evidence was gone. Later in the day, these people would then hawk the fish around the local hotels.

Is it any wonder then that the powers that be both sought, and were granted, a change in the season for catching char to open on the first of May, curing at a stroke the cropping of spawning fish, which to an extent I suppose I was guilty of doing myself without realising it. It needed to be done, and thank goodness it was.

This pretty much brought about the total extinction of char angling at the lake, with just myself and a few die hard friends keeping the practise alive. But no longer with the bait fishing techniques of old.

May the first was a date chosen because it was assumed that by that stage, all the char in Coniston had completed their breeding. This would see them off the spawning beds with a more general distribution across the lake, and would therefore render bait fishing pretty much ineffective, which has proved to be the case.

A new strategy then had to be found, which we took from the traditional plumb-line commercial char fishermen who I spent time with, watching and chatting, then adapting their approach to suit conventional rod and line fishing.

Plumb-line fishing employs a large bamboo cane out-rigger from each side of a boat which is slowly rowed over the deeper parts of the lake. Each pole can work as many as a dozen spinners spread out up the heavy main line which is weighted by a couple of pounds of lead to give good water column coverage.

To better understand the technique, I spent a day with Coniston based plumb-lining experts Jeff Carroll and Bill Gibson, shooting a historical video on this rapidly dying art both for YouTube and for the Ruskin Museum.

This demonstrates the technique and talks through some of the related problems far better than I could explain here. There is also an audio interview with the pair on the whole history of char fishing and its techniques, from its origins, right up to present times.

Having trailed their boat all over the Lake District and Scotland demonstrating plumb-lining, which as a traditional art they are trying to keep alive, Jeff and Bill have a wealth of char knowledge the likes of which it would be rare to find again in any one place.

But the use of multiple lures and huge leads has no place in rod and line fishing, so what we needed to do was adapt the basic principle to suit our particular angling needs.

The most valuable piece of kit in all of this was an echo sounder. With it, we were not only able to locate the char, but also pick out patterns with regard to depth of water favoured within newly discovered holding areas, and more importantly, how high up in the water column they were feeding on any given day.

Earlier I mentioned thermal stratification. This is the process of the upper layer of the lake warming as the summer progresses, forming a layer known as the epilimnion, which because it's less dense, floats on top of the colder water below which is known as the hypolimnion, separated by a short band of rapidly changing temperature called the thermocline.

During the winter and spring, none of this exists, leading to total mixing. At such times, char have access to the entire lake, and as a result, in early May before stratification kicks in, I've come across fish not too far down from the surface, and have on occasions even managed to catch them on a fly we devised called the 'Char Lady' which had a gaudy red body with silver tassels fished on a lead core shooting head.

More generally however, what we were finding was that most of the fish would be between twenty and forty feet down over around sixty feet of water.

Obviously then, that was where we needed to be presenting our spinners, which were being offered singly, weighted by drilled bullet leads on the line stopped by a bead and a swivel, the amount of which we really had to work at to accurately determine.

To do this, we decided that rather than rowing, we would use a four horse power outboard motor on tick-over to slowly push the boat along. So all our experimentation was based on that. Starting with one ounce of lead on the line, we ran the boat in to the shore until the treble hook snagged bottom. We then went back out until we had a vertical line down to it and sounded the depth.

This was repeated with various other amounts of weight, until we knew how much lead would take the lures down to different depths with the outboard running, so that when we spotted char on the sounder screen, we knew what it would take in terms of weighting to get down to them.

Our findings were, that as a rough guide, one ounce of lead will work a small mepps spinner at around fifteen feet; two ounces at thirty feet, with all graduated combinations in both directions.

We also found that in May, when most of our fishing was done, that certain areas were most definitely favoured. Again, the echo sounder would help here, though many times we would pick up fish on the lures after having seen nothing on the screen, and visa versa.

On other occasions, the sounder screen would show very little at all throughout the entire day, so we would therefore work the sixty foot contour with different amounts of lead on different rods until some sort of pattern started to show.

We never bothered fishing much after May because thermal stratification would start to kick in, pushing the fish into ever deeper water all over the vastness of the lake looking to find suitably cooler temperatures.

The unfortunate knock on consequence of stratification is that it's the water-air interface and surface layers that absorb the oxygen from the atmosphere, but because there is no mixing either side of the thermocline, the hypolimnion becomes depleted and less hospitable.

Food will be scarcer there too. Conversion to body weight is reduced due to the lower temperatures, and with lower oxygen levels also acting as a limiting factor, growth becomes stunted as a result. Typically, Coniston char would be around the half pound mark.

We would occasionally see the odd bigger fish to over a pound, but these were few and far between. More recently however, when I was filming with Jeff and Bill, and not having fished for char for a good fifteen years leading up that day, I noticed just how much the population balance had changed during that period.

There were certainly less fish about by that stage, which the pair had seen as an increasing problem over recent times. But, the size had increased very dramatically, maintaining a similar level of productivity and biomass, only now expressed in a different presentation.

Suggestions put forward include eutrophication such as septic tank inputs from a growing local population of people, and from agricultural runoff enriching the water, both of which can lead to increased invertebrate productivity. Rising temperatures generally will be in the mix there too. Whatever the reason, the balance has very clearly shifted.

Coniston and Windermere are the two lakes I am most familiar with. But there are dozens of others, particularly in Scotland. Jeff and Bill were saying great things about Crummock Water being the best bet these days for good char hauls, and we have also picked a few up there while ferox fishing in the past.

Unfortunately, many of the Scottish waters are either less accessible, or not available to char angling at all. There is however one worth mentioning here, that being Loch Arkaig.

Apparently, the char there have learned to gather up under the salmon farm cages at feeding time, gorging themselves on high protein pellets missed by the salmon which then fall through the mesh.

As sea run char in the Arctic can well top twenty pounds, the growth potential is there, even if other factors are limiting the expression of this amongst land locked populations. It should come as no surprise then that some of these Loch Arkaig fish grow big. Very big in fact, with double figure specimens having already been taken.

A word of warning however, and this goes for all the larger exposed glacial ribbon lakes situated in deep mountainous valleys. When the wind is being channelled along these lake surfaces by the surrounding hills, the water at the downwind end can get as rough as anything you are ever likely to encounter at sea.

I remember being out one day on Coniston in a howling blizzard with waves coming over the roof of the sixteen foot Pebble dinghy we were fishing from. Another smaller open boat close by decided enough was enough, upping anchor and turning beam on to the swell to run for shore, only to be completely swamped and rolled by breakers within seconds.

What a dodgy rescue that turned out to be. Fearful of a similar fate, we could only grab the wrists of one person at a time and tow them back into the shallows, then back out for another one.

So respect the conditions. The fact that it's freshwater and therefore can't get as bad as being out at sea is a fallacy. No bag of fish is worth any measure of personal risk.

Associated audio interview numbers: 46.

### SCHELLY, GWYNIAD AND POWAN Coregonus lavaretus

**Bucket List status – result**

At the height of the last ice age, much of Britain, Ireland, and a lot of northern Europe was a frozen wilderness where glaciers carved out deep valleys such as in Cumbria and Scotland, paving the way for the glacial ribbon lakes such as Windermere and Ullswater which we know and love today.

Due to the amount of water taken up by the ice, sea levels were very much lower than they are currently. England was joined to the continent of Europe, and Ireland was joined to England by the Kintyre land bridge.

There was no Irish Sea. Just for the most part an empty basin in the middle of which was a body of run-off water forming a large lake linked to the surrounding land and distant ice free sea by a number of rivers.

This lake was post glacial Lough Hibernia, and in it lived members of a family of fishes known as the whitefishes, represented in the present day British Isles by _Coregonus lavaretus,_ the English schelly, Welsh gwyniad and Scottish powan, which despite the name differences are all the same fish, and _Coregonus albula_ , the English vendace and the Irish pollan. Then, as the ice lost its strangle hold and started to melt, sea levels began to rise, creating the geography we see today.

At some stage in that transition, the sea broke through the Kintyre land bridge isolating Ireland from Scotland, eventually filling up the Irish Sea.

As it did, it obviously mixed with the waters of Lough Hibernia greatly increasing salinity levels there, either killing off its inhabitants, or as in the case of the whitefish species, sending them scurrying up the nearest rivers, initially populating many stretches and lakes, until ultimately when things became too warm for them, at most locations they died out, leaving just the handful of scattered remnant struggling populations we have today.

Seven populations of _Coregonus lavaretus_ are recorded as managing to hang on in the British Isles, all of them living in England, Scotland and Wales. None survive in Ireland, though the Irish have four of the seven recorded populations of _Coregonus albula_ , which because there is no rod caught record for that species, ceases to be of interest to us here.

Schelly are found in Ullswater, Haweswater, Brothers Water and Red Tarn in Cumbria, Llyen Tegid which is Bala Lake in Wales (gwyniad), and Lochs Lomond and Eck in Scotland (powan). However, when I first became interested in the species, Brothers Water was not an inclusion on that list.

One day, Bob Fitchie and I decided to fish for brown trout in some of pools along the length of Goldrill Beck which connects Ullswater to Brothers Water, eventually ending up taking a walk around the northern margins of Brothers Water in the proximity of the beck junction. It was there that we spotted a dead schelly floating on the surface.

We already knew they left Ullswater at the other end of the lake, as coarse anglers had caught occasionally them on both the River Eamont and River Eden. But this was something new. So I contacted the British Museum, the knock on effect being that Brothers Water has since been shown to be an additional previously unknown home for the species.

Though rare in the extreme, schelly, powan and gwyniad are easy fish to identify, because they can only be found in the lakes specified above. You will see them described in some books as being herring like, but this to me is a misleading description.

I would say they look more like a grayling without the long tall dorsal fin or spots. Quite an inconspicuous looking fish really, the big give away being the small fleshy blob on the back just in front of the tail which all salmonids have, the adipose fin.

The mouth is slightly under-slung and to an extent protrusible in a downward direction, suggesting a life spent grubbing about in the bottom sediments.

When dead, they also have a scent of either cucumber or thyme, though this, as with checking out the mouth, is something anglers are not now in a position to explore, as all specimens must by law be returned to the water immediately

As with that other post glacial relict species, the char, when I learned about the existence of the schelly I was immediately drawn to it. But unlike the char, which I caught at the first attempt and pretty much to order thereafter, the schelly proved to be a far more elusive, mystical fish, and again it would be people I worked with who would come to my assistance. And while the pair in question deserve credit of sorts for that, I'm not going to mention their names for reasons which will become apparent.

Throughout April, May and June, these two anglers would travel up to Ullswater to fish a secluded spot known as Sharrow Bay. There's a small lay-by at the side of the very narrow road there, with a path leading off it to a small shingle beach.

The bay is a yacht anchorage these days. But back then it wasn't. There is also a small stone built boat house to the side of the beach, and there used to be a couple of old upturned boats on the shingle itself.

What made this spot ideal from their perspective was that you could hear people coming along the road and down the track. This gave them time to 'modify' their activities in case it was a fishery bailiff. They would also have a dog with them which would bark when anybody approached, just in case.

All of that being the case, they felt able to flout the rules on the use of maggots and ground bait, and as a consequence caught literally dozens of brown trout, with the bonus every so often, if you can call it that, of this other kind of fish which they'd didn't recognise, but which sounded to me like it could be a schelly.

So despite what was going on, I tagged along on a few trips, and indeed the fish in question did turn out to be a schelly. It was only an occasion catch, say a couple each season. But I had at least located a vantage point, so I had to keep on tagging along, though I stress I always fished with worm.

Yeah, sure you did I can sense people saying. Well yes, I did. I felt I had to, because even at that time I had aspirations of going to university, and concerns about jeopardising career paths that might follow as a result, all of which was ultimately vindicated one Sunday morning. The day in fact that I finally caught my first schelly.

The dog must have been dozing on that occasion. And while the buckets of ground bait and maggots were concealed under one of the boats, when the fishery bailiffs eventually made it down to us unannounced and spotted a few maggots crawling about on the stones, they had us all reel to check our hook baits.

My worm bait thankfully put me in the clear. But the other two were cordially invited to spend a day at Carlisle magistrates court to put their hands in their pockets, hence my not naming and shaming them earlier.

It's often said that as one door closes, another opens. The lads in question stopped going to Ullswater after that. I in the meantime had teamed up with another angling colleague, John Roach, and we started exploring fishing the opposite side of the lake along the road from Pooley Bridge to Glenridding.

In the process of doing this we came across a group of coarse anglers from St. Helens on Merseyside, who chartered a coach every Sunday throughout the coarse fishing close season. This would drop them off at the same pegs along the road side week in and week out to fish a trout match using bait. Consequently we saw the same faces on most of our visits.

John and I tagged on at the end of their line, at which point we regularly got into conversation with a chap called Wally Wainwright. These lads all fished worm on a leger pennel rig at long range, primarily looking for brown trout, but occasionally picking up an odd schelly in the process, which they knew we were interested in.

One particular morning, Wally shouted us over, and there in his landing net was the biggest schelly I'd ever seen. So big in fact that we decided to weigh it, which you could do back then, and found that it well beat the existing British record.

As a species, schelly were not protected at that time, so I took the fish away and arranged to look after the record claim for him. I'm not sure if he thought he'd ever hear anything about it again. But he did, and not only from the British Record Fish Committee. Also from the World Records Hall of Fame.

That record stood at one pound ten ounces for quite a few years, eventually being deposed by the current incumbent at two pounds one ounce nine drams from Haweswater. A fish displayed in the British record list for historical record purposes only, as the species is now barred from further claims due to its protective status under the Wildlife and Countryside Act.

Inspired by Wally's catch, John and I fished on at Ullswater for a while, but without any further personal success, though we did still see the odd one caught here and there from both sides of the lake.

While all of this was going on, I had also started delving into the history and biology of the whitefishes. In England they were to be found in Ullswater, Haweswater and Red Tarn. Ullswater we knew was difficult due to its huge size and small numbers of schelly, and assumed that Haweswater would be similarly hit and miss. Red Tarn on the other hand is quite small.

Unfortunately, it's also close to the top of Helvellyn in a glacial scoop or corrie at the base of a six hundred foot rock face, sandwiched between the notorious striding edge and swirral edge. The highest altitude water in England to contain fish in fact, linked to Ullswater below by a steep gradient piddling little stream called Red Tarn Beck.

At times of heavy rain fall the beck would flow well. But at other times, particularly when the level of the tarn was low, it might not flow at all for months on end.

Not unexpectedly, Red Tarn contains brown trout, though even they must have struggled to gain access battling the steep gradient, shallow turbulent water, and un-reliability of Red Tarn Beck to flow.

But with several thousand years to repeatedly try since the glaciers retreated from the area, the odds were that one day they would catch it just right.

Schellies on the other hand are not so tough or resilient. Not so pioneering either. They prefer deeper water and lower temperatures, though they do occasionally run out of the lake into the connecting rivers. Even so, Red Tarn Beck was going to be a very big ask.

Yet there they were reported as being a part of the tarns fauna, though how they got there remains something of a mystery. Maybe monks introduced them. Then again, maybe not. Either way, with less of a surface area facing us, Red Tarn seemed like the next logical step.

The first time I fished it was on a family fell walking outing. We stopped at the tarn for a spot of lunch, and in an hour or so fishing with a little telescopic rod from my rucksack, I caught ten beautiful brown trout on legered maggots, a bait which it is legal to use, as Red Tarn is not on the list of nominated waters where the use of maggots is prohibited.

Time then to be thinking about a more concerted effort, which I undertook on a number of occasions over several years with different people, and which, with only the odd rare exception, all produced schelly.

Granted, it was typically just the one each visit mixed in amongst lots of brown trout, though on one occasion Bob Fitchie had a brace in the same session.

Like the trout, some of them were surprisingly big fish too considering the low productivity of such a high altitude, freezing cold, nutrient poor piece of water.

Sometimes we would blitz an area with maggots and ground bait, laying down a carpet to place our hook baits on to which would be periodically topped up over the day. On other occasions, we fished with swim feeders instead.

Both seemed to work equally well. So with weight always a consideration for the long hard slog up 'the hill', swim feeders and light telescopic rods became the norm, and we enjoyed lots of success in the deeper parts of the tarn, particularly on the swirral edge side close the steep rock face.

So much in fact that the British Museum requested we collect research specimens for them, which we did. But not anymore as it is now illegal to fish for them, with any 'accidental' encounters having to be returned to the water immediately.

Associated audio interview numbers: 53.

Frank Carbone Peacock Bass:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Moray Eel from reef:   
Photo Phill Williams

Dave Devine 310 pound Tuna:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams 90 pound Wahoo:   
Photo Phill Williams

Dress to blend in. PW small Tiger Fish:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Beryx:   
Photo Phill Williams

Ulrich Schneider 42 pound Salmon:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Canaries Carp:   
Photo Phill Williams

# PART TWO  
BEYOND HOME WATERS

THE CATCHING OF 300 SPECIES WORLDWIDE

**Bucket List status – result**

Shortly after embarking on phase 1, the catching of one hundred species of fish from home waters, a second phase was added, with the more ambitious target of catching a further two hundred foreign species, giving a global target of three hundred species or more.

To look at all of those foreign species individually, many of which will be names few people will even have heard of, would potentially bore the waders off everyone. So rather than doing it that way, what follows is an alphabetical location by location run down of all of the venues and many of the fish that have contributed to that successful outcome.

### AMERICA

While America is a single country, it's way too big of a place and opportunity to deal with under a single blanket heading, for which reason I feel I must break it down into specific smaller portions.

In general terms, it is arguably the best fishing venue in the world. Granted, there will be bigger fish and better specific opportunities elsewhere around the globe. But in terms of overall package presentation, and for sheer quality and professionalism, you won't find anywhere quite else like it.

There is however a down side to this. American anglers demand deck scivvies and tip well for the privilege. Brits on the other hand, once we know the script, usually like to do things for ourselves.

So if you want that to be the case, to keep the deck crew from going OTT working to earn their tip, either tip them right at the onset on the understanding that they only come back out on deck when called, or tell them that unless they leave you to get on with it, there will be no tip at the end.

Usually this works, though not always, as trying to do everything other than wind the fish in for you has become so endemic in their culture that they can't seem to stop themselves. Something you need to decide upon and deal with immediately if, like me, you don't want third party interference ruining your day.

### CAPE COD

Even amongst anglers with no interest in or intention of ever setting foot outside of their home patch, Cape Cod and its adjacent east coast venues has an importance and relevance that transcends international borders.

The striped bass fishery there has become an example; a beacon; an object lesson even, in what can be achieved in turning an ailing situation around from the very brink of extinction into a world class fishery.

Of even greater importance still, the Americans did it in a relatively short time, and with a species so similar in appearance, life style, and under a similar level of threat to a fish British and Irish anglers hold so dear to their hearts, that the parallels are so uncanny as to look contrived. But they are not.

The lessons are there to be noted and taken forward. Least ways they could be were it not for the one dissimilarity in all of this - political will. The ability to take hard and binding decisions without the requirement that other member states participate and agree with you, which is why America has succeeded, and where the UK and the European Union ultimately will not, at the cost of the European bass.

The Cape Cod area also has other noticeable parallels to our home patch, and to England in particular. It shares many of its place names, which tend to be small quaint little seaside towns completely out of keeping with the more traditional US wide highway model, with its sprawling malls, and an ever repeating sequence of MacDonald's, KFC and the rest of the junk food regulars as far as the eye can see.

A venue that is so easy to feel at home in. As if walking back through a time portal, not only in terms of location, but also what that location has to offer the visiting bass angler.

Okay, so we are talking striped bass here. But other than having a few darker longitudinal lines on their flanks, they look, feed, and act like any European bass you will catch back home, the only other difference being that they grow much bigger and there are so many more of them, both from the beaches and from the boat.

Cape Cod is a venue where bass in the eight to ten pound bracket are so common that the skipper doesn't even bother getting out the landing net, preferring to lift them in by hand, with a realistic possibility that the next fish to come along could easily top twenty pounds. That was our experience at Chatham fishing offshore and in around the Monomoy Bank.

This was a pre-arranged striped bass trip with a single mid point day off on which we still fished home waters style, and for familiar species, out of another classic English named port, Plymouth, more of which later. Five of us had gone over just as the summer was starting to turn to autumn, giving it even more of a 'back home' feel.

The boats there tend to be fast skiffs, but because there was five of us, we ended up with one skiff for myself and fly fisherman Ian Gaskell, and another slightly larger boat for Dave Devine, John Devine, and Paul Bennett.

We also took along some tackle of our own too. Ian in particular with his fly fishing gear, though in hind sight we needn't have bothered, as both boats had a complete set of everything supplied by Orvis. And it was there that we were introduced to a soft plastic lure called the sluggo.

The name sluggo actually says everything about it the lure. It looked like a long featureless slug that came in a range of colours, though we predominantly fished a greyish-silver version slipped on to a lead-head of a couple of ounces. This was cast from a drifting boat and slowly tweaked back in depths down to around thirty feet.

As with any location, fish won't always be on the same marks day in and day out. Tide, ambient light, and the movements of bait-fish shoals are just some of the determining factors, which is why it is so important to buy in local knowledge in the form of a guide.

Every day we would work our way out of the shelter of the huge natural harbour through the narrow outlet to the open sea to fish any one of a wide range of possibilities according to a combination of timing, tide, and conditions.

Actually, that isn't entirely true, as one morning we stayed inside for a few hours because of the wind outside, which later dropped away. It was there that I got my first false albacore. There had been a few taken outside on the previous days, but not by me.

We also picked up a few stripers and some other bits and pieces inside. So all isn't necessarily lost if the weather sends a short lived front sailing through, though obviously it's far better to get outside. What isn't always necessarily is to get very far off.

One morning that particularly sticks in my mind was of us running along the outer edge of Monomoy quite close to the shore where we noticed heavy surface feeding activity very close in to the sand. So close in fact that bait fish were actually being driven up on to the beach where the gulls were grabbing them.

It wasn't guaranteed that it would be bass pushing the bait in as there were good numbers of bluefish about at the time too, which pound for pound, as far as I'm concerned, fight far harder than bass anyway, though for some reason the Americans don't like them.

Either way, this was an interesting situation, but unusual in that we had to ease our way in with the boat so as not to spook the fish, then actually cast our lures onto the dry beach in front of us so that as we retrieved them they were working right from the water's edge, where they did indeed start to pick up bass.

The numbers and size of the fish we caught was quite staggering. There were short lived blips where a new mark needed to be moved to from time to time. But by and large, it was good action all the way through, with moments when you genuinely needed a time out for a rest. Particularly with the bluefish.

Mainly though we caught bass, a good number of which were in double figures, with the biggest tipping the scales at twenty two pounds, which considering the tiny wands of rods we were using paired with small light fixed spool reels was great fun.

Lots of bluefish too, though these tended either to bite through the mono leader, or simply cut the sluggo off behind the hook. Wire traces were the obvious answer there. And of course there were albacore. I even had bonito one day, plus we picked up what looked like spurdogs occasionally too.

Ian then turned his attention to the fly rod, taking a grand slam on a range of sandeel patterns. I even gave it a go myself and hooked up a few bluefish, ending up with reel battered knuckles as a result. But still good fun none the less.

I mentioned earlier that we had a mid-point day off from the bass fishing and had decided to fish out from Plymouth. We'd taken a drive over there one evening to have a look at the place, and had spotted a number of large party boats in the harbour with their advertising boards covered in pictures of cod.

So, always willing to try something different, and having brought along some bottom fishing outfits just in case, we decided to book in on one of these.

As is the norm in these parts, all the bait was supplied, which was shellfish and squid. The boat itself was huge with an under-cover dining area, showers, and toilets.

Inside the main cabin area there were the usual photo albums showing endless streams of people lifting up monster cod. That unfortunately is in the springtime, on top of which, as with elsewhere these days, even there things weren't what they used to be.

Still, we caught cod, and lots of them up to maybe five pounds, plus wolf fish, and quite a few small wrasse like fish. There were probably a few other species mixed in there too elsewhere around the boat. Not exactly earth shattering. But different, and a nice little break from the bass and bluefish.

While we were at Plymouth we spotted a Wal Mart close by and decided to call in and take a look at the fishing tackle area. It was there that we bought ourselves some of the ultra-light bass rods to take home. But as importantly, we also spotted a range of small plastic kids rods with tiny closed face fixed spool reels moulded to them, decorated with pictures of mickey mouse and taz, and decided it might be a bit of fun to buy one of each.

The obvious problem was that Dave, our skipper, hadn't even the slightest hint of a sense of humour, so we had to smuggle them onboard and hide them in one of the lockers where they remained for a couple of days. It wasn't until Ian had boated the first of the twenties that 'taz' finally surfaced and was tackled up with a sluggo.

To say that Dave wasn't impressed would be no understatement. I actually shot some video footage of the whole episode which is on YouTube, and I honestly don't know how I managed to hold the camera still as I was laughing so much.

First throw out, Ian felt a few bumps, but no fish. Next throw he got a good solid take. The tiny reel couldn't have held much in the way of line, and its little plastic gears were literally on the verge of melting.

That one must have been a bluefish, as there was literally nothing on the end when the line eventually came back in, persuading Ian to use a short wire trace, and next throw he was in again.

As before, the sound of the plastic gears is one I will never forget as the two foot long rod buckled and creaked under the strain. It looked inevitable that something was going to give. The rod, the reel, the line; it had to be one of them. Incredibly however, it turned out to be the fish.

I think that had it been a bluefish or an albacore there may well have been a very different outcome. As it was, a seven pound striper was just about within the outfits capability. Certainly one of the most amazing, amusing, and dare I say impressive angling feats I have ever witnessed.

### FLORIDA - BANANA RIVER

This was a one day session tagged on to a day out from Port Canaveral, and two days fishing the nearby Stick Marsh before we headed off down to Islamorada in the Florida Keys.

For the most part, you can find many of the same species in varying mixes at a majority of the venues throughout Florida. One exception however is the red drum which needs to be specifically targeted, and it was these that brought us to the Banana River and Indian River system, which aren't really rivers at all, but a couple of long linked lagoons between the mainland coast and the fringing islands running south from Cape Canaveral.

There was no particular reason to choose one lagoon over the other. Our guide trailed his boat to a slip on the main road across the water just above Palm Bay and made his decision during the sail up to where Merritt Island splits the two water bodies, in this case taking the right hand entrance into the Banana River based on a combination of recent catches and jungle telegraph news.

For our part, we weren't bothered either way. As long as we could have a crack at some red drum we were happy. So having called in at a string of pots for blue crabs to use as bait, we were off headed up the lagoon, a journey which seemingly went on and on forever and ever.

Every so often the engine revs would drop a little, or we might take a bit of a detour, and all the time our guide was scanning the water every which way looking for who knows what. Time appeared to be getting eaten away. Expensive time at that, and nothing to show for it.

In well over an hour we hadn't even picked up a rod. Though nothing was said, doubt was starting to creep in with Dave Devine and Paul Bennett too. Then suddenly our man spotted something and took a sharp turn to the left to investigate further. We couldn't see anything, but obviously he could, as he cut the revs back and started to creep towards one particular spot.

Still unable to see what had grabbed his attention, we waited for instructions. Then he pointed, and we could just about see the tiniest bit of surface activity which he had picked up on from hundreds of yards away.

The water here is very shallow, so when the fish get their heads down to grub about in the bottom sediments, their tails were breaking surface, and it was this that he had spotted like dots on the horizon.

Having established that we had located a shoal of feeding red drum, he slowly backed the power off, keeping an eye on the fish all the time. Each of us was given a tiny wand of a rod with a small Penn fixed spool reel and a short heavy monofilament trace of maybe a yard in length with a hook probably in order of size 6/0.

When we had edged closer to within comfortable casting range, the hooks were impaled into half a crab, and the boat slowly edged forward with the instruction to wait for his command, then gently lob the bait free-lined ahead of the lead fish and hang on for dear life, which is exactly what we did, and what subsequently happened.

It was instant success. Not all of us at the same time mind. But it took mere seconds to hook up and the huge fish was off. And when I say off, I mean exactly that. The water being so shallow in these lagoons, there was only one way for it to go – away as fast as it could. Very powerful fish too and on such light tackle.

Typically ranging between twenty five and thirty five pounds apiece, each one took ages to overcome, then it was back up to the shoal for another shot, until eventually, due to the chaos and the time spent drifting away from them while dealing with the latest hook up, we lost them never to be found again, eventually using up the rest of the day fishing for other things such as ladyfish and speckled trout.

### FLORIDA - BISCAYNE CANAL

When I fished in the Amazon, I was faced with the difficult choice of either targeting payara, which are widespread throughout the whole system in the fast deep water sections, or heading north in search of peacock bass, which favour the slower quieter parts of the system and its jungle lakes.

This being a trip of a lifetime, I obviously wanted to fish for both. But due to the distances involved commuting between sites, that wasn't possible, so I chose the payara, and ever since, with all the hype now coming out surrounding the fighting abilities of the peacock bass, I felt as though I'd maybe made the wrong call. Then one day quite out of the blue, as a result of sheer chance and family commitments, that feeling of having missed out was rectified.

Not by a return trip to the Amazon. In fact it wasn't even a trip to South America. This time it was Florida, thousands of miles to the north of the ancestral home of the peacock bass.

My wife Dawn had been getting on to me for some time to do a family holiday taking in Disney and all the other theme parks while the grand kids were still at the right age to enjoy them.

I agreed to go on the proviso that I could take a couple of days out to fish. But for what. I'd done all the inshore and offshore stuff several times over and was looking for a different challenge. So I Googled the words 'Florida freshwater fishing', which to my surprise came back with peacock bass.

Intrigued, this triggered further investigation, and my introduction to a boat fishery I previously wasn't aware even existed.

With its near tropical climate and abundance of freshwater habitat, Florida is the perfect location for many alien species to establish themselves, something they have done to such an extent, that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) have been forced to take decisive and quite radical action to try to keep these invaders under control.

The 'problem' it appears stems from fish enthusiasts releasing exotic species that have become too large for their indoor aquariums. So much so that native species are coming under very real competitive habitat threat from alien species such as oscars, cichlids, and tilapia, to name but a few, which are quite literally taking over the place.

Native predatory species such as the large mouth bass are simply unable to cope. So the FWC came up with the idea of making an alien introduction of their own that hopefully could, the Amazonian peacock bass, which coincidentally also just happened to be regarded as one of the premier game fish on the freshwater scene.

For many years, American sport fishermen have been organizing specialist trips to Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela to target the species. But now they don't need to, because between 1984 and 1987, the FWC introduced twenty thousand fingerling butterfly peacock bass, and one hundred of the potentially bigger speckled or three barred peacock bass to the metropolitan Miami canal system.

This isn't a canal system as we would know it in the more industrialised parts of Britain. It's more of a controlled drainage network similar to the Fens, excavated from believe it or not, solid land locked coral, and used to drain surface water from Miami and the surrounding area.

So why go to the trouble of fishing it from a boat. The simple answer is that some of the more affluent residential areas of central Miami back onto these canals, where the only access to much of the system is by boat.

Another important point of difference, not only between the Miami canal system and that of the UK, but also between it and the rest of the US, is that it lies on top of the Biscayne aquifer, which even in winter rarely drops below sixty five degree's in temperature.

This is crucial to both the well being and the containment of peacock bass. Not only can peacock's not spawn in water below sixty degree's, they would also struggle to survive in it too.

This then has been crucial to their spreading and prospering throughout the whole three hundred and thirty miles of the system. But more important still, it also confines them within it too.

The FWC were very careful not to introduce another alien species they could not contain which might exacerbate the problem of exotic introductions still further. And in that regard, the experiment has been a complete success. Numbers of other exotic species have fallen off dramatically since the peacock bass started munching their way through them, and to quote Star Treks Mr. Spock, the peacocks themselves have lived long and prospered as a result.

So much so that the world record for the species, previously from from Venezuela, was toppled from the Miami area shortly after my visit, placing the Biscayne Canal system very firmly at the centre of a brand new multi-million dollar sport fishery.

As a visitor to the area, I not only needed to hire in the use of a boat, but also the services of an experienced guide, so Dawn and I booked a day with peacock bass expert Frank Carbone who operates 'Hawg Hunter' Guide Services, 'Hawg' being the local term for a super sized large mouth bass. And when it comes to equipment and professionalism, they don't mess about in this part of the world.

Even though we were 'only' going canal fishing, Frank still turned up with a twenty one foot flying machine with two hundred and fifty hp of engine clamped to the back of it. A little OTT at face value. But when you consider the size of some of the lakes he also guides on for large mouth bass you can appreciate the reasoning.

So with drinks in the cooler and six dozen roach like live-baits called shiners in the live well, it was off to the suburbs of Miami to slip the boat from its trailer and start working our way through the system.

Peacock bass differ from endemic species of North American bass such as large mouths in a number of ways, the most important of which being that despite their build, name, and aggression, they are in fact not actually bass at all, but members of the cichlid family.

They also fight much harder than the resident varieties, and will feed when other species of fish would prefer to get their heads down and sulk.

Largemouth bass for example prefer over-cast cooler weather and hate flat calm bright sunny days. Peacock bass on the other hand are at their best when, as was the case this particular day, you feel like you are literally going to melt exposed out there in the boat.

They are not too demanding either when it comes to tackle. A nice light outfit, a single size one hook tied directly to the end of the line, and a small shot above it to take the live-bait down is all it takes.

Oh, and a good pair of polarized sun glasses to see them with, because this is all about spotting individual fish and sight casting the baits right onto their nose.

This is the other big reason why you need a boat. Even it you could get bank fishing access, it wouldn't be much good, as you need to search the length of the canal for individual fish. And as it was spawning time, many of the fish were either paired up or guarding egg clumps in the margins along the tops of the coral shelves; in and around drainage pipes, or lying in ambush under the edges of over-hanging vegetation.

At first I had difficulty picking them out, particularly at distance. But you soon start to get your eye in. Frank on the other hand could spot them from incredible distances.

This is where the Minn Kota electric outboard on the bow of the boat really came in to its own. Controlled completely by a foot operated pedal, Frank was able to both power and steer the boat quietly to within casting range without any undue disturbance.

The idea was to cast the shiner just ahead the basking bass, then let it swim down past it. These are exceptionally aggressive fish which would more often than not gulp the shiner down within seconds if the placing just right.

If it wasn't, you simply had another shot, and another... Most would eventually take the bait, though a few that were guarding eggs swam at it and simply 'blew' it away from their territory.

Watching a fish approach a bait then take it brings an adrenalin rush that no other approach to fishing can match. All heart in the mouth stuff, and boy do these fish go once the hook is set. Rather like rainbow trout in fact, they can take off at a good rate of knots, and will not give up until they are safely inside the landing net, if you can get them to go in it that is.

The smaller ones were lifted aboard, but the better fish do need the net, as I found out to my cost when I parted company with the best fish of the day through not waiting for help.

I won't be making that mistake again. And after careful unhooking, plus a few photographs, each one was taken back to the exact point it came from for release so that it could get right back to its egg guarding duties or defending its patch.

The peacock bass project was never intended as a challenge to South American supremacy. But that's what it has developed into, as well as being a highly successful biological control mechanism, and nobody, least of all American anglers, are complaining about that.

It's just a pity that the hundred or so fingerling barred peacocks didn't follow through to share in the story, for these fish can easily grow upwards of twenty pounds.

Perhaps that is something the FWC will take another look at in the future. But for the moment at least, they are looking to conserve the success of the project as it currently stands by encouraging catch and release for all peacock bass caught, with a mandatory maximum take home bag limit of two fish per day.

In addition to this, only one fish may be greater than seventeen inches to preserve the spawning integrity of the population and success of the project, because as it turns out, peacock bass appear mainly to prey on the undesirable exotic species, leaving the smaller native prey species to be controlled by the indigenous largemouth bass.

### FLORIDA - CAPE CORAL

Paul Haynes, co-director of Warrior Boats, owns a big house with a boat and boat dock on the canal system at Cape Coral, and had on a number of occasions after singing the praises of the fishing over there, suggested I might want to go over for a fishing holiday and take a look. So in 2011, Dave Devine, his brother John and I, plus the wives, decided to do just that.

It was as much a holiday as a fishing trip. But with a twenty six foot boat with a two hundred and fifty hp engine strapped to the back at your disposal, plus Paul over-lapping our stay by a few days to show us the ropes, you just have to use it. Good job he was on hand though, otherwise things might not have gone as well as they did.

Paul's house was set way back up the canal system, which if you used the on-site boat dock, would add an hour or so in each direction to the days travelling.

With that in mind, he arranged for us to to rent a berth at Tarpon Point Marina just beyond the exit lock, which while it made a huge difference, still left us with a lot of very slow speed restricted travelling time.

Manatee's are the 'problem' here. For although we didn't see any, the area is supposedly alive with the things, hence the mandatory low speed limit for miles through the winding creeks until you reach the road bridge between Punta Rassa and Sanibel Island.

Only then can you turn up the power and run for the open sea, unless of course the weather is bad, in which case there is lots of shelter all over the place, and potentially still lots of fish.

None the less, a very frustrating and time consuming place to fish compared to say Islamorada, where within literally minutes, you are straight onto some of the best fishing grounds around.

Counter balancing this, as I've already alluded to, is the degree of shelter and richness of inshore fishing within that potential area. The drift under the road bridge for example is the spot where live-baits regularly connect with huge goliath groupers.

Goliath's were on the protected list until recently, but have made such a good come back that they now appear to be everywhere. Not that I would recommend fishing for them.

With weights up to five hundred pounds, spending a couple of arm wrenching hours connected to one of those things where the eventual outcome pretty much always goes the way of the fish, is just one more waste of more profitable time. A way of changing the line on your reel at best after getting spooled.

On top of that, there are lots equally interesting fish out over the offshore reefs and wrecks, and in the would famous Boca Grande Channel, which every man and his dog seems to make for in search of tarpon.

But once again, we are talking huge distances, which in turn relate to travelling time. It's all very well for local people, and indeed for Paul who visits regularly, with the time to explore, to travel, and to try different things.

Our situation was different. We didn't know where we were going and were very much time limited, so confined ourselves to exploration of a different type, splitting our options between running out to fish a number of reef marks off the west side of Sanibel Island, and working the channels on the sheltered side, finishing up with a reasonable variety of fish.

Nothing big, and none of the headline species such as tarpon. But plenty of speckled trout, sharks, and spanish mackerel, plus a whole swath of lesser species

We also put in a bit of time fishing the canal itself from our boat dock in the evenings. The four hundred miles of city canal system there, which is said to be the largest in the world, was excavated and connected into the Caloosahatchee River after Cape Coral city was planned and built starting back in 1957.

This is controlled by a single lock to balance the water level, thereby keeping it navigable for the many luxury homes with their boat jetties, which is situated just to the side of Tarpon Marina where we moored Paul's boat.

This lock can be left open, sometimes for extended periods, which has allowed in an amazing array of marine fish species to swell the ranks of the freshwater species which are also able to survive at the furthest extremities, where surface water run off has diluted the salt content to acceptable levels, with of course variable brackish water regions in-between where suitably tolerant species from both camps inter-mingle, as we would eventually find out for ourselves.

I am reliably informed that the canal provides an excellent fishery for many sought after species including redfish, snook, goliath grouper, ladyfish, spadefish, sheepshead, jacks, tarpon, and several different types of snapper.

Paul tells me that he regularly trolls lures along the mangrove edges on the un-inhabited side on his way back to the house, as well as elsewhere in the system, and has picked quite a number of good fish including jacks into double figures. But that's just a bit of bonus fishing on the otherwise long boring run out or in from his boat dock to the lock.

Some of the locals have even made the system their sole angling objective, and regularly take some very good catches, which is especially useful when it's blowing outside and everyone else is confined either to the marina, or to tucking in behind one of the islands just outside for shelter.

Equally, several of Paul's clients have also had some very good fish including tarpon to around fifty pounds. We on the other hand had paid for a two week berth in the marina to give us more sea time, so our efforts were very much more constrained. But still very interesting non the less.

In the heat of the day (it never dropped below 93 degrees F during our stay), understandably, whatever fish there were in the vicinity of our leg of the canal, tended to keep their heads down or looked for shade.

We would see and hear them splashing about in the first hour after day break, and again later in the evening, which presumably is why trolling on the run to and from the lock for a day at sea fits in best with their feeding patterns.

We hadn't specifically intended to fish the canal. But with a rack of light fixed spool outfits in the garage, a pack of bubble float from Wal Mart, and whatever bait we had left over from being at sea, which usually centred around squid, fish, and live shrimp, we decided it was at least worth a shot.

After a few days sitting around the pool watching and wondering, one evening we decided to throw in some pieces of bread to see what, if any response that drew, which initially brought hoards of tiny fry to the surface.

As the bread was blown into the reeds close to some over hanging trees at the extremity of the arm we were on at the bottom of the garden, larger swirls and crashes could be heard. So I laid down on the jetty and scooped up a couple of dozen fry with a small bait net, some of which we sent out a couple of feet down under the floats.

Initially, we just put one rod out to see what if any response the small fry live-baits would get, and were taken completely by surprise when Dave brought in a large mouth bass.

This is a freshwater species, though with hindsight, having dragonflies which reproduce in freshwater regularly sitting on the top of the float, plus rushes and tree's growing out of the margins, we should have suspected that the water there was at least brackish.

I must confess to not being the biggest fan of large mouth bass. After an initial surge, they quickly seem to come to the surface mouth open wide seemingly wanting to be taken out of the water. I can't see what all the fuss is about. All that hollering, whooping, and back slapping, over something with very little going for it at all. But in this particular instance, we were both happy and surprised.

From my research on the Internet, it seems that one of the top baits for the canal is live shrimp, which we had left over from every boat trip. So home they came in the aerated tub. They say you can catch just about anything on a live shrimp from tiny snappers to monster tarpon, snook and redfish.

Another favoured bait we had in abundance using the sabiki rigs out deep was pinfish. For the larger fish, and certainly for blacktip sharks which are also present in the canal, these are a must, though we tended to stick with the live shrimp, suspecting a more brackish to freshwater species mix down along our stretch of the system.

Surprisingly these lasted quite well in the water we threw them into, particularly as Paul had told us not to leave them in the live well of the boat if we brought it back to the dock as they would be dead by next morning.

But although we caught on the shrimp, it wasn't really the shrimps themselves that were grabbing the bulk of the predator attention.

As dusk started to make its presence felt, we noticed increasing fish activity at the surface, some of which was coming from toothy alligator garfish.

Instinctively, we would all pull our red and yellow bubble floats in their direction to try to tempt them with the baits. But it wasn't the baits they were interested in. Almost without exception they would take hold of the float and start swimming off with it.

In all cases, they would at some point let go and it would pop back up to the surface with the fish still showing interest. What we would then do was quickly ease it away from the culprit causing the shrimp to rise us in front of its nose, hoping they would grab hold of that instead.

However, as I know from past experience with big gator gars on live-baits in Thailand, getting a take is one thing. Sticking the hook into them can be quite another matter, and initially we were unable to convert interest into fish on the pontoon. But eventually, we found our timing. By leaving them for long enough to try to swallow the bait, it was possible to get a good firm hook up.

On our final evening, though we had plenty of live shrimp, I decided to try something a little bit different, and put on a strip of skinned squid. The idea was that as the light faded, the gator gars would have less trouble seeing it as I tormented them by slowing easing it away from the end of their beaks.

That as it turned out was not what happened. Instead of seeing the float grabbed and pulled under, it shot down in the proper manner on its own. Obviously then, not a alligator gar. And again we were to be surprised.

It turned out to be one of the saltwater catfish that had been robbing our baits out off Sanibel Island earlier in the day. Horrible things with solid bone heads and very sharp venomous spines at the front of each pectoral and the dorsal fin. Not deadly venomous. But nasty enough to really hurt and take ages to heal readily, with the potential for infection if not cleaned up and treated properly.

A fish that was quickly followed by another offshore saltwater species, the ladyfish, which is a small, sleek and very fast moving relative of the tarpon caught by John using the shrimp. Something then for everyone.

### FLORIDA - ISLAMORADA

It was on the drive back from Key West to the airport at Miami during a family holiday come fishing trip that I just happened to stop off at Islamorada to take a break. I'd spotted the sign for Bud 'n' Mary's, which in fishing circles is legendary, so decided to take a look around and stretch my legs.

What I saw there would ultimately steer the direction of our future visits to the Florida Keys. Everything about the place spoke volumes about top notch fishing. I just had to give it a go, which taking in a wide coverage of options spread across several visits, I eventually did.

These would eventually include offshore trips with legendary big shark hunter Jim Taylor, amberjack fishing over the hump, and all manner of self-drive options with Dave Devine, Paul Bennett and Graeme Pullen, which collectively produced a range of fishing the likes of which you would struggle to repeat anywhere else along the Florida Keys.

Also, some memorable experiences for reasons other than the fishing, including getting caught out in a self-drive boat in a twister, plus the incredible hand feeding of monster tarpon at Robbie's Marina just across the bridge, all of which for me makes this my venue of first choice on the Florida scene.

The first re-visit was a split centre trip shared between Key West and Islamorada. We fished the wrecks off Key West for big AJ's which was good, but not a patch on going offshore to fish the hump for them with Jim Taylor.

The hump is an under-water mountain rising up from depth to within a few hundred feet of the surface where the water all around quite literally dances and is marked by swell.

All manner of fish congregate there from bait shoals to huge predators, including giant AJ's and sharks, both of which were on our target list.

So the hump it was for the next five days, mainly for the AJ's, but with a bit of trolling on the way out for dorado and black fin tuna, and time-outs from the lure dropping, including one whole day to try for the sharks.

As with Key west, we took it in turns to drop our jigging lures, which were hit the instant they got down there. So prolific were these fish that if one came adrift down deep, its replacement would be there within seconds.

With so many huge hard sluggers up to ninety pounds in weight, you literally needed a break between fish. So much so, that at times the arguments between us was not that it's my turn next, but rather, it isn't me next, as each of us tried to grab a bit of extra R&R to give the arms and shoulders time to recover.

And so it went on drift after drift, day after day. It was manic. Even the commercial boats which were knocking seven bells out of the amberjack population appeared to be having no effect, though I hear that eventually they did, which is very sad.

We put all of our fish back. Jim had a long needle onboard which was inserted close to the pectoral fin to puncture the expanded swim bladder inside and release the gas allowing fish to get back down, something tagging had shown to have at least some measure of success.

Well, I say we put all our fish back, but that isn't strictly true. We did keep an odd one for shark bait, which seems bizarre when you see a forty pound amberjack flapper being put out. But that's what Jim Taylor did.

Not that it made much difference. For despite his reputation as the number one shark hunter in these parts, we never saw a shark, which was disappointing, but perhaps as well for the sharks sake as he was taking no prisoners.

He had a pump action twelve gauge shotgun onboard which he used as an attitude adjuster while the shark was still in the water, and which he liked to put a couple of cartridges through each morning to 'clean' the barrels out. But that unfortunately was the only action the shot gun received.

The next time we fished Islamorada, we decided to go self-drive and explore inshore. So we rented a small boat from Bud 'n' Mary's, which if I'm honest, wasn't the most sea-worthy craft I've ever fished from. It was US Coastguard approved with full in-built buoyancy, but the free-board was way too low, and although we caught lots of very good fish, we felt a little restricted as to where we could go.

Despite all that, we pottered around the flats and channels fishing small live and dead-baits caught in our chum slick, which along with frozen squid and live shrimps bought at Bud's bait store, brought us all manner of stuff including lots of sharks and stingrays.

We also went out to the buoy at Alligator Reef where we caught plenty of small to medium sized barracuda's, and on one occasion, I jumped aboard a bigger faster boat with Graeme which we took way down to Tennessee Buoy where the barracuda's were huge, and again we caught plenty, but not the really big boys.

You could drop a live mullet or blue runner right on their nose and still they'd turn away, the moral here being that fish don't grow that big by making stupid mistakes.

These cuda, some of which must have been a good seventy pounds and more, knew exactly what they were doing. Fortunately their smaller brethren up to maybe thirty pounds were a little more relaxed and were willing to play ball.

Bonnet headed sharks and nurse sharks were probably the most abundant decent fish we caught. We did see the odd bigger shark go cruising through, plus an occasions tarpon. But neither our tackle nor our boat was up to that. Not that you necessarily need a big lump of boat under your feet to be in with a chance of big fish.

At the end of each day when the offshore boats have all docked inside the marina, any fish brought in for eating are filleted off and their carcasses dropped in all around the place, which obviously is going to get swarms of smaller fish milling around picking off what bits they can.

If on the other hand you went back after dark with a lamp and looked in the water, you would see far bigger predators at work. Huge rays cruising around like vulcan bombers, plus massive lemon sharks and the like. Fish well in excess of three hundred pounds just yards away from where you stood.

The problem was that the marina had a rustic construction. Wooden posts driven into the bottom with latted wooden walk-ways. In other words, potential snags everywhere. So when Graeme dropped in and hooked up a huge lemon shark which instantly went berserk and totally out of control, unable to hold it, he wrapped the trace around one of the wooden posts, at which point the fish set about trying the tear the place to pieces.

By this stage the wire was so tight around the post that it couldn't be freed. Nothing left to do but cut the line and leg it, leaving the shark to do it's worst. Fortunately next morning the jetty appeared still to be in tact and the fish was gone. But it was touch and go.

Still liking the idea of self-drive boats, for our next visit we went over the bridge from Islamorada to Robbie's Marina which we'd looked at on the previous visit.

Robbie's is where you can hand feed huge tarpon. They also offer a much better range of boats. We hired ourselves a twenty three footer with electronics and a sun canopy which extended our operating range considerably. We were still sailing out of the same channel next to Bud 'n' Mary's, but now we were properly seaworthy.

Still, we fished many of the same types of marks as previously, though the hull being bigger and having far more draft, we couldn't cross the flats where you risk legal action if you go in too shallow and start ripping them up with the propeller. So that was one drawback. But the positives far outweighed any negatives.

We could now go pretty much anywhere, and we did, adding in a trolling session for dorado and black fin tuna which we had cooked at the marina, plus trips out to the drop off of the reef, both for trolling and bottom fishing.

The range and quality of the species taken there was phenomenal. And it was out there in the company of dozens of other small boats that we got caught by that twister.

The day started breathless. But as you looked inland you could see it changing. Then the first hint of breeze came along. Minutes later, it was so bad that the boat was in danger of going over as the wind got under the sun canopy. Eventually we got it down, but could hardly breath due to the force of the rain hitting us on the back and chest.

Then we had to negotiate the narrow buoyed rocky channel which we couldn't properly see for all the white water. It was a nightmare. How nobody perished in that lot defies understanding. But they didn't, and somehow we all made it back safely.

Two particular drawbacks to this sort of fishing are that despite the areas noted reputation for tarpon and bonefish, neither were really an option, even from a large self-drive boat.

Unable to stay out after dark, we could go through the motions of fishing live-baits in the channels by day for tarpon, and might occasionally even get some interest, plus we could get as close to the flats as the boat draft would allow to try for bonefish. But if I'm honest, that was as much to say we'd tried it as being in with any realistic chance of success.

I did pick up a bonefish on shrimp where two channels met as they skirted around one of the flats, but that was it. As for the tarpon – nothing. Nothing that is until we booked a few evening trips aboard one of the specialist tarpon skiffs 'hubba hubba' skippered by Kenny Knudsen, a man who wore a sort of leather flying helmet, face mask and gloves in the daylight to protect himself from the sun's UV rays, something which as a skin cancer sufferer myself long after those trips, I perhaps should have done a bit more of too.

Drifting the channels up to the road bridges, we did eventually catch tarpon. I had my PB there at one hundred and sixty pounds. A fish I hooked in the Gulf of Mexico and finally released in the Atlantic ocean.

It sounds good, but all it did was take us under the road bridge several hundred yards from where it was hooked up on a live mullet, leaping pretty much all the way with us in measured pursuit.

### FLORIDA - KEY WEST

This was my first ever fishing trip abroad. I'd looked at a whole range of options, and while there were bigger fish and more interesting species to be caught in other parts of the world, all things considered, such as range of species, range of boating options, and chances of success, Florida got the green light and would get it again with the same range of factors up for consideration.

Having fished there on a number of occasions since, I am still of the same opinion, though with hindsight, the fishing options I would take would probably be different to that first visit, which taught me a great deal, not the least of which is that sometimes you need to take a chance and target things you really want regardless of cost, even if it ends up in failure.

It also taught me that some lessons are based on what you didn't do and wish you had, which is very much easier to get around today by surfing the net. There is absolutely no reason these days why you cannot have the complete picture in advance at the click of a mouse, which unfortunately was a luxury I didn't have back then.

There were so many species I wanted to catch, that to be honest, I didn't know where to start. So we kicked off by going trolling offshore with a spread of ballyhoo dead-baits, mainly picking up wahoo and bonito, plus a sailfish which only managed to stay attached for seconds before it jumped its way to freedom.

Later we came across a floating wooden pallet which stirred up a lot excitement between the skipper up top and the crew down in the fishing well. The boat was brought to a halt, and suddenly chunks of ballyhoo were being cut up and thrown into the water.

No explanation was given. It was one of those 'let's wait and see' moments based on their past experience. Then sure enough, we started to see what looked like tiny blue neon lights way down in the clear mirror calm depths. That was the trigger to feed in more chunks and break out four light fixed spool outfits – one each for all the family.

The instruction was for me to drop a free-lined bait in first, then when I hooked up, shuffle along the stern to the far corner allowing the fish to thrash at the surface making a commotion until the rest of the family had done the same. My fish would then come aboard, and working on a conveyor system, each person in turn would repeat the process, drop back to the start and keep it going.

Eventually we had literally hundreds of dorado at the surface virtually crashing in to each other every time a few chunks were thrown in to keep their interest levels up. This, coupled to the thrashing about on the top, kept them there for well over an hour of the most concentrated muscle taxing fun fishing I can ever remember. It was truly, organised chaos.

Apparently dorado love to hang about under floating objects, a fact we've exploited on a number of occasions since, not only off the Florida Coast, but elsewhere in the world including the Canary Islands. Not something you would want to do all day or every day, but a great experience, particularly for a family, and on your first ever foreign trip.

I'm not certain how many dorado we caught, but the body count must have been up towards the hundred mark, with a few taken away for preparation at one of the many cook your catch restaurants they have in these parts. A meal that was only bettered a couple of days later when we had a good haul of yellow tail snappers while trying for barracuda for the last half hour on the way in over the reef edge close to base.

One evening after a quick turn round of something to eat and dropping the family back at the motel, I was back aboard the same boat for an after dark session fishing for tarpon.

Tarpon, along with lots of other desirable fish, seem to be everywhere in these parts. You only need look along the harbour walls and inlets to see the sheer wealth of fish they have available to them. It can be quite mind blowing at times.

On this particular trip we would be trolling ballyhoo again, though around the channel entrances rather than way out at sea. I've since learned there are better ways of approaching tarpon, which are notoriously difficult fish to catch. Not so much in getting them to take a bait, but to stick the hook in and get it to stay there, then get them back to the boat.

The interior of a tarpons mouth has been compared to having a lining of fibre glass, and as such is a difficult place to get a hook to bite. On top of that, their aerobatics doesn't help the situation either. Combine the two, and you have the perfect recipe for fish losses. But not that particular night, as we boated and released a fish of around a hundred and forty pounds, and later, another of seventy pounds.

Subsequent visits to Key West have been a mix of trolling and wreck fishing, with the former being done on the way out to try the latter.

We also did a repeat of the dorado trick by chumming them up from depth around a raft of floating sargassum weed. But primarily we were interested in fishing a couple of US navy wrecks that had been deliberately scuttled for diving and fishing purposes after they had been given the ecological green light, which by that stage were loaded with big fish.

Again we took in turns on the rods, switching pairs with each new drift. It was a bit like Whitby wrecking with large lures, except that the fish were a whole lot bigger, and definitely harder fighting.

These were amberjacks in the forty to ninety pound bracket, after which you needed the break that alternate dropping gave. It was relentless. Fish must have been piled high over the rusting hulk just waiting for the next pair of lures to go down.

What I've also done at Key West is head-boat fishing. I've had a few trips out on the bigger party boats where you can really rack up the species numbers.

This was the first time I'd ever tried that type of fishing, and while it can be a never ending source of small fish for the hire rods, it can also be a cheap way of getting access to big fish too for the more experienced, depending of course on the areas of reef the skipper chooses to fish.

We had literally dozens of species of smaller end hard fighting fish. But we also had some very good bonito, hammerhead sharks, and reasonable sized barracuda. Good sized red snappers too, which was the fish everyone on-board seemed to want.

Most of what I caught stayed on-board. But I was persuaded to take a couple of hogfish and have them cooked at a restaurant, and they were beautiful.

I was also tempted to try one of the longer range seventy two hour head boat trips they do there for the really heavy weight stuff way off around the Dry Tortugas, but had to back off that one due to the other fishing commitments I'd already made.

### FLORIDA - KISSIMMEE

One point worth mentioning here is the way many residential areas in Florida, and possibly other parts of the country too, deal with their surface water run-off. The fact that this example was at Kissimmee is irrelevant really. I've seen it at other locations too.

The Americans like to collect their surface water in ponds of varying sizes with high level overflows going to who knows where.

The last pond I fished was surrounded by large houses available for holiday let. You just opened the door on the mesh cage covering the swimming pool and walked across to it where other people were fishing already.

Complete with resident alligator and turtles, the water was obviously stuffed with fish. Initially, what species and sizes was difficult to say. Some of the locals were casting lures and talked of large mouth bass, but I didn't see any caught. So next time I was in Wal Mart I bought a carton of worms, rigged up my telescopic rod with a small float, and proceeded to catch a never ending stream of bluegills and small bass.

I also saw an alligator gar patrolling the margins, and when I put a bait down on the bottom it was bullhead catfish all the way. But the best fish of all came quite by chance.

I was float fishing at the time and was forced back inside by a sudden thunder storm, so I left the bait in the water until it had passed.

When I got back out there was no sign of it anywhere. Fearing that the alligator had snapped it off I wound in to re-tackle, only to find a big tilapia hanging on the end.

### FLORIDA - PORT CANAVERAL

The day after the red drum session mentioned previously on the Banana River, and our final day fishing up around that end of Florida, with the same guide as used previously, we decided to look for some of the more open water species after putting the boat in at Port Canaveral.

Initially we stayed tucked inside, slowly trolling live-baits along the edges of the harbour walls, which, using the same ultra light tackle as for the red drum, produced some brilliant sport with hard fighting crevalle jacks in the twelve to fifteen pound bracket.

These might not sound like big fish, but jacks rate amongst the hardest pound for pound fighting fish on the planet.

Later, when we'd exhausted that one, and ourselves, it was decided we would head offshore to an area marked by a buoy to fish for barracuda, stopping off on the way to take a look under a patch of floating sargassum weed around which we spotted some triple tails, one of which I managed to tempt on a small shrimp bait.

Then it was back to the barracuda's on small live-baits. The only problem was that if you fished with a wire trace to beat the teeth, they could sense something was wrong and wouldn't take. So we switched to heavy mono, got the takes, but then got bitten off.

All very frustrating, followed by a good soaking on the way back in as the afternoon sea breeze had kicked up quite a chop which the small skiff proceeded to plough back through.

Some years later during a family holiday near Kissimmee, and looking for any excuse to escape the theme parks, I persuaded my Grandson Josh and his uncle Steve to try a day out on one of the larger head-boats out from Port Canaveral, where I thought that being aboard a big boat with all its on-board facilities would be easier on them if it wasn't to their liking.

I hadn't taken any tackle over for that type of fishing thinking I would be doing other stuff on small guided boats. But I did have a good selection of terminal gear to knock up some end rigs for the rods and reels supplied on-board, which kept them both busy with a seemingly never ending stream of trigger fish, small snappers and the like, all of which I had to deal with meaning that my own fishing suffered, which was fine by me.

Meanwhile, the locals, who obviously knew the script and had come with live-bait containers filled with small fish, were fishing for and catching big red snappers. Not loads of them. But enough good ones out over the open water reefs to make the effort worthwhile.

A few jacks also put in a show, plus a big nurse shark which they managed to cut free in the water. So something worth considering for the future, and with a bit more advance homework, plus the right approach in terms of tactics and bait, could produce some very good fish.

### FLORIDA - STICK MARSH

The Stick Marsh, or Farm 13 as it is also known, is a 6,500 acre man made stretch of freshwater near to Palm Bay nestled in between a range of natural waters, the nearest of which is Blue Cypress Lake.

The expanse was impounded in 1987 and first opened to the public in 1991. Judging by the numbers of tree stumps protruding from the lake, which typically averages between four and eight feet in depth, at least part of the impoundment looks to have previously been wooded.

I fished it in 1994 during a visit to central Florida, which while it was primarily a trip aimed at saltwater fishing, also had a couple of days largemouth bass fishing added to the itinerary to give it a bit of extra variety.

With that in mind, we booked to fish with a local character, who to help the story along shall remain nameless. The reason for this is that it wasn't the most politically correct few days we ever spent, which I would add, should have no absolutely no reflection on us. We were mere observers caught up in somebody else's feud.

We met up with our man at Starvin Marvins diner at around six am. The boat hitched to the back of the truck was a bit of a give-away. A man who was probably well into his fifties by then, with lots of hair, a big drooping moustache, and wearing matching bright red budweiser cap and braces.

After the usual preliminary greetings, he stood up and said "we need to get moving before those damned blacks get in the boat and steal everything".

To be honest, there wasn't another living sole anywhere in sight. But that sort of set the tone, and off we went in our hire car following the boat to the launching area at the Stick Marsh site, where having slipped it from its trailer, he set about filling the live wells with 'shiners' which he caught using a cast net.

Typical of American boats, this one was fast, sleek, and packing plenty of horse power. Not that you could do much with it due to all the submerged tree stumps. But there none the less, just in case it could ever be used one day.

It was here that I was first introduced to circle hooks. The rods were short and light paired up to small Penn fixed spool reels, and typically, by UK standards, the approach was very basic. Lightly blown up balloons for floats suspending live-baits just off the bottom.

Depending on whether you hooked the shiner in the shoulder or towards the tail determined whether it tended to swim upwards or downwards. But it was that first sighting of the circle hooks that most sticks in my mind. They looked to all intents and purposes to have been bent out of shape during some brutal disgorging session, though as we would eventually find out, nothing could have been further from the truth.

If I describe our man as 'a good old boy' or 'a red neck', I don't think I would be too far away from the truth. Racist to the core and willing to point the finger of blame for everything bad at anyone and everyone who was black. Least-ways, that was the message that filtered out during the early conversations of the day.

As for the fishing, I'm not sure whether to describe it as good or disappointing. We had lots of bass, though by that stage, the Stick Marsh had yet to earn its reputation as a producer of double figure fish.

It was still way too early in its evolution. So the best we could hope for was the possibility of fish to maybe five pounds, some of which we got, plus the seemingly obligatory praise, back slapping, and hand shaking that goes with guided boat fishing in the US.

Phrases like "good fish" and "well done" were also liberally used. But it truth, other than a bit of head shaking and opening up of their cavernous mouths to create some extra drag, winding in bass is like catching bronze bream back home.

All of that said, it was none the less enjoyable. We tried every conceivable area of the lake, and put in a lot of time casting right up to the edges of the lilly pads trying to tempt fish out of the shade in what was two days of relentless blistering sunshine. But actual stand-out moments were probably down to encounters with things other than bass.

Paul Bennett hooked up a huge snapping turtle which at the side of the boat did an excellent impression of ET as it cranked its neck up in an attempt to grab his fingers, which, we were assured, it could quite easily have taken off.

Our man wanted it in the boat, but it got away. Apparently his dog 'bugger' liked eating them. A similar encounter was with an alligator that crept up slowly towards my float, then suddenly went into a tail stand, grabbed my bait, and was away.

We also decided to try for other species, particularly on the second day after we'd been pointed at a bait outlet where we could get worms (night crawlers) and crickets.

The worms added quite a few assorted catfish to the species list, which we later found out at a local restaurant were beautiful to eat. As for the crickets, we fished these under bob floats for bluegills which were small and plentiful.

Alligator gars also occasionally made short work of the live shiners, though having such awkward shaped mouths, these were difficult to hook up needing lots of time to get the bait into position before you can even think of setting the hook. So for the most part, encounters with those were pretty much a lost cause, though we did land a couple.

I'm sure we had other stuff too. Particularly with the smaller species on the live crickets, which didn't all look the same. And of course, we had loads of large mouth bass which had been the primary objective of the trip.

There were also a couple of interesting incidents off the lake too, such as when we arrived at the motel we used the evening before meeting up at Starvin Marvins.

As we pulled on to the rear parking area, all we could see was red and blue flashing lights, and police, weapons drawn, dashing up and down shouting at somebody running along the building's roof. Not the best end to a long tiring day travelling, though it was only going to get to worse.

The following evening, our man, who happened to be booked into the room next door to us, had parked his truck and boat in full view of his window, which he told us was to keep an eye out for thieving blacks. And he meant it, because when I glanced in through the entrance, there on the cupboard nearest to the door was a revolver which he made abundantly clear he fully intended to use.

Shocked, we said to him, you can't do that. "Sure you can. This is Florida. Hell, at the end of the day all of you've got is one dead thieving black, and there ain't no court in the state going to convict a man for that".

It was at this point, and without even the slightest hint of exaggeration here, that a very smart clean cut young black chap walked around the corner carrying a petrol can, explaining he needed to get back to his army base urgently, had run out of petrol, and was looking to borrow ten dollars to fuel up.

He looked and sounded convincing to me. But not to our man, who started asking which base and what unit, then told him that that particular unit wasn't stationed there at the time, and started to accuse him of a potential rip off.

The supposed soldier couldn't see in through the doorway because our man was blocking his view. But as he stepped back to where the gun was, the would be soldier suddenly grasped the gravity of his predicament and was off, which thankfully was crisis averted. An eventful couple of days to say the least.

### VIRGINIA BEACH – RUDEE INLET

Back in 2002 when my wife Dawn said she fancied a holiday taking in the sights in and around Washington, trust me to pick a base where the boat fishing just happened to be the costliest in the entire USA.

At around twelve to fourteen hundred dollars per day even back then for offshore trolling, Virginia rates amongst the most expensive fishing destinations in the world. Yet from the same marina's you can bottom fish fifty trips on a party boat for the same money as dragging lumps of plastic around the ocean just once.

The old cliché of only getting what you pay for springs to mind here, but that isn't necessarily always the case. Virginian offshore trolling can be patchy over the high summer months when we were there, with tuna, when they are to be found, dominating catches.

As one local party boat angler put it, "you would struggle to get twelve hundred dollars worth of tuna in a freezer. But at twenty six dollars a trip on a party boat, even if you catch nothing, you still don't feel ripped off".

There's not much chance of drawing a blank on the party boats though. While the fish are a bit on the small side, what they lack in size, they more than make up for in suicidal numbers.

If I had one complaint to make it would concern the lack of variety. That said, it was August, which is the slowest period of the year. Later on into the autumn when the water has started to cool, a wider variety of species including striped bass and bluefish start to swarm inshore.

This coincides with a greater variety of party boating opportunities too, including extended inshore, offshore, and wrecking trips, and all at prices comparable to those back home.

That however is where any similarities with our home ports ends. No bookings are required. If you want to fish, you simply arrive half an hour before the boat is scheduled to leave, buy a ticket from the kiosk, and step aboard.

You don't even need tackle or bait, as this is included in the price. Of course, you don't have to use what's provided, and while it may be convenient, particularly if you are holidaying over there from the UK or Ireland, in many ways it pays to take along your own tackle and buy some bait, as much of what is provided is very basic. The bait for example was a polystyrene cup filled with squid strips.

All the fishing was done on the drift. With no more than eight ounces of lead being needed to hold bottom, a light boat rod and small multiplier loaded with fifteen to twenty pounds lbs monofilament would be perfect.

Leave the braided line at home. Water depth and tidal flow don't warrant it, and while it will still catch fish, it can also present major un-tangling problems of which there can be many if the boat is crowded.

When it comes to bottom fishing, the average US boat angler lags way behind his UK counter-part in terms outlook, attitude, tactics, and technique. Conversely, US boat operators certainly could show us a thing or two about service and value for money.

American party boats bear no resemblance whatsoever to their UK counterparts. The boats there must have been sixty feet in length and possibly more. All had plenty of cover from the elements, which in this case was the sun, with comfortable seating all round. They also had hand and fish washing facilities, toilets, and a lounge from which you could buy snacks and cold drinks.

At other ports, I have even fished on party boats with café facilities serving hot food. Deck hands do all the running around, cutting bait, disgorging, icing of fish etc. The man at the helm has his wheel-house up on the top level just ahead of the sun deck from where he keeps the party updated about the fishing, planned moves and like, over a tannoy system.

Out from Rudee Inlet we fished on the drift, so short droppers above the lead did the business. It wasn't exactly reefy ground. More a mix of all sorts including patches of heavier stuff.

Hang-ups were not that common place, and when pressure was applied, whatever bit of the rig was snagged up would usually pull free. I'm not sure whether it was weed, boulders or what exactly was causing these hang-ups as nothing ever came up on the hooks except for fish, which did so by the bucket full.

This was a venue where double hits were the rule rather than the exception. Black bass were the main culprits starting at a couple of inches in length right through to a couple of pounds. But these were not the only fish. Quite a few flounders were also caught.

This doesn't sound very exciting, but other than being flat, American flounders bear no resemblance to their name sakes on this side of the pond. Instead, they are more like small halibut, with huge mouths crammed full of sharp pointed teeth.

I suspect they are related to turbot and brill as their eyes are located on the same side of the mouth. They also fight well and are very good to eat as I was to find out one evening in a restaurant.

When there are lots of anglers tightly packed onto a party boat, it can be hard work keeping clear of other people less familiar than perhaps you would like with fish and tackle handling. This particular boat however had a long narrow pointed walk-way protruding out from the bow which Dave Devine and I made a bee-line for.

This allowed us to drop down from either side depending on the direction the boat was set up to drift. And with nobody behind us, or for that matter within several yards, we didn't suffer a single tangle all day.

The crew on the deck organised a two dollar sweep. It wasn't compulsory, though judging by the stamp put on the back of the hands of those who paid, most people were in it.

Numbers onboard these boats can vary between a mere handful on quiet season midweek days, to maybe forty and more when word gets about that the fish are in. So the sweep money can be worth picking up.

Who gets it though is very much a lottery, in that while most Brits would wipe the floor with the yanks in terms of numbers of fish caught, picking out the single biggest fish of the day in situations like this unfortunately is beyond individual control.

I thought I had it for much of the trip with a nice flounder picked up on a long thin mackerel strip cut to resemble a sandeel, but unfortunately at the weigh in, I was pipped by a whisker with a black bass.

The inlet itself is quite a sizeable affair with plenty of surface area for boats and moorings, all of which is accessed via quite a short narrow channel lined with big boulders which look to have been put there deliberately, as they follow the contour of a protective sea wall, behind which is a walkway used by the locals for fishing.

The entrance can get quite busy with boats, which, despite speed restrictions, can still cause a bit of a wash, and is probably the reason why a ban on fishing from these rocks is so strictly enforced.

Very strictly enforced in fact, as I was to find out when a police boat with a loud speaker came along and told me to get back behind the wall. But not before I was able to get the fish I was looking for.

I wasn't the only person fishing either from the rocks or from the wall. But I was one of only two people to catch, the other being a local angler who knew exactly how to fish the inlet and the nearby surf beach. He had an aerated tub full of tiny live mullet, plus some breakaway leads to hold them out in position.

He had already caught himself a couple of nice flounders by the time I got talking to him. He then gave me a live mullet and told me to put it out in the middle of the channel, which I did, and the rest as they say is history.

I got a decent sized flounder just before the police moved me on. I even got my battered live-bait back. But with nowhere left to cast it, I decided to call it a day.

If, as we did, you explore using a hire car, you will quickly find all sorts of other shore fishing opportunities. Anywhere there was water with access seemed to attract fishermen. In particular, around and under the bridges, where we saw people catch flounders, black drum, and croakers.

There were also plenty of croakers caught from the purpose built wooden angling jetties, and we had more than our fair share of those out on the boats too, which are a bit like whiting in terms of size, willingness to feed, and availability.

Triggerfish were another fairly common species, plus we had quite a few pufferfish. But bass and flounder were the species everyone wanted for the freezer, and with the black bass in particular, nobody went home disappointed.

### ASCENSION ISLAND

Ascension Island. That tiny lump of wind-swept cinder sitting on top of the mid-Atlantic ridge, which along with its two 'sister' south Atlantic British overseas territories of St. Helena and Tristan Da Cunha, is part of the most isolated island trio, and therefore location on earth, with obvious important ramifications for the fishing.

Huge numbers of desirable fish species congregate there under the supposed protective shield of the UK military by way of a 200 mile exclusion zone. Otherwise, a tiny speck in the middle of a huge ocean, with precious little in the way of infra-structure, other than a few houses and administrative buildings, an air strip, and a virtual patch-work of UK and US eaves dropping equipment sat astride a heap of volcanic rubble and cooled larva flows.

Despite it being Yellow Fin Tuna heaven and having un-paralleled shore fishing possibilities, my personal reason for wanting to go there was it's potentially large numbers of huge Six Gilled Sharks which come in close from deeper water surrounding the island after dark.

Still needing a fish topping 1,000 pounds to complete my bucket list project, and currently in my late sixties, I recognised that this would be my last shot at placing that final tick on the list, and that come what may, win or lose, I could finally get on with completing this book.

Not the easiest of places to get to. With all the entry consents, permits, and vetting required by both the Ascension Government and the military to get on to the flight at RAF Brize Norton and off again at Wideawake airstrip, it was a relief to exit the airbase, finally knowing that at last all the paper work must have been in order, and that the outcome of the visit was finally down to Dave Devine, Graeme Pullen, Kev McKie and myself. That was if all the other long range email arrangements regarding car hire, accommodation and fishing had also gone according to plan, which, thankfully they had.

Because of the sheer quality of both, I'm going to look at the boat and shore fishing separately, starting with the boats. There are limited offshore game fishing opportunities from big boats at big prices, and there are far less expensive smaller part time local boats.

For my money, there is no comparison between the two. True, we are not comparing like with like in terms of objectives. But having fished from both, I would gladly waive the comfort of the big game boat for the sheer enjoyment, quality of fishing, and local knowledge of the smaller private inshore boats, with the add on bonus of coming in at an absolute fraction of the cost.

We had two Americans staying at our digs, one of which was a Marlin boat owner and the other his skipper based at Hawaii, looking to catch themselves that elusive 'grander' which Ascension is famous for. Between them they caught four small white marlin and a couple of wahoo over the week. The only grander they saw was the one leaving their wallets each day. Ouch!!.

Each morning at breakfast we would swap the previous days experiences, them aboard the big boat, and us from Patrick Anthony's small open boat 'Bounty Hunter', and they were obviously impressed with both the quality and quantity of the fish we had taken. So what better place to start than with Patrick, known locally as Kimbo, boat fishing out of Georgetown.

The name Georgetown kind-of over-states the size of the place. At best there are maybe half a dozen small roads, a handful of old colonial government buildings, and a few houses clustered around a pier head. With no hint even of a harbour, what boats there are lie moored up just off, which is safe enough.

Despite there being a constant breeze of between 15 and 25 miles an hour, because it's the trade wind from Africa, it always comes from the same direction, which at Georgetown is offshore. So unless it picks up, or big Atlantic swells push in from bad weather elsewhere, you are reasonably assured of getting afloat.

The next area of concern is the pier head itself. Stone steps at the end lead down to a small stone ledge where small boats can come in to pick up. Unfortunately, even in calm weather, when the tide is up, there is usually a swell washing over this.

So you're going to get wet, and so too is your gear if you are not careful when boarding the boat while clinging on to one of half a dozen 'tarzan' ropes dangling from above to help hold the boat steady as you attempt to get in. Local people have been lost here. A sobering thought worth bearing in mind.

When we were there, Kimbo's boat 'Bounty Hunter' was a small open centre console outboard powered vessel of around 20 feet in length and was guaranteed to throw spray up and into the fishing well, which added to the pier head steps, meant another wetting.

Light water proofs are essential if you don't want a good soaking, or like Dave and Graeme, wear a make-shift spray jacket made from a hotel bin liner. I'd also take along a life jacket for those days when you need to board and unload from a small punt at the moorings, which can be a bit un-nerving.

You could if you wanted start fishing immediately. On a couple of occasions we saw birds circling and tuna topping amongst the moorings. The problem with that is the number of jacks knocking about inshore which would be onto the trolled lures immediately.

Best then to wait until you are out of the jack's preferred feeding depth range before putting lures out for the short run down or up to where Kimbo thinks the tuna are, where the main approach then is chunking and free-lining, either on the drift, or more usually at anchor.

Throughout, we fished in two's or three's because of the lack of room, a pattern we followed on both the weekend morning and mid-week evening trips due to Kimbo having a regular full time job. One day, Dave and I had two yellow fins and a 90 pound wahoo trolling just beyond the moorings en route to the buoyed anchor, while on an evening session a few days later, Dave had a 310 tuna on a lure.

That said, the bulk of what was caught fell to chunking, which is loose feeding with chunks of fish followed by similar sized baits free-lined amongst them so as to sink at the same rate.

This was how most of the tuna were caught from dusk on into the dark. Kev had a tuna of around 220 pounds doing this with his fixed spool lure popping outfit, which took him 2 hours and 40 minutes to beat. But typically the tuna would range between around 40 to 70 pounds apiece, which while this doesn't sound much, can still be a handful to beat, even on the much heavier gear Kimbo provides.

On a few occasions however, the same chum also drew in less welcome predators, as indeed would hooked tuna struggling on the hook sending out stressed messages, leading to them occasionally coming back bitten off just behind the head.

Obviously this was the work of sharks. But not just any sharks. So far as we could ascertain it would always be by galapagos sharks in the 200 to 500 pound category. It's worth noting that at the time, the world record for the species stood at 308 pounds 10 ounces.

One particular day we got Two Boats store owner Andrew Ellick, known locally as 'BBC,' to take us out in his converted ships life boat 'Lady Shy' for a mid week daytime trip while Kimbo was at work, and in no time at all we were surrounded by huge galapagos sharks.

So brazen were they that Graeme even managed to dart tag a couple as they swarm around the boat, one of which was a good 600 pounds. We also kept hooking them on small chunks of bait intended for the tuna. I had one on for well over an hour before it bit through the heavy mono trace, while a combination of Dave, Graeme and BBC actually got a big one to the boat and tagged before it too bit through.

As mentioned earlier, my sole objective was to tick off the missing 'grander' from my bucket list, and with that in mind, we booked a couple of evening trips spent fishing after dark at anchor aboard the 36 foot marlin boat 'Harmattan'.

While it was still light, the shark gear stayed in the boat. Instead we chunked for tuna for fresh bait which were not slow in coming. Then as darkness fell, the 130 pound class outfit was brought out and rigged up with a long heavy wire trace to beat the teeth and abrasive skin, with the addition of a large lump of rock on a piece of lighter line tied to the hook, the idea being that when a shark took the bait, the lump of rock holding it down would be bitten free, leaving just the fish on the end of the line.

We did eventually get a big six gill during the second session caught by Kev, which because it was estimated at a 'mere' 800 pounds didn't bother me that I'd missed out. In fact, I was quite happy that it wasn't my fish.

Having already previously caught them to 900 pounds, what I didn't want was all that laborious hard slogging dead weight effort, only to be disappointed at not having a 'grander' as compensation. So not as much six gill activity as we had hoped for. But not necessarily because of any poor showing on the part of the sharks. Other un-anticipated factors were to a large extent responsible.

Pretty much as soon as the big tuna slab went down after dark on both trips, fish other than six gills were biting and tugging at it on the bottom. These we were told were oil fish, a species of so-called snake mackerel I had previously only seen in photographs of people posing with specimens which looked to be between maybe 10 and 20 pounds.

What we had not expected was either the numbers of oil fish we would eventually encounter during our stay, and more especially their size. Their power too once they felt the pressure change around half way up, which during later encounters on much lighter tackle, saw them repeatedly fast stripping line from the reel.

Great fish while on the end of the line in the water. Wild fish when they hit surface where they would immediately go nuts, and dangerous fish with all but the smallest of specimens carefully held in gloved hands brought inside the boat on account of the sharp bony tubercles between their scales, their spiky fins, and their teeth.

These tubercles have hard razor sharp pointed tips which are well capable of removing skin and cutting in to flesh. As if that was not enough, at the business end, the mouth is huge and full of sharp teeth. Not the best of fish to attempt to pose for the camera in light of their insistence to wriggle and crash about generally while out of the water.

Once we were aware of the presence of oil fish after dark, we deliberately started fishing for them with 10/0 hooks tied to 200 pounds bs monofilament droppers. One evening Graeme found a small chemical light stick in the bottom of his box and attached that to the trace, taking three out of the four we had that night.

Unfortunately, it was the only one he had. The locals on the other hand tend to see them as nuisance fish. But for us, getting pestered by hard fighting fish averaging 60 to 80 pounds, and occasionally topping the hundred, was just the kind of nuisance we could happily live with while waiting for the tuna on the chunks.

The shore fishing around the more accessible parts of the island is perhaps best described as frustrating. Absolutely world class at the right spots when it's on song. Painfully boring when its not. And sometimes both within minutes of each other at the same place on the same day.

The quality of the shore fishing along the beaches and at most rock marks almost completely comes down to the presence or absence of 'fry' shoals, which are actually scad being pushed in close by predatory fish marked by flocks of diving frigate birds. No frigates or fry, then no fish. But even more frustrating is that even this doesn't always hold true, so it can be a hard situation to read at times.

A good example here is a day when we had driven down to Pan Am beach, which is a series of three short beaches separated by rocks close to the American base. Along one of these beaches the frigate birds were going berserk, so we quickly tackled up our popping rods armed with shimano saragosa reels loaded with 80 pounds bs braid, tied a short length of 200 pounds monofilament to the end, then fished a variety of poppers, dexter wedges and lead-heads with soft rubber split tails, and bingo, it was every egg a bird. Mainly hard fighting black jacks and almaco jacks. But there were also some tuna mixed in there amongst them as evidenced by the sizes of some of the surface boils.

But every so often the birds would stop diving, and either continue circling high up over the water, or sit it out on the rocks and wait. Correspondingly, the regularity of takes on the lures would fall away. Then suddenly it would all kick off again, a pattern which on this day persisted for a few hours producing lots of good action and fish.

So much so that we got a bit blasé about it and nipped over to Two Boats for some cooked food, which is something of a rarity on Ascension, as the few potential food outlets there are always seem to be closed when anglers typically find time to feed. But not this day, so we grabbed our chance, and when we returned you could not have bought a bite. It was hard to believe we were back at the same place.

On another occasion, we spent a couple of hours driving from beach to beach looking for bird activity and saw nothing. With experience of the previous encounter etched on our minds, we were becoming despondent. We wanted to fish, but not simply to stand there flogging the water for nothing.

In the end however, that was the only alternative left open to us, so at a short finger of rock in front of the desalination plant, again at Pan Am, we decided to bite the bullet and give it a go. Not a bird could be seen anywhere. Yet as soon as we started casting it was absolute carnage, which as you would expect, we looked to repeat on subsequent days, yet caught nothing.

We made our visit in September running on through into early October. Having taken a very wide cross section of advice on the various options available on and around the island, this seemed to be the best compromise.

The main scad run, which can never be accurately predicted, and in some years doesn't even happen at all, is usually around June-July time. So it's a difficult one to call. That said, the man who really set the shore fishing scene alight here, an English chap now living in Switzerland called Grant, was also there at the same time as us. So read what you will into that one.

In the not too distant past, Grant had become the first person to land a yellow fin tuna in excess of 200 pounds from the shore. It's been done a couple of times since from the same spot, but Grant was the man, and we'd accidentally stumbled across him fishing his favoured deep water mark.

In fairness to him, I'm not going to disclose its location other than to say it's a rock mark between Long Beach and English Bay, and while the fishing platform at the bottom over-looking very deep water is a good one, the climb down is treacherous and daunting to say the least, even with both hands free by not carrying fishing tackle.

I was lucky in that I had a four piece popping rod made for me by artico in Italy courtesy of Neil Bryant at bluezone tackle. Along with my cameras, this went into a rucksack with the rest of my gear for the hazardous climb down to the spot, where in the past, Grant had shackled himself to a rope tied around a rock with a short lanyard to play and land his big tuna, a fish which took in excess of 6 hours to beat.

Now that's dedication, as is the rest of the safety kit he carries, the months of gym training he does in the run up to these visits to be able to cast his huge poppers all day every day, and his deliberate avoidance of huge amberjacks, black jacks and almaco jacks, which might detract from the sole objective of big tuna or nothing.

We fished it a couple of times. Initially I wouldn't do down. Myself and Dave Devine went off elsewhere in the car, returning later to pick up Kev and Graeme who'd managed to get down. When we got back, Kev held up a tuna of around 35 pounds which he'd literally just caught.

Needing to get a picture, I decided to brave the descent, then while he was getting himself sorted out, I had a few casts with his rod, one of which had a missed hit is the middle of a water boil the size of dinner table. Tuna, most definitely. Monster tuna, very probably. Disappointed, not really. Posing a monster fish for the camera is one thing. Getting beaten up for the next several hours just to be in that position is completely another matter altogether.

Before we flew home, on the last day, Graeme and myself popped in to the conservation lab to talk to a young lady there who was involved in a government backed research project looking at age to growth rates, sexual maturity, and gut analyses, in the many tuna that were brought in every day.

Interestingly, what she did say was that the black triggerfish, which abound in their millions tight up to the shore, feature heavily in the stomach contents of the very biggest tuna, which might help explain why shore anglers, inshore spear fishermen, and boat anglers working very close in seem to catch the biggest fish. Also why dark coloured poppers work so well.

We also pushed her on rumours regarding the planned issuing of long-lining permits which she did not want to talk about. In fairness to her, despite being privy to the discussions, this wasn't her responsibility. But appreciating that it would be a very touchy subject, nobody was willing to say anything other than hint that the income generated was necessary to finance more infrastructure on the island, and to finance further conservation research in the future, which to my mind is a complete contradiction of the definition of the term 'conservation'.

Why risk damaging a perfectly balanced, protected, and productive fishery in that way. It makes no sense. Not only tuna, but sharks, marlin, and many other species are also going to be at risk. So if you fancy fishing Ascension, better get over there quick before it's too late. The writing it would seem is very clearly now on the wall.

### AUSTRALIA

According to a very interesting TV documentary, the Cairns area of Queensland in north east Australia, is statistically the most toxic location on the planet. Not from a pollution point of view, but by way of a collection of animals living locally in the wild which could, given the chance, and in a variety of ways, very easily kill you.

The sea for example has sharks, poisonous sea snakes, box jellyfish and blue ringed octopus to name but a few, while the adjacent creeks and rivers are full of saltwater crocodiles. On the land its funnel web spiders and deadly taipans. And so the list goes on.

Not that anyone need be particularly concerned. We roamed freely in all these types of venue, and while we did see examples of some of what was lurking out there, we were always well insulated from it.

So a wonderful experience at a fantastic location, also supposedly offering some of the best fishing in the world. Certainly from an offshore big game perspective. But as an avid species collector, I wasn't there to go dragging lumps of plastic all over the ocean on the off chance of a marlin trying to eat it. There were way too many other potential attractions on offer for that.

The creeks for example, where you can fish for amongst many other things, barramundi, and of course there's the great barrier reef.

If I'm honest, though I went to Cairns with the hope of fishing the barrier reef, I wasn't actually sure until I got there that this would even be allowed, as there was little in the way of Internet back then to check things out in advance. So I started things off by fishing a few short stints in and around the creeks from a guided aluminium skiff in the hope of barramundi.

Not that it would have mattered even if I had found myself a barrier reef opportunity, as the weather was ropey. So up the creeks it was catching all sorts of catfish and snapper-like things, plus a fish that looked like a barramundi but wasn't.

Usually this would be done in the morning. Our guide would use his cast net to gather up an ample supply of large shrimps and we were off.

It was fun fishing. Nothing big, but plenty of action from a wide variety of species more than capable of giving a good account of themselves. Then quite by chance, on one of the days, we chose to fish in the afternoon. An inspired decision.

Not so much for the fishing on that particular day, but most definitely for what was to come. For coinciding with our arrival back at the marina came one of the larger reef angling boats, and on the dock they were sorting through a whole host of huge snappers, groupers and jacks.

That was my cue. I made a bee-line for the skipper, and by the time these trips came around, the sea had thankfully settled and the sun was out. A good job too as it was a long haul out to where we were headed to fish some of the deeper portions of the barrier reef.

The fishing itself was straight forward enough. I had my own tackle, but none the less I let the skipper advise on the terminal gear. He's the man who does it every day, so no point in wasting time, though as it turned out it too was quite basic. A single hook dropper rig tied from very heavy monofilament with a weak link for the lead.

Bait was equally un-fussed. I seem to remember there being squid, huge shrimps, and cut fish. A case of just loading it on, sending it down, and hanging on in there poised for action, knowing that you had to be brutal and quick by not letting a fish, however powerful it might be, have its head and power dive down in to the rough where it would be lost.

Easier said than done. Sometimes you would feel fish biting, hit them, and would have little trouble clearing the snags. They still fought hard and were a handful, but manageable due to their smaller size. Then on other occasions, what initially felt like the exactly the same bite would suddenly develop in to a mad uncontrollable power diving rush which the fish would invariably win.

Not always, but usually. Very powerful fish, which judging by what we did actually get to the boat were huge snappers, groupers, or jacks. Exciting, but very frustrating at the same time, with lots for arm wrenching physical exertions, and often precious little to show for it at the end.

### BORNEO

I went over to Borneo completely clueless, knowing that whatever I found out there fishing-wise, if anything at all, would have to be done on the hoof.

Considering the nature of the place and its tropical rain forest coverage, it's actually quite well developed in a couple of the major centres, with the contrast of a beautiful new marina faced off by a collection of battered old tin shacks sprawling out in to the water surrounded by rubbish on the opposite side of the road.

So they had boats there, which was a start. They also had a lot of jungle rivers supposedly full of fish like jungle perch. But where, and how could I get access to any of them was the problem.

I did get to look at one river when we headed off up into the jungle on a battered old train belonging to the North Borneo Railway, built by the British in the 1890's, aboard what looked to be the very same trains judging by the one we had, which leaked during the regular afternoon down pour through holes in the roof.

Not that getting wet mattered as it was warm, on top of which we'd just body rafted through the white water sections of the river on our way back downstream to pick up the next station, with no real hint of any likely spots or possibilities to freshwater fish. And so it went for the first few days, with a spot of beach fishing always looking the most likely candidate.

That being the case, one morning I made my way down through the hotel grounds to the tree's fringing the beach to weigh up my options, passing a cat taunting a cobra on the lawn en route, only to be faced off by a herd of buffalo bathing in the sea where I'd intended to fish.

Needless to say I gave that one a miss. Then I stumbled across this Australian lady named Shelly who owned a small restaurant on the road into Kota Kinabalu where we'd called in for a meal, who also owned a boat with a skipper who would take parties out to fish. The boat was called 'Fat Cat', and the man in charge was Edwin Pong.

Conditions across all the trips we did were never ideal, though always fishable, just about. The journey out to the grounds was also long. Certainly to get amongst the better fish.

Borneo had suffered a lot of unwanted attention from commercial fishermen coming over from the nearby Philippines using dynamite, which besides killing or damaging the fish, more worryingly was destroying the reefs capability for short term recovery.

At that time, the Malaysian authorities looked to be getting a grip on the situation, but full recovery was still some way off, the result being that it was difficult to find good sections of reef that had not been seriously affected, and good fish stocks that hadn't also been hit hard.

Fortunately, the crew had a few aces up their sleeve which would make the long hard slog out into the South China Sea worthwhile. Certainly more worthwhile than staying inshore, where all I saw was a few local fishermen coming in with the odd barracuda and small snapper.

The marina too was full of small fish, and on one occasion when we were taken across the bay to a nice restaurant built on legs standing up from the water on a tiny island just across the way, I saw lots of small jacks and other interesting looking fish nosing around the docking platform, which obviously you couldn't fish from.

So there were opportunities inshore too, if only some way could be found of exploiting them. Otherwise, you needed to be afloat and heading well offshore.

To put things into context, the fishing was a bit like Whitby. The water was deep, but not too deep; the ground was heavy, but not too tackle hungry, and the fish were feeding right down in amongst it at the bottom. It was all bait fishing with good strong hooks on short heavy monofilament droppers above the lead.

Good, solid, hard fighting fish too. Probably nothing making double figures, though quite a few would come close to that weight. But snappers, groupers and coral cod in that sort of weight range are still incredible scrappers. Incredible eating too as Mr. Pong and his crew cooked some up for lunch which was served on a table with a cloth and cutlery. All very civilized, and a bit surreal on the deck of a pitching boat sat under a cover to shield us from the rain.

They tasted much better at Shelly's restaurant that evening where she put on a good spread of coral cod and red snapper. All top notch quality eating fish, and the primary reason for the Philippine fishermen dynamiting the reefs. Beautiful fish to look at too.

The red snappers I don't think were the same species as I'd caught previously in other parts of the world, and nor were they all the same species there. But the coral cod I'd seen and caught before. Incredible fish, which for some reason, at least one other similar looking fish had gone to great pains to mimic.

### BULGARIA

Not I suspect the first name on the list when laying down plans for a fishing holiday, Bulgaria is an ex-Soviet bloc eastern European country with a short stretch of coastline on the Black Sea.

If I'm honest, I wasn't impressed with the place at all. The resort was terrible and the fishing there wasn't up to much either. There were a few fliers pinned up around the place offering both sea and freshwater fishing trips to holiday makers, all of which need to be avoided like the plague.

For my part, I had contacted a chap in Sofia before I flew out who offered a guiding service, and we had arranged to meet up to fish the River Danube. I'm not an out and out freshwater fan really, but the prospects of a new species in the form of an asp kind-of caught my imagination, so we decided to give that a go.

Andrey Parvanov and Pavel Pavlov picked me up at my Hotel for a three day look at the real Bulgaria, with its pot holed roads, ram-shackle Dickensian looking industrial complexes, and mighty River Danube which commercial ships use as an arterial trade route to adjacent cities and countries. And what an eye opener that turned out to be.

The International Union For The Conservation Of Nature (IUCN) record the asp _Aspius aspius_ as a red list endangered species. It is also protected by the Bern Convention on endangered species and habitats. But judging by the number of times I've been asked what an asp is, my guess is that not a lot of people know that.

For those who think that an asp is the snake used by Cleopatra to kill herself, let me say that it is in fact a predatory member of the cyprinid family that includes the roach and the chub, which in terms of general appearance it rather looks like a hybrid of. Until that is you get to the mouth. This is huge, slightly up pointing, and interestingly for such an aggressive predator, totally devoid of teeth.

In a way it reminded me of a tarpon's mouth, and judging by the way they totally engulfed the lures we were using, it also appears to feed like a tarpon too by coming up to its prey from below, then quickly sucking it right in to the back of its throat.

In terms of distribution and life style, asp prefer the bigger, faster rivers of Eastern Europe, though I understand that they can also be found as far west as northern Germany, particularly in the River Elbe.

The Danube is one of the biggest rivers in Europe, which from its origin in Germany's Black Forest, flows through nine other European countries before eventually discharging into the Black Sea close to the Romanian city of Sulina. And based on local information, it was that stretch where the river actually marks the border between Romania and Bulgaria, around thirty miles to the east of the city of Ruse (Pyce), that Andrey and Pavel had ear marked as the area to fish.

We knew that the further east we fished, the better our chances were, particularly if we chose a large, deep, fast flowing stretch which was an almost tailor-made definition of much of the lower Danube. But that still left a lot of potential water to be tried. So Andrey and Pavel sought advice from some of the local angling talent in and around Ruse, who told of a potentially productive stretch way out of the city where the river actually looks more like a rural river should.

We were to find a specific track leading down through the surrounding forest to a water pumping station, downstream of which we should look for fast water glides within casting range where the bigger asp are known to do some of their feeding, particularly early mornings and evenings, which in the dark and with no prior knowledge of where to go, took some finding. But at around day break on the first morning, bingo, we had found 'X' marks the spot.

So what exactly is a big asp. Well, there have been authenticated reports of specimens topping twenty pounds, though we were told to expect a more typical good fish average of around two to four pounds, by which stage they should have become lone hunters, usually out in the deeper water.

Smaller asp on the other hand tend to be pack hunters. Find one and you could be in for a bit more regular action, which we were later to find was a very accurate piece of advice.

The thing about asp is that while they are potentially big fish with big mouths, unlike predators such as pike which have enormous mouths, they require much smaller lures, particularly for the smaller pack fish.

A further problem is that they like their lures cranked back in at almost break neck speed, which, unless the lure is carrying a fair bit of weight, is going to bring it up quite high in the water column, which if it's deep, or if say it's carrying a bit of colour after heavy rain, can present problems getting small lures down deep enough while coming in fast enough to be in with a shot.

With that in mind, Henk Simonsz has put together a range of asp specific lures in different body weights and colours, which I must admit I had not seen before, but which I dare say I will be using again for other small to average fish, both in freshwater and at sea. They were absolutely excellent, and amongst the best and most innovative lures I have used in a very long time.

With the sun now fully up in the sky, we stopped off at the first fast water stretch we came across where we all started pitching in our lures at long range, the reward for which was a very early bit of success in the form of what would turn out to be our best asp at around three pounds to Pavel's rod.

He described the hit as hard and sudden. A fish with plenty of power, and no easy push-over to get in to the landing net. But unfortunately, despite being suddenly enthused by Pav's fish, for the next hour or so we drew a complete blank, unless you count a couple of spirited but abortive hits by small pike just as the lure was about to be lifted from the water.

It was at this point that Andrey wandered back a couple of hundred yards upstream to where a fallen tree was somehow being held out across the water flow. Here he started trying a few risky throws with the lure in an attempt to get as close to the log as possible without actually getting hung up, which unfortunately did eventually claim a few lures over the day, though the payback for the gamble proved to be more than worth it.

Protruding branches from the log eventually took lures from all three of us. But it also gave us at least one asp each. Granted, they were all small fish, which fits in very neatly with the juvenile shoaling instinct we were told about, but still none the less they were asp.

That probably isn't the only reason why we took a total of four asp from the area of its influence. As it was protruding above the water line, the log clearly also had a lot of water flowing underneath it too, as evidenced by the swirls being thrown upon on the downstream side. Just the kind of stuff asp love.

But again, that may not have been all, because those parts of the tree submerged nearest to the bank where the water was both quieter and shallower would also provide a nice stretch of sheltered haven for any small prey fish in the area. And as these asp were probably only just at or into the start of their fish feeding phase, if that were so, then it could only be a good thing.

What amazed me about those smaller fish taken around the log was the amount of aggression they showed for their size when attacking the lures. Very obviously, even by that stage, they were instinctive full on predators, which put together with Pavels account of the earlier bigger fish left me wondering just what it might be like if one of us was to hook up something into double figures, which I'm sure are there, and for a couple of good reasons.

The first is that asp have a preference for the lower reaches of big rivers, though we were still around a hundred and fifty miles from the Black Sea, which while that might sound a long way, is nothing when you consider the total length of the Danube.

More important still, the local anglers, of which there are literally hundreds each evening along every available stretch of river bank in and around Ruse city centre, for the most part have absolutely no interest whatsoever in catching the things.

Not that they would have much of a chance of catching them anyway as most were fishing with bait, the reason being that bread and maggots catch roach, bream, and catfish, all of which you can eat, whereas asp, certainly from the English speakers I bumped into, are not well regarded as table fish, which in light of their endangered status is perhaps as well.

### CANADA

I chose to fish the Fraser River at Chilliwack in British Columbia very carefully. I needed to catch a fish from freshwater weighing in excess of one hundred pounds, and while there are a number of potential locations and species such as wels catfish from the River Ebro, and arapaima in Thailand, with typically one in every six sturgeon caught there topping the hundred pound mark, the chances of success looked very good, on top of which, I just fancied fishing for sturgeon anyway.

Our timing however wasn't in any way flexible. Dave Devine and I, plus our wives, were over there to see the Calgary stampede, followed by a drive across the rockies taking in all the usual tourist haunts along the way through to Chilliwack, just outside Vancouver, where we would hook up with a guide for a few days on the river.

Not that timing mattered that much to us, because sturgeon were our primary aim, though July is not a good time to be there if you want to catch any of the various Pacific salmon species which also run this river in their millions every year.

Actually, it would have been impossible to catch fish during our visit on anything other than bait because of the discolouration of the water, which looked as though someone had been washing out paint brushes with white emulsion on them.

Visibility would have been measured in mere inches, caused by a natural phenomenon known as glacial flour. This is finely ground rock fragments similar to talcum powder, scoured from the surrounding substrate by glaciers gets into the river as the ice melts.

The other problem with our timing was mosquito's. I've never seen as many in all my life. We fished from aluminium jets boats which were launched each day from a small beach where we parked up the car.

Once the boat was off its trailer we would exit the car and make a run to it, then race out across the huge expanse of the river with the front window open to blast any mossies out of the cabin.

It wasn't too bad out on the water, though obviously you still had to take precautions. But around the banks it was mossie city. So bad in fact while we were there that they had crop dusting helicopters spraying insecticides along the river margins all day long. The big question was, would the fish bite as well as the mossies did.

We were assured they would and that we would see some big fish amongst them within that six to one ratio mentioned earlier. But that's just a prediction, not a guarantee. And even if it does work out about right at the end when the final stats are all in, it won't necessarily be five double figure fish then one over the ton in chronological order.

They could come in any sort of order, which is exactly what happened, which when you are the only one not to have achieved it and it's the afternoon of the last day, believe me, the pressure is really on.

For obvious reasons, the tackle they use there is heavy by freshwater standards. Medium sized boat rods with shimano multipliers loaded with one hundred pounds bs braid.

The end gear is similarly heavy and crude. Quite a large lump of lead to keep the bait well pinned down in the fast river flow, and a very short flowing trace, presumably for the same reason.

As for the bait, this was either a one inch diameter bag of salmon eggs contained in a piece of material cut from a pair of women's tights (for reasons of staying out of trouble, preferably not while she's still wearing them), or a tiny cross section cut from a lamprey, both of which had the potential to bobble about and lift in the flow, which is another reason for the short trace to help keep baits down in the feeding zone.

While both were small baits in proportion to what it was we were hoping to catch, every day out in the boat still brings with it the likelihood of cracking the ton.

There is a pretty good chance of cracking the double ton too. Then there are the really big fish going anywhere between five hundred and a thousand pounds, and the beauty of it is that any and every bite could genuinely be that fish of a life time.

And still it doesn't end there. From time to time, anglers get completely spooled out by truly monstrous fish. The largest sturgeon ever recorded from the Fraser measured over twenty feet in length and weighed in at 1860 pounds.

Because of the catch and release policy, which had been in force for fourteen years prior to our visit, the bottom eighty miles of the Fraser River is now said to hold around seventy five thousand sturgeon, though the fishing guides involved in the electronic tagging scheme put the true figure very much higher, having already tagged in excess of thirty five thousand individuals, with more new fish showing every day.

Certainly while we were there, a good thirty percent of the fish we caught were not carrying tags. And with average catches of between four and six fish per day at the slowest time of the year, which coincided with our visit, it isn't hard to see why the official population estimate is thought to be on the low side.

Actually, on our first day we boated eleven fish, though unfortunately this did not include the predicted three figure specimen in there amongst them, with the best fish going around fifty pounds. That meant that by day two we were theoretically owed a couple of hundred pound plus fish.

Thankfully, by the end of day three, the one to six ratio was back in balance and we were accumulating numbers towards ton-up fish number four. But there were times, particularly in the early stages, when I feared the ratio, and in particular my part in it, looked like being missed.

Sturgeon are present in the river all year round, though the best times are without doubt the early summer months when a smelt-like bait fish know as eulachon swarm into the river, and again in the autumn when the salmon are running.

What you also have to take onboard is that the Fraser River has incredible runs of five species of Pacific salmon. The pink salmon run alone, which occurs every two years, numbers around thirty million fish, which, with the many millions of individuals from the other four species thrown into the final calculation, makes for the highest concentration of salmon anywhere on the planet.

What makes this fact important from a sturgeon point of view, is that unlike Atlantic salmon, in the autumn when Pacific salmon spawn, they all die, providing easy pickings on an unimaginable scale for anything with a big enough appetite to help in the clean up, which is one of the reasons why there are so many sturgeon, and why they can grow so big.

Surprisingly, for the size of these fish and the degree of movement in the water, strike worthy bites barely move the rod tip at all. The best thing I can liken it to is a shy cod bite. We were assured by our guide Chad that that is about as good as it gets.

As sturgeon mooch along the bottom hoovering up edible items with their extendible mouth rather than pursuing them, with such small baits, you don't have to wait to snatch the rod from the quick release holder and set the hook.

The arrangement with Chad was that after catching one Sturgeon apiece of any size, a fish in excess of a hundred pounds was then our sole target, even if that meant missing out on some degree of potential action. So on day one he took us down river to a quiet area behind a gravel island where small fish could be relied upon, and within the hour both Dave and I had the species ticked off our list.

Mine was a very small fish down in single figures. But Dave's wasn't a bad one which probably went somewhere between forty and fifty pounds. Then the search for the big fish holding areas was on, which doesn't take long in a shallow draft twenty one foot aluminium jet boat powered by a 286 hp Chevrolet 350 engine, giving it a top speed of around forty three mph.

As I've said, day one produced a lot more fish than had been expected, but that first fish of Dave's turned out to be the best. Eleven fish boated and released meant that if we caught anything at all on day two, by the law of averages, we were still owed two biggies. Least ways, that was our thinking as we sat in the car at the slip waiting for Chad the following morning.

With rain rattling on the car roof and fearing being eaten alive by mosquito's outside, we waited patiently. Fortunately the rain came and went over the day, though with the heavier bouts typically always managing to coincide themselves with the hooking up fish.

As I recall, we probably only managed four or five fish on that second day, but Dave broke his freshwater ton with a hard fighting beauty of around one hundred and twenty five pounds according to the length and girth estimation chart used by all the guides.

This was a previously tagged fish last caught in October 2000 when it had weighed in at sixty five pounds, which was almost half its current size. But by close of play, if the predictive stats were to be proved accurate, we were still owed at least one more ton, and were well on the way to accumulating enough fish numbers to qualify for a third.

Dave didn't fish on day three. Instead I had my wife Dawn onboard to operate the video camera. When asked if she wanted to catch one she said yes, but just a small one to say she'd done it. So with this in mind, Chad anchored the boat up in a nice quiet little nursery area where the first fish on any of the three rods would go to Dawn, after which we could then go off searching for bigger targets.

Within minutes one of the rod tips was tapping. She picked it up expecting to connect with something between five and ten pounds, then for the next half hour or so had to deal with a fish that came out of the estimation formula at one hundred and seven pounds. It was bound to happen. Chad and I even said as much on the journey down river prior to hooking it.

That brought our ton up average back almost on target. But it also piled more pressure onto me. Would I be the only person in the party not to crack the hundred. It was certainly looking that way until Chad brought one of the rods in and replaced it with a smaller outfit and a very much smaller bait.

Many of the taps and rattles you get along the quieter parts of the Fraser come from what are locally known as squaw fish. A sort of cross between a barbel and a chub with a mouth the size of a cod. The aim was to catch ourselves a couple of these, which we quickly did, then move over to a known big fish lie and put one of them out as a dead-bait.

With a bait of that size, the bite detection tactics also changed. The reel was set on ratchet with the lever drag backed off so the fish could pick up the bait and move off until it had it well inside its mouth. It was big fish or nothing on that particular rod, though on the other two we still had salmon eggs and lamprey section just in case.

All three rods were mine, and we were probably now owed two more fish over the ton. How much pressure do you need. Fortunately, relief was not long in coming. The squaw fish rod started nodding followed by line trickling from the reel, which to all intents and purposes could have been a slow tope run.

Nervously I stood holding the rod waiting for the nod from Chad. When it came, there was no mistaking the feel of a more solid fish. But within seconds it stopped doing anything much, leaving me with just the strong river flow to contend with.

Still it wasn't easy to get it to the boat, but it certainly wasn't fighting. We then started wondering if it was going to be a fish of maybe fifty pounds or so with delusions of grandeur.

Eventually it appeared within reach, and when Chad put his hand its mouth and started to lift it up to drop into the measuring sling, we could see it obviously wasn't a bad fish. It was at that point however that it suddenly burst into life, breaking free from his grip and making off down river at a rapid rate of knots.

In the end we had to slip the anchor and take off after it. Still not quite the fight I had expected, but now knowing that unless disaster struck, I was finally going to crack the ton, and by some considerable margin if the hook hold held. I just wanted it in the boat.

Some twenty or so minutes later it was back within lifting range, and this time Chad's grip of its bottom lip and pectoral fin held firm. One good heave and it was in the sling. A quick check with the electronic tag detector showed it had been caught before. Then for the moment of truth with the tape measure.

It was obviously bigger than Dawns fish, but how much bigger?. Well, according to the formula, at one hundred and fifty five pounds, it was almost half as big again. What's more, the rain held off throughout the entire encounter for the video camera.

By this stage our sturgeon total for the three days was running somewhere in the low twenties, which meant that we could theoretically expect to see another three figure fish at any time, and not long after, another run did come on the same squaw fish bait.

Unfortunately, no sooner had it started than this fish, which was another biggie, was tail walking on the surface trying to eject the bait, which it did with ease.

So my ton turned out to be a last gasp success, as no other fish at all were boated. The only remaining bites came from the mossies as we made our dash from the boat back to the car, relieved and satisfied that all objectives had finally been achieved.

### CANARY ISLANDS - EL HIERRO

El Hierro is probably the least known, smallest, and most isolated of the Canary Islands. Certainly amongst English people. A dry, mountainous, bleak volcanic tip rising straight up from the ocean floor out on the western edge of the island group, with very little English spoken there at all.

It reminded me of the kind of step back in time we do here in the UK when we visit small isolated villages which have not so much failed to adapt, but have refused to adapt to the twenty first century. The kind of place you visit for a trip back to your roots.

Dave Devine and I were over there specifically to fish for six gilled sharks, which are a large deep water bottom feeding species. The actual fishing for these is covered in full detail in part 3 where I target a fish of over a thousand pounds, so I'm not going to re-cover that part of the story here. But some degree of overlap between that account and this one is inevitable.

To give some appreciation of water depth around the island, the first clue is the anchoring procedure. Miguel Gamito who was our skipper, had two permanent buoyed anchors to tie up to. The inner mark, which we didn't fish, was around half a mile off and was used for stingrays.

The outer mark, which we fished every time at about a mile off, was his six gill spot. The boat would be tied to this, and depending on the direction of the tide and wind taking it either inshore or off, you could be fishing in two hundred fathoms or closer to four hundred fathoms just because of the angle in the rope.

I remember asking Miguel what depth he had on the sounder when Dave hooked up a big six gill, and he came back with 1,750 feet (approx. three hundred fathoms). As Dave put it, that's three Blackpool Towers stacked on top of each other. And when we went a little further off as we did for one particular night session, our starting depth was in excess of a thousand fathoms.

By any standards then it's deep, with most of the fish, certainly the ones we were interested in, preferring to feed on the bottom. But not all of them.

During the short run down the coast from La Restinga harbour where Miguel was based, to the 'Costa Calma' as the locals call it, which is the calm water around the bottom tip of the island sheltered from the persistently howling north easterly wind where the permanent anchors were situated, we would troll small lures in the hope of picking up a few bonito for bait. This unfortunately never produced a fish. Commercial pressure it seems in not unique to the British Isles.

We did however catch quite a few small dorado on spinners, attracted as the species so often is by anything floating on the surface, which in this case was the anchor mooring buoy. But that was it. We neither saw nor caught anything else up top.

That said, keen to add more names to my species list, I had taken along an outfit loaded with six hundred yards of braid which I was determined to use to send down some small baits on a sort of multi task scratching rig.

I think I tied on something like half a dozen hooks of different sizes due to the depth and time involved in getting the gear down and back up. It took forever before the lead touched bottom, though that was as nothing compared to how long it took getting the fish back up. Nothing to do with size. I didn't catch a fish bigger than around a pound. It was all down to the depth.

On one occasion, as soon as I touched bottom, a shark was hooked up and I had to retrieve the gear as fast as possible to slip the mooring and get the fish away from the rope.

I can't tell you how hard that was. My arms were pounding and aching. Even when I was bringing fish up gradually I was still having to stop for a rest. Now my heart was almost bursting out of my chest. But worth it to a degree with a selection of deep water species including argentines, bluemouth and beryx.

One evening just before dark, Miguel, Dave and I took the boat around to the 'Costa Calma', then headed away from shore until we were well past the thousand fathom line where the boat was set up on a long drift that would take us through in to the early hours.

What an eerie feeling that was. With El Hierro being so remote and so sparsely populated, there wasn't a light on shore to be seen anywhere. It was absolute darkness.

Of course, we had lights onboard the boat, including a particularly powerful one high up on the mast which illuminated quite a wide area around us, picking out small luminous green fish darting about at speed with bright red squid in hot pursuit.

Out over deep-water after dark, and the reason for us being there, the food chain progressively moves up in the water column as the phyto-plankton, which are small plant cells at the base of the food chain reliant on sunlight for photosynthesis, rise up to grab the last few rays of fading light, dragging everything else up with them in the process.

This includes zoo-plankton, which are microscopic animals that feed on the phyto-plankton, followed by small fish mopping up these tiny animals, and progressively larger fish all the way up to the apex predators, which in this instance would be a species known as escolar. A sort of tuna shaped fish with lots of sharp needle like teeth which follow the larger bait fish up progressively higher and higher in the water column as the night wears on.

Initially, our whole mackerel baits were suspended in a spread at varying depths maybe three quarters of the way down, creeping progressively higher in small increments as the night went by.

Meanwhile, Dave and I were sight casting small lures at the squid and having a great time loading them into the live-bait well. Actually, they put up quite a decent fight. We even used a couple as live-baits.

Then the escolars ranging between maybe thirty and fifty pounds apiece started finding the bigger baits. Dark coloured fish with jewel like green eyes as the boats lights caught them, and gill covers as soft as wet cardboard.

I say this, because as Dave lifted one up by its gill cover in traditional pose for a photograph, it ripped, allowing the fish to drop and its teeth to make multiple cuts down the side of his leg. There was blood everywhere, and it didn't seem to want to stop coming out.

Actually, it was borderline bad enough to warrant going back in, with only repeated use of the first aid kit eventually rescuing the session, plus more escolars coming along to take Dave's mind off it, by which time the baits were right up near the surface.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, line started screaming from one of the outfits baited with a large live squid. Instinctively, Dave grabbed the rod and started winding, but as he did, the ratchet stopped. The fish had turned and was running straight back at the boat. Unfortunately, by the time he'd caught up with the slack line, the culprit had thrown the hook.

The general consensus was that it had to have been a swordfish which are not uncommon in the area, particularly after dark. But it was gone. And now unfortunately so too is Miguel, who moved his chartering operation south to Cape Verde shortly afterwards to concentrate on marlin fishing.

### CANARY ISLANDS - FUERTEVENTURA

Fuerteventura was never intended as an inclusion here. Ascension Island was supposed to be the final brick in this particular wall. But within days of getting back, my wife Dawn decided she also wanted a holiday and booked a last minute fortnight in the Canaries, leaving me no time whatsoever to try to get anything pre-arranged on the fishing front, meaning that I went in completely cold.

I was fortunate in that we were staying at Caleta de Fuste where down on the sea front in one of the units under the Geranios Hotel, avid local angler Aram Taholakian runs the tackle shop 'Gone Fishing', which besides the obvious, also sells bait, offers advice, and can help arrange boat trips. And in addition to that, Aram also has a very good collection of photographs of fish caught locally, more of which later.

From my very limited experience of the fishing here, I would divide the prospects up under three sub headings, these being shore fishing, novice & visitor boat fishing, and serious boat fishing, the first two of which I dabbled at, while the third, which I dearly tried to get involved in, unfortunately eluded me.

From the beaches, it's mainly stingrays after dark, with the occasional eagle ray or monkfish. It's the rock marks looking out over deeper permanent water that are the main producers of variety and which can be productive by day. While I was there, pelamid (bonito) and big garfish were both taken on lures just to the north of the harbour, along with lots of the obligatory smaller fish such as breams and wrasses. Needlehounds and barracuda are also a possibility.

Most numerous of all, particularly on small portions of prawn fished under a float, were bogue, followed very closely by turkish wrasse, though Aram tells me that the lagoons on the other side of town can produce numerous species of small fish, which might have proved useful here in terms of camera fodder had I got around to giving that a go.

At the shop I quizzed Aram about the species I particularly needed to put in front of the camera to complete the fully illustrated version of the book, some of which are not only caught locally, but he already had shots of on his computer which he was willing to share. Fortunately I had a memory stick with me and was able to get a download of fish like rays bream, dusky perch, puffer fish and blackfish.

Mixed in amongst the many photographs were also shots of fish which while I didn't need them for the book, I still none the less wanted to see and if possible catch. One in particular was the seven gilled shark, which, along with a fish I had caught before at El Hierro, the escolar, they catch at night in around 150 metres of water from the boat.

Efforts were made to get a group of interested anglers together for a serious minded night trip, but unfortunately, not helped by lack of advance notice on my part, this wasn't to be. However, I could still arrange to fish from the same boat 'AlbaKora Cat' for a few hours of a morning. But as mixed parties tend to be holiday makers wanting to give it a try, you shouldn't expect much in the way of serious fishing, though we caught a good selection of breams, plus a couple of barracuda, and a moray eel.

With regard to daytime private charters, the target choices are many and varied, including marlin, tuna, amberjacks, red snappers, and assorted larger breams. Obviously there is a seasonal element to it all, the trick being to get working on the arrangements before going out rather than with just a few days left by contacting Aram through his 'Gone Fishing' Facebook page.

### CANARY ISLANDS - GRAN CANARIA

Of the four main holiday options in the Canary Islands group, Gran Canaria has been the most productive for me personally. In particular Puerto Rico at the southern end where the climate differs markedly from that at the northern end of the island around Las Palmas.

I haven't fished Lanzarote, though I hear that Arrecife Pier, which I understand is a concrete harbour construction, can be a very good spot for a wide range of predatory species, and I did once boat fish out from Tenerife and found that to be a complete holiday rip-off.

Similarly, my first taste of Puerto Rico many years ago was a bit that way too, though maybe not quite as bad. At all the main ports throughout the island group you will probably see big game boats with super sized Penn outfits on display and old faded pictures of marlin at the booking kiosks.

Marlin are occasionally caught at each. But the window of opportunity is often very small, and with little in the way of predictable bait-fish holding areas to hold them up as they pass through, I personally don't entertain thoughts of marlin trolling, which I don't like at the best of times..

For the most part it's a holiday angler con. For me there is too much other good stuff going on to bother wasting time in the vague hope of latching on to an occasional blue marlin.

That first taste of Gran Canaria that I eluded to earlier was typical of a holiday angler being drawn in by all the hype. Many years ago I booked a marlin trolling trip as a quarter share on a flashy looking boat, where it very quickly became obvious that we were never going to see a marlin, or anything else at the surface for that matter. A line of though reinforced when the skipper suggested a bit of bottom fishing in the afternoon.

Being the only 'proper' angler on-board, I was obviously in the best position to know how to keep contact with the sea bed on the drift, and for my trouble, I came away with a big stingray, which though similar to those we catch in home waters, was not the same species.

Even so, recognising the trip to be rip off, I didn't bother going out again, preferring to float fish around the harbour for all sorts of small breams and wrasses, plus smoothhounds at the harbour mouth on squid as the light began to fade.

I also discovered that a reservoir not too far from where I was staying was full of large mouth bass which would readily take a small spinner, and on subsequent visits, even small gaudy flies.

So I split my time between racking up a list of all sorts of saltwater species you hear of but rarely get to see back home, plus catching lots of small bass in the reservoir. And it was there while taking a minute sat on the rocks that I noticed something out of the corner of my eye break surface close in just to the side of me.

When I turned for a better look, it was gone. So I sat and waited to see if it might appear again, which eventually it did. Three huge carp in fact basking in close, quite literally like pigs with fins.

Sadly, not having anything suitable either in the way of tackle or bait to have a go at them, there was nothing I could do other than watch and drool. But a mental note had been made, which would prove useful some years on in the future.

By that stage my kids were grown up and had flown the nest. I was over at Puerto Rico for a winter break with my wife Dawn, Dave Devine, and his wife Kath, and as you do being anglers, Dave and I strolled down to the harbour which was now a very different proposition to how I remembered it from all those years back.

It seemed bigger. But also, the angling emphasis was now on bottom fishing, in particular from a huge state of the art catamaran called 'Katfish' which fished for marlin in the summer and other stuff over the winter. So, it being December, we decided to give it a go.

They supplied everything, which for holiday anglers meant short rods and fixed spool reels. Fortunately we had taken our own boat gear across, just in case.

The bait was good, the live wells had squid in them, and this time the boat was anchored after we'd sailed the short distance around off the cement factory on the harbour at Arguineguin.

With half a dozen other anglers on-board at most, we had acres of space, and because we had our own gear, apart from providing bait, the skipper and crew pretty much left us to get on with it, which we did.

As always, I had a quick look at how the hire rods were set up, which was with short heavy monofilament flowing traces and a 6/0 hook. As this is my favourite all round trace anyway, Dave and I knocked up versions of the same, and very soon we were all in to a seemingly never ending stream of stingrays and eagle rays, typically running between twenty and forty pounds.

There were a few bigger fish. In fact, one chap from Southampton fishing with one of the fixed spool outfits supplied onboard managed to boat a stingray that went over two hundred pounds, which like everything else we caught was very quickly released.

Impressed by the day, we booked on again, and this time I persuaded my wife Dawn to tag along, who like the rest of us caught stingrays and eagle rays. But there were also two particular stand-out moments on that trip which neither of us will ever forget.

I'd decided to write an article on the venue and was spending as much time taking photographs as I was fishing, which meant I had to leave Dawn in charge of my rod too which was still fishing while I was otherwise pre-occupied.

The first incident was a cry for help from Dawn who had a superb monkfish at the surface which tipped the scales at fifty five pounds which we weighed and photographed before putting it back.

The second incident shortly afterwards however, was a bit more serious. A bite had developed on my rod, which as I was busy, I asked Dawn to deal with, little realising the mauling she was about to receive.

To cut a long story short, the fish took off ripping line from the reel, then clamped itself immovably on the bottom. 'Choo Choo Monstrosa' the skipper said, which I later discovered translates to monster stingray.

We'd previously seen a two hundred pounder on a fixed spool outfit, but this fish was something else. In the end they fitted her up with the full stand-up harness normally reserved for the marlin fishing, lifted the anchor, and literally followed the fish in the direction of Africa, none of which made any difference. That fish was never coming up.

Eventually, with time running out, Dawn and the skipper started pulling for the break, which itself was a job and half.

Back at the kiosk I got the English speaking chap to translate. The potential it seems for stingray in these waters can exceed five hundred pounds. So who knows. It was certainly one very big fish.

Wondering what else might be down there, on subsequent trips, Dave and I started experimenting with smaller baits and different rigs adding barracuda and couches bream to the list, plus a fish that looked like a sierra mackerel with plenty of sharp serrated teeth.

One Australian woman also brought up quite a sizeable powerful looking pargo. Another fish was the almaco jack, which when I showed interest in catching jacks, the skipper in his best broken English said he fished for big jacks over a patch of reefy ground nearby from time to time.

Back on the shore with the help of the English speaker at the booking kiosk again, I pushed the skipper on the subject of the jacks, and he agreed that we could try live-baits next time out for what turned out to be amberjacks. The problem was that when next time came around, the day was wild and wet with white horses everywhere, and the tactic was to suspend the live-baits just off the bottom using clear plastic water bottles used as floats.

I've caught lots of big AJ's over the years in Florida, but always on baits or lures dropped straight down. Nothing like this. It worked though. Well, of a fashion. We got some really violent takes which would rip the live-baits clear of the hook, yet we didn't actually hook a fish between us.

In the main this was because besides being barely able to stand up in the chop, we couldn't see the floats either behind the curling waves, so in the end we called it a day mid afternoon. It was then as we made our way across the marina, wet, bedraggled, and cold, that we spotted an advertising flier offering guided carp fishing trips, and I suddenly found myself thinking back to those monsters I'd once seen while fishing for large mouth bass all those years ago.

With more than a twist of irony, that evening sat at the bar waiting for our wives to finish applying their slap to go out into town for dinner, there was an Englishman and his son sat close by who were joined by a scruffy looking bronzed chap in his thirties who handed them a VHS video cassette. We could hear them talking, and as soon as the word carp was mentioned, we started ear-wigging.

As it would turn out, this was the chap named on the fliers we'd seen earlier. The holiday-maker and his son it seems had been out carp fishing with him that day and had had a burster with fish well up into the thirties, and the guide, who turned out to be ex-pat English carp fanatic Dave Beecham, was dropping off a video of the day.

He didn't stay long, but it was long enough for us to know that we needed to grab him as he left, which we did, and a trip was arranged for a couple of days hence.

No gear was needed. No food or drink either. We would each get a high quality three rod set up with all the latest thinking down at the business end.

Bait, feed, and food for us was also part of the deal, and we would be picked up outside the hotel for the drive up in to the mountains where a number of lakes had been created by dams to collect rain water for crop irrigation.

There are no natural lakes on the Gran Canaria. Obviously no indigenous freshwater fish species either. Carp were put into these lakes to grub about and muddy the water in the hope of keeping weed growth down, which apparently they did quite well. Large mouth bass were present too, though the story behind that introduction was a little less clear.

On the morning of the trip I was apprehensive. As someone with a morbid fear of heights who once decided to take a hire car on a drive across the mountainous interior, I knew what was coming.

Back then, the roads were so narrow, that once committed, the only way was forward. There was no conceivable way of turning round. The only way out was to abandon the car and walk, which was too far, and still almost as bad.

The sheer drops, some literally thousands of feet in places and without crash barriers didn't help either. Fortunately, the intervening years had seen some barriers erected on the more dangerous bends. Not that I looked. I hardly dared open my eyes all the way from Puerto Rico to Embalse de Chira, one of the largest and probably most accessible of the islands irrigation reservoirs.

De Chira is a vast piece of water in a spectacular almost alpine setting, though a little bit chilly in the early morning December sunshine.

Dave had chosen to take us close to the dam wall where he piled in the boilies, the ripples from which were matched by the number of ripples made by topping fish as far as the eye could see.

I'm no carp angler, so it's not for me to comment, on top of which, his business was working with holiday makers rather than serious carp anglers. So maybe carp specialists would have done things differently, I don't know.

What I can say is that the gear was good and we had fish to just over twenty five pounds. And again, several years on, we had more carp to just shy of thirty pounds, which for a sea angler grabbing a day away from the beach is good enough for me.

Associated audio interview numbers: 55.

### CUBA

Cuba for me is a country of contradiction. Its geographical position and political isolation suggest it should have lots of fish. But when you go there looking for them, you can't help but wonder where they all are.

The simple answer it seems is that for the most part the locals have caught and eaten them. Forced to take anything and everything, regardless of the consequences, austerity is a powerful driving force.

Add to this the fact of the state owning and having a monopoly on everything, lack of incentive is another reason why the fishing is poor. Even if the fish were still there, local people it seems are not in a position to help anglers exploit them.

Two examples of this that I came across are that when I did find a boat to fish from, because it was government owned and the crew received a regular wage, even the weakest of excuses not to sail was enough to cancel trips. So I went off looking for alternatives, and eventually found a chap in charge of speed boat trips for tourists, who, after much third party cloak and dagger arrangements to go out after normal work time into the mangrove swamps and fish, never turned up.

I had to endure similar experiences with so called fly fishing guides working outside their normal day jobs too, though in fairness, I did see them turn up occasionally for some arrangements. So, a country lacking incentives, and for the most part also lacking fish. But not everywhere.

Having watched TV programs about the wonderful fishing potential in and around Cuba, I can't help wondering just how genuine these reports are. You never seem to see much in the way of hard evidence. The odd fish here and there, but certainly nothing that you couldn't get as regularly and with much more ease in nearby Florida.

The truth of the matter seems to be that if you want to do well in Cuba, you have to go to areas where the locals can't fish, and that means officially restricted areas of which there are just a few.

The main angling centres are guided operations, usually run by outsiders given permission to set up in the national parks, where for obvious reasons the locals either cannot or dare not go in to fish, or in areas where the locals are excluded for 'other' reasons.

I first investigated the former, and while the fishing looked interesting, decided against it as I was there for a family holiday wanting to take days out rather than committing to a full week at a time.

The latter however was much easier to come to terms with, though it still had limitations of a different sort. You needed to base yourself within a restricted area, which looking back at the location I chose, was no hardship whatsoever.

My choice was to to book a stay at Cayo Coco which is located towards the extremity of a long isolated finger of land terminating in a few small islands along the north coast of Cuba, stretching from around Nuevitas to well beyond Moron.

A stretch of land separated from the mainland by a long lagoon with very few roads across it, each of which has a check point allowing through only official personnel, and even then for the most part on a daily return basis.

This is a four and five star all-inclusive luxury resort, where people like hotel staff and other essential workers are bussed in and back out every day.

The one concession to this was a small block house where some essential workers were put up to stay longer term, and though still very tightly controlled, it was these people who helped me with the shore fishing.

They still kept everything to eat, but with numbers of fish taken so small scale compared to the geographical area in question, it didn't seems to make much difference to population numbers. Nor to fish sizes either. And while I'm certain that with a bit of exploration there would be many great fishing marks along the connecting causeway and around the fringes of the exclusion zone, there was one spot in particular which I fished regularly.

With hindsight, I wish I'd chosen to stay at Cayo Guillermo. The hotels at both resorts are exactly the same, in most cases run by the same chains. Where I lost out was proximity to the fishing, the best of which was from the road bridge across the inlet close to where the hotels are situated at Cayo Guillermo.

Each morning I would have to catch a bus, which then stopped at every hotel en route through to the turning round point beyond the Cayo Guillermo hotel area, which took around forty minutes. The draw back was that this service ended around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, which meant that if I wasn't on the last bus back, I was stranded.

Thankfully, knowing I was there to fish and would be going back, the driver looked out for me and would wait. In fact, on one occasion, the ticket collector even came looking for me. But it was still very restrictive. I couldn't fish in the evenings, which people staying at the adjacent hotels could, and from what they told me, that made a very big difference.

Close by was also one of the block houses where a few of the locals were billeted, and with nothing else to do while off-shift, they would too fish from the bridge.

Most used hand-lines, because while I was there, tackle of any sort was virtually impossible to come by. The nearest tackle shop I could find was in Havana which was quite a reasonable flight time away. Maybe the new accord with Barrack Obama will now help make a difference. It needs to.

A couple of the locals had rods and reels given to them at the end of holidays by anglers they'd helped. Otherwise it was a coke tin with pebbles inside it sat on a hand line as a bite indicator. Yet still they caught some amazing fish.

The main target species was red snapper, the best of which I saw caught topped fifteen pounds. Not the most numerous fish however. That would have been jacks.

Stingrays were another fish I saw caught, and you would regularly see sharks, barracudas, and needlefish swimming by, all of which were caught on small live-baits which you could catch to order on size ten hooks and tiny pieces of squid around the legs of the bridge.

Boat fishing unfortunately was another matter. After numerous false starts, I eventually found a small marina tucked way out of sight down a dirt track through the mangroves, where there were some very nice angling boats tied up.

I even managed to book a trip, though not at the marina itself. Nobody there would take responsibility for that. In the end, after the holiday rep had been dragged into the arrangements, the hotel was able to place a booking on my behalf.

That unfortunately was cancelled a couple of times, supposedly due to the weather, though in all honesty it looked fine to me. Again the crew were on a fixed salary arrangement, so it didn't matter to them whether they sailed or they didn't.

Eventually we did get afloat, taking a long route down the inside of a fringing reef looking for a place to cross, passing a boat stranded on the reef top that hadn't made the best choice of crossing point. Then at last we were out in the open sea.

I think I was there in February. Whatever the date, it was a change-over point in terms of fish species, so we were told not to expect too much.

Certainly we should expect the wahoo to be gone, and with the summer species yet to arrive, on top of which as it was mainly undiscerning holiday makers as opposed to anglers who booked these boats, we might have to make do with barracudas.

Not content with that, I went up top and started talking to the skipper, suggesting things we could try instead of working the edge of the reef all day with lures. Willing to blank trying for something better, I twisted his arm to venture further off. But we were still trolling a spread of lures of different sizes and at differing depths.

Eventually we spotted some frigate birds circling one specific patch, went over to see what might be attracting them, and immediately we were in to dorado.

Continuing to work the area even after the birds had gone, we added more dorado, and a couple of nice bonus wahoo to our tally. Then it was back inshore to anchor up and dine.

The food was very nice. Fresh lobster, plus some dorado steaks. What miffed me was that I wasn't given prior notice of the schedule and so didn't take my little telescopic rod and small end gear with me, because the shallow reef beneath us was alive with all sorts of groupers, snappers and the like.

So a very good bonus opportunity was missed. Then it was back to the trolling, only this time we did stick to the tried and tested reef edge, taking a seemingly never ending stream of average size barracudas.

I did however make up for missing out on the reef fishing with the telescopic rod in the days that followed at two locations I eventually found very close to the hotel.

The first was a huge rock on the beach which I fished from with prawns bought from the hotel kitchen. This turned up all sorts of species, with a few break off's by fish way too powerful for the light tackle I was using.

The other spot was a small wooden bridge over what appeared to be a river, but was actually a tidal gap between the mangroves, from which I caught all sorts of small fish ranging from needlefish to porcupine fish and small snappers.

All interesting stuff. But a far cry from the promise of a Caribbean angling paradise, which from a purely holiday perspective it most certainly is.

### EGYPT - LAKE NASSER

As a country, I don't like Egypt. It's dirty, noisy, and certainly in the more populated areas, everyone is constantly trying to see the inside of your wallet one way or another. Quite literally, a land of waving palms.

Thank goodness then when we arrived we only had the one night to endure at Aswan where we stayed inside the hotel in readiness for a four am convoy to the fishing on Lake Nasser.

This was supposedly a military protected convoy due to the threat of Islamic terrorism for our long arduous journey through the dessert to Abu Simbel close to the border with Sudan.

It started off well enough, then very quickly descended into a live version of the wacky races, with trucks and coaches all trying to over-take each other in the dark on the narrow dessert track, ducking and weaving between each other and the numerous wrecked vehicles lying by the way-side to the point where there was no convoy left, which is presumably when the army contingent turned around and headed back to base.

At Abu Simbel it was a very quick turnaround. The gear was taken off the mini bus, put straight onto one of the boats, and we were away down the lake to set up camp on one of the islands which we were informed was technically inside Sudan.

There were three boats in all. Two for fishing with some supplies onboard each, plus a third full of camping and cooking gear which the support crew also slept in, the idea being to work our way back up the lake to an agreed rendezvous point a week later, fishing and camping along the way.

But that would start the following morning. For day one we would remain on the island with an evening boat trip planned. In the meantime, we were free to wander and fish, which is exactly what we did.

To better understand the situation, a little of the history and geography of Lake Nasser itself might help. With a surface area of over two thousand square miles, a length of three hundred and forty miles, and a width of twenty two miles at its widest point, this is one of the largest man made reservoirs anywhere in the world.

Constructed between 1958 and 1971 under the instruction of Colonel Nasser, the Aswan High Dam across the River Nile has impounded this huge volume of water, which amongst other things produces much of Egypt's electricity through hydro-generation.

What it has also done is create a very stable and productive habitat for fish like nile perch and tiger fish, both of which can grow huge in these parts, and were the main reason for us being there.

That first day on the island was a real eye opener. As with the rest of the desert in these parts, it was a mix of sand and rock, with an area of beach adjacent to the camp.

We'd been advised to take along heavy duty spinning gear as well as trolling outfits and large plugs. Wire traces too, which, when you look at the dentistry of a tiger fish, it's blatantly obvious why.

We were also advised to swap the trebles on the various large heavy spoons for quality 6/0 single hooks, which again we did, and off we set as a loose group along the beach to throw out a few lures in the run-up to the boat fishing later on the edge of darkness after we'd eaten.

We'd been informed that the beaches would most likely produce tiger fish, and that if we wanted to target nile perch, to stick to the deeper rock marks. But nothing could have prepared us for what was to come.

I stayed with the group that fished the beach. Not really knowing how best to approach things, we all opted for different strategies to compare notes, if or when any success came along.

The water was like gin, so you could see if anything was interested, but we saw nothing. Not even a follow. Then suddenly, one of the lads was shouting followed by lots of splashing about and leaping as this huge toothy bar of silver repeatedly took to the air. He'd cracked the code.

What you needed to do was cast as far as you could, then retrieve as fast as your arms would let you. Initially, all you would see was the lure racing back in through empty water. Then suddenly, out of nowhere like a torpedo, a silver shape would come tearing in behind it, and in one swift split second move would grab, take to the air, and start emptying the spool with breath taking power and speed.

Tiger fish are spectacular creatures, and big tiger fish are in a class of their own. Typically, these would average between ten and fifteen pounds apiece. Absolutely amazing, and they fought like tigers too.

Once we'd sussed the technique, we caught literally dozens of the things, not only that day, but every day when we stopped and had a bit of time to ourselves.

Inevitably, we also picked up an odd one trolling rapala's as we progressed up the lake looking for nile perch while moving from camp to camp. In the main though, we had them from the shore, which in places was a bit dodgy, as there were scorpions and snakes, not too mention crocodiles and larger fury critters knocking about too.

One of the lads stood on a large loose rock from underneath which emerged a cobra. We could also hear crocodiles crashing about at night on some of the beaches where we'd set up camp, and every morning there would be dog-like foot prints in the sand between the camp beds, for which reason, Dave Devine, Kevin Eardley and I decided it might be best to sleep on the boat.

We had plenty of nile perch too, though not unfortunately any of the really big ones. For that you needed to be based at one of the better permanent camping areas, which for whatever reason, the organisers only offered to repeat customers. So we were on the move constantly.

The best nile perch we had was a fish of seventy one pounds by Dave Devine caught after dark. We saw plenty of fish in the twenty to forty pound bracket through, and lots of smaller specimens on light plugs and spinners cast from the rocks.

I also managed to find a quiet little backwater at one location which looked like a small lagoon. There I was able to try a spot of fly fishing with some streamer lures I'd tied to short wire traces, and managed to bag myself a small tiger fish on the fly, which I was especially pleased with.

So a decent trip with all the main boxes ticked, except for a freshwater one hundred pounder, which we later discovered the other party headed up by Barrie Rickards had managed quite a few of at the permanent camp. That it seems is most definitely the way forward on there.

### GAMBIA

I've fished Gambia on a number of occasions. In fact, on my last visit I even got married there with the taxi driver on the video camera and two of the church cleaners as witnesses. And speaking of witnessing things, because my visits always had a few years of a gap between them, I have been able to witness at first hand how the fishing has progressively declined in quality.

You get to hear all sorts of rumours as to why this is, such as the selling off commercial fishing rights to certain Asian interests.

I don't know where the truth lies. What I do know is that it happened very quickly, going from superb to poor over a very short period, which is bad for visiting anglers; bad for the tourism economy, and most of all, bad for the locals, many of whom lead subsistence lives reliant on what they can catch from their dug out canoes as the main source of food and income for themselves and their families, and it is those people down at the pointed end who always seem to come out of things worst off.

The inspiration for my first visit was a photograph of a friend of mine Graeme Pullen, sat on the rear seat of a nineteen foot orkney fastliner holding the tails of two three hundred pound plus lemon sharks, which seemed to stretch forever towards the camera along the floor of the boat.

Based on that, in 1990 four of us went over for a mix of small boat and charter boat fishing out of Oyster Creek which separates Banjul Island from the rest of the country.

Big sharks had been our primary target, of which we hooked several. We had some enormous lemon sharks on the trace at the side of the boat, plus at least one huge black tip. But, through a catalogue of errors, not a single proper shark either boated or deliberately released, all of which must go down to the man in charge.

He in turn blamed the local lads on the boat working for him, but none of it was down to them. As a result, when we got back in they came over to us concerned and apologised, but there was nothing to apologise for.

I felt sorry for them. It wasn't their fault. It was all down to faulty traces, trying to boat big fish while they were still way too fresh, and giving bad instructions to the lads. Needless to say we never fished on that boat again.

When we fished from the smaller boats, a couple of the same lads took us out in the orkney's fishing further around the coast off Bakau where we had a great time. No big sharks, but plenty of fish. We even organised a competition across the two boats we were fishing from, each with two of the local crew looking after two of us.

The Gambian lads were given a fishing rod apiece for an international match between Gambia and the UK. I can't remember who won. It doesn't matter. It was a fun couple of days afloat with loads of stringrays, kasava and kajele taken on uptide tactics.

Those kajele certainly fight well. One fish however which didn't fight well but we found particularly troublesome to catch was the butter fish. A fish which reminded me of a large blue-brown garden slug with white spots, armed with four guillotine like teeth with which it could bite through the shanks of the hooks.

We also did a bit of rapala trolling through the mangrove creek back to base in the evenings, adding barracuda, red snappers and crevalle jacks to the list.

My next visit was all fished from the smaller boats. Gordon Thornes and I, plus our wives, had gone over to team up with Graeme and his wife who were already over there.

By that stage, little if any thought was given over to sharks. They were a thing of the past. This time we put in a lot more effort trolling the rapalas, which took quite a few barracuda, red snapper, and crevalle jacks, the latter sometimes being encountered in huge boiling shoals at the surface crashing through the bait fish concentrations.

One particular day when around mid afternoon when we hadn't done a great deal, the skipper who I mentioned previously, came over to us in one of the other boats to say he had an airport pick up to make, and asked us to keep an eye on the local lads at the helm.

Within minutes of him vanishing, we suddenly started piling into the barracuda and red snapper, which would have been kept by him and sold on. So as we made our way back in amongst the dugouts, we give the fish away to the locals, telling him later that the fishing had remained poor after he'd gone.

On one particularly blowy day we decided to stay inside the mangrove creeks to fish a species match with a mix of trolling and bait fishing. A case of having to be innovative with various scratching rigs, home made floats and the like.

Nothing big came along, but the variety was fairly impressive, with everything from sunpats and angel fish through to snappers and frog fish.

Most impressive of all, but at the same time also quite worrying were the sea snakes, which loved peeled prawns. These were brown and yellow hooped with blue heads. More worrying still, we managed to run aground on a mud bank with a dropping tide and had to get out of the boat to push.

It was the thought of what might be down there in the mud as we walked bare foot through it that concerned us most. Thankfully we soon got the boat afloat again, then later on found out that the sea snakes were not in fact snakes at all, but banded snake eels. Still, better safe than sorry.

On my final visit I fished with another ex-pat Englishman Steve Robinson, again out of Oyster Creek, and again aboard one of the orkney longliners. But to get out of the creek you had to sail under the main road bridge, which on one particular day almost saw the end of us.

The tide was making and it couldn't have been too far off high water, so it was a bit of a dash to get beyond it and away in time. The problem was that half way under we got the roof of the cuddy wedged against the concrete above us and had to start palming the boat along, which with the tide rising, was getting increasingly difficult.

Had we not pushed it free, I dread to think what might have happened. We would have been wedged there with the water coming up, and way too much current to try to swim for it, besides which I can't swim anyway.

By that stage in the proceedings, Gambia had started making quite a reputation for itself as a big tarpon venue, so we bought half a dozen live mullet from one of the local gill netters on a nearby beach to give that a try.

We could see tarpon topping and tailing inshore, but they weren't having any of it. So it was back off to the usual marks bottom fishing with slices of bonga and peeled prawns, where we caught a mix of pompano, kasava and kajele, which were now being called captain fish.

These were the prize fish to be catching. Excellent scrappers, and still reasonably plentiful. But you could sense by the numbers, mix, and size of what was coming up that the writing was on the wall.

They still get some good fish from the boats, and I hear that there are still good numbers of big guitar fish to be had from the beaches. But if I'm honest, I think we saw the best of it, as we have at quite a number of the more exotic venues we've fished over the years.

### GERMANY

You could be forgiven for thinking that Germany isn't exactly an automatic stand-out place as an angling destination, and certainly not for sea angling. But you would be wrong. For along with the other countries looking out onto the Baltic Sea, it offers opportunities you will find nowhere else in the world, as I discovered in 2010.

Through Warrior Boats, I was put in touch with Dr. Sven Hille who is a research scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research at Rostock in northern Germany. Sven had bought himself a Warrior 165 which he had specially kitted out for deep water trolling, and was at that time taking it around some of the big angling shows in Germany to promote trolling techniques.

Knowing that I had produced a number of demonstration video's for Warrior, he contacted me, firstly to see if he could use the Warrior 165 video at the shows, and secondly, to see if it would be possible to do a re-edit with all the captions translated into German, both of which we did.

Then, many emails later, Sven suggested I might like to take a flight over there to see the trolling project in action, which sounded like a very good idea indeed.

To get a better picture of what the fishing scene is like along Germany's Baltic coast, there are a number of things you need to know about the place.

First amongst these is that the Baltic is no ordinary sea. While in reality it isn't land-locked, to all intents and purposes it might just as well be. There is a narrow opening to the North Sea between Denmark and Sweden, after which it has a coastline with Finland, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and finally Russia, losing its salinity continually as it progresses eastwards.

Off the German coast it is still quite saline. Yet even there it supports what we over here would see as an interesting mix of saltwater and freshwater species, which it does because the lighter density freshwater from river inputs and run-off floats on top of the more dense saltwater, creating two well defined bands.

Inshore, along the shallower parts of the coast, the freshwater might extend throughout the entire water column, allowing colonisation by those species which have a high tolerance of very low salinity brackish conditions from both sides of the divide.

What you also need to understand is a bit about the relevant politics here too. Germany if you recall was a divided country, until Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave the east German people the all clear to cross and later demolish the Berlin Wall, eventually leading to reunification.

Prior to that there was a very strictly enforced border which hit the coast close to Wismar, putting Sven's home town of Rostock just inside the eastern sector.

The importance of this fact is that offshore fishing was to all intents and purposes banned there. The east Germans would not risk anyone escaping by boat, particularly in the border regions, which on the one hand may well have led to improved fish stocks by virtue of no exploitation, but on the other, left local anglers with a lot of catching up to do once the wall came down.

This they have done astoundingly well. Not only in terms of acquiring boats and technology, but equally important, getting the best use out of them.

At the same time, they have also recognised the need to conserve and protect their assets, with a fishing licensing scheme that requires thirty to forty hours of supervised lessons. This is then followed up with a written exam looking at fish specialisation, biology, equipment, treatment of fish, and relevant legislation. Visiting anglers however can get a tourist fishing permit.

To be in with a shot of seeing the offshore trolling scene at its best, Sven suggested I compete with him in the annual trolling competition out from Schaprode on the Baltic island of Rügen where he moors his boat.

Unfortunately for our plans, this fell right in the middle of the aircraft grounding fiasco following the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption in Iceland, which saw me stranded in southern Spain.

It took me three days to get home by bus, train, ferry, and hire car, arriving back on the day of the flight out to Germany. Not that it mattered. With all flights still grounded, the Baltic visit was put on the back burner, and by the time flight restrictions were lifted, the effective fishing season was all but over.

The one remaining option was to go over and give it a go anyway, then trail the boat back to Rostock for the summer. Not unfortunately the favoured option, but I allowed myself to be persuaded and re-booked the flight to Hamburg, then on by train to Rostock where I was met at the station by Sven, and later Christian Bruckmer.

Up to that point, everything was going according to plan. Well, sort of. Unfortunately when we got to the water-front at Rostock, we could hardly stand up as the wind was that strong.

It was no better the following afternoon either at Schaprode looking out across the lagoon to the small island of Hiddensee. There were white horses literally everywhere, and this was arguably the most sheltered area, with the small island acting as a natural wind break for the powerful westerly gale.

Even so, wanting to sample everything on offer, we still took the boat out for a couple of battered hours spinning for pike which can grow huge in the brackish waters close in to shore. Then it was off to bed in a caravan for a long night of buffeting by the storm.

The following morning when we re-grouped it was unbelievable. No wind, no waves, and lots of pleasant spring sunshine. The big unanswered question was, would there be any residual swell, particularly up around the northern edge of the main island, where most of the offshore deep water trolling takes place.

But first things first. We dropped in over a small wreck just on the edge of the open sea, on the one hand to see what conditions were going to be like, and on the other to catch a few cod which live in the saline water beneath the brackish surface water floating above it where the salmon, sea trout and pike prefer to live.

Out deep in say a hundred feet of water over the wrecks, cod are always going to be present, and with no tide to contend with, we were able to fish ultra light rods with fixed spool reels working light pirks and weighted shads.

Both on and off the wreck we found plenty of cod in the one to three pound bracket, and no doubt had we stayed longer, we could have caught dozens of the things, as well as being in with a good shot at some of the better fish. What an amazing place. Then later, with the trolling lures out, we also picked up quite a few garfish.

It's weird how the fish distribute themselves there, with the cod under the lighter density brackish water, the garfish, salmon and bigger sea trout offshore close to the transition level over the deeper water, and the pike and smaller sea trout in closer to the islands shore.

Fortunately, with conditions improving all the time eventually leading to an oily flat calm, all options were open, so offshore we went, where Sven put on a full trolling demonstration for a YouTube video, and at last, the real fishing was able to get under way.

This involved the use of double clipped down-riggers, deep diving vanes, and side trolling vanes, collectively all working a spread of something like a dozen or so lures at various depths, and all without even a hint of a tangle which was an art form in itself. I was well impressed.

More important still, so too were the fish, with some very nice salmon well topping twenty pounds, plus a couple of bonus double figure sea trout, one of which we later dropped in at a restaurant, nipped back to the site for a shower, then returned to devour it with a side order of pan fried potatoes, beer, and later, glasses of chilled vodka.

Germany would make an ideal destination for British and Irish anglers to trail boats to. A cursory look suggests this would mean taking a ferry to Holland and trailing the rest of the way, which on the quality of the roads in that part of the world isn't so bad. I've trailed much further here in the UK and Ireland.

The one major drawback is that the fishing is so unlike anything we would ever do around our islands, that nobody could expect to go over there and simply give it a try.

Besides the obvious technical void, there is the cost of gear such as down-riggers, which back home may never see light of day again, though they could I suppose have some potential value for bass, but that would be limited.

A far better idea might be to book some guided fishing aboard one of the small boats operating out of Schaprode, and possibly to do that during the late spring trolling competition. That way you get instant access to the equipment required, and the knowledge of how to use it.

Salmon and sea trout are the main target species during the competition, but for other times, as I hinted earlier, the pike fishing can be out of this world.

As for the cod, I hear that there are also larger charter boats which specialize in this, though I have no first hand experience of this.

Associated audio interview numbers: 95.

### GIBRALTAR

Situated close to the entrance-exit of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Gibraltar is in quite a unique position in that fish making the passage through this narrowing gap tend to be squeezed up into a tighter concentration that at other locations in that vicinity. Add to this very deep water close by, and you have the potential for an excellent inshore and offshore fishery.

On the down side however, the Mediterranean being renowned for being full of mainly small fish where anything and everything is exploited to the maximum by every man and his dog, while this might not necessarily be the fault of the Gibraltarians themselves, by virtue of proximity, at face value, chances are they too could be forced to suffer to some extent as a result.

Having said that, on the back of some very interesting reports regarding rod and line fishing in the area, I decided to start checking out if it might none the less still be worth a visit.

Much of this was centred on telephone calls and correspondence with Gibraltar international angler and local tackle shop owner Tony Triay, who in turn approached the tourist authorities to see if we might set up a promotional visit.

Later, having got the green light, four of us then went over to try out a mix of shore and boat fishing. The shore in the mornings and the boat in the afternoons on into the evening with Tony after he had shut up shop, which as it would turn out was a very nice balance.

The one potential drawback with this was that age old problem faced by all boat anglers in hot climates; sea breezes. As the land heats up over the day getting considerably warmer than the sea causing the air above it to rise, it pulls in brisk onshore breezes, which by late afternoon can throw up quite a nasty chop. Not every day. But we had our share, which can make for troublesome complications around 'The Rock'.

The geography of this very British 'outpost' is such that most private boats tie up in the marina on the western side quite close to the border with Spain. If you want to fish the eastern side, which we did, you then have to motor all the way round, which means that once you've passed Rosia Bay, there is no shelter as such to tuck into if you need to.

Nowhere at all to land, which as I was to find out later can have its safety implications. But we did it, and on some days it was quite choppy. Not so much once you got around to the eastern side. But you always knew that it was there waiting for you on the return leg.

Much of the fishing there is for breams, which come in quite a wide range of colours, shapes and sizes. The one's we had most dealings with were white bream, couches bream, soldiers bream, and two banded bream, which we took on quite a wide range of baits.

The most interesting of these baits and approaches was the use of live shell-fish opened up sufficiently to nick the hook into the flesh, then allowed to flutter down once the tide had slackened with the shells still in place and no lead on the line. You can't get a more natural presentation than that.

I mentioned earlier the deep water close in. It also runs very hard, so even with braid and loads of lead, keeping bottom contact at times can be very difficult. But we must have managed it while trying to catch scabbards one day, as we came up with of all things, black mouthed dogfish and some small velvet sharks out off the western side, and on another occasion down off the southern tip, again in deep very water, you could catch as many bluemouth as you could ever wish to see.

I'm told there are also big six gilled sharks in the area, though we didn't get to try for those. Our experience of the really deep water fishing actually was little more than a brief diversion, then it was back to the real job at hand of searching out quality bream.

With that in mind, one day we motored around to the eastern side to fish some fairly deep lying heavy ground close to where a number of very large cargo ships were anchored up. Tony assured us this mark held some absolutely enormous hurta whose mouths are filled with fearsome teeth and have a love of live fish.

Our problem was catching the necessary live-baits, which were extremely difficult to come by. But we did eventually get a few, and we did connect with what presumably were large powerful hurta bream.

Dave Devine in particular who had one so powerful it was completely un-stoppable and looked like it might drag his arms from their sockets before finally making it back to sanctuary in the reef. Needless to say none were landed.

When the live-baits were gone, we were forced to revert back to cut bait, whereupon Dave's brother John brought up a small moray eel of several pounds.

I remember it lying there on the deck with its head just poking out of the landing net, so I decided to grab a few photographs. Unfortunately, as I leaned over to pick up my camera, my left hand must have been trailing close to the moray's mouth and it struck.

Instinctively, I whipped my arm back with the fish still attached, and presumably banged it against the side of the boat causing it to let ago. But by then unfortunately the damage was already done.

One finger in particular was cut right down to the white bone, and there was blood everywhere. In that short time it had inflicted over thirty assorted cuts and scratches across my fingers and hand.

Immediately it was bandaged up, but it wouldn't stop bleeding. So the bandage was tied tighter to the point that my finger end was turning purple and throbbing.

Unfortunately, being so close to the border on the wrong side to go ashore, we couldn't have been further away from help, besides which, everyone else wanted to get on with the fishing, as you do.

The blood however just kept kept on coming. Then we spotted a police boat close by. Apparently there had been a border incident involving some sort of gun firing the day before from the Spanish side, so the police were on high visual alert.

Tony made a quick call to them on the VHF to see if they could help and over they came, took me onboard, then radioed ahead for an ambulance to come to a tiny piece of beach next to the border, and promptly took me in.

This tiny beach as it turns out was quite steep, though not perhaps steep enough for the police boat to nose right up onto, besides which there was a bit of an edge to the sea. The ambulance was there ready and waiting. It was bridging that gap between the two that was going to be the problem.

I can't swim, so that was out of the question. In the end one of the policemen went in, followed by me. He then towed me by the chin to the waters edge where quite a crowd had gathered which he told I was a Spanish drug smuggler.

Then to complete my humiliation, at the hospital, some geordie nurses pinned a luggage label to me describing my injuries for the doctor, which read 'attacked by ferocious fish'.

Stitched up, injected, and on a course of anti-biotics, I was told not to go out in the boat again. The others still went leaving me kicking my heels at the hotel. In the end I decided to go for a walk down to the harbour where I spotted some of the biggest grey mullet I have ever seen.

Immediately I nipped back, got my rod plus a fresh loaf on the way through, then enjoyed some of the best mullet fishing I've ever experienced in my entire life, which I've covered in more detail in Part 1 under the thick lipped grey mullet heading.

I also had a speckled bass on the bread. Well, they only said don't boat fish. No mention was made of fishing from the shore.

So impressed was I with the mullet fishing that while I was over in Spain in 2010, I decided to drive all the way down there for another session, only to find the entire marina closed off by a skirting of plush shops, cafés and the like, killing any chance of any repeat fishing between the boats stone dead.

### ICELAND

I'm hearing good things coming out of Iceland in recent times, particularly for huge coalfish and good sized cod out from Sudavik in the north, which to an extent is at odds with the mediocre to disappointing experiences I have had over there.

I've fished from a number of venues all around the country on two separate occasions, though in fairness, both visits were at a time when the tourist authorities were still working on developing their angling assets, rather than more recently when much of that development work has now taken place.

The first of these was an invite to spend a weekend fishing out of Akranes on the northern peninsula just across the bay from Reykjavik. I was picked up at the airport by the husband of the lady in charge of tourism at Akranes.

He turned out to be a golf course designer and constructor who told me they had around thirty golf courses dotted around the country serving a population of around 240,000 people who pretty much all lived around the coast as the interior was too harsh.

That's just over one course for every eight thousand people. Golf must be popular there then. More popular than rod and line fishing, which like everything else in Iceland was ultra expensive.

Economies normally work on the basis of cost balancing, with expensive items being offset by cheaper ones. It may not be the same items in every country, but the concept of the balancing effect should be the same. Least ways, that's how it's supposed to work. But not so far as I can see in any of the Scandinavian countries, all of which are staggeringly expensive. No surprise then that when the Icelanders do put their hands in their pockets for a day out, if they can afford to, it's party time.

The whole coastal area was alive with fish. Cod were coming up as fast as you drop a string of lures or a pirk in front of them. Loads of haddock too, and as many norway haddock or redfish as you could ever want.

Unfortunately, everything seemed to max out at around five pounds, with just the odd better fish, and nothing crossing the line into double figures. Not that it bothered the locals. They had crates of beer, bottles of spirits, and a big portable barbecue out on the deck, plus a determination to eat and drink as much as they could squeeze in before heading back.

At one point they skinned a load of cod and haddock, barbecued the skins, then presented them to me as a special treat as guest of honour. Apparently these are regarded as the best part of the fish. That or they were taking the pee. Either way I ate them, though that was as nothing compared to what was to come.

Back at the harbour we tied up alongside a commercial gill netter who was just tidying up his nets. He'd been working very close in to the shore netting lumpsuckers which move in from deep water in the late spring to spawn. It's the ripe females they are after, the eggs from which are a local delicacy eaten in the same way as caviare.

To demonstrate this, he clamped a lumpsucker belly up between his knees, made an incision, then started scooping the eggs out of its body cavity with his dirty fingers and eating them before passing the thing to me. Well, you know what they say.......when in Rome??.

The other interesting claim to fame Akranes has, is that it was a blacksmith from the town who designed and knocked up the cutting gear used by the Icelandic gun boats Thor and Odin in the cod Wars of the 1970's.

Because it has few natural resources other than fish, the Icelandic government started pushing its territorial waters out seaward from twelve miles, to fifty miles, and eventually two hundred miles. This forced trawlers from Fleetwood, Grimsby, and Hull progressively away from their traditional distant water grounds, which in the end they refused to comply with. Hence British and Icelandic warships having regular skirmishes, which led to the cutting of trawl warps by the gunboats.

This cutter itself was quite a small device, rather like a traditional fisherman's anchor both in appearance and size, but with the arms bent in closer to the stem, and sharp cutting blades fitted to both inside edges.

The taut steel warp would be hooked as the device was towed over it and would slip further and further down the narrowing gap of the blades until it finally parted. Simple, but very effective.

I actually got to visit the workshop where they had been made, and even got to handle and photograph one of the devices that had seen action. The scourge of many a distant water trawler back then, and part of the reason why ports like Fleetwood and Grimsby have subsequently slipped into decline.

Ironically, it was pressure from the Americans that brought Britain to ultimately concede defeat, as the Icelanders threatened to close down strategic NATO facilities if we didn't relent.

Talking to some of the older Fleetwood trawler-men in recorded interviews, though they were bitter at the time, on reflection, most understood the Icelanders situation. Their only regret was that we hadn't done the same and kept all our fish stocks to ourselves instead of sharing them with the rest of the European Union.

My next visit, made some years later, was deputising for Sea Angler editor Mel Russ, who at the last minute couldn't make a trip organised by Icelandair taking a team of journalists from all over Europe on an angling tour of the country.

I got five days notice on that one. My problem was that my fear of flying had lead me to let my passport expire after swearing I would never use it again. The promise however of a weeks fishing in Iceland quickly over-rode any such concerns and had me standing in the queue at the Liverpool passport office.

In addition to that, a word with Cliff Brown, the current Sea Angler editor who was working on a sister publication back then and also couldn't make it, confirming that he too would take an article from my boat partner Dave Devine got him onto the trip as well.

We flew in from Heathrow and met up with the others at Reykjavik. From there we were bussed over to the small internal airport at Keflavik for a flight on a small twin prop plane to Akureyri in a howling gale, which was an experience to put it mildly.

On landing, despite the relatively short distance, it was another world. Bright sunshine and hardly a breath of wind, though that unfortunately wasn't to last. That night we were treated to roast puffins washed down with lots of beer, then on to Dalvik further up the fjord for a dose of small cod and coalfish.

Again, as with Akranes years earlier, the fishing was nothing to write home about, and not even as many fish. Then around three O'clock in the afternoon we had to cross to Grenivik for the onward journey to Husavik where we would overnight for the following days fishing, by which time a very stiff northerly wind had got up.

It was horrendous. The fjord sides were exacerbating the problem by channelling the wind in. How we made it across I don't know, but relieved and soaking wet, we thankfully did.

We then fished on in similar vein at a number of other beautiful fishy looking locations, again unfortunately, none of which fulfilled their promise.

Finally, we flew back to Keflavik where we did another overnight in preparation for our final day out from there. But first, they had booked us in for a viking feast at some posh gaff in Reykjavik, where another 'interesting' food encounter was planned.

By this stage, everyone was quite relaxed with each others company. All except for one poor German chap called Frank, who I actually already knew as a translator of work I'd done previously for the German publication Fisch und Fang.

Most of the other journalists were from countries occupied by the Germans in WWII, and despite the fact that we had all been born in generations after the war, they weren't going to let him forget it, a fact which became increasingly obvious with every glass of alcohol which arrived at speed each time a glass was emptied, carried to us by scantily clad viking women slapped on the backsides by viking men who kept telling them they hadn't raped anybody yet all day.

Then it was time for the meal with its raw fish platter starter. This was a wooden board with various offerings like dried cod and smoked salmon scattered around its edge, plus a small white cube of something in the middle with an Icelandic flag stuck in it. Obviously, then, the centre piece of the meal.

As if dried cod, which looked like wood shavings and had to be reconstituted with saliva wasn't bad enough, the mysterious cube turned out to be a piece cut from a greenland shark, a species so toxic to the human palate it has to be buried in the tundra for twelve weeks to allow bacteria to break down the toxins before it can be eaten raw.

I can and will eat pretty much anything, but still it took me several attempts at swallowing to finally get my piece to stay down. Then I was asked what I thought of it. One of those dreadful do I or don't I moments. Tell the truth and you risk offending your host, but say you liked it and you risk getting another lump.

The following morning it was howling from the west and lashing down with rain. Consequently, only four of us fished that day. Dave, myself, and two chaps from Norway.

The boat was a small commercial plodder fitted with hurdy gurdy auto-jiggers which the skipper edged along the sheltered shore of a headland right up to the point where huge rollers were starting to show around the exposed tip. He then put us on a long slow drift progressively back towards base.

It was uncomfortable to put it mildly. When we moved, waves were coming in over the wheelhouse roof, and when we fished we got lashed with rain. But when we hit bottom with a range of pirks and hokkai type rigs, you just simply couldn't go wrong.

This time we caught loads of cod, a good proportion of them going well into double figures, with the best pushing up towards twenty pounds. Catfish, coalfish and haddock too.

The skipper was dashing from one side to the other with a sort of gaff which looked like a lump of wood with a large straight nail knocked through the end of it which he impaled into the fishes skull. He was very good at it. Obviously he'd had years of practise.

Unfortunately, I hadn't, and sods law, when I picked a spare one up to help out, the fish I was confronted with was a halibut which I promptly knocked off the hook and sent back on it's way. The only halibut we'd seen all trip. Fortunately, its Norwegian captor didn't seem too fussed as we proceeded to fill the boat.

When it was over, the others met us in at the harbour and were gob smacked. We were just cold, weary, and very wet. Time for a quick shower, load all the wet gear into our suit cases, grab a bite to eat, then back up in the air taking off in one of the worst cross winds I've ever experienced for the two hour flight back to Heathrow.

### INDIA

India has always held a fascination for me. In the war, my dad was based there in the army before going into Burma, and he always spoke highly of the place, particularly Kashmir. Then more recently, while running a DNA trace on my ancestry, I found that my mothers side originated there some three and a half thousand years ago. Two potential reasons then for my being drawn to the place. Not unfortunately though for the quality of its fishing.

Desperate to wet a line somewhere, I was torn between the coast and the inland waters fishing for mahseer. Unfortunately, mahseer fishing has slipped a long way since the days of empire when treble figure fish were regularly caught in the mountain rivers. So the coast it would have to be. But easier said than done.

On my first visit, which was to the south of the country to the state of Kerela, I particularly struggled. Eventually I found a tuc tuc driver who claimed to know people in a nearby fishing village. But on the day we visited there was some sort of stand-off between the villages Christian and Muslim communities taking place, at which point an army bus arrived full of very tall men in uniforms with big sticks who beat seven bells out of everybody, and that was the end of that.

In the evenings we would dine at one of the shacks down on the beach from where I could see the lights of numerous fishing boats out there working offshore.

At that time Kerela was a still dry state, so unless you registered as an alcoholic, you couldn't get a drink. Well, shouldn't have got a drink. To get around the ban they would bring beer to the table in a teapot which was quite amusing, and talking to the people at the shack, I managed to track down a chap with a boat who might take me out for a few hours one morning to the fishing fleet.

When it happened, I did manage a bit of fishing, catching just a few trigger fish. The commercial boats on the other hand, which were a mix of battered old things up to maybe eighteen feet in length, plus a scattering of dug out canoes, had quite a mix of half decent fish amongst which I recognised scabbards and cobia. But they had been fishing after dark, and my man wouldn't budge on that one. So once again, that was the end of that.

Determined to get some proper fishing in, my next visit to India was to Goa, and on this occasion I put in the time on the Internet looking to find some fishing opportunities before I went.

Not the easiest of tasks I can tell you. Quite often you would pick up a thread on either an individual or a club, only to find no contact details. On other occasions it would be an email address and nobody would come back to you. Very frustrating.

Eventually I came across a chap called Tony Estrocio based at Dona Paula at the entrance to the Mandovi River near Panjim who did reply. An ex-commercial diver, Tony had a fast boat of around twenty feet which he operated for diving and fishing. So with dates booked and taxi's arranged to get me there from Calangute where I was staying, at last there was the promise at least of some proper fishing.

You need to watch the taxi drivers there. My driver demanded a fee from Tony for introducing me to him as a customer, despite the fact that I'd previously set the whole thing up myself from the UK. He then moaned all the way back because I'd left fish on the boat instead of keeping them for him. Needless to say he talked himself out of a tip there.

So off we went to fish the reefs around a couple of small islands called Iiha Grande and Iiha de Sao Jorge, trolling a range of rapala lures. And while we didn't catch much, what we did catch was a couple of quite sizeable groupers, plus a very nice emperor snapper which I took back to the hotel and had cooked in a light coconut sauce later that evening. A fish which very nearly didn't make it to the kitchen.

Having somehow managed to get itself wedged under a rock leading up to a stalemate situation, Tony put on his scuba diving gear, went down and freed it, then gave my line a good pull to let me know to start winding again.

On the way back in that day, we also came across a boiling shoal of small jacks which proved to be a nice bit of a distraction. But as far as the lure fishing went, that was pretty much it. So on the second day I suggested we try a bit of bottom fishing with small hooks and bait, which was interesting.

Nothing big, but heaps of fish. Lots of variety too, though with the potential for so much more if we'd only had a bit of half decent bait. Tony had brought along a box of long dead prawns which were way too soft to stay on the hook properly. The fish liked them well enough, but would usually rip them free before you could manage to strike.

Those fish we did catch included lots of trigger fish, parrot fish, dollar fish, and various breams, plus several other species which never even got a name. Also a spectacular looking lion fish which we had to shake off the hook because of its dangerous spines, all of which was very enjoyable. But not a venue you would want to go to specifically with serious fishing in mind.

### ISREAL

Potentially, as with its near neighbour Egypt down the other end of the Red Sea at Sharm El-Sheikh, Eilat has a tremendous fishing potential. You only have to put on a set of scuba gear and walk in over the edge of the rocks as I did to appreciate the diversity, abundance, and sheer quality of the fishing which could be on offer within just a few yards of the shore. It was quite staggering.

Unfortunately, it isn't available, as the Israeli's, along with the Egyptians, prefer to keep it as a marine national park, which on the one hand is understandable, but for an angler, very disappointing to say the least.

I did manage to track down a few holiday maker boat trips where they would let you put a line out over the back trolling lures for bonito or whatever, but nothing worth bothering with. So, I had to content myself with my little telescopic rod down at the harbour snatching out all sorts of weird and wonderful things, none of which would have made half a pound.

### KENYA

One fish I had long wanted to catch but somehow always seemed to miss out on was a sailfish. With that in mind, after taking advice from a number of people including Dave Lewis on specifically selecting the venue offering the best chance of success, I booked a trip to Malindi fishing with Angus Paul who operates the kingfisher fleet based there.

February was ear marked as a good all round time to be fishing, and requesting Angus personally as my skipper was also a key part of a recipe, which I was assured would be successful.

So there I was very early on the first morning stood on the jetty steps looking out on the moored fleet of offshore boats, with numerous smaller craft ferrying anglers out to them across the lagoon. Then I glanced seaward where beyond the protection of the reef, I could see big breaking swells coming from across the Indian ocean.

They start fishing early in the morning there for just that reason. As the day heats up, so the breeze gets stronger to the point that by late afternoon you can sometimes barely stand up in the boat. The idea then is to get out early, bag up, and be back ashore before that happens.

I also remember how cool it felt, and how we even took a bit of a battering in the skiff from swells making it in over the reef top. I remember too thinking we need to get some early fish so as not to miss out in case Angus decided to cut things short, worrying that this might be yet another missed opportunity.

I made it on to the boat at around seven am while the Kenyan crew were still getting everything ready. By around half seven we were exiting the lagoon, and immediately the lures were being paid out. Small self weighted skirted lures with long cuts of fish lashed to their hooks fished in a spread along the outside of the reef, and by five minutes to eight, the first sailfish had been to the boat, was tagged and released.

In less than half an hour it was mission accomplished, and seven hours later, something of the order of fifteen others had gone through the same process, along with various other equally desirable species. Malindi had proved to be everything people said it would be and more.

Kenyan sailfish are not big fish. Typically they would range between about forty and sixty pounds, but still spectacular fish to catch, because unlike marlin they are not so big that you need to reverse the boat back down on them.

Instead, you can stand there as you would with any other fish and fight them completely un-aided, so you get to see all the leaping and aerobatics, which you can also get from marlin, but often miss out on with the boat in reverse against a swell, as the man on the rod gets swamped with seawater coming in over the back.

Everybody else on-board other than you gets to enjoy the marlins aerial spectacle. All you get is sore eyes with the salt, sore shoulders with the fight, and if you're lucky, a photograph at the end. So in that regard, sailfish are much more enjoyable billfish to catch.

I was also able to join in the tagging and release process which was good, except that not all of the sailfish got to swim away. One in particular bellied up almost immediately it was released.

In a flash, we could see a huge brown blur in the water circling around underneath it. A tiger shark was homing in. Then the order came from up top for one of the Kenyan lads to go in and retrieve it quickly before the shark got to it.

I think I'd have told Angus where to stick his job. But life is different there, and as commanded, in he went. Thankfully, he won the race, but only by a small margin. A very difficult thing to watch.

Wahoo were probably the most prevalent 'other fish' species we also encountered, which on the thirty to fifty pound class outfits used for the sailfish went particularly well, the best of which I had weighing in at fifty five pounds.

We also had a few similar looking kingfish, along with quite good numbers of small yellowfin tuna, skipjacks, and bonito, one of the smaller specimens of which went on as a live-bait fished deep using a heavily weighted down-rigger. This produced both the biggest and the toughest fish of the day. A giant trevally or GT of around seventy pounds.

As good as that might sound, you don't want to be hooking up too many of those things in quick succession. The power GT's have is unbelievable, particularly when hooked so far down where they stay and slug it out rather than making long runs.

Imagine dangling a hook down from a motorway bridge and latching on to a lorry travelling in first gear, then trying to stop it. That's deep water GT fishing. So when Angus offered to put another live-bait down, understandably, or was it wimp-like, I decided to give that one a miss.

Day one was my trip to remember. Instant success with the sailfish followed by all those others, not to mention the wahoo, kingfish and GT, and the remaining days were pretty much a repeat of the same.

Granted, no other day produced quite so many fish, nor as many species. But any of them could well have been stand-out days. That's a measure of the fishing there back in 2000. Whether it's still the same, or even approaching that quality now is difficult for me to say, though probably not. Where is these days. And therein lies a problem for venues all around the world.

Some obviously are better than others, and a few do still fit the definition of world class. Having said that, it doesn't take long, particularly with big fish venues for that mantle to slide, as I know only too well from the number of once prime locations I have re-visited only to be astonished by how far down the ladder they had slipped.

It may well be that Kenya is not in that position yet. Even so, and this goes for all venues, including those in home waters, you really need to get to them as quickly as possible.

Not only for the quality of fish, but the availability of the fishing too, as things are changing rapidly with boats struggling for business due to falling angler interest levels, as other distractions see to it that younger replacement anglers are not coming through any more in the numbers they once did.

### MADEIRA

In some ways, Madeira is the Portuguese equivalent of Spain's Canary Islands. Small, and mountainous, with very deep water close by, placed in an open Atlantic location off the North African coast. But in others ways, it is also very different.

For example, as a visitor, you quickly become aware that it is far quieter and more 'normal' than the hustle and bustle of many of the Canary Island holiday destinations.

A location more in tune with honeymoon couples and older people looking for a bit of peace and quiet, hence it's description as being the land of the newly wed and nearly dead.

It's fishing too is similar to that of the Canaries, but again, at the same time different. Generally it sees much the same species as the Gran Canaria and the others, but in different proportions and mixes.

The summer blue marlin fishing for example is of a far higher standard, with 'granders' taken most years by boats working the south side of the island out of the capital Funchal.

I've only visited the island once, and that was in the run up to Christmas, which is a very pleasant time in terms of winter weather and atmosphere, but not the main angling season. That said, as I'm not one for aimlessly dragging skirted lumps of plastic all over the ocean for hours on end, this suited me.

Don't get me wrong. I want to catch marlin and the other big pelagic predators as much as the next man. But bottom fishing is what I've been brought up with, and winter can be a very good time to visit Madeira in that regard.

With that in mind, Dave Devine and I teamed up with another Brit holiday maker Brian Wilkinson who was also looking to make up a trip, and between us we booked Ron Cowlings boat 'Our Mary' which he had sailed over from his mid channel wreck fishing base on the south coast in 1988 and had never gone back.

A bit long in the tooth by that stage for working the deck, Ron now employed a local full time skipper and was more of a figure head. Even so, they had won the fourth of July Marlin World Cup that year with a fish in excess of eleven hundred pounds.

This actually was the boats first season of winter bottom fishing, so something of a learning curve for all concerned. In previous years it had been left tied up in the marina between trolling seasons. But that's a long time without fish, which for an old sea dog who simply loves to be out there as much as looking to earn a crust, it was a no brainer.

So it was off we went following the coast until we reached the designated spot. A patch of clean ground butted up to the edge of a reef in around two hundred and twenty feet of water within half a mile of the shore.

I'd taken along a thirty pound class shimano exage travel rod paired up to a TLD25 loaded with braid, which on the face of things seemed like the perfect choice, and in many ways it probably was.

Ron unfortunately wasn't impressed with the line choice, preferring monofilament for the stretch cushion it offers, which, with hardly any tide to contend with, he felt was best.

By coincidence, 'Our Mary' was a shimano sponsored boat. In fact, the shimano UK management team had been out there fishing with him just a few weeks earlier, and had left all sorts of goodies behind. So he insisted I use his TLD15 loaded with mono, and to keep the peace, I agreed. He also provided the end gear, which was a simple heavy mono flowing trace.

Big stingrays, eagle rays, and the odd butterfly ray had been the main stay of the shimano trip. That sounded good to me, particularly the butterfly ray. I'd seen them once or twice in the past, but had never actually caught one myself, so I was up for that.

Fortunately, mixed in amongst some quite sizeable stingers, plus more than enough horrible moray eels, that's precisely what I ended up with. Like a wide winged vulcan bomber with a short stubby tail and beautiful spotted markings gliding around just under the surface. I couldn't believe my good luck.

### MALAYSIA

Kuala Lumpur was a stopover en-route back to the UK from Borneo. As we were scheduled to change planes there, we thought we might as well stay over for a few days in what turned out to be an incredible city. Clean, high tech, and feeling perfectly safe, with great night time entertainment in the open air bars scattered around the Petronas Towers.

Really friendly people too. So friendly in fact that a chap called Auslan who I'd exchanged a few angling emails with in the run up to the visit, agreed to meet up with us and introduced me to several of his locally well known fishing friends.

These fellow fishermen included a local tackle dealer, plus angling journalist Aznir Abdul Malek, who after a nice meal and a few beers, offered to take me for a day fishing for giant snakehead, which I had secretly hoped might be to the vast jungle wilderness of Tasik Temenggor in the north of the country where snakeheads, jungle perch, and mahseer, are common place. But the distances involved were too great.

Instead, they arranged a visit to a local fishery called Tow Foo, which is a small commercial lure only water close to the Sepang F1 race circuit, where because of the limited amount of time, and me never having seen a snakehead, the fishery owner waived the lures only rule and provided my with a load of small dead-baits.

One the face of things a concession, except that none of us had suitable terminal tackle for bait fishing. So we cobbled together the heaviest mono trace and largest hook we could muster, baited it up, and threw it out into the pea green water, leaving it to fish free-lined with the bale arm open where it was instantly picked up by a good fish. An encounter which unfortunately only lasted seconds, as the culprit quickly bit through the monofilament trace.

This happened a couple more times before somebody thankfully found a short wire trace. Now we were really in business. Every egg a bird in fact. No wonder then that they don't allow bait fishing. Amazing fish to catch though, which both pull hard and run well.

In many ways they remind me of pike. They even look a bit like a pike in that they have a long sleek body and lots of teeth, though that's where any similarity ends.

The dorsal fin is long and continuous, rather like that of a ling. But it's the colour and patterning that can really stand out. Not so much in the fish I caught. But some of the larger wild specimens can be spectacular in the extreme, with their black base colour covered in prominent white spots and stripes, plus of course their huge mouths bristling with sharp teeth.

### MALLORCA

Like much of the Mediterranean, Mallorca is a holiday destination whose coastline is inhabited mainly by lots of very small fish. On one visit however back in the early 1970's that didn't matter, as I had been tasked with the job of collecting the widest range of research specimens possible for external anatomical studies such as scale and fin ray counts for Dr. Dietrich Burkel, who was illustrating the Collins Encyclopaedia of Fishes.

Species listed as rare in home waters, but abundant throughout the Med such as comber and an assortment of wrasses and breams. And as most holiday makers will know only too well from looking into harbours and around the rocks in these parts, particularly those who pack a small telescopic rod, these fish are everywhere. An absolute collage of colours, shapes, and layouts. But barely anything big enough to cover the palm of your hand.

With all the above in mind, a boat trip was arranged with a local character to go exploring in and around Palma harbour, fishing with small hooks on dropper rigs and a box of fresh ragworm where it was absolute carnage.

Fish were coming up by the string full. I didn't know at the time what many of them were, so anything that looked a bit different was photographed for colours, then popped into the formaldehyde tub for transportation home.

Back in the UK, after Dietrich's formal identification work, I was absolutely staggered by the variety I had in there. Far more than I had anticipated. So while it wasn't exactly scintillating sport, it served two very important purposes. Dietrich got his artwork specimens, and I was able to positively add the best part of twenty new species to my world-wide list.

### MAURITIUS

When discussing the fishing in South Africa later, I describe it was one of those places I would never ever go back to. Based on the experiences of a visit during the early 1990's, though for different reasons, Mauritius is another such venue. A trip which started off so full of hope and anticipation, but failed miserably on all fronts.

It could be argued that we were just unlucky. Yet when I speak to other people, it would seem that is not the case. There are more stories of failure than success coming out of that place, though I do concede that it probably was once a fantastic destination, particularly for big marlin.

Those days however are long gone, and not only for the billfish, which probably makes my experience typical. For like the infamous dodo which also once thrived there, decline followed by extinction is a word seemingly woven into the fabric of this beautiful island.

For those unfamiliar with the place, Mauritius in quite an isolated deep water Indian Ocean island. One of those venues where the marlin lures can go out more or less at the moorings and stand as much chance of success as they will at any other time during the trip, which these days unfortunately probably isn't much.

I went across in the company of Graeme Pullen, Tony Kirrage, and a number of other notable weathered big game enthusiasts, all expecting at least to see if not catch marlin.

Being honest, I did see a couple of small ones being weighed when we first arrived which stoked the fires of anticipation even more. But that I'm sorry to say was it.

On our first run out we had what we presume to have been a marlin strike which brought one of the outriggers tumbling down into the boat. Later in the day, trolling a small skipjack tuna live-bait, Ken Mitchell landed a hammerhead shark of just over three hundred and thirty pounds. Then the weather set in.

It was on the evening following that trip that we first started hearing rumours of a cyclone, the Indian Ocean version of an Atlantic hurricane. Satellites tracking it were predicting it was headed directly for us, and consequently, the whole island went into shut down.

The fishing boats were secured away inside the storm harbour, and the fronts of the hotels were all stripped bare, with everything that could be removed stowed away safely in their basements. The airport was also closed. It was then simply a case of sit and wait.

The TV in the bar was full of nothing else other than tracking the monster rotation. Meanwhile, we found a bunch of garden canes at the rear of the hotel and decided to organise a fishing competition from the little wooden jetty using these with pieces of monofilament tied to the end.

What a sight. Journalists, England internationals and the like, all fishing with sticks and lines, which incredibly did actually manage to come up with a few small fish and produce a winner.

Not content with propping up the bar waiting for the violence to start, a couple of us took a walk along the beach and found ourselves a local fisherman who said he could safely take us out to fish the protected inside edge of the reef. As the storm hadn't yet arrived, conditions there were not too bad, particularly with the reef breaking up any incoming wave patterns.

On our first venture we out set off in day light, but ended up fishing well on into the dark in this battered old boat with an eight hp outboard motor that was literally nailed in place on the transom to be used in conjunction with a battered old patched up sail.

At one point it started raining, putting it down like you've never seen it back home. So we spent an hour or so huddled under a plastic sheet waiting for it to pass. Then when it got dark, we felt completely lost. No lights on the shore nor any other signs of land for comfort.

Thankfully, the fisherman seemed to know where he was, and as a result we fished two or three times from his battered little boat, catching a whole raft of weird and wonderful things, and regularly getting bitten off too, probably by barracuda, while retrieving some small reef fish or other.

Actually, it was quite enjoyable. But having spent so much money and travelled so far, not exactly what we had originally planned on doing. And all the while, cyclone Bella as it was now officially called, was creeping ever closer, to the point that even the inside of the reef was no longer safe to venture out on.

Then suddenly, almost within battering range of us, it inexplicably veered off along a slightly different path, ripping eighty percent of the vegetation off the adjacent island of Rodrigues just to the east of us.

We still got some 'weather' from it, but missed out on the worst of it, which when things started to settle down a bit, left us with a couple of days at the very end which were just about fishable in terms of swell, but which unfortunately produced very little.

One of the abiding memories I have of the place is the water colour and clarity. It was everything you'd expect from a tropical paradise, and on one particular occasion, we found ourselves surrounded by small tuna at the surface in every direction for as far as the eye could see.

What an amazing sight, and needless to say we were quickly into action knocking out small yellow fins and skipjacks as fast as you could get a lure in front of them.

Some of these were again used as live-baits. But as interesting as this was in that moment, it was still a far cry from the main objective of the trip, both for us and for everyone else concerned.

So un-impressive was the fishing that I can't honestly remember if our marlin competition even ended up with a winner. I don't recall seeing any more marlin brought in, though I did hear of a small spearfish, and Pete Sharples on our boat managed to sneak out a bonus sailfish right at the death.

So disappointment all round, and a hard hitting lesson that even if things had turned out better in terms of the weather, I still don't rate dragging lumps of plastic around the ocean for hours on end, then if you're lucky, being handed a rod with a fish on the line that the crew have hooked up for you as being in the true spirit of fishing anyway.

### MEXICO

My first visit to Mexico was to Cabo San Lucas towards the end of the 1980's. Back then, it was still a bit of a ramshackle fishing village stuck out on a limb at the tip of Baja California, with the Pacific ocean on one side, and the Sea of Cortez on the other. A far cry from the plush stopover port reportedly used by luxury cruise liners today.

I was with a group set up by Graeme Pullen visiting around Christmas time, which is the key period for striped marlin, plus a whole load of other potential goodies. But while we caught a good variety of fish both inshore and off, things didn't always go completely according to plan.

The problem was twofold. Being so close to America, having potentially excellent fishing and consequently attracting lots of US customers, the fishing fleet understandably was geared up to that particular market.

Americans as we all know want everything done for them on a plate. The first time they touch the rod is when the crew places it in their hands complete with ready hooked fish on the end, then moan at them every time the drag adjustment is touched.

Difficulty number two was the fact that back then, few of the boat crews could speak any English, which made getting our point regarding who hooks the fish across to them very difficult. A problem further compounded by never having the same boat two days on the trot. Any progress that was made was therefore immediately lost at the close of play.

The fishing was for striped marlin with live-baits. It couldn't have been more simple. A rubbing trace on the end of the main line with a hook and a nose hooked scad.

The skipper would head off looking for circling frigate birds, then try to spot the sickle-like tail of a feeding marlin protruding above the surface, at which point the crew would lob the bait out just in front of its nose, and hopefully it would be taken. Something we could quite easily do for ourselves.

But no, we had argument after argument as the crew wanted to be in total control. So Gordon Thornes and I went off to the booking office to try to explain that we were not Americans, and that if the crew hooked a fish in future then they would also have to wind it in, which would mean no tip.

Not that it made any difference. Next boat we had the same again, so we refused to take part and demanded to be taken back in.

On another occasion when it happened, we told them not to bother with any more marlin and started fishing for other things, which included various sharks, dorado, and dog toothed tuna.

Meanwhile, the other boat parties within our group we coming in with five fish limit bags of striped marlin every day. That's how prolific the marlin there were. But were they really catching them, or simply winding them in?.

When we finally got the message across, we were given the freedom to use our own gear and do our own casting, and while we had precious little to show for it by comparison to everyone else due to the limited time, we were satisfied, and were in our eyes at least, the only ones who 'actually' caught striped marlin that week.

Around the mid point in the trip, we were given two days off for sightseeing or whatever, which Gordon and I used to great effect by chartering a panga.

These are small boats of around twenty feet in length which tend mainly to work inshore, though while we were there, some of the panga's were catching and releasing as many striped marlin as the bigger boats.

They also had blue marlin too. But marlin were off the menu for us. We wanted to stick inshore, and in particular to target rooster fish.

December unfortunately is not the best time for big roosters inshore. They tend to be more of a summer species. But we fished for them anyway by slow trolling live-baits on the edge of the crest of the rollers pushing in onto the steep sandy beaches. Real heart in the mouth stuff, riding the rising swells of some of the bigger waves beam on.

Sometimes the skipper would get it just slightly wrong and have to gun the outboard at the very last moment if a roller started to break early, which around day break in the poor light conditions made them look even more ominous than would be the case later on in the day.

We did actually manage to catch a few rooster fish. Only small ones, but we had them. Dorado too, and plenty of crevalle jacks, not too mention huge needle fish at four and five feet long, which look like garfish with crocodiles heads and would constantly be crewing our expensive live baits to pieces.

We even found time to have a couple of hours with smaller baits over a section of shallow inshore reef catching all sorts of everything. Then it was back to the arguments and frustrations on the bigger marlin boats.

The evenings obviously were spent out eating and having a few drinks. Not too many though, as the starts were always very early in morning around day break.

We also managed to sneak in an extra hour or so of fishing just as the sun went down, casting from a man made boulder arm forming what looked like some sort of harbour entrance, throwing bar spoons out into the darkness which were snapped up by barracuda and jacks.

I even went down there mid afternoon after one of the panga trips to try a spot of shore bait fishing for anything and everything, catching a good mix of snappers, trigger fish and the like. Also sergeant majors around the harbour entrance.

Holiday makers throwing bits of bread in had them swarming there, so I improvised a float from a piece of wood, cadged a bit of fresh bread, and proceeded to fill my boots with those for half an hour. So all in all, certainly from a species point of view, Cabo was a very successful trip.

The sight casting to the marlin, when eventually we got that sorted out was fantastic too. When a live-bait goes in, if a marlin was in feeding mood, it would suddenly light up neon blue then dart forward and and grab it. An incredible sight, and one which most certainly would have been missed leaving everything to the crew.

Then it's away leaping all over the ocean, except that the man on the rod doesn't get to see any of that as the boat is backed down sending bucketfuls of water in over the stern, over your head, and into your eyes.

My next visit to Mexico was in January 2015. For years Paul Haynes at Warrior Boats had talked about the fabulous marlin and yellow fin tuna fishing out of Puerto Vallarta further down the Pacific coast from Cabo San Lucas. So when Dawn and I decided to go to Mexico on holiday, that seemed the logical choice.

We both loved the place. Very clean, lots to do, and very nice helpful people too. A far cry from my previous Cabo experience.

Obviously, some fishing was also on the agenda. But first I needed to suss out where the boats were and what they were catching, so I headed on up to Marina Vallarta hoping to see them coming in, which in theory was a good idea, foiled only by the fact that none seemed to be going out fishing in the first place.

I saw plenty of boats and advertising boards. But I never saw any fishermen at all coming in. So as you do, I started asking around, and very quickly got the distinct impression that things weren't what they used to be.

I was told that tuna were scarce and hardly worth bothering with. The only people still doing a bit of rod and line fishing were the panga's. These would come right in onto the beach in front of your hotel to pick you up, which is eventually what I did.

A word of warning though. Even in flat calm conditions you still get one big roller at the edge, which makes pick ups and drops decidedly dodgy.

Also, I would advise taking your own tackle. I had more eyes than the battered old rods they provided on the boat. And still we caught fish, all of which is okay if slow trolling live-baits for good sized jacks turns you on. But that pretty much is what it's come to there now by all accounts.

One day we took a rackety old bus ride down to the Malecon, which is the old Puerto Vallarta where all the shops, bars, and night time entertainment goes on. A great place to visit, and while I was there I went off scouting for vantage points to fish, where on the far side of the river, I found a small brand new concrete pier that some of the locals were fishing from with hand lines.

The following morning, armed with a pack of calamari bought at Wal Mart and my telescopic rod, I was on the bus and back there before daylight, making my way down to fish the pier where it was instant success.

Every drop a hit. All sorts of fish from jacks and snappers through to trigger fish and porcupine fish, plus weird looking blue spotted flatfish with their eyes set wide apart, all of which I was able to identify from my photographs using the Internet back at the hotel.

The big problem was that the trigger fish kept biting my size eight hooks off their eight pounds bs monofilament snoods. There were some better fish in there amongst them too, with several stripping line from the spool. I also saw some very big fish mooching around the concrete legs, including stingrays.

This beats any panga fishing I thought, so the next day I was back for more, and again on day three. Only this time I was in for a bit of a surprise.

That morning, some of the panga's were coming in to the lower platform of the pier to pick up clients, one of which pointed out that if the police caught me they would confiscate my gear and fine me, asking if I'd seen the big no fishing sign at the start of the pier.

Obviously, in the dark, I hadn't noticed it and had in fact walked right past it. So that unfortunately was the end of that.

### NAMIBIA – SKELETON COAST

The writer Oscar Wilde is reputedly responsible for the often used quote 'there are lies, damn lies, and there are statistics', one interpretation of which is that with careful massaging of the facts and figures, the truth need not be allowed to get in the way of a good story. Raw statistics on the other hand without selective presentation or supplementary comment can tell little other than the truth. See what do these figures say to you....

11 anglers, six days surf fishing, 15,000 pounds of fish

5 members of the party not dedicated shore anglers

Most members of the party took at least one day out

88 sharks averaging a 150 to 160 pounds apiece

2 anglers each in excess of a 1,000 pounds in a single day

8 of the 88 sharks weighing in excess of 200 pounds

1 individual shark touching on three 300 pounds

To me that is irrefutable evidence for the most impressive shore fishing in the world. Accumulated by a party of UK anglers fishing the surf beaches of Namibia in February 1999, at the time it took place, this trip is thought to represent the most productive surf fishing trip ever made.

Namibia back then was one of the newest countries in Africa, encompassing one of the oldest, and certainly one of the hottest deserts on earth. Don't however read too much into the hot desert bit as it can be very cold down on the beach, and for up to maybe half a mile or so inland. So much so in fact that fleece jackets might even need to be worn.

A little intervention from one of the coldest places on earth is actually the main driving force behind both this fact and this remarkable marine and coastal ecosystem. For this region, known as the skeleton coast, receives cool nutrient rich water all the way from Antarctica carried northwards by the Benguela Current.

Our guide for the trip was Namibian international shore angler Johan Berger. A man whose enthusiasm, work rate, and temperament, make him one of the finest fishing guides anyone could ever hope to meet. At eight o'clock prompt he would pick us up at the Hansa Hotel, and would not pack up until either everyone in the group was satisfied with the fishing, or it was no longer light enough to see.

He would then make the long trek back along the featureless salt tracks of the Namib Desert to our base at Swakopmund, usually in total darkness. Just time for a quick shower, a bite to eat, and a few hours sleep, then it would start all over again.

Other than the occasional mile marker, out on the desert salt tracks there are no sign posts to pick up on. But like a cruise missile programmed to find a specific target, Johan would suddenly detour from the track out across the desert sands to the lip of a steep surf beach. There he would stand for a few minutes watching, looking at the surf tables, water colour, and current.

Some days he would even walk into the water to see if it felt cool enough. Only when all his criteria were satisfied would the rods be un-clipped from their racks for a cast. But you only got ten minutes. No bait fish and we were off again looking for a new stretch of beach.

The first priority on most days was the catching of at least half a dozen gully sharks for bait. A fish not unlike a bull huss, but with the capacity to hit weights of seventy pounds and more. A powerful fish too in its own right. My best tipped the scales at forty eight pounds. But not the species we had travelled all the way to Namibia to catch.

Standard UK shore fishing gear is fine for these fish. A heavy mono leader, 6/0 hook, and a mullet head make the perfect business end combination.

Stingrays, bull rays, and sand sharks also came the same way, and like the gully sharks, all found their way into the back of Johan's truck. Never again will fishing for bait ever be so pleasurable. Then with the bait requirements taken care of, we would head north looking for deeper, cooler water.

To me, one piece of surf beach looked much the same as the next. But not to Johan. He was looking for water with an olive green tinge and breaks in the surf indicating deeper gullies between submerged banks.

More importantly, it had to be a piece of coast where the current was being deflected outwards by the shore and the breeze. This is crucial if the big bronze whaler sharks are to be drawn within casting range, for it's this that will deliver the chum trail out beyond the banks.

After removing the gills and liver from the gully sharks for bait, the carcasses were then pegged out on the beach at a point where each incoming wave would pick up a bit of blood and other body juices to establish this all important scent trail.

It was usual at this point to be given a prediction as to how long it would take before the first dorsal fin would appear within casting range. Usually this would be around half an hour. Just time to set the rods up and get everyone prepared for action. Prepared in their minds that is. But on this the first days fishing, far from prepared physically for what was to come.

Tackle for the shark fishing was provided by Johan in with the guiding fee. One piece fourteen foot purglas executive rods with their reel seats fixed around nine inches up from the butt are favoured in these parts.

The reels themselves were a mix of penn senators and daiwa sealine 450 heavy duty boat models. I own and have used a daiwa 450 on quite a number of occasions in the UK for big common skate fishing. Amazingly, here Johan was using them for surf casting.

To do this he had hack sawed one of the cross bars out to be able to get his thumb close enough to the spool to control it so as to prevent casting overruns. But seating the reel so low down meant that after casting, line control was done using the left hand, which took some getting used to. These were loaded with thirty five pounds bs monofilament tied to a heavy mono shock leader with twelve inches of heavy wire armed with two 10/0 hooks and a small sliding lead.

Bait was a sandwich of gully shark liver wrapped in blood rich gills bound together with elasticated thread. The fixed hook at the end of the trace was then inserted into the resulting sausage rather like threading on a lugworm, with the free sliding second hook nicked into the other side facing out the opposite way.

Then, with a skill that had even the shore specialists in the party standing back in amazement, it was sent out by Johan to the back of the breakers. And before the last of the baits made it into the water, the first one had been already been picked up by a shark, so it was game on, quickly followed by two other sharks which were hooked a short time later making it a triple header, and all within the first hour.

Shortly after, John Devine hooked up what would turn out be the biggest fish of the trip. With John still struggling, after a couple of pulls and several good hard strikes, line started pouring from my reel too, and after a gruelling hour long tussle, I had a 192 pounder on the beach. The other lads had also landed their fish by this stage. John meanwhile was still struggling, and a further hour or so later was still into the same fish.

By this time people were starting to rally around offering him encouragement. But unlike the fish, John was tiring fast. Then, two and quarter hours after hooking up, he handed the rod to me. At first I refused. Only when he said he'd cut the line then did I relent.

I really started laying into the fish. After all, if we parted company, it wasn't really my fish anyway. So beach or break, I had nothing to lose, except for seeing what it was that that could pull so hard, which when finally it was beaten, turned out to be a monster of almost three hundred pounds, and like John, I too had literally had enough.

Day one produced seven sharks, all over the one hundred pound mark. Day two was a little more productive with ten fish, reverting back to seven again on day three, with day four a lot less productive in terms of the sharks, as much of time was spent fishing for edible species such as Steenbras and Kob.

We only managed two sharks that day, both over one hundred and sixty pounds. So on the fifth day we decided to concentrate solely on the sharks at a new location to the south of Swakopmund, known locally as Donkey Bay.

This unfortunately meant no opportunity to catch gully sharks, so bait would have to be frozen mackerel. No carcasses either to stake out along the waters edge to draw the bigger sharks in, which in light of what was to happen was perhaps as well.

The response to the mackerel baits was instantaneous. Reels were pouring out line on all sides. It was however to be a day of mixed blessings. Our final total for the day was our best yet, but that was only half of the story. So effective was the mackerel, and so numerous were the sharks that it was drawing in from seemingly miles around, that we had a feeding frenzy on our hands.

The problem this brought was that with so many sharks cruising the shallows with their mouths open, they were repeatedly swimming into our lines, sometimes while we were playing a fish, and accidentally biting the monofilament reel lines through.

Were it not for the many bite-offs, our total of twenty two fish beached both would have and should have been twice that. Instead, we ran out of traces, and had to call a premature end to the fishing allowing us a good night out in the town.

Day six was to be the big day to remember. Johan took us to the sheltered side of the bay we had fished the previous day where conditions were mirror calm. The beach there didn't look too steep. But several yards out, the water colour quickly changed from sandy brown to blue as it dropped off suddenly to around twenty feet.

Spurred on by Kob to over forty pounds taken from the shallows by local anglers, four of our party then decided to devote themselves to fishing for edibles, leaving the rest of us to work on the sharks, which we did to some tune.

Over the week we had enjoyed numerous multiple hook ups. It was fairly common to see three or four rods in action at any one time. Here on day six, we had seven sharks being played simultaneously, all of which were in the one hundred and fifty to two hundred and forty pound bracket.

Total catch for this day was exactly forty, with Dave Devine and Mike Dennehy both taking well in excess of a thousand pounds of fish apiece in a single session. Quite staggering fishing.

I well remember the golden days of west country wreck fishing back home, when ten anglers sharing a charter boat would be given loads of press coverage for a collective haul of over a thousand pounds. To do it single handedly, and from a beach, quite literally defies belief.

My best fish went two hundred and twelve pounds, which I took using my own UK beach tackle on the last day, and I don't reckon to be any sort of a shore angler at all. Providing you are prepared to listen to the guide and use the right terminal gear, anyone could enjoy this level of unbelievable quality shore angling.

As long as the reel is seated low down on the butt to allow the use of a butt pad for actually playing the fish, I don't think any reasonable quality UK surf rod would find it a problem either. But you do need a reel capable of packing at least three hundred yards of thirty to forty pounds bs line.

It's no good fishing light for these sharks. You have to be able to pile on the pressure, otherwise they can spool you out as one South African visitor next to me found to his cost. In that regard, both the TLD25 and the daiwa LD50H would be good reels for the job.

Anything less and you would be making a rod for your own back in every painful sense of the phrase. For make no mistake about it, as good as the fish may look in the photographs after-wards, each one comes at a price in terms of back, leg, and shoulder muscle pain.

Associated audio interview numbers: 49.

### NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand was a brief visit as part of a wider look at south east Asia and Oceania, timed to be as close as possible to the international date-line for the millennium new years eve party at Christchurch on South Island.

Fishing was a secondary consideration, but still a core objective none the less. That said, the tremendously good and expensive fishing I know they have over there for a variety of big game species, and in particular broadbill swordfish, was unfortunately never going to be a part of that plan. A case of grab what I could on the hoof and make the best of it.

Unfortunately, in the run up to new year, the weather was appalling. So bad in fact that despite it being mid summer there, the new years eve celebrations set up for the local park had to be cancelled due to the severity of the wind and rain.

Needless to say my fishing arrangements also went down the pan for the same reason, leaving me kicking my heels at some tiny rustic little harbour whose name I completely forget, with no chance whatsoever of the boat putting to sea. The best I could muster was to try an hour from the jetty, which turned up a string of small wrasse-like fish.

North Island proved to be a little better. There I managed to get myself onto a boat trip out of Wakatane on a day when the weather had finally picked up. A trip on which my wife Dawn and I took the two remaining spaces on a boat otherwise full of Maori's out for a picnic and days mixed fishing.

The women and kids sat around tucking in to all sorts of food and drink from huge cool boxes, while the men fished, drank beer, and replaced the rapidly reducing contents of those cool boxes with fish.

Initially, they kept themselves pretty much to themselves, until one of them cottoned on to the fact that we weren't New Zealanders and started to chat. Once he realised we were from Lancashire and lived quite close to Wigan, the conversation very quickly turned to New Zealand rugby league player Va'aiga Tuigamala, otherwise known to Wigan rugby league fans as 'inga the winger'.

That was it. The ice was well and truly broken, and we shared a very enjoyable day with the party, including throwing all sorts of quite decent sized karawai and terakihi into their cool boxes. Barrachouta too, which look sort of similar to a barracuda but without the same fearsome dental array.

Gurnards very similar to our tub gurnards were another species I particularly remember, plus a lot of problems with blue sharks snatching hooked fish from the lines at the surface, which I wanted to try for, but nobody else wanted anywhere near the boat.

### NORWAY

On more than an odd occasion, I've been very lucky in my angling life in having got to fish some of the best venues in the world while they were still at the top of their game. Often that doesn't last for long, so when you find one, you need to be in there quick. Norway however is probably the exception here in that I was there back towards the start of it all, and now ten years on, it's still just as good ever. Possibly dare I say it, even better.

Not so much the quality of the fishing, which the Norwegians not being members of the EU, and with sensible fishery management policies, have managed to keep good. More a case of knowledge building by visiting anglers, both in turning up new potentials and learning how better to fish the ones they already know, which if the quality of that potential remains as high as it has, is bound to follow on like putting one foot in front of the other.

As such, the long awaited first ever rod caught hundred pound plus cod caught by German tackle manufacturer Michael Eisele came in 2013. The commercial hand-liners had already seen fish of that size on several occasions previously, so it was only a matter of time. Other species which thrive and grow big in Norwegian waters are coalfish, halibut, torsk, haddock, wolf fish, and plaice.

Much of the best fishing takes place at latitudes well up beyond the Arctic circle. Lyngen Fjord and some of the other camps in the Tromso area, which are the main producers, are almost two hundred miles up into the Arctic.

It depends what it is you want to catch, which in turn adds a level of seasonality to the whole affair, which is no bad thing, as it allows those who are less hardy not to have to endure the worst of the winter weather and still record a string of excellent PB's.

The biggest cod are there in February, March and April, which understandably can be very cold. I was there in mid May, and still there was plenty of snow lying about. Avalanches too sliding off the mountains forming the rim of the fjord, which are a spectacular sight to witness from a safe distance in a boat.

You can find very big cod from forty to seventy pounds inside some of the northern fjords such as Lyngen. But for a chance of the really big cod in the seventy pounds and upwards bracket, you need to be at Lauklines, fishing from a large charter boat out over the offshore reefs, which can be a very exposed wild place in the winter months, and certainly not for the faint hearted.

Still, if you want to be on a trip where people don't even get their camera out for fifty pound cod, then that's what you must do. Otherwise, stick to one of the more sheltered self-drive locations which still produce lots of what we in the UK would regard as big cod in the spring and early summer, plus big coalfish and halibut as the summer marches on.

I fished out of Kappangen, a tiny no shops collection of houses at the base of Lyngen Fjord. No pubs or restaurants either, which with Norwegian prices as high as they were was perhaps no bad thing. We stayed in a property where people would come in and cook for us, plus we picked up alcohol en route from a supermarket somewhere way out of town.

We also fished from a large comfortable skippered boat called 'Pendlar', which unfortunately is no longer available. Not that it gave us any advantage over the smaller boats other than it was warm and had shelter, plus we got a cooked meal at lunch time, and hot coffee on tap throughout the day.

We would also get a tot of brandy off the skipper Od every time a big fish came aboard, which on the last couple of days almost made it a booze cruise, such was the quality of the cod fishing.

Fishing with fast drop pirks in a range of colours, and large self weighted shads, the fishing early on could best be described as being patchy. It came in fits and starts with some very big fish thrown in. But no consistency.

One day for example we were followed by another boat, so Od stopped 'Pendlar' in the middle of nowhere and told us to pretend to fish seriously until it had passed. Dave Devine boated a forty seven pound cod at that 'non fishing' spot.

Cod obviously were the dominant species, with enough fish topping thirty pounds to keep everyone on-board happy. The lads on the shads also had small halibut up to around twelve pounds, plus we picked up some very good haddock on smaller baits, along with a smattering of wolf fish, and always plenty of torsk, one of which topped twenty four pounds.

I even had quite a sizeable redfish on a pirk, while a couple of Polish lads fishing baits in deep water from a self drive close to base brought in a couple of rabbit fish.

Cod though were always the number one target fish, certainly on our trip. As I say, we picked up good fish all over the place, and on one occasion in a blowy snowy squall, even ventured outside the fjord to fish the inshore reefs around the Island of Arnoy which were stacked with fish, but generally only up to around twenty pounds.

And so it went on for the first few outings, until on the next to the last day, on our way back in, Od picked up an interesting hump like feature on the bottom in around six hundred feet of water very close to our home base well down inside the fjord, and suggested we give it a few drops.

This was it. The promised land. And to think we'd been sailing over it on our previous outings heading up the fjord looking for fish which had been there on our doorstep all the time.

We only gave it an hour as we were due back in. But what an hour it turned out to be. Big cod were coming up left right and centre. At times there were two and three forty pound fish being disgorged next to each other.

Needless to say, the following mornings destination was written in tablets of stone. And so it continued just as we had left it the previous evening. Cod fishing of a consistent quality, the likes of which I don't think I'll ever see again.

They may well get bigger cod elsewhere such as at Lauklines if you have the stomach for the big seas and cold, but this was sheer carnage. Well, I say carnage, but actually, where fish looked likely to survive the rigours of being brought up from such depth they were put back in, and many cases appeared to get back down okay.

Longer term well being is another matter. But if you don't try you certainly won't succeed. And it's just that type of mentality that has not only made, but will hopefully keep the fishing in Norwegian waters right up there at the top of the pile, for species and tactics which home waters anglers feel comfortable and happy with.

Associated audio interview numbers: 51.

### PERU - AMAZON

Despite the picture painted by numerous TV documentaries, the Amazon is not one single river. It's a collection of many rivers across several countries spread out like a vast tree root, channelling rain water from a huge swathe of tropical rain forest to the west of the Andes, all of which empties into the Atlantic Ocean via one huge outflow which is the River Amazon close to Macapa in Brazil.

In rod and line fishing terms, few people actually fish the Amazon itself. It's too wide, too deep, and often too murky. Most Amazonian angling is done on the smaller tributaries outside the rainy season which causes the area to flood, and in that regard, my Amazonian experiences are no different.

We initially flew in to Lima in Peru, and from there on to the old Inca capital of Cuzco up in the high Andes where the plane door was left open on the small runway for passengers to get on and off.

That was my first taste of high altitude. As the door was opened, it sucked all the pressurised air out of the planes cabin, and not being acclimatised, for around half an hour or so we sat there gasping for breath. Then it was on to the low altitude small jungle frontier town of Puerto Maldonado on the Tampobata River close to the Bolivian border to be picked up by our guides Marcel Gondenneau and German Valazquez De Silva.

Though we didn't know it at the time, German was a newly retired admiral, and had been chief of military staff to the Peruvian government, a fact that would only become apparent later on. For despite being well inland over on the far side of the Andes, because of its geographical position, and with rivers being the only navigable highways in the region, Puerto Maldonado had a naval base from which crews in small boats would patrol looking for drug smugglers, and everywhere we went with German, sailors would inexplicably stop, stand to attention, and salute.

Puerto Maldonado is a sprawling ramshackle town with small compacted soil roads, market stalls, and lots of motor cycles which are used by everybody, even as taxi's. There were also a few battered old tuc tuc's, plus the occasional car, but not that many. This is frontier gold prospecting territory, and later, we were to see many prospectors working along the river itself.

Everywhere there seemed to be little kiosks trading gold, which was bought and sold by weight. I bought my wife a pair of gold ear rings with pearls from mussels taken from the local river, and again these were sold by weight. But more importantly, because of the isolation of where we were ultimately headed, my brother-in-law Eric wanted to buy some beer and spirits, which despite all the small bars, in the market area was difficult to find.

Wading through stalls stacked with live fish, strange fruits, and cactus pads, we eventually found an 'off license'. The down side was that this made us a couple of hours late in getting away aboard a large outboard powered canoe laden with fuel, food, and other supplies for our base nearly a hundred miles up into the jungle. So late in fact that when darkness came, we were still around twenty miles short of our destination.

What a journey that turned out to be, shooting rapids and dodging boulders in the pitch dark. On-board was an old car headlight with two pieces of wire to a battery which we had to use to scan the water ahead, trying to pick out and avoid boulders and the banks.

In the calmer areas, this also picked out the red eyes of caiman crocodiles which were everywhere, and as soon as it was switched on, the lamp would also attract vast swarms of moths which would come swooping in, followed by hundreds of bats feeding on them all around our heads.

For miles we endured this until eventually we spotted a gas light on a pole at the bottom of some steps cut out of the steep river bank leading up to the lodge. Quite an experience to say the least.

The lodge itself was a collection of sheds in a clearing with a large open planned seating and eating area, where for a few hours in the evening, a small generator would provide light and pump water up from the river. So if you wanted a shower, it was cold and muddy.

As for the huts, these had been soaked in diesel to stop the termites eating them, and all around were strange creepy crawlies, including lots of huge tarantulas, plus poison arrow frogs. Vultures too attracted by the rubbish bins, and every morning we would wake up to the strangest blend of sounds I've ever heard.

I say wake up, but that implies that you was able to sleep, what with the sounds outside and the feeling that you had just swallowed a gallon of diesel fuel.

On one occasion, having managed to untangle myself from my mosquito net in the dark to nip outside for a leak, I felt something crunch under my bare foot at the side of the bunk.

Without light it was impossible to see what it was. Next morning however I found a huge dead millipede with a flattened foot print half way down its body. But you very quickly got used to it, and shared a similar general lack of sleep and personal hygiene with everyone else.

The fishing was divided up into two parts. The first was a six am start for a couple of hours before the main show, which came after breakfast. This was a short run up-steam to a constriction in the river where the flow was being very tightly squeezed by two banks of tall rocks. Not so much rapids as a collection of fast deep swirling eddies, which we would fish at the exit point where the river suddenly widened out again.

The flow there was still strong and swirling, but settling out all the time. Here payara would line up waiting to pick off disorientated victims appearing out of the faster flow, and was the part of the trip I had particularly come for. I so much wanted to catch a payara, which is a silver salmon shaped fish with black edged fins – until you get to the head, which is short and stubby with an in-credibly evil quality to it.

The locals call it the devil fish, and you can easily see why. It's large eyes, which are set quite close together, are presumably for hunting in low light or murky conditions. But it's the mouth that really steals the show.

This is armed with some of the most spectacular teeth and fangs you will ever see in any fish anywhere. I have the skull of one at home, which when I show it people and ask what they think it is, never gets picked out as belonging to a fish.

It has a sort of dinosaurial quality to it. In particular, two very large fangs which stand a good one and a half inches tall at the front of the lower jaw. So tall in fact that the fish has evolved holes in its upper jaw for these to fit through, otherwise it would be unable to close its mouth.

Great for grabbing and holding on to small fish passing by. Less good for grabbing wooden plugs, which they would frequently hit without becoming attached.

We had payara there every morning. Unfortunately, I'm using the 'royal we' here. German and Marcel had them. I couldn't seem to set the hooks, while Eric and the ladies all stayed in bed.

These sessions would last a couple of hours or so from first light. Plenty of time then to chat, which is where I got the low down on German, who looked like the small shaven headed captain of the aircraft carrier in the Tom Cruise film top gun.

Marcel had set up the guiding company some years earlier. He and German had always been fishing friends, but obviously would meet infrequently due to the nature of German's work. As an avid angler however, on his retirement, German offered to buy into to the company with Marcel.

As was often the case, the chat went off in all sorts of directions, which included a report I'd read of an alien space craft having crashed in the jungle over on the Brazilian side of the border. The 'occupants' had reportedly been captured by local Indians and taken to a medical centre, where some American's turned up and spirited them away.

As an evolutionary scientist myself, which includes cosmology, I am well aware that alien visitations are nigh on impossible due to the distances involved, and therefore I'm always sceptical. But an interesting thread to the conversation none the less. So I asked German what he thought of it.

I knew he'd been involved in meetings with his US counterparts, including the CIA, so I asked him what he knew about Area 51 and the like from those contacts. As you would expect, he said very little. But one thing he did say which has always stuck with me, was "put it like this, I firmly believe in aliens". So make of that what you will.

The main jungle fishing was no less interesting, but not much more fruitful either. What you need to understand is that despite this being virtually un-spoiled rain forest with abundant and varied wildlife everywhere, you don't see much of it, and the river too seemed loathe to give up any of its fish.

If you've ever watched Jeremy Wade fishing the Amazon, you will quickly appreciate the many frustrations and blank hours he regularly endures, and for us it was to be no different.

We expected much, but considering the time put in, and the pristine location, we were rewarded with so little. That said, there were still some stand-out moments, plus a reasonable variety of fish, even though they were few and far between.

One particular recollection is of heading off upstream in the boat with a group of bird watchers, including my wife Dawn, who were being taken to see what is know as a parrot lick. A particular stretch of the river bank rich in essential minerals to which birds in the area flock to stock up on their bodily requirements.

The idea was to drop us anglers off on a shallow gravel bar mid river adjacent to a deep pool where we would fish for an hour or so until the boat returned to ferry us about for the rest of the day.

We trotted our baits down through the pool, but to no avail. I could see Marcel looking at his watch. The boat was obviously late back, and he was getting frustrated. So much so that in the end he waded ashore and off he went along the river bank looking for it. Meanwhile, we fished on. Then suddenly he came darting back, jumped into the water and waded as fast as he could back to the gravel bar, where once he'd managed to catch his breath, he told us what had happened.

On one of the bends he'd been greeted by dozens of frightened capybara, some in the water, with others running in all directions along the bank. And there a short distance in front of him was the reason why. He'd stumbled into a puma that had just killed one of the capybara and was looking him straight in the eye. Time for a quick exit leaving the big cat to get on with it.

Fishing a similar gravel bar and pool on another occasion, we dropped onto a shoal of pacu, which are large fruit eating piranhas not averse to taking fish baits. Great fish to catch, and excellent fish to eat too as it would later turn out. Very powerful never say die fighters all going on up into double figures.

My wife Dawn had the best one at fourteen pounds fishing from the bank with Marcel, as she wasn't too keen on the ferocity of the water flow. It was hard to stand up and dangerous to wade in places, becoming even more dangerous than that at one stage, though not because of the water flow this time.

Instead, it was for what came up on the end of my line. I'd felt a bit of activity down at the business end for a few minutes, but nothing you could really put down as a bite. So fearing that my bait might be stripped, I decided to wind in, and immediately started to sense 'something' on the end of the line. No recognisable struggling, so it didn't feel like a fish. Then it surfaced maybe twenty yards out. A sort of long yellow and green shape.

On seeing it, the native Indian guides were off like a shot. They thought it was an anaconda, but actually it was even worse than that. It was an electric eel, and there we were stood shin deep in the water directly in front of it.

Fortunately, it must have discharged itself out in the deeper water when it first felt the hook, because it just laid there nice and still at my feet waiting for something to happen. I have to say, not the easiest bit of disgorging I've ever done, and not the only electric eel of the trip either.

Other fish caught included a variety of catfish, stingrays, and red bellied piranhas from a pool on a small stream way out in the jungle which one of the local Indians had taken us to. And eventually, during the last hour of the last morning, I landed a seventeen pound payara.

### SOUTH AFRICA

Of all the places I have visited, either to fish or simply for a holiday, on my list of preferences, South Africa is the only one I would never ever go back to. You couldn't pay me enough to revisit the place. A very uncomfortable country with lots of highly opinionated bigoted people, and the sense of a need to be looking over your shoulder constantly.

I suppose that being held up at gun point in the middle of the day at the side of the main road in Cape Town didn't exactly help. Had it not been for a couple in a passing car, plus a local security team picking the incident up on CCTV, I don't know what might have happened.

That occurred within hours of us arriving in Cape Town. But I was already uneasy about the situation before I even got there, having just spent a week fishing in and around Sodwana Bay in KwaZulu-Natal where we were based inside a large protected compound close to the beach, which kind-of says it all.

The only time we went out was when we were escorted, and even then we were stopped by army patrols looking for hijacked cars. It might have felt worth the discomfort if the fishing had been better. As things turned out, it was nothing out of the ordinary, despite reputedly having the potential to produce great things.

The experience of fishing out of small fast ski-boats was something I'll never forget. Not so much for the handling or pace of the boats as the conditions they were being expected to deal with. There are some very big swells out there in the Indian Ocean, particularly over the inshore reefs and onto the beaches.

These tend to increase in size as the day progresses due to the heating of the land setting up quite a stiff on-shore breeze. Out on the fishing grounds it isn't too bad. But at the back of your mind you know what is waiting for you closer to the shore at the end of the day.

Quite literally, it's a roller coaster of a ride flying up and over huge grey mountains of water with breaking tops, then hitting the beach so hard and so fast that the twin keeled boat slides a good fifty yards clear of the edge up onto the dry sand.

There was talk of marlin, big sharks, and wahoo, plus all manner of other things. The reality unfortunately turned out to be kingfish up to maybe thirty pounds, plus bonito, and not that many of either. We tried fishing bonito live-baits for marlin and sharks, but nothing.

In the end, the land marks suggested we were repeatedly working the same small patch of water, where the only time the skipper would speak would be to tell me off for adjusting the drag or doing something else with the tackle that he wasn't happy with.

In the end, I decided enough was enough and called for an early finish. He wanted to be in control of everything right up to the point of cranking the handle on the reel. That being the case, I thought he might as well go the whole hog and do that too, so I left him to it.

I've come across this type of attitude before in other parts of the world. Usually it's where Americans fish and expect everything to be done for them, plus of course, the crew wanting to please you as they are looking for a tip. But not so here. More an attitude problem generally, which is what got South Africa as a country into such a mess in the first place.

Having had enough of the kingfish, we arranged to take a run inland to the Pongolapoort Dam. This forms a huge lake in a national park straddling the border between South Africa and Swaziland. There we fished from a small trailed boat in another situation which was to say the least, uncomfortable.

In the mud adjacent to where we put the boat in there were fresh leopard tracks, which immediately had us looking around in the trees. Also, all along the waters edge there were large crocodiles basking in the red hot sunshine, while out on the water we were troubled by hippo's.

One in particular kept slowly creeping up towards the boat. So much so that we were told to hold on to the grab rails in case we needed a quick get away, which eventually we did, as for whatever reason the animal suddenly came charging at us.

Even if the hippo's don't kill you, it's not the best of places to end up in the water there with all those croc's. Then the same hippo, along with three of its mates, started following us everywhere we went to the point that we were constantly counting the heads popping up out of the water. Then they'd duck under and pop up somewhere else, but you'd never know which ones or where. A very uncomfortable day with a few medium sized tiger fish to show for our concerns.

When we later moved down to Cape Town, it was primarily in search of sharks, which was a two pronged approach. Having done some preparatory dives in the shark tank at the local aquarium, we drove over to Gansbaai, where on a very gloomy swelly day, we took a run across to Dyer Island where there is a channel formed by a reef which great whites patrol waiting for cape fur seals to come by.

The stench of the seal colony is over-powering. This actually is the location where most great white shark documentaries are shot, and in the shelter of the channel itself, conditions were quite calm. Down at the entrance unfortunately where we anchored, there were some quite sizeable swells rolling in over the reef edge scattering the chum far and wide. Again, not the sort of place you want to end up in the water.

A short time later we had five huge sharks up to the boat, one of which insisted on mouthing the outboard leg, probably drawn by the weak electrical current created by saltwater contact with exposed bits of the metal casing.

You could actually touch the sharks as they went by. Unfortunately, it was too rough to get in the water with them, which in hindsight was probably no bad thing.

Great whites are a protected species. That said, you can't help catching them if they take the bait while fishing for other things, which still regularly happens. So with that in mind, I booked a couple of trips out from Simon's Town on False Bay where there is a second cape fur seal colony on a small island mid way across. Another good spot for great whites, plus other species, including the ragged toothed shark which I had been diving with earlier.

Unfortunately, the planned trip was cancelled each morning due to the weather. However, after cancellation on the final day, I received a phone call mid morning to say that things were starting to settle out, and that if I wanted we could give it a few hours, which we did.

At last the shark lines were out and fishing. But other than several pyjama sharks which look like striped bull huss, it was quiet on the big baits. My wife Dawn meanwhile was having a field day with all sorts of smaller fish on a small light paternoster rig. Unfortunately, by that stage, all my enthusiasm had long since gone.

**FOOTNOTE:** Some time after this visit I watched a documentary about a group of evolutionary scientists who had found a small colony of coelocanth within diving depth range living in some deep water caves a couple of miles out in Sodwana Bay. Had I known that at the time I would have given the kingfish a miss, and who knows, maybe instead caught the first ever coelocanth on rod and line.

### SPAIN

I've only ever been to mainland Spain once. That was slap bang in the middle of the Icelandic volcanic ash grounding of most of Europe's air traffic. As a result, I spent three days on the road by bus and train followed by a ferry journey to get back to the UK.

Far from my best experience if I'm honest, with the fishing not exactly providing a lasting memory either. Not that I'm surprised. It was early in the year on the tail end of a particularly cold winter. So cold in fact that while I was there, I had to nip out and buy some extra warm clothes.

I was there actually for reasons other than fishing, but being so close to the River Ebro, over enthusiastically as it would turn out, I decided to book a couple of days fishing anyway, which were spent freezing my bits off in a small boat tucked in out of the wind failing to catch wels catfish close to the town of Tortosa.

That said, Graeme Pullen went over there a couple of months later when things had warmed up to fish further in-land on the top side of the dam. There he had an absolute burster with cats to one hundred and eighty pounds, plus lots of big wild carp.

So I would most definitely go back again. It's all about timing, and in that regard, mine was completely wrong.

### THAILAND

Although I am and always have been an out and out saltwater boat fisherman, if I'm honest, with regard to fishing abroad, the best foreign fishing I have ever enjoyed, and the aspect I would be most happy to go back and repeat, would without any hesitation be the commercial big fish lake fishing of Thailand.

It isn't cheap, particularly with a guide who will collect and deposit you at your hotel in an air conditioned vehicle, as well as arranging food, tackle, and bait, plus anything else you might require to make the day a complete success.

This then allows you to base yourself at a nice hotel in the middle of Bangkok, or over at the holiday resort of Pattaya for the night life, and still enjoy some of the best freshwater fishing in the world by day, for an international range of species and sizes of fish the likes of which you will find nowhere else on the planet. It's unique; it's breath taking, and it's most certainly not to be missed.

The way it works is to decide on what it is you want to catch in terms of size range or species, then search the Internet on the basis of that.

Though generally clustered within reasonably easy reach of Bangkok, understandably, there are also some excellent commercial fisheries either at, or close to all the main tourist destinations, including the holiday islands to the south.

As most if not all are man made, it makes sense when you think about it to place them within easy customer reach. That said, not all will contain the same mix or size range of fish, and quality in that regard will be reflected in the ticket price.

So while the list of potential species is reasonably finite, each fishery will be looking for some angle to make it that little bit different and stand out from the rest. It pays then to shop around, and maybe, as I have done, fish a different location every day.

My first visit was to Bangkok where I'd arranged to meet up with Eddie Mounce of Fish Thailand. I'd flown over from Bali specifically for three days fishing with him, and had decided to kick things off with a visit to probably the most expensive fishery of them all, IT Monsters Lake.

They say you only get what you pay for in this life, and in that regard, IT Monsters was worth every penny. Apart from two other chaps booked in for half a days lure fishing, I had the whole place to myself.

On the bank just in front of the restaurant area was a live-bait tank full of three inch tilapia. Quite literally hundreds of the things. So many in fact that the guide threw handfuls in as loose feed which were met with huge swirls and slurps at the surface from big fish whose identity couldn't be seen in the murky muddy water. These were quickly followed by free-lined live-baits, and as just as quickly by hook ups. Within seconds of starting I was in.

That first fish ran me ragged. It was arm wrenching. As soon as a bit of line was gained, twice as much seemed to be lost from the spool.

Eventually, I had an amazonian red tailed catfish of around forty pounds in the net. Time then for a breather, or so I thought. But that wasn't to be, as the second rod already had another big red tail on the end of the line waiting for me, followed by another, and another.......

As fast as you could throw baits at them they could be hooked up, and not always amazonian red tailed cats. I also had a couple of the indigenous Asian red tailed cats. Then the catfish seemed to go off the boil which allowed in other interesting species, including a spell when I kept getting runs that resulted in missed fish.

These eventually turned out to be from alligator garfish, which with their long thin crocodilian looking mouths can be notoriously difficult to hook. But in the end, with the right strike timing, I managed a few, the best of which would have been well up into double figures.

Around lunch time the fishing generally seemed to noticeably slow down. This was an every day occurrence, or so I was told. The fish seemed to get their heads down and sulk in the midday heat, and boy was it humid and hot. It was at this point that we started to wander around the margins looking for any activity and throwing live-baits at it.

An interesting period in many respects, as it brought in quite a wide range of other smaller but no less fascinating species, the most unusual of which was a giant featherback. Pacu, which are giant fruit eating piranhas, a species I was already familiar with from the Amazon, and giant snakeheads which I'd caught before in Malaysia were also in the mix

One of the lure fisherman eventually hooked up and landed a nice arapaima, by which time the red tailed cats had switched back on for another couple of hours of arm wrenching shoulder aching fun towards late afternoon.

The next day was in theory going to be a little less physically demanding. Least ways it should have been, but not by any great margin,. I'd decided to try Boon Mar Ponds, which isn't a commercial fishery at all. Instead, it's a high turn-over fish farm churning out quality barramundi for the table. A large complex with dozens of square ponds starting with small fish at one end progressing through to larger specimens at the other, as fish are graded and moved on to produce what is required.

Another blisteringly hot and very humid day too. Obviously, not all the ponds are available to fish in. The one we were directed to held fish in the sixteen to eighteen pound bracket, the bulk of which, if not all of them, had never seen a lure before. So you can imagine the carnage.

Keen to get a couple of early fish under my belt, I started off casting soft plastics on a small lead head. Then once that tick was on my list, it was over to the fly rod, which was the main objective of the day.

Casting big heavy flies tied on strong heavy hooks is never easy. Least-ways I never find it so. I'd had quite a large selection of different gaudy concoctions tied up, but for whatever reason, picked out quite a lightly dressed scruffy looking tarpon fly I'd brought back from the US years some ago, though in all honesty, any pattern would probably have done.

I didn't need to use anything else all day. Eventually the barramundi had all but destroyed it, yet still they kept coming back for more. It was merciless, both for them and for me.

I had taken along a fladen nine foot vantage travel rod paired up with a maxximus lever drag fly reel loaded with a weight ten floating line and plenty of backing, the bulk of which I saw pretty much every time I hooked a fish.

The speed at which these things can go is particularly impressive. So too are their aerial abilities. A fly fishing paradise, with lots of power packed good double figure barramundi hungry and ready to feed.

My final day was to a fishery which Eddie normally uses to kick a week long booking off, and to close with. A lake where back then he was offering a money back guarantee if you didn't catch a fish topping forty pounds. How many fisheries dare make an offer like that. Bungsamran right in suburbs of Bangkok city justifiably can.

This is quite a large lake surrounded by open fronted bungalows with fishing platforms looking out on to the water. Essentially, the fishing is either for mekong catfish or siamese carp, both of which can easily top one hundred pounds at this particular venue.

The lake record carp if my memory serves me right is something like 264 pounds. On the flip side, siamese carp are neither numerous nor are they easy to catch, so the majority of people tend to concentrate on the mekong cats.

There are also some huge arapaima in this lake, which as air breathers, you will see topping here and there over the course of the day. Not that you are liable to catch them, as both the carp and the cats are vegetarians, whereas the arapaima are strict carnivores. You can't deliberately fish for them there either.

After some unfortunate historical incidents in which large arapaima died, deliberate fishing for them was stopped, which is a pity, as some of the specimens that have been left to munch their way through the many smaller bait fish the lake also contains, are now up in the many hundreds of pounds.

Pound for pound, I would rate mekong catfish as the hardest fighting freshwater fish I have ever come across anywhere. The nearest comparison I can make is a big powerful tuna. They never give up, have immense reserves of power, and they stay deep, tearing off line right until the moment they are engulfed by the landing net.

Worse still, some would run straight at you and swim between the wooden stoops holding up the fishing platform which meant they were actually behind you. But you couldn't turn to face them because they'd gone underneath with so many potential snags.

In terms of approach, we used a very large method feeder loaded with a grapefruit sized ball of paste made up from rice husks suspended under a sliding float. The float was there not so much for bite indication as maintaining fishing depth, as once a cat had picked a bait up it would be off, tearing line from the bait-runner spool. And they were relentless.

From start to finish it was every egg a bird, with an incredibly brutal mauling guaranteed. Mainly from fish in the forty to sixty pound bracket, with, as you'd expect, progressively fewer numbers as the size range increased beyond that, though hundred pounders were reportedly common enough. No worries then in terms of the price refund guarantee ever needing to be met.

In the end it became more akin to punishment. I'd caught sixteen of the things and couldn't physically take any more. Yet as soon as a fish was disgorged, Ali, my personal guide, had the rig baited up and out looking for yet another. I tried to get him to stop by pleading with him that I needed a rest, but nothing. The only way to escape was go for a walk around the lake.

Unfortunately for her, my wife Dawn was sat at the back of the bungalow under the fan reading a book. Like a machine, Ali just kept on casting, then turned to her and said "you, lady, wind in this fish".

By the time I got back Dawn was struggling with catfish number three. Needless to say I got it in the neck for deserting her. But at least it let her see that contrary to what she had previously said on many occasions about me going away enjoying myself, it wasn't necessarily always the case.

My next visit to Thailand was five years later, by which time Eddie Mounce had set up a fishery of his own. He was still doing all the other stuff as well, but had based himself a couple of hours to the west of Bangkok at a purpose built water he called Jurassic Fishing Park, where the big attraction was the availability of siamese carp.

Normally at locations such as Bungsamran, it can take a couple of days to get a carp result. At Jurassic, you can expect at least a couple and more in a single session, plus you get to put a second dead-bait rod out for arapaima which can well top two hundred pounds. A very pleasant fishery way out in the countryside, with excellent dining facilities, plus on site accommodation for those that might want it.

For my part, I just wanted either an arapaima or a siamese carp. I didn't unfortunately get the arapaima, but I had a few nice carp to fifty five pounds, one of which ran me peg to peg along the entire length of the lake.

Very powerful fish with huge shovel like tails and the strangest of faces, with their eyes, for whatever reason, set way down the side of their head. Very odd. But very good fish to catch on halibut pellets, both on the bottom and suspended under a float with a few fed in loose every so often.

I can understand why people want to catch them and rave over them when they do. There were also a few small amazonian red tailed cats just to add a bit of extra variety to what in2015 was still a fairly new fishery only just reaching maturity, but with a very promising future when that time does eventually come along.

### TUNISIA

While there is the possibly of a few half decent fish left swimming about in the Mediterranean, to all intents and purposes, the place is an angling desert. Plentiful numbers of fish and lots of potential species ticks for the list, but quality wise, rarely if ever anything worth bothering with due to the relentless way the place is, and has for so long been over fished, with anything and everything regardless of size or species being taken for the pot.

And so it was when I found myself on the Med's southern shore looking seaward from Tunisia in north Africa. Lots of people fishing from virtually every vantage point with their almost obligatory plastic buckets containing tiny dead fish.

A similar story down at the fish market too where anything over a pound in weight stood out like a beacon of hope, its size exaggerated by the swath of tiny specimens on the counters surrounding it in every direction.

What I did find unusual about Tunisia, certainly at Sousse close to where I was based, was that some of the shops actually sold ragworm for bait. Tiny little things in damp moss, but live-bait none the less. Not that it made much difference.

Every evening just before getting showered for dinner, I would nip across the road and have a few casts, and without fail, every session I would catch the same single species to the total exclusion of all else. Gilthead bream it seems are the dominant fish in these parts. Certainly from the beaches.

Out in the boat it was a slightly different story. Still hardly any fish and nothing much bigger than half a pound, but with breams of several species now making the frame on what was advertised as a big game fishing trip. All in all, a very frustrating waste of time, totally in keeping with Mediterranean expectation.

Davy Agnew Loch Ryan:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Spotted Ray record 1974:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams IGFA tippet record Coalfish:   
Photo Phill Williams

Malcolm Greenhalge Ferox Trout:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Bass 13 pounds 2 ounces:   
Photo Phill Williams

Dave Devine self drive skate:   
Photo Phill Williams

Big Six Gill at the boat:   
Photo Phill Williams

Mekong Catfish:   
Photo Phill Williams

# PART THREE  
INDIVIDUAL TARGETS

THE CATCHING OF SPECIFIED INDIVIDUAL FISH   
**Bucket List status – Incomplete**

This part of my bucket list is a collection of individual fish target weights as opposed to personal bests or species head counts. The sort of thing that most fishermen other than genuine pleasure anglers and pure match specialists have as an agenda in some form or another.

My particular take on things, while it isn't exhaustive, has most certainly been exhausting in the sense that a lot of travelling has gone in to catching a lot of very big fish, with a lot of equally exhausting near misses and frustrating failures along the way, with one tick that clearly now is never going to grace my list, arguably the most elusive of the bunch........ **the big one.**

### NATIONAL RECORD FISH

**Bucket List status – result**

Way back in 1970 when the embryonic version of what would ultimately become my bucket list, my life-long quest, and now this book was beginning to emerge, I'm pretty sure I would have settled for any national record, never mind a British record.

But, times and ambitions evolve and move on. That was the year I joined the Leyland and Farington Boat Angling Club, and for the first time in my sea angling life, I had some measure of regimented order and camaraderie.

Almost immediately, my début trip came around taking us to nearby Morecambe, which may initially sound a million miles away from any record breaking potential or influence, but bear with me here.

One of the local shrimpers took us out on a grim blustery day to fish the channel just up from the stone jetty, where the only thing I can remember us catching was shed loads of sea scorpions, a species you rarely if ever see there these days.

Obviously, the trip eventually came to an end and we motored back to the nearby moorings, at which point, the first half of the party piled into the tender, and the skipper started rowing them back to shore.

I was in the larger second batch, which, with the extra weight, as you might expect, put the little displacement boat further down in the water to the point where it shipped a few bits of swell in over the back wetting whoever was sat there, and as you do, we all laughed.

That was until more than a little bit of swell suddenly swirled in over the transom, and very quickly, the boat went down, which with me as a none swimmer, and nobody wearing life-jackets, made for a particularly memorable day, though for all the wrong reasons.

Thankfully, with toes just about touching the bottom at shoulder depth, and with everybody holding on to each other in the tide, working as a huddle, we eventually all made it safely back to shore crab fashion, cold and wet, but very relieved.

That incident had a profound effect on me and what would ultimately become my future as a life-long small boat angler. But there were more immediate considerations here, because our next trip was to Loch Ryan fishing with a man that would ultimately become my mentor.

This was with Davy Agnew, who chartered out of Lady Bay aboard a sixteen foot clinker built Mackay Viking powered by twin four hp Seagull outboards, and throughout that trip, flashbacks of the water swirling in over the transom at Morecambe haunted me to the point that I almost decided I couldn't do it anymore and should look for a safer hobby.

Almost, but not completely. For Davy took me under his wing and eventually helped me not only re-build my confidence, but ultimately become a small boat fishing enthusiast, and for that I will forever be in his debt.

I would think that Davy must have been in his seventies even back then. A bald headed, thick set, mild mannered Scot, who was very measured, very calm, and very deliberate in everything he did. That was until the day he had a fourteen pound turbot up at the side of the boat on his own rod and could no longer contain himself.

At the first rushed gaffing attempt he completely missed the fish, and with the second wild swipe, he somehow managed to part the trace. Fortunately, the fish lay momentarily stunned on the surface, and seconds later, at the third attempt, it was in the boat.

That day I also caught quite a sizeable tub gurnard at four pounds four ounces, so Davy had me take the two fish down to Don McDiarmids tackle shop in Stranraer for official weighing where the Gurnard went on to take the Scottish record, beating the previous best by something like three ounces if my memory is correct.

As I hinted previously, in those very early days, as records go, I could quite easily have settled for that. Except that the following September, again out from Lady Bay with Davy, mixed in amongst a batch of thornback rays came a spotted ray, which because it was a club first, was weighed and witnessed in a way that most of the other fish we caught usually weren't.

Dove-tailing very nicely into this story, also around that time, I had just gotten to know Dr. Dietrich Burkel from Glasgow, who was about to become the Scottish Federation of Sea Anglers (SFSA) fish recorder.

Dietrich had been looking long and hard at the list he would inherit, and had expressed grave doubts about a number of its inclusions, one being a spotted ray of something like sixteen pounds, which also held the British and European records at the same time.

I don't know the politics here. But I do know the outcome. The suspect inclusions were all given the elbow. In the case of the so called spotted ray record, mainly because of its size which was way too big for such a small growing species, plus some uncertainty apparently regarding official identification.

As a result, that record slot, in the company of a few others, was thrown open to claims, and I was subsequently invited by Dietrich to submit my fish, which I did, as I fortuitously had all the relevant support data in place which so easily might not have been the case. In fact, it wasn't the case when the BRFC later ejected the standing sandy ray record, more of which later.

What I didn't initially appreciate here was that as part of a knock on process, I was also about to take the British and European records too, all in one fell swoop.

To some extent, and for quite a wide range of reasons, depending on species and where it's caught, that sort of multiple record slot filling wouldn't automatically happen today. Many anglers are now no longer willing to kill inedible fish simply to see their name on a list, and every credit to them for that.

Unfortunately, and to some extent I can understand why, national fish recorders seem completely unwilling to accept rule changes to the extent that in many anglers eyes, and sea anglers in particular, records have become something of an irrelevance.

Most anglers these days prefer to concentrate on personal bests, based either on weights they obtain outside of the prescribed rules such weighing in a boat, which the BRFC would find totally unacceptable, or in the case of large fish such as skate, derived from very well prepared weight estimation charts based on empirical measurements, which again, fish recorders say are not good enough.

If anglers are not prepared to claim records for whatever reason, and these days there are many who won't, then what is the value of an official record to those record holders who are willing to jump through all the necessary hoops, when everyone knows there have been bigger fish which for conservation reasons weren't claimed.

Quite simply, it devalues the standing records. So in their current format, record fish lists are meaningless. What they need is a good shake up to reflect what modern anglers want as opposed to what out of date fish recorders think they want. A point I put to the British Record Fish Committee (BRFC) in the format of a scientific paper in 2009 exploring the many problems they must face up to, while at the same time offering potential workable alternatives.

I also put those same points and more to BRFC chairman Mike Heylin in a two part audio interview, and while he as an individual was sympathetic, it's now 2015, and still nothing has changed.

Let's take a more detailed look now at some of the problems I highlighted in that presentation as to why many anglers are no longer making claims, and sea anglers in particular, because coarse anglers don't face the same in-boat weighing difficulties and potential need to kill situation often facing saltwater anglers.

Two reasons in particular why claims are not forth coming are that, as previously stated, people don't want to have to kill say a large bass or a tope to make a successful claim and are happy just to ignore the records, and also, for some species, it is now illegal to bring them ashore anyway. They can be still be fished for, weighed, and photographed, but must be returned alive at the point of capture.

Two working examples of this legislative protection are skate and tope. Yet the BRFC still insist in their most recently published claims procedure that all potential record fish must be weighed on solid ground, and not in a boat, if a claim is to be considered. Should that then be seen as an invitation to commit an offence?. That's not for me to say. But certainly it could be interpreted that way.

When last approached by me on this subject, the Scots were equally unwilling to accept anything other than records carefully weighed on firm ground. Yet the Welsh are now quite happy to stray from that requirement.

So much so that they already have records for tope and smoothhound which weren't weighed on the shore, all of which brings into doubt the subject of Welsh national records being slotted into the British or European lists where the qualifying rules are different, more of which later. For now it's probably better not to cloud the debate by wandering off track.

Weight estimation charts can be extremely reflective. I have deliberately avoided the word accurate here, because that in itself would be in-accurate.

The better ones have been painstakingly put together based on many hundreds of actual weighing and measuring sessions across the entire size range for the species in question, and in so far as they are often no more that just a few percentage points out when comparing estimated weights to actual weights, as it's the same for everybody, where is the problem?.

People either accept that weight estimation for some species is the only way forward, or have a record fish list in which certain categories are allowed to stagnate because claims can no longer be made, despite fish bigger than the listed records quite legitimately being caught but could not be claimed.

It has to be said that weight is only one way of expressing the size of a fish. It's a good way, and one we have all grown accustomed to so therefore feel comfortable with, but it does not have a monopoly. In America for example, fish lengths, including a list of IGFA world records, are often given as a nose to tail length measurement.

I suggested in my representations, not only to the BRFC, but also the Scots, Irish and Welsh, that they might want to take this one stage further by requesting a girth measurement at the widest point as well, or in the case of skates and rays, between the wing tips.

By multiplying length and girth together, you then arrive at a representative points score. The fatter or longer the fish, the more points it will generate in the same way that it would pull the needle around further on a weighing scale.

The difference is, this could be done quickly and accurately in a pitching boat, after which, with all the usual safeguards of photographs, witnesses etc. in place, the fish could then go back at the spot from where it was taken, in some cases as required by law.

I further proposed that they run these scores in an additional column next to the existing weight records, in effect creating two parallel lists – one each for those willing to kill fish and others insistent on returning them.

A second alternative was to consider creating a separate sporting species record list for those fish which anglers want to return and/or cannot legally be brought ashore. But yet again, no response. And no response either to my focusing their attention on a wide range of more general anomalies within the existing lists, which could so easily be rectified by a quick meeting and a bit of administrative tidying up.

Perhaps they just don't take kindly to 'unqualified outsiders' highlighting their faults, mistakes, and short comings.

For example, the sandy ray appears in the British record list when clearly it shouldn't. As new species come on to the list, and also in some cases with long standing inclusions where only one of the two available boat and shore record slots is occupied, such as for example the mako shark which has only ever been caught from a boat, the corresponding vacant slot is then declared open for claims, which is fine, but with a minimum qualifying weight, which is not fine.

If a specimen is the biggest example ever caught, then it should be the record without having to cross some artificial threshold. So why have qualifying weights at all. If elevated standards need to be met to make the list appear more respectable, exclude the current British six gilled shark boat record of 9½ pounds as they have been caught in excess of a thousand pounds in nearby Irish waters.

Anyway, back to the sandy ray. A species listed with two qualifying weights, one each for both boat and shore, which in real terms means that in common with numerous other deep water species potentially available around the British Isles, none have ever been officially recorded on rod and line.

Why then not either remove this empty inclusion, or for consistency, list all the other fish nobody has ever caught too, in addition to which I have a further axe to grind here. Back in the 1970's I actually caught a sandy say in the deep water off the Isle of Arran in the outer Clyde.

At that time there was actually a bigger record weight listed, which in a much needed purge of doubtful inclusions was ditched shortly afterwards, by which stage I had no way of making a successful claim, as there had previously been no need for me to gather in what would then be required as supportive evidence.

The first mako shark in around forty years was taken off Milford Haven in 2013, and blue fin tuna have not been recorded by anglers in the North Sea since the 1950's. What then are the odds I wonder of catching one or other at any weight from the shore, let alone a specimen in excess of the stipulated forty pounds qualifying threshold for consideration as a British shore record.

Any shore caught specimen of either species would be worthy of a place in the list. The tuna though, which is edible, would present far less of a dilemma than the mako. Why would anyone want to kill a mako then dispose of it. But if they didn't, even if it made the qualifying weight, it still wouldn't count.

That said, and I'm not sure to what extent the BRFC are aware of this fact, but not all the records they have listed have complied with the letter of their laws anyway.

I know of one, a stingray, which was definitely weighed in the boat, and suspect that the current common skate record may well have been also, as the boat which took it had a purpose built weighing gantry fitted so that they could all go back, as indeed they all should.

Let's move on now to other potential wrongful inclusions such as the sunfish, anglerfish, and smoothhound. Irish fishery scientists insist that sunfish don't intentionally feed on anglers baits, and as such have both removed and barred the species from their list. Yet here in the UK we still record it. So who is right and who is wrong?.

The same sort of scientific opinion question can again be asked with regard to the two smoothhound species _Mustellus mustellus_ and _Mustellus asterias_ , the common and starry smoothhounds respectively.

Irish research scientist Dr. Ed Farrell has shown through DNA analysis, that in European waters, despite some smoothhounds having spots while others don't, both are the same species. In short, so called common smoothhound simply doesn't occur at our latitude. Yet BRFC thinks otherwise.

Scotland and Wales are currently considering their position on this dilemma, while the Irish now list just the one species. Then there is the subject of a second angler fish species being discovered in our corner of the world, begging the question as to which one holds the current record.

On the subject of fish identification, there will be times when somebody authorised by the committee in question will need to see certain fish species to be sure that they are what is being claimed, and this goes for freshwater as well as saltwater, though in freshwater it should be far less of an ordeal to keep something alive until the cavalry gets there.

Using the anglerfish as a worst case scenario, everyone knows what a generic anglerfish looks like, but distinguishing _Lophius piscatorius_ from _Lophius budegassa_ requires an almost forensic investigation.

Fortunately, most of the recorded species have features which could, if carefully recorded with a decent camera, allow positive identification based on photographic evidence alone so that the specimen concerned could be released if its captor so wished.

This may well turn out to be a vitally important point, particularly if on-board weighing or some other way of arriving at a representation of size or estimation such or using my suggested points system is ever adopted, because as previously mentioned, some species which can still legally be caught, measured, and photographed by anglers, can no longer be brought ashore.

If there isn't some move towards recognising and resolving this issue, then why continue to list those species as available for claims.

The same is also true of the freshwater schelly, which at the time of writing is still listed, but is protected from any form of human interference under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Yet the wels catfish, which isn't even native to the UK, has had its record suspended while other alien foreign imports have not.

My next big gripe, again on the saltwater scene, but backed up by coarse angling records, is having a two tier list. In the coarse fish list, all species are given equal status in a straight forward roll call of names. Not so the saltwater list, where records coming in at under a pound are given second class billing in a separate mini species list. Where is the consistency there I wonder.

Where too is the consistency within the saltwater system of having the British boat caught comber listed at one pound thirteen ounces in the main list, which automatically generates a vacant shore angling slot, then give this a minimum qualifying weight set at twelve ounces making it by definition a mini species.

Would it not be better to simply include **ALL** saltwater species in the one list with boat and shore options available to each, and with all vacant slots simply left open to claims by the biggest example that comes along, instead of some artificial qualifying threshold.

Talking to BRFC chairman Mike Heylin during our audio interview, the exclusion of the wels catfish was put down to a combination of it not being indigenous, plus unscrupulous activities with regard to stocking and manipulating potential record status. But again, let's see some consistency here.

Isn't exactly the same true of carp. Or is the money generated by carp fishing now so big as to get away with that sort of indiscretion, even though the BRFC make no secret of the fact that they would not only like to see all alien species removed from their record lists, but also from the country, and that includes the carp.

Why then not rainbow trout too which are also a foreign import, and have in the past been grown on to record proportions for introduction to fisheries where only certain people are invited along to fish for them.

Why also list the walleye, which is an American species of zander accidentally introduced to the fens way back in the 1930's. Beneath its inclusion are the words "list closed" which I take to mean no further claims will be considered.

In truth, no further claims are likely ever to be made anyway, as according to John McAngus who was a member of the Great Ouse River Board team responsible for introducing our current stock of European zander to the Fens in 1963, the fish in question was seemingly an accidental stray in amongst a failed experimental introduction of American black bass where its presence was over-looked, so as a never to be repeated one-off, it shouldn't be included in the list anyway.

The game fishing record list isn't immune to anomalies either. Rightly or wrongly, the grayling is considered in some anglers eyes as belonging on the coarse fish list, yet in common with all the other freshwater game species, because it has that small fleshy bump known as an adipose fin in front of its tail, it quite rightly appears in the game fish list.

Why not then the schelly, which also has an adipose fish, yet somehow finds itself residing amongst the coarse fish species. And why is the sea trout _Salmo trutta_ listed as a separate species from the brown trout _Salmo trutta_. Wouldn't it make more sense simply to have one _Salmo trutta_ with migratory, non migratory, and ferox options. After all, the ferox stands at least half a chance of coming out of the ongoing science relating to brown trout genetics as a separate species, while the migratory version of the brown trout never will.

My final comments on the current state of fish recording are political. The Welsh and Scots have their own record lists, and rightly so, with fish caught in their territorial waters also qualified to appear in the British record fish list which covers the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Northern Irish fish can also appear in the combined Irish record list which goes across borders, and again, rightly so. But what about English fish.

Following on from the failed devolution referendum in Scotland during 2014, the prospect of England going it alone in specific instances has suddenly become a very hot topic, and once again, rightly so. This then raises the question of when are English anglers also going to get their own records in addition to the current list they share with the rest of the UK.

There would still by a joint British record list. But to make this work, the four contributing countries need to sit down and thrash out an agreed set of rules that are adhered to by all concerned, so that where applicable, records from any of the four member nations can automatically be promoted to the overall British record list, which currently is not the case.

In theory they already can. But a tope record from Wales which has either been estimated or weighed aboard a boat, as is currently the case, can't make it on to the British record list as the current BRFC rules stand.

The sunfish, smoothhound and anglerfish anomalies would also need to be addressed. Meanwhile, anglers will continue to catch record fish and refuse to make claims, as I have done myself for species not mentioned in this section of the book, but which are discussed in Part 1 under their appropriate species headings.

Associated audio interview numbers: 134 and 135.

### EUROPEAN RECORD FISH

**Bucket List status – result**

Record spotted ray taken from Loch Ryan in 1974 as previously discussed both above, and as part of the one hundred species role call in part 1.

**NOTE:** This fish was weighed at five pounds five ounces and amended down by me to five pounds two ounces after taking into consideration the official calibration of the scales, which showed them as reading three ounces over.

However, as a point of historical accuracy, that three ounce adjustment was unfortunately made a second time by the Scottish record fish committee, and subsequently passed forward to British and European fish recorders, when in fact the true weight was three ounces heavier than shown.

To be fair, this was a problem unknowingly caused in the first instance by me making the adjustment before making the claim, all of which is now academic, as the record has since climbed steady over the years to its current 2015 level of 8 pounds 10½ ounces.

### WORLD RECORD FISH

**Bucket List status – result**

The greater the prize, theoretically, the greater the input of effort required to achieve it. Or so you would think. But in the case of an International Game Fish Association (IGFA) world record, all may not be as it appears.

I say this on the basis that if I was told I had to break an angling record, any record, whether that be Scottish or Welsh all the way through the various tiers up to world level, and that my life depended on it, without hesitation I would opt for an IGFA world record.

Why.....because based on species numbers, available categories, and all the rest, the opportunities are so much more numerous, on top of which, many species have vacant slots waiting to be filled, while others could so easily be beaten as they currently stand, particularly if you study the line class and fly fishing tippet opportunities.

Back in 2003 while out tope fishing in Luce Bay aboard Ian Burrett's boat 'Onyermarks', at some stage during the day long chatter, the subject of fly fishing for pollack drifted in to the conversation.

Immediately my ears pricked up. Apparently, one of Ian's regular parties from up in Scotland's salmon belt had been down float fishing for pollack close in around the Mull of Galloway, when one of group raised the possibility of getting down deep enough with a fly outfit and large sandeel pattern to see if a pollack would take it.

All sorts of line and leader options were discussed, at which point Ian said that the lures would not need to go all the way down, because pollack will come up under a meal passing overhead and pick it off at any level, so long as the water was clear enough to get a visual on it.

And so the concept of fly fishing for pollack in south west Scotland was born, with salmon angler Allan Everington the main driving force.

I remember suggesting to Ian that this would make an excellent subject for a YouTube video and a magazine feature, so he arranged for Allan and a couple of his salmon fishing chums to come down and demonstrate all that they had learned on camera. Everything, including the rods, braked fly reels, line choice, and range of imitative patterns was up for discussion.

Also, their casting techniques and the right areas to fish in the various little coves dotted around the Mull, where slack periods of tide can vary dramatically, even on such a local scale.

What this does is allow the lures on their various breaking strain tippets to be worked well down amongst the fish on the drift, where in the past, the group had already boated specimens on the fly well over a number of current IGFA records, all of which were released unclaimed as is Ian's boat booking policy.

It would be easy for anyone reading this to dismiss unclaimed records as exaggeration. What you have to appreciate is that Ian Burrett, who is projects director for the influential marine conservation group the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN), will only take bookings on the basis that all fish other than mackerel which are required for bait, are carefully returned to the water alive, otherwise, don't make the booking.

On top of this, freshwater anglers like Allan and his mates tend not to have the same seek and destroy mentality as some sea anglers, so pretty much everything goes back anyway. And that includes records, be they the IGFA world tippet records that were our primary target, or the Scottish record ballan wrasse which I also took on the same day while fishing a bait after all the filming was done.

Opportunities to realistically and successfully fly fish in saltwater here in home waters are limited by water depth, water clarity, and the fact that most home waters species tend to feed at or on the bottom. Mackerel, bass, coalfish, and pollack are the most likely targets when suitable conditions can be found, though there may well be others.

Fortunately, four names there which rate amongst the hardest fighting and most sporting home water species we have, so a bonus there too of sorts.

Pollack and coalfish in particular are very powerful fish. I remember acclaimed salmon angler Ally Gowans getting his first pollack on a standard salmon outfit and being amazed at the small size of the thing after the scrap it had put up.

Size for size, far better than any freshwater species. And therein to some extent lies a problem, particularly when trying to break IGFA world tippet records.

A typical weight seven outfit around the Mull of Galloway would very probably get destroyed. Based on experience, Allan and his party had brought along rods in the AFTM ten to twelve weight range.

Reels too need to be up to the mark. Suitable capacity to take plenty of backing is a must. But of far greater importance is having a good braking system and anti-reverse to save your knuckles getting a battering from an uncontrollably fast rotating handle.

Allan's choice was a penn 4AR saltwater fly reel with a number of spools carrying a range of line options, from intermediate through to an orvis 600 grain fast sinker. But it's water clarity and speed of drift that will have the biggest say in which line ultimately to choose.

The remaining items are a selection of quality, reliable, IGFA rated spools of monofilament for use as tippets, and of course, a selection of large sandeel pattern flies up to maybe four inches in length, which I personally find difficult to cast.

Fortunately however, fishing on the drift, you don't have to cast far if you are happy to snake out the remaining length required using the ground coverage of the boat. It's a personal thing. Allan and his party were all proficient casters. I on the other hand prefer to use a combination of the two.

No need for much if anything in the way of retrieve rate either. Again, the drift of the boat can provide much of the fly movement required.

Watching the salmon lads, they would use a combination of the drift and a very slow figure of eight which they would speed up a little if or when the drift died away, and in particular when they felt a fish nipping at the lure to try to induce a more positive take, which when it comes, will see the fish grab and kick for bottom in one continuous movement negating the need to strike.

Striking runs the risk of pulling the lure away from the fish. When a pollack is ready it will hook itself as it grabs and dives, so why not just leave it to get on with it.

IGFA tippet record categories go from one Kg through to ten Kg, which in imperial measures is roughly two pounds to twenty pounds breaking strain.

From memory, on the day, the Scottish lads stuck to two, three, and four Kg, sometimes taking bigger fish on the lighter breaking strains, and certainly getting smashed up by very big fish up into double figures even at the heavier end of the range.

Somewhere in the region of forty pollack were caught and released that visit, three of which when weighed quickly in the boat in flat calm conditions, well beat existing IGFA records.

At one point I even suggested taking the boat in to nearby West Tarbet Bay to comply with the IGFA weighing rules, which state it must be done on solid ground, but they weren't bothered, so the fish went straight back. Knowing they'd beaten the records was good enough for them.

Claiming an IGFA record however doesn't automatically mean the fish in question has to be killed. Providing the weighing is done in accordance with all the rules and suitable photographs are taken with a tape measure in shot, the fish can still go back. The tippet then needs to be retained and must accompany the claim to ensure it parts at or under the breaking strain being claimed.

Some companies guarantee their monofilament to meet IGFA standards. Understandably, these are a little more expensive. Otherwise it's a case of the usual witnesses and scales accuracy certification, all of which, along with the records themselves, is detailed on the IGFA website.

That trip, and a repeat with yet more unclaimed records the following year, convinced me that this would be my best chance of ticking off the world record I so badly wanted. So when an opportunity to go over to Northern Ireland came up which included the potential to catch coalfish on the fly, as you might imagine, based on my earlier Scottish fly fishing observations, I jumped at it.

That trip was to explore the potential of Hamish Currie's thirty foot charter fishing RIB 'Predator II' working out from Cushendall. All sorts of inshore and offshore options were on the cards, dependant of course on the weather, one of which was a couple of hours around the farmed salmon cages anchored out in the middle of the bay.

Hamish Currie is the only home water charter skipper I have ever come across who actually guarantees his clients fish. When, or if things aren't going to plan, a couple of drifts around the salmon cages usually saves any strugglers on-board from suffering a blank and earns him a wage, the reason being that huge shoals of coalfish have taken up residence under the nets where they wax fat on any high protein pellets missed by the salmon which then fall through the mesh.

And when I say wax fat, that is precisely what they do. Initially, fishing with traditional soft lures on fixed spool outfits was producing fish to double figures, which on any tackle would give more than a good account of themselves. So much so that I was starting to have second thoughts about putting a fly tied to a four kg tippet into the water.

IGFA rules state that fish must not be chummed up, so throwing in pellets, which we had onboard, would reflect neither the spirit nor the legality of things. On the other hand, to get a feel for how things might ultimately go, as an experiment, that's exactly what we did, and sure enough, a huge dark ball of writhing coalies came up into view almost the instant they picked up on the sound of the pellets going in, followed immediately by my fly.

But you had to be quick. Very Quick in fact. Mopping up the handful of pellets, the ball of fish was so tight and the boats drift in the wind and tide was so great, that by the time the fly got down to depth it was miles away from the fish.

Far better than not to feed at all and keep working the cage edges trying to interest more scattered fish as they mooched about waiting for their next meal, which is exactly what I did.

Getting takes wasn't a problem. Holding on to them without parting the leader as I fought to steer powerful fish from under the net and away from the anchor cables was a nightmare, and as a result, I lost several good fish in quick succession.

I say good fish, but judging by the size of the best fish I eventually landed, which was a little over four pounds, they may well not all have been monsters. They just go so well. Extremely powerful fish.

Eventually, I did start to get the better of a few down at the lower end of the size range, which I have to confess I kept, as at that time we were using coalfish up to around five pounds apiece as bait for common skate, which meant I wouldn't have to call in at Carlisle on the way up to Lochaline to pick up a frozen supply the following spring.

As a result, the official IGFA four Kg tippet world record of four pounds four ounces which I had weighed on a certified scale in a grocers shop, went on to catch me a common skate of one hundred and forty five pounds.

Associated audio interview numbers: 138.

### A TROUT IN DOUBLE FIGURES

**Bucket List status – result**

I don't really know why I added a double figure trout to my 'must do' list, as my favoured aspects of still-water fly fishing are loch styling on the bigger reservoirs such as Rutland; fishing a suspender minkie in some quiet reservoir back water, or working through a selection of fry patterns around the jetties and boat moorings in August and September on Draycote.

Appreciating that while any of those three approaches could theoretically turn up the odd bigger fish, it would not be the path I would deliberately choose for shortening the odds of a double figure trout. But sometimes in this life you have to do what you have to do, and with the challenge set, I needed to go about finding a resolution to it.

When I first started dabbling with fly fishing it would have been easier to get a double figure trout than it is today. Expensive, but given time, fairly readily achievable at fisheries such as Avington, Dever Springs, Lechlade, and right on my own door step, Pennine, which were all competing with each other to grow on and be responsible for huge, occasionally even record rainbow trout.

Not so much brown trout though, as these were more difficult, or should I say, more money and labour intensive to grow on, and would invariably sulk for weeks after being introduced, making them frustratingly harder to catch. But of course, a far greater prize when one is persuaded to take.

Dever Springs seemed to have the monopoly on that particular score. Big rainbows on the other hand would often not see out the day.

I'm not sure where I actually sit on this particular issue. Growing on these huge fish is an art form in itself. Catching them has also developed a tactical approach all of its own.

Some were undoubtedly caught by simply casting blind. Pennine for example wasn't clear enough to spot and sight cast to fish in the way that both Avington and Dever Springs are.

My problem comes from the fact that it wasn't always a level playing field, with big fish often being stocked on press days, or for the potential benefit of some celebrity big name, and reputations were most certainly enhanced as a result.

If the management team had nominated undisclosed random introduction dates at the start of the season and stuck to them giving everybody a 'raffle' chance, I might be persuaded. But they didn't, so I'm not.

I have done sight casting, jiggling, and all the rest in the gin clear waters of both Dever Springs and Avington. Graeme Pullen and I made a number of YouTube video's at both fisheries where we were guests, and while we weren't unfortunately in a position to target the monsters of historical legend, mainly because by that stage the ultra big fish bubble had burst, we none the less had some very good fish thanks to the high quality general stocking policy at both fisheries.

Graeme had a targeted sight cast sixteen pounder at Dever which was quite a nice fish, and we both had quite a few around the eight pound mark at Avington jiggling tiny weighted nymphs on their noses through holes in bushes, around submerged tree roots, and under floating rafts of leaves on our of proportion ultra-light five weight outfits.

Not exactly fly fishing as most regular practitioners would recognise it though. A world of people skulking around peering into the water, fearful of casting until they spotted something worthwhile in case they inadvertently hooked the wrong size of fish which would count against their compulsory kill all bag limit.

Also, anglers with noisy ratchets removed from their reels so they could sneak line off for casting without alerting other 'stalkers' that a big fish had been located. And people often not even casting at all for much of the time as they dangled small heavily weighted nymphs down on just a fluorocarbon leader, twitching it as much to trigger an aggression response and grab as opposed to persuading the fish to actually feed.

Graeme and I had a selection of leaded nymphs tied specifically for the occasion by Syd Knight, including Graeme's own pattern, the fire bug. That's what I had on when I spotted a good sized fish lurking around some tree roots behind an awkward line of bushes.

Somehow, I managed to get the rod through and started twitching the tiny lure a foot or so away from the fishes nose. It didn't like that at all. Several aggressive charges were made. Eventually, probably having driven it half mad with rage, I saw the white inside of its lips indicating that the bug had been sucked in, and knew that if I didn't strike instantly, it would be blown out again. That was my best Avington fish of the day.

I never fished Lechlade so I can't really comment there. But I did on a number of occasions fish Pennine, which I hoped would be the provider of the required big trout tick on my list. That unfortunately didn't happen, though I saw a few doubles come out there from time to time.

My best was somewhere in the region of eight pounds, and what a fiasco that turned out to be. The leader attachment loop came off my floating line as I was tackling up, so I tied a knot in the end of the fly line and attach the leader directly behind it. What I neglected to do unfortunately was clip off the fly line stub close enough to the knot.

I don't know what fly I was fishing. Probably some lure or other as it was winter time if my memory serves me well. So, I pulled the fly line through the end eye, flicked the offering into the water at my feet, then left it there while I pulled the required length of line from the reel and stretched it straight. That done, it was time to make my first cast.

As I lifted the lure from the water to start false casting, it was immediately taken with barely more than a yard or two of fly line out. Then to make matters worse, in all the excitement, I inadvertently drew the temporary knot back through the small aperture of the end eye on the rod where it became lodged because of the stub, leaving me to play quite a reasonably fresh fish on nothing more than the leader. Happy days.

It was around this time that I was introduced to wild fish expert Dr. Malcolm Greenhalge, who at the time was still a college lecturer, but about to retire as a fortieth birthday present to himself to see if he could make a living out of angling journalism.

Part of that plan included writing books, two of which were already commissioned and required illustration with both line drawings and photographs, which is where I came in. I was given the job. And as he lived just a few miles down the road from me, we also started doing a bit fishing together, both for pleasure and for the camera.

Malcolm had somehow got himself involved with a new single species specialist group based up in the Scottish highlands called Ferox 85.

Essentially, they were a bunch of fishery scientists working at Fascally, studying such diverse subjects as whitefish and char populations in Scottish waters, lead if that's the right word, by Ron Greer and Alistair Thorne.

Malcolm had managed to blag a selection of suitable fishing gear including echo sounders for them to use in some of the most inhospitable situations you could ever wish (or not wish) to fish in.

Huge, deep, cold, thermally stratified peat stained lochs, which when the wind blew, which it usually did, could throw up breaking rollers equal to anything I would ever have to endure while small boat fishing at sea.

Gradually over time, patterns had started to emerge. Things like seasonality, water depth, lure or bait selection and the like. Yet still there were many freezing cold blank days spent getting battered by the elements, interrupted infrequently by an occasion take or boated fish.

Collectively, they once racked up thirteen successive blanks. And now Malcolm was trying to sell this to me as he'd been invited up to fish with them and thought I might want to accompany him.

So, on the allotted freezing cold wild day in April, we made the long trek up there to stay at Ron's house, which as if to condition us for what was to come was also freezing cold, devoid of a wife to run the place, and where we were served a huge equally freezing cold pie to eat as he'd forgotten to turn the oven on prior to us going to the pub to get warm, as he normally didn't bother to cook.

Rannoch was our designated loch, fishing from two orkney longliners – Malcolm, Ron and myself in one, with Alistair, along with a couple of the other group members in the second, fishing a patch of water that looked like well stewed tea with huge rollers on the exposed side, and just about manageable conditions on the other.

Thankfully, Ron decided we would work the sheltered margin, explaining the dead-bait trolling set up that was to be my rod. A powan of around a pound was rigged up using a stiff wire inserted internally from mouth to tail and bent to give it a banana shape. From the split ring holding the wire there were two runs of trebles to trace wire in case a pike hold, one set inserted along each flank.

In the water, at minimal trolling speed on the outboard, this bait rotated in a huge vibrating circle, which in the low visibility conditions would be crucial. Various sizes of flat D-shaped leads were also available to adjust the working depth, depending on the requirements of the day. In contrast, Malcolm and Ron would be fishing large lures.

I can't recall what Ron had on, but Malcolm's was a deep diving rainbow trout patterned rapala. These lures can work as deep as twenty feet under the right trolling conditions, and again, leads or even diving vanes were available to increase that depth if needs be, all of which to a huge extent is governed by the movements of the char shoals according to seasonality, water temperature, and the rest.

For more detailed information, take a look at Ron Greer's excellent book 'Ferox Trout'. On this particular day, it was decided that the thirty to forty foot contour was the favoured working line, and so far as it was possible, keeping an eye on the echo sounder close to the tiller, that was what we followed.

Fortunately, we didn't have to wait long. Shortly after heading off down the loch, my rod slammed over and line was pouring from the reel. Quickly, the other rods were brought in, while at the same time trying to keep the boat from being blown too far out into open water and getting broadside on to the waves.

To be honest, I don't recall too much about the fish on the line. I think my brain was as frozen and useless as my fingers. But eventually it appeared through the deep 'cold tea'. A large dark shape with a huge kype, and some of the biggest and most amazing spots on its flanks that I'd ever seen. Then it was in the net.

A big cheer and an out-pouring of Gallic obscenities quickly followed as both boats motored in to the shore to weigh, photograph, and hopefully release the enormous fish, which tipped the scales at fifteen and a half pounds. I had my double, and a proper wild fish into the bargain. What a feeling.

Alistair immediately sedated it in a bath of MS222 to do all the necessary science stuff. Then, after a quick photograph, it was time to bring it back round for release, except that it then unfortunately bellied up.

Despite repeated further attempts, nothing more could be done, and so a wider selection of photographs was able to be taken. But since those early days, it's been found that sticking at the revival attempts for longer can ultimately pay off, though that knowledge hadn't been acquired at that time.

Back out onto the loch, the dead-bait and lures were reset, and next up was Malcolm with an even more beautiful twelve and a half pounder on the rainbow trout patterned rapala, and still with a good hour or more to go before our lunch of jam butties and barely luke warm coffee.

Ron later had a third smaller specimen of around six pounds to the boat ,which unfortunately slipped the hook at the very last moment.

The remainder of the session produced nothing, as did the following day. But compared to thirteen consecutive blanks, in ferox terms at least, this was an absolute fish fest. Not only had we caught two amazing doubles, but both had gone to ferox virgins, neither of whom had even seen a ferox trout before.

Since then obviously, the groups expertise has come on in leaps and bounds. Shortly after our visit, Alistair took the record up to nineteen pounds ten ounces on Loch Awe, a record which has since climbed to thirty one pounds twelve ounces, again from Loch Awe, where even bigger fish are known to exist, or to have existed, based on actual specimens from this huge and especially difficult water to fish.

Indeed, I believe it was here that the thirteen consecutive blanks occurred, leading to the term 'relentless group' being coined in recognition of the efforts both required and put in with regard to gaining more knowledge of this enigmatic fish.

Loch Awe, as seemingly empty as it's vastness can appear at times, is the undoubted home of the biggest ferox trout. It's also the most hospitable in terms of allowing people to fish, both from their own boats, and from locally hired craft.

Many of the other highland lochs are virtually un-fishable in that sense, including Loch Rannoch which produced my fish, and where Ferox 85 have negotiated access for their work. But let's not forget the deep Cumbrian lakes, most of which also have ferox trout.

Windermere fairly regularly produces them to pike anglers baits. We also deliberately took a nine pound ferox on Crummock Water from a hired boat, and I had my best ever pike on a ferox outing to Coniston.

The key to ferox potential is having small shoaling fish to feed on, which usually means char, but could be anything providing the numbers of prey items are there, including other brown trout.

Currently, ferox trout are generally viewed as being individual brown trout offspring which turn to fish feeding at a very early age, breed far less frequently than their typical more generalist feeding siblings, and can far out-live them too, with I believe, ages in excess of twenty years having been recorded.

Some scientists one the other hand think that ferox trout breed true, and as such are a separate species, or at the very least, a sub species. The same is also suggested for the various ferox-like trout in some of the bigger Irish loughs. On the other hand, huge cannibalistic brown trout have been taken from man made English reservoirs where they can't be anything other than _Salmo trutta_.

One of the recorded audio interviews I have archived is with Ron Greer, where amongst many varied related topics, the speciation question was raised. In his view, ferox are not a separate species. His actual comment was "all ferox are brown trout, but not all brown trout are ferox".

For me, the jury is still out.

Associated audio interview numbers: 15.

### A BASS IN DOUBLE FIGURES

**Bucket List status – result**

In Part 1, where I looked at all the home waters listed species on an individual basis, I have made very clear my position with regard to bass. An important fish, but one which has never really played a major role either in my planning or thinking. For while I have always been both happy and willing to boat fish and occasionally shore fish for them whenever opportunities have arisen, and have long championed their cause in my role as a recreational fishing representative on the North West Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority, I've never been obsessed to the point of making a great play at targeting them, preferring to enjoy those that have come along when they come along, while still enjoying everything else just as much when they haven't.

Why then you may ask this urge to catch a double figure specimen as part of my bucket list project; an objective which will never fit the definition of being an easy task to complete, and one that has and will continue to become increasingly more difficult over recent time.

The answer may well be because a double figure bass should be on every red blooded anglers wish list, and in that regard, I am no different. A truly iconic home water anglers fish. Yet there were times when I truly though this might turn out to be my Achilles heel.

In truth, a double figure bass was a moderately late addition to my bucket list. I was fishing out of St. Peterport on Guernsey when I got the opportunity to go out with a bunch of local bass experts fishing a bank within distant view of a nuclear power station over on the French coast, somewhere just to the west of Cherbourg.

In addition, we had a fisheries research scientist onboard, the plan being to catch as many bass as possible, grab a load of scientific data from each, then stick in a dart tag and have them back over the side ASAP. And what a trip that turned out to be.

I remember seeing two double figure bass in the landing net being revived in the water at the same time, plus quite a few others putting in a show over the course of the day. I personally didn't get one. But it was at that point that I decided it was an achievable target, and shortly afterwards added it to the list.

Actually, it was a repeat visit to Guernsey some years later that finally clinched the deal for me. A group of us has booked Dougal Lanes 'Midnight Moon' for a week with the primary objective of fishing the banks up around Aldernay wherever the weather allowed, trailing long flying collar rigs baited with live sandeel baits through the swirls, eddies, and over-falls, which betray the position of these fishing holding hot spots.

Obviously, bass weren't the only fish we were after. I'm pleased to say that a few turbot, brill, and red gurnards also put in a show. But bass were the most numerous species by far, and as it would turn out, the biggest too.

Towards the close of one particular day, we'd had the best part of fifty bass to around nine pounds when Dougal shouted lines up. Time to head back to St. Peterport, the pub, and something to eat. So as instructed, we all started cranking our reel handles, when I noticed a little more weight than expected on my line, though not so much that I thought anything in particular about it.

If I'm honest, it felt like somebody else's hook had caught on my line on the way up. It was then that I noticed everyone else's gear was already in. Next thing I remember was seeing this huge grey torpedo darting about just under the surface, then seconds later, Dougal had it in the net and on the deck.

On-board it weighed thirteen pounds one ounce, though later when re-weighed back at port it turned the needle around to twelve pounds fourteen ounces, making it the second heaviest bass taken from Guernsey in the 1991 season, for which I was awarded an engraved tankard and given a very pricey bottle of brandy. But the real prize was of course the fish itself, which I have recorded as a PB at its original on-board weight.

My only regret is the circumstances of the catch. I had no idea there was even a fish on my hook until the final few seconds, and certainly not at any stage until we emptied the landing net was there any indication of just how big it would turn out to be.

So on the one hand, a much needed potentially difficult to obtain tick on the list, but on the other, what a waste of such a magnificent fish. The kind of encounter you dream of as giving a truly memorable epic battle, but which in reality gave itself up with barely a whimper.

### A FISH IN EXCESS OF ONE HUNDRED POUNDS IN FRESHWATER

**Bucket List status – result**

Not being a freshwater specialist, or even a regular freshwater angler, initially, this particular strand of the bucket list concerned me. With hindsight however, due to an ever growing number of commercial as well as wild fishing opportunities, providing you are willing to travel and inevitably invest both money and time, potentially this now should be one of the easier ticks to put on the list. But don't expect to be able to achieve it here in the UK any time soon, if ever at all.

With the wels catfish is currently suspended from the British record fish list, and as a result, with some measure of interest having now been lost in the one species all of Britain's ton up aspirations were riding on, looking further afield is currently the only viable option, though in all honestly, with the British Isles geographically lying outside the wels natural comfort and growth zone anyway, even without the record suspension, breaking through the one hundred pound barrier on home territory was always going to be a very big ask.

On a more positive note, providing you are willing to widen your angling and travel horizons and go about things in an organised systematic manner by identifying a target species, then a stretch of water you know has big enough specimens constrained within it, if you want it badly enough, it should only be a matter of time, bearing in mind that what at face value might appear to be the cheapest option, could well turn into something very much more expensive if repeat visits due to initial failures subsequently have to be made.

So nominate wisely, which for me means exploring the possibilities of quite a short species list comprising wels catfish, mekong catfish, arapaima, siamese carp, the various sturgeons, and the Asian freshwater stingray species _Himantura chaophraya_. Nile Perch are another, though for reasons of political instability are perhaps left off the list. And still, depending on the chosen wording of the challenge, even then there are potential pit falls.

By this I mean, is it to be a one hundred pound freshwater fish, or a one hundred pound fish caught in freshwater. There is a difference. Unsure myself, I have tried fishing for both, with differing degrees of success.

But first things first. Let's try to settle the argument about freshwater fish or fish caught in freshwater. Wels catfish, mekong catfish, arapaima, and asiatic carp are true freshwater fish and therefore fit the bill whichever way you look at things. But with sturgeon and stingrays, unfortunately it's far less clear cut.

My understanding of the various sturgeon species life cycles is that at some stage this involves time spent in saltwater, though I've also heard of land locked populations of some species with smaller specimens tenuously managing to hang on and survive.

With the stingrays it seems, the jury is still out. I've caught them in the foothills of the Andes a good three thousand miles or more upriver from the sea, so there is no way that particular species retains any measure of saltwater component to its life cycle.

Clearly, either evolution or rapid within population adaptation has taken place there, as demonstrated can happen with land locked populations of bull shark trapped by dam building in Australia, which are known to be reproducing satisfactorily, despite having no return access route back to the sea.

Lake Nicaragua sharks are also bull sharks which have accessed freshwater where they have carried out fatal attacks. Now it seems the worlds genuine worst man eater has evolved, adapted, call it what you will, to occupy that indistinct grey area between saline and fresh. So maybe we should be adding bull shark to the list of potential freshwater targets too.

The big stingrays caught on rod and line with weights up to five hundred pounds and more in the Bang Pakong and Mae Klong Rivers of Thailand, plus some of the adjacent rivers in the Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam area, from a scientific perspective it seems, also currently sit in that no man's land between completely saline and freshwater life styles.

Research is still ongoing to try to resolve the issue, though I would be surprised if runs back in to saltwater do not form part of their as yet to be fully documented life cycle, due to the close proximity of where in those rivers they prefer to live in relation to the coast.

None the less, a fish I was more than happy to target myself, then had to pull back from due to the timing of my first visit to Thailand, which unfortunately happened to coincide with the height of the rainy season, filling the rivers up with highly coloured water and floating debris, making fishing them for anything impossible.

Prior to fishing Thailand, and without researching things properly, I decided to go for a true freshwater thoroughbred by visiting the Amazon and fishing for arapaima. Bad decision.

As there is already a complete account of my time in the Amazon in the Part 2, suffice to say here that targeting big wild fish in those parts is both a daunting as well as a potentially dangerous task, as scary encounters with bats after dark, electric eels, and a hunting puma all suggest. On top of this, the area is so incredibly vast and for the most part barely accessible.

Okay, so you can access much of it by boat, and yes, arapaima, along with some very large catfish species do live in these waters, so where is the problem. Well, it all boils down to where exactly do you start.

After the annual flooding of the whole region, when the water level drops, arapaima and other air breathing species often become trapped in receding jungle lakes, which might offer some sort of opportunity. But where exactly are these pools and how do you get to them. Far better I think to target arapaima in the stocked commercial fisheries around the world.

If you want a guaranteed thoroughbred freshwater hundred pounder, then without hesitation, I would say head over to Thailand and base yourself smack in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Bangkok city centre, where each morning an air conditioned vehicle will pick you up at your hotel and whisk you away to whatever commercial fishery it is you have chosen, according to which particular species you have set as your target for the day.

You may not even need to leave to Bangkok at all, as one of the best and certainly most physically taxing big fish waters, Bungsamran Lake, sits well within the city limits. There may well be better waters in terms of hundred pound plus opportunities, but if you want to get beaten up by big fish from the first cast to the last, then Bungsamran is the place to go.

There are huge arapaima there too weighing many hundreds of pounds. You will regularly see them coming up to the surface gulping air. Unfortunately, due to a combination of their relative frailty and mis-treatment by anglers in the past, fishing with live or dead-baits, which is what you need as arapaima are predators, had been stopped when I last visited the place.

Anglers must now stick with the vegetarian approach, that being no great hardship really, as both the mekong cats, which are so numerous that guides offer a money back guarantee for anyone not catching at least one forty pounder, and siamese carp, which have been taken there in excess of two hundred pounds but are far less common, can both be targeted without the chance of hooking up an arapaima as the rules dictate.

Big mekong cats are easy to catch, and without equal in terms of brutal hard fighting abilities. Unless you are an out and out masochist, you won't manage to keep going there for the whole day. I certainly couldn't. I'd rented one of the open fronted bungalows with its fishing platform on stilts, and while I fished, the wife sat at the back under a large electric fan quietly reading a book.

Ali, our guide, was a harsh taskmaster. The second a fish was disgorged, out went another float fished giant rice husk ball on the method feeder, and in no time at all, line would once again be pouring from the bait-runner spool.

No time for a breather, and in all honesty, I have to say that mekong cats are the equal in slugging it out never say die terms to anything I've ever hooked up anywhere in the world, including tuna at sea.

By early afternoon, and with sixteen of the things up to between sixty and seventy pounds to my credit, I decided enough was enough. But with Ali in attendance, the only way to escape catching yet another was not to be there, so I went for a walk.

Undeterred, like a robot, he continued firing out the baits. Unfortunately, not having me to pass the rod to and torture, he insisted that my wife Dawn take over instead. I can tell you that by the time I got back she was less than pleased. She'd had to bring in three big cats and he was just lining her up for a fourth.

My options then were either call an early finish and make the short run back to the hotel, or alter the set up and try for the big carp, which, if you catch one every couple of days there is a result, and therefore would virtually guarantee my arms getting a rest.

That unfortunately wasn't to be, as siamese carp swims need to be pre-baited just as carp swims do here at home, so in the end it was an early bath.

They do regularly get hundred pound mekong catfish at Bungsamran. But with so many smaller fish between forty and sixty pounds in the place, that's where the bulk of the action will obviously come from.

Shadow Lake on the other hand is a totally different proposition, and therein lies the beauty of fishing Thailand. The range of waters and species close to Bangkok is so vast, with many lakes specifically leaning to one particular species or other ,giving each water its own unique angle.

Arapaima to three hundred pounds are now available at a growing number of commercial waters there. I specifically targeted them at Jurassic Fishing Park, mainly because that particular water also had a very good head of siamese carp which I particularly wanted to catch, and in fact did catch to fifty five pounds, having already caught pretty much everything else on offer over there apart from arapaima, a fact which still needs to be remedied.

Ironically, I finally succeeded in ticking off my freshwater hundred pounder with a wild fish caught in a wilderness location half a world away from the far east. Canada to be precise, fishing the mighty Fraser River in British Columbia based at Chilliwack, where white sturgeon up to a thousand pounds have been caught on rod and line, and where frighteningly, specimens up around two thousand pounds are known to exist.

A location where all fish are tagged and released by law, and where statistically, one in every six sturgeon caught will be a treble figure fish. The big question then has to be, what are the chances of catching half a dozen fish in a session.

Obviously, this is all boat fishing, and in terms of catching six fish in a day, you would be extremely unlucky not to succeed. That's not to say however that you are guaranteed to crack the ton. One day we had eleven fish maxing out at around fifty pounds, then on a subsequent day caught two at one hundred pound plus as part of a five fish haul. It's all about percentages. The more trips you put in, the greater the probability, obviously.

On the final day, Dave Devine who I was over there with and had already caught a one hundred and twenty five pounder, decided to take his wife out for the day, so my missus was persuaded to jump onboard in his place. She quite fancied catching a small sturgeon just to be able to say she'd had one.

With this mind we motored off down to a quiet little backwater which we'd previously found to be full of fish up to around ten pounds, and to get the task done quickly so as to concentrate on the real job at hand, we decided that all the rods were hers, and thankfully, within minutes she was in. But not unfortunately with the ten pounder we had been aiming for.

After quite a protracted battle with lots of begging for assistance, all of which fell on deaf ears, she had a one hundred and seven pounder in the boat. And there was I still waiting for my ton up fish.

That fish, like most of the others, had fallen to a small bag of salmon eggs fished hard on the bottom on a very short trace. Scent here is crucial, certainly in the early part of the summer when we were there on account of the clarity of the water, which looks like dilute milk due to the phenomenon of glacial flour.

Over the winter, the slowly creeping ice forming the glaciers grinds away at the bedrock creating a sort of talcum powder, which later, when the ice melts, colours the river to the point where visibility is virtually nil.

Obviously, this can't be a year round problem, because the Fraser is one of the most famous multi species salmon rivers in the world, and fly fishing would be virtually impossible if it remained coloured in that way.

This was our final day before moving on to Vancouver, so a result was very much required, and quickly. Worried that Dawns big fish might have been it, our skipper Chad motored in to another quiet reed fringed back water, and after setting out the bigger baits, had me fish a couple of salmon eggs on a light float rig tight up to the margins, which resulted in me catching two squaw fish or pike minnows, the bigger of which might have made a pound in weight.

We then raced over to a specific mark he had in mind, which in a jet boat is an experience in itself, and there the squaw fish was rigged up as a dead-bait which very quickly had me latched on to what eventually, after several powerful scorching runs, was the required target tick, coming out of the weight estimation formula at one hundred and fifty five pounds.

Thailand, British Columbia, and the Amazon, as fantastic as these venues most certainly are in their very different ways, are not the only potential producers of hundred pound freshwater fish. Nor are they necessarily the most likely. For there are venues very much nearer home offering true freshwater species which can be fished at a fraction of the cost.

Spain, France and Italy have excellent fishing for big wels catfish, and offer a wide range of guided trips for none freshwater anglers like myself to enrol on. Based on my limited knowledge of fishing the European mainland, I would say that the River Ebro in Spain perhaps offers the best chance of a quick fix. A friend of mine Graeme Pullen fished there and had cats to around a hundred and eighty pounds at the first attempt, with numerous big wild carp from the margins on a second rod.

I fished it myself at Tortosa, which is way down-stream of the dams above which Graeme had fished. But I blanked, a fact explained by the early timing of my visit before the season had properly started as I was there primarily for other reasons, on top of which, it had been the coldest winter in living memory with loads of snow melt entering the system from the nearby mountains. So cold in fact that after the first day I had to drive into Tortosa and buy myself some additional warm clothing.

It was grim. And apart from one half hearted take which was quickly dropped, that was it. Then, with a certain twist of irony, later in the same year, Graeme and I found ourselves fishing Anglers Paradise in Devon after an aborted sharking trip out from Boscastle, and there I caught myself a wels at the very first attempt.

As a sort of prediction as well as a last loose end tie up before I close here, let me say that while it hasn't happened yet, never the less, one of our more familiar home waters fish, the carp, should not be completely ruled out here, though obviously not caught in the UK.

In October 2014 I recorded an audio interview with Warren Harrison who lives about an hour away from me in Manchester. During the September he had caught mirror carp of ninety four and eighty seven pounds, plus a common carp of ninety pounds, and all in the same session at Euro Aqua lake in Hungary, where even European big fish can come with equally big price tags.

At that stage, the lake was known to hold at least one fish topping a hundred pounds. Several weeks later, and reflecting the way in which the water is fed by its owner, Warren's ninety four pounder came out again, only this time at ninety nine pounds. Since then, fish weights (and presumably ticket prices) have climbed, and literally at the point of publication, Warren finally cracked the ton with a superb carp of 101.5 pounds.

Associated audio interview numbers: 154 and 185.

### A SHORE CAUGHT FISH IN EXCESS OF TWO HUNDRED POUNDS

**Bucket List status – result**

Before we go any further on this one, let me repeat that while I regularly have and still do fish from the shore, I'm not by any definition a proper shore angler, being someone who is more inclined to dabble either while on holiday or when the weather keeps me from going afloat in the boat.

There's a certain irony therefore in the fact that I should be a part of arguably the greatest beach angling catch ever made, due in no small part to the initial investigative work of Dave Lewis and Clive Gammon, plus the excellent guiding skills of Namibian international Johan Burger. So all credit to them.

Dave and Clive had reccied this trip the year before, which was 1998. From what Dave tells me, they didn't break any records during that visit. Neither the weather nor the fishing was outstanding. But the raw potential of the area certainly must have shone through.

Based on that trip, the following February saw a group of ten put together by Dave, including myself and Dave Devine, make the long flight from London to Frankfurt, then on to Windhoek, where we swapped to a smaller plane for the final leg to our destination of Swakopmund on the Skeleton Coast.

Swakopmond sits right on the very edge of the Namib Desert, which as I've explained in the full account of this trip in Part 2 looking at Namibia generally, can be the hottest place on earth, though at times down on the shore you wouldn't think so wearing two fleece jackets and still feeling rather chilly.

This desolate stretch of south west Africa with its constantly shifting sands merging beach into desert where some of the inland dunes reach up to a thousand feet in hight, is touched by the Benguala Current bringing cold nutrient rich water all the way up from Antarctica.

As a result of this, and particularly in the mornings, the first few hundred yards of shore stretching back inland can be shrouded in a cool damp mist, which as it turns out is the primary source of coastal moisture upon which many creatures and any sparse vegetation locally depend.

The sea water too is obviously quite cold, but it teems with life, including many predators, the largest of which are sharks, and in particular the bronze whaler or copper shark.

Initially during our visit, Johan did much of the casting, allowing us all time to have a play until we got the feel and balance of the heavy duty outfits provided. Knowing now what was to come, you can easily see the reasoning behind the heavy choices made. Particularly having the reel seat low down the butt to allow the use of a butt pad.

In contrast, the baits were quite small made up from gulley shark liver and blood rich gills bound together to form a sausage using elasticated thread. I've since tried this in UK waters using dogfish liver and gills for tope, and amazingly, didn't even get a touch. But I digress.

So the baits went in, and the rubby dubby carcasses were staked out along the waters edge. We all knew what we were fishing for which is why we had made the trip. What we most certainly did not know was what to expect shortly after those first baits entered the water.

After casting, we had the choice either of standing the rod up vertically in a sand spike, or holding it upright with the butt on the sand.

With the pounding waves on the line rhythmically pulling at the rod tip, at first we wondered how we might recognise a bite. What a wasted piece of concern that turned out to be. When a bronze whaler shark picked up the bait, the rod tip would slowly pull down further and further leaving you struggling to keep hold of the outfit.

We were told to strike at these fish several times, which we did. Whether that was always necessary in debatable, because when they picked up a bait they were most definitely having it, and away they went leaving the poor sole at the other end struggling to play catch up.

One good thing about bronze whaler sharks is that for whatever reason, they appear to prefer to run parallel to the beach. Had they decided to go seaward, which they so easily could have done, we might not have landed as many as we did. But running either to the left or to the right meant that you could follow them, passing rods over and under other people's lines who were also hooked up themselves.

The singing of taut line in the breeze was seemingly constant. At one point I counted seven out of the ten of us hooked up at same time being dragged towards the horizon in different directions. But Johan would not allow people to be dragged too far as there are occasionally desert lions and hyenas in the area, which with a sea in front of you which is full of sharks, doesn't leave too many options for somewhere safe to run to. What a venue.

An alternative strategy was to excavate a shallow depression in the sand and sit in it with your feet dug in hanging on for dear life, rather like fishing from a boat. Unfortunately, this often resulted in a stalemate situation with no likely winner unless something more decisive was done.

One option tried was to put the rod over the shoulder and walk off into the desert trying to physically drag the fish in closer, then rushing back towards the beach cranking the reel to gain some line.

And so it went with some anglers vanishing off up the beach, taut singing lines, and Johan dodging between incoming rollers trying not to get soaked as he guided yet another big shark to within gaffing range.

I should add here that although all the fish were gaffed, this was in the flesh towards the tail, and after a quick measurement, photographs, and tagging, all were released, which itself was quite a task.

On the final day, which was breathless and blisteringly hot, Johan decided to take us for a short run in the opposite direction to where we'd done most of our earlier fishing to a place known locally as Donkey Bay. So, with no gulley sharks in the area for bait, we stopped off at the nearby town of Walvis Bay to put a box of large frozen mackerel in the truck.

Obviously, by this stage, we'd all pretty much mastered the casting, which to varying degree's we were by then already doing for ourselves.

We'd also all had more big fish encounters than you could shake a stick at. So whatever happened in this the closing session, to a large extent didn't really matter. All the boxes had already been well and truly ticked, except unfortunately my two hundred pounder, for which I was eight pounds short. But what the hell. Time to relax and to play, or so we thought.

Having heard of kob to forty pounds taken just up the way the day before, four of our party decided to finish off the trip trying for some of those, leaving six of us, plus Dave Lewis, to have one final go at the sharks. And like the others, with nothing to loose by that stage, I fancied going completely solo on the sharks using my own UK surf fishing gear, which even if it wasn't up to the job and ended up broken, didn't matter as we were about to go home anyway.

This comprised a penn progression rod paired up to a daiwa LD50H reel loaded to the brim with seventy pounds breaking strain braid. To this I attached a trace borrowed from Johan, lashed a large chunk of still frozen mackerel to the hook, then sent it out seaward into the mirror calm water which had a shelf a short distance off where the colour changed from pale to dark blue signifying depth.

The bait hadn't been in the water more than a few minutes when the characteristic pull down on the rod tip marked the start of business, and off I went being dragged along the beach. From the onset it felt like a particularly hefty fish, though it was difficult to say with any degree of certainty as I was fishing with a very much lighter outfit for the very first time.

A good half hour or so later, Johan sent someone up the beach telling me to work the fish harder and turn its head before I completely vanished from view. "Doesn't he think I'm trying to do that already", I asked.

So I piled on as much extra pressure as I could, and thankfully the fish duly responded by suddenly heading off back towards the main base area where everyone else was fishing. That fish came out of the weight estimation formula at two hundred and twelve pounds beating my previous best of one hundred and ninety two pounds, finally taking me beyond the double ton.

Associated audio interview numbers: 49.

### A FISH FROM MY OWN TRAILED BOAT IN EXCESS OF TWO HUNDRED POUNDS

**Bucket List status – result**

Catching a big fish from your own trailed boat, so far as the bucket list is concerned, doesn't automatically have to mean fishing UK or Irish waters, though taking account of the logistics involved, along with the availability of suitable target species, realistically it probably means exactly that.

Actually, this is no bad thing, as home waters offer as good if not better opportunities of success than a great many more distant so called big fish venues.

A two hundred pound fish anywhere worldwide is not to be sniffed at. The beauty of home waters is that you can more easily incorporate repeat attempts as a natural part of the learning process, which unless you get immediately lucky, could otherwise eat up a great deal of time, not to mention money.

The home water species theoretically capable of putting this particular tick in the required box, are mako shark, porbeagle shark, thresher shark, blue shark, six gilled shark, common skate, and blue fin tuna.

All potentially viable targets on paper, but in reality, and for various reasons, some more likely potential targets than others, particularly if you either need to do it quickly, or want to verify the size of the fish accurately and safely, while in some cases complying with the constraints of the law.

Let's look at the pro's and con's of each in turn, starting with what I consider to be the least likely, working through to the most likely. Two fish tie as least likely candidates, these being the mako shark and blue fin tuna. In 2013, Andy Griffith fishing aboard the UK's top shark boat 'White Water III' skippered by Andrew Alsop took the first mako in UK or Irish waters in thirty seven years.

Unlike porbeagle sharks, and to a lesser extent blue sharks, mako sharks are warm water oceanic wanderers. So if, as the climate scientists keep telling us, sea temperatures have been noticeably rising thereby increasing the likelihood of such an encounter over the past three decades and more, then we should have been seeing progressively more mako sharks rather than less. But we haven't. So how much time have you got to invest in that particular project.

Moving on to unlikely candidate number two, back in 2010 I recorded an audio interview with a chap called Bill Pashby over at Scarborough. Bill had been the oarsman of a small rowing boat dropped from his fathers chartered trawler many miles out in the North Sea who would take out wealthy clients wanting to fish for what he called tunny, but we now call blue fin tuna.

When the commercial herring boats were hand hauling their drift nets, damaged and still living fish would drop back into the water acting as chum for the big tuna, which would gather around some boats picking off the victims.

Bill's dad would get a call to say which boats had them around and they would motor over, then drop the rowing boat down in which Bill and his tunny angler would row across. Doing this, his clients took dozens of fish to over eight hundred pounds.

The tuna didn't suddenly disappear from the North Sea during the 1950's. But the herrings were certainly in danger of going down that route and something had to be done.

The response was that a moratorium on herring fishing was put in place, which besides bringing about the total collapse of a way of life for many east coast fishermen and their wives who followed the 'silver darlings' from port to port, also marked the end of rod and line fishing for the big Yorkshire tunny, as there was no longer any means of locating them.

Over-fishing by the Danes also had an effect by decreasing tuna population numbers. Then around the millennium, anglers became aware of big tuna running up the west coast of Ireland where they began targeting them with live-baits and trolled lures, eventually bringing specimens ashore to well over nine hundred pounds.

Unfortunately, a great deal of investment in time and fuel was required to find the quickly moving tuna pods, on top of which, after just a few seasons, the Irish skippers such as Michael McVeigh and Adrian Molloy eventually had to remove the outriggers and fighting chairs from their boats as a sharp decline in numbers pretty much made searching for them in the vast open expanse of the Atlantic a no hoper.

So again, as with the mako shark, not something to get too tied up with as one element of a much larger, and of itself, already highly time consuming life time quest. That said, more recently, an odd tuna has been taken well out off the coast of north west Scotland, which like the west coast of Ireland, is not exactly trailed boat territory. Or is it?.

Quite literally as I was doing the final proof read before publishing, I received an email and photographs from Irish angler Alastair Wilson, who over a very short period involving several runs out from Teelin aboard his Warrior 165, caught and released a number of blue fin tuna to over 300 pounds. So it can be done. Something most definitely to keep an eye out for in the future,

Next fish on the list is the thresher shark. I have friends who have not only successfully targeted the species from a trailed boat, but who succeeded with what most certainly would have been a new British record had they killed it and brought its body ashore for official on-land weighing as the BRFC rules demand.

Sceptics might say it's easy to make big claims when you don't provide the evidence in the form of a body and weight certificate to back it up. Others however would pat them on the back for releasing such a magnificent fish.

The anglers in question were Wayne Comben, who was on the rod and whose seventeen foot Wilson Flyer was the fishing platform drifting to the east of the Isle of Wight, and big shark expert Graeme Pullen, who captured the whole thing on HD video, including under water footage shot on a Go-Pro attached to a pole.

The rough dimensions of the fish were taken, which put its weight at upwards of four hundred and fifty pounds. But the chances of deliberately catching any thresher, let alone a two hundred pounder, and from any boat never mind a trailed dinghy these days, are way too remote unfortunately even to consider.

It may surprise some people here when I say that for me, the blue shark is the next fish on the unlikely list. The most numerous 'proper' shark in British waters, and a fish shown to be capable of throwing up the odd two hundred pound specimen.

My reason for putting both the porbeagle and the six gilled ahead of it as likelier candidates, are that blues are an open water offshore species preferring depths of at least forty fathoms along the western Channel and Atlantic coasts, which for reasons of weather, are not always readily reachable in a small boat.

Numbers and sizes have also taken a bit of a battering over the years due to commercial over exploitation, though Andrew Alsop working out of Milford Haven still does very well, including catching one fish of two hundred and twenty two pounds.

The problem is that on top of the previously mentioned draw-backs, there simply aren't sufficient two hundred pounders about to be in with any sort of realistic chance, even if you get amongst good numbers of fish aboard your own boat.

Now we're beginning to get into realistically achievable territory, starting with a fish not only well capable of crossing the two hundred pound threshold, but frequently the thousand pound barrier and beyond. And yes, despite the fact that the current British record stands at less than ten pounds, it is a more than realistic home waters target, with a friend of mine Mickey Duff from Liverpool having done it on a couple of occasions aboard his Warrior 175 while fishing for another species which is equally capable of cracking the double ton.

The explanation is that he was fishing out from Kilkee in western Ireland, just to the north of the Shannon Estuary where charter boat skipper Luke Aston fishes an area he regularly takes big six gills from, and has authentically weighed specimens in excess of a thousand pounds.

The big draw back with this area is its exposure to the elements. You could go there for a fortnight and not get out once due to the Atlantic weather, unless you tucked up well inside the Shannon fishing for tope, rays and huss, which is not the object of the exercise.

Six gills on the other hand are a deep water species which tend to come up the steep slope into shallower water to hunt after dark. That said, Mickey wasn't actually fishing too far out, and it was broad daylight. It's that proximity to immediately deep water that is key here, and the outer Shannon has that aplenty.

Mickey actually was fishing for common skate at the time in around two hundred feet of water towards the mouth of the bay when they made contact. Understandably, all the fish were released at the side of the boat. But realistic estimates put them between three and four hundred pounds apiece, which for six gills shouldn't even raise an eye brow.

I mentioned earlier when talking about thresher shark prospects, Graeme Pullen, Wayne Comben, and a make of boat each of them owns called a Wilson Flyer. Well that same combination, only this time aboard Graeme's boat, took a porbeagle shark with a weight estimation in excess of five hundred pounds, again with Wayne on the rod and Graeme on the camera, which blitzed the media at the time, including the prime time national TV evening news.

That wasn't the first big Porbeagle small boat encounter Graeme had been involved in over the years, so it can be done, and for my money, this is one of the hot favourite candidates, and a fish that I only narrowly missed out on myself.

I had the invite from Graeme to be there that day, but unfortunately was unable to make it, leaving Wayne to jump in as my replacement. On the basis of the arm wrenching struggle Wayne ultimately then had to endure, whether or not that was a good or bad thing on my part is debatable, particularly as he is much younger than me.

As ever unfortunately, in that neck of the woods there are drawbacks. Not the least of these are accessibility and personal safety, though as I've discussed elsewhere under the porbeagle shark sub heading, Boscastle, where this particular event took place, is a far better location that Bude which was previously used, though in reality that still isn't saying much.

Bude with its rolling surf tables can be a potential nightmare both for getting out and coming in, regardless of how flat sea conditions might be out on the fishing marks. At least Boscastle with its ram shackle slipway is a predictably safer launch and retrieve, if only its availability was better.

Boscastle is very much a high-water slip with access on and off the trailer only possible around the top of the tide, which as it pulls back, virtually empties the entire harbour, the entrance of which is also concealed inside of an 'S' bend opening through the cliffs making it difficult to find on the way back in.

Once outside, that's it for ten hours regardless of conditions, with absolutely nowhere else to run if it suddenly cuts up. On the plus side however, early in the year around March and April when the biggest porbeagles are on the cards, they are only a short travelling distance away close in to some of the many headlands which protrude seaward all along this inhospitable stretch of coast..

The final species, and the one I personally used to get my particular tick in the box is the flapper skate, formerly known as the common skate.

When I first fished for big skate with Ian Burrett, Paul Maris, and Dave Hawkeswood, it was either the Sound of Mull or the Firth or Lorne according to the weather around our base at Lochaline.

March and April is the main season, which up in the Scottish highlands can be less than hospitable, with hail, snow, and wind a constant threat.

If conditions were very bad, we also had the option of trailing over to nearby Loch Sunart which is especially sheltered, and from where we've taken some very big fish. You can also hire small self drive boats there at Laga Bay which Dave Devine and I have used to good effect in the past.

In the early days you could launch at the salmon farm slip. More recently however, Salen and Resipole have become the preferred launch sites of choice, with plenty of good fish about immediately out from both. In fact, I've even seen kayaks tied up to some of the buoys there fishing for and beating them.

Obviously, when they hook up, they need to un-tie from and work clear of the buoy anchor rope ASAP. Fish to well over one hundred and forty pounds have been landed and released by the kayak lads fishing in this way.

As with some of the other big fish mentioned earlier, fuller and more detailed accounts are given in the species run down in Part 1 and would only be repetition if we covered them again fully here.

On the particular visit when I broke the two hundred pound barrier, we'd trailed our Warrior 165 up to Lochaline, which at the time offered good access, weather permitting, to our preferred destination of choice which was the Firth of Lorne opposite Oban, anchored up over on the Mull side.

Small tides and fishing the slacks is when the majority of the skate action usually takes place, and it was doing just this, anchored up in over five hundred and fifty feet of water on soft ground that I had a two hundred pound plus skate in absolutely perfect conditions.

The sea was like glass, the sun was shinning, and yet it was still only April. The tides were favourable too, plus we had plenty of bait.

Normally back then that would be a coalfish of around three to five pounds, though dogfish, mackerel, and squid will also catch. This day however we had around a dozen two pound jacks from Ammo baits which were so hardy that you could catch more than one fish on each if needs by.

Onboard with me was Dave Devine and Charlie Pitchers. Dave and I had both caught big skate before. Charlie on the other hand was a skate virgin. So we enacted the plan we always stick to, which is for each person to take the first fish on his own rod, then drop out, still leaving his rod fishing for the benefit of the others, until everyone has had a fish, after which it's every man for himself.

It's a fair way of doing things so that everybody feels they have a chance. But when the first take came along, which happened to be to my rod, I felt sorry for Charlie and invited him to take it, which he 'reluctantly' did.

An inspired move as it would turn out. That fish came out of the weight estimation formula at just under one hundred and eighty pounds. That chart by the way is available online for printing and laminating on the catchalot home page.

I then took the next fish on my rod which was two hundred and three pounds, followed quickly by another different fish of the same size and weight to Dave before the tide picked up and things went quiet. A smaller male fish of around the hundred pound mark later in the day completed the session.

Since exploring out from Lochaline and the upper reaches of Loch Sunart, Ian Burrett has moved his spring and late autumn annual skate hunts to Crinan on the Sound of Jura. A far more sheltered proposition where the fish are often very much closer to base.

It's almost like fishing in an enclosed lake, where only a good stiff breeze from the south west is likely to cause any real problems. Last time out fishing with Ian and Dietrich Burkel, we had high winds from the north bringing squally hail and snow, but still we were out comfortably fishing.

Again it's very deep. And again there are some very big fish, but with a good head of smaller fish too, and if you put down a set of baited features while waiting for the skate, there is also a very real chance of a black mouthed dogfish.

I have to say though that when conditions are right, I still rate the Firth of Lorne and Sound of Mull, both of which have a long historical track record of producing very big fish.

**NOTE:** Unfortunately, few photographs were taken on my double ton day, and none at all of my fish due to the fact that we were filming the whole episode for a YouTube video.

Associated audio interview numbers: 14, 31, 45, 54, 90, 109, 112, 123, 124, 137, 141, 153, and 188.

### A FISH IN EXCESS OF ONE THOUSAND POUNDS

**Bucket List status – no result yet**

Thousand pound fish, or granders as they are called in big fish circles, are rare. For obvious reasons, the biggest examples regardless of weight for all fish species these days are now unfortunately on the wane.

These are the individuals that for however long they've lived, have managed to avoid becoming sick or diseased, dodged predators in their many forms during the various phases of their development and growth, and up to the point of appearing on the end of someone's line, also previously managed not to get caught, either by anglers or commercial fishermen, all of which makes for one very fortunate fish.

Other factors will also have been at work too, such as a genetic pre-disposition towards maximised potential growth. On top of all this, and despite fish having a theoretical capacity for indeterminate growth, only a handful of species have the actual capacity to become granders, even if and when all the odds are stacked in their favour.

A few friends and associates of mine have managed to achieve this very significant milestone. Dave Lewis for example is one who got lucky in the lottery of who takes which strike during a marlin trip to Cape Verde, and came away with a fish of eleven hundred and twenty pounds.

Pete Thorman, who I interviewed for the audio archives is another. A man who has caught a number of four figure great white sharks, including one well over two thousand pounds. Even back then, getting the necessary permits to catch, tag, and release great whites was difficult. These days it would be virtually impossible.

So what is there left to aim for. Well, when I was over in Mauritius, UK angler Leo Kennedy had a grand plus mako shark on a live tuna slowly trolled for marlin. But like huge marlin these days, though there are still a few grander pelagic sharks, including tigers, knocking about still, it's not to the extent that they can be realistically deliberately targeted.

One shark exception, though little fished for is the greenland shark, which like the six gilled shark is a sluggish, primitive, deep water species capable of some truly mind blowing dimensions.

Because of the geography involved, not a lot is known about them, though they are occasionally caught by anglers, obviously around Greenland, but also nearer to home in some of Norway's deeper northerly fjords, where weights up to fifteen hundred pounds are not out of the question. So that's one which might be worth researching.

Closer to home, Adrian Molloy in County Donegal, and Luke Aston a little bit further to the south, have been show casing some of the big fish potential on offer along the west coast of Ireland.

As mentioned previously, Luke has actually put a fish of over a thousand pounds on the scales. A big six gilled shark in fact which was the best of a number of six gills his clients have caught. After weighing, that fish was put into cold store for research purposes with scientists from a number of countries clambering to get hold of it.

Adrian's fish on the other hand was a blue fin tuna which fell just a few pounds short of being a Grander, though he has seen far bigger fish in the area. These however must be viewed as exceptional episodes in every sense of the word, with the realistic chance of any repeat not nearly so good as in other parts of the world. Even so, all is not lost.

Several years ago, Graeme Pullen heard on the rumour mill that there was a chap in the Canary Islands who regularly caught very big fish, including granders. After some preliminary research, the location turned out to be La Restinga on the outer island of El Hierro, and the man in question, a Frenchman, was Miguel Gamito, who fortunately for us could speak English – one of the few on this tiny isolated island who could.

Willing to take a chance, Graeme went over with his son Mike and Pete Scott where the trio were rewarded with a string of huge six gilled sharks, a number of which well topped the thousand pounds.

The following summer, he set up a return trip for himself, followed immediately by a weeks fishing for myself and Dave Devine. We flew in to Tenerife where we briefly met up with Graeme who was just about to fly out on his way back home. They'd had some absolute monsters between a thousand and twelve hundred pounds, plus one special fish that well topped fifteen hundred pounds.

Buoyed up by that, after a couple of beers and a few hours sleep in some grubby little hotel, we were in the taxi to Los Christianos harbour for the four hour sail across aboard the Fred Olsen ferry to Puerto de la Estaca. There we'd arranged to be met at the harbour and taxied down to the bottom end of the island to the apartment Graeme had just vacated.

El Hierro is pretty much a crisp cinder of volcanic rock rising up from the deep ocean floor, the barren exposed tip of which is dry land. Quite a small, bleak, desolate looking place. A far cry from the general UK holiday makers perception of the Canary Islands. A place in fact where only locals tend to visit, and where English is very much an alien tongue.

Thank goodness then for Miguel who at the time was living with his Austrian girl friend who ran a little food shop and was able to point us at the restaurant, bar, and car hire, not that there was very much choice available on any of those counts.

One thing people should understand about El Hierro is that it's always windy. Very windy in fact. Throughout the entire summer, the north east trade wind blasts the eastern side of the island which is where La Restinga harbour is situated.

I remember lying in bed that first night listening to the windows rattling and the wind quite literally whistling around the corner of building, thinking there would be absolutely no chance of going afloat the following day. Yet when we made it down to the quay, there was Miguel ready and raring to go.

A quick look over the harbour wall showed white horses breaking as far as the eye could see. But you only need to sail a short distance to tuck in around the sheltered southern tip of the island to fish an area the locals affectionately call the 'Costa Calma', which is where the big sharks are.

Because of the depth, Miguel had two buoyed permanent anchors in place. The first, maybe half a mile out was where he fishes for stingrays, with the second in very much deeper water maybe a mile of so off where he targets the six gilled sharks.

To put the depths here into some sort of context, depending on the direction of the wind and the tide pushing on the outer buoy creating an angle in the rope, you could be fishing in as little as two hundred fathoms or as much as four hundred fathoms, as the island quite literally is an almost vertical rock wall climbing to the surface from the abyss, and unfortunately, six gilled sharks like to feed hard on the bottom.

What normally happens is that the boat catches one big six gill, then moves to the inshore buoy to use up any remaining time fishing for stingrays.

What Dave and I did was extend each of the days we fished to ten hours so we could stay tied up to the outer buoy, thereby, theoretically at least, giving us both a shot at a big fish, and sufficient time to get them in. For while six gills certainly don't put up much in the way of a recognised fight, their sheer bulk, coupled to the extreme water depth and blazing sunshine, makes it tough going to say the least.

Imagine trying to winch in a wheely bin with its lid open up the side of three Blackpool towers stacked on top of each other under a blazing sun and you start to get the picture. One six gill in a session is enough for anyone.

The bait was a whole bonito. When they are about you can sometimes troll up a few en route from the harbour. We were not so lucky and had to make do with frozen baits. But with food presumably quite scarce in a dark world often reliant on corpses falling from above to provide meals, the six gills aren't too fussed.

That said, the buoy, which was marked by what appeared to be a large floating mattress or air-bed, attracted reasonable numbers of small dorado, some of which we caught on small lures cast to them while the shark baits were down.

I even tried bottom fishing with small hooks and baits. This brought up all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff including bright red beryx. But that soon started to wear thin. I remember on one occasion that as soon as the baits had completed their very, very long drop, a shark bite developed, so it was straight back up again at high speed with my arms feeling like they were about to explode.

When a shark took the bait, which was little more than just a few pulls at the rod tip even though we were fishing with non stretch braid, Miguel would release the rope to the buoy and start motoring away, which both helped set the hook and cleared the anchor rope. Then the work really began. A long, slow, arm aching pump to the surface that would probably take the best part of an hour.

You might get the odd head shake or token dive. In many ways six gills fight like bull huss. In fact, at the surface they even look like bull huss, but obviously on a very much grander scale. And at the boat they still stick with the dogfish theme. You can easily hold one in place with just the trace and pretty much guide it around at will into a good tagging position, after which, the hook is either retrieved or the trace cut, allowing the fish to slowly make its way back down.

Tagged fish are occasionally recaptured. So taking such a huge up and down with its enormous changes in pressure doesn't seem to be having too much of a detrimental effect, certainly not on every fish. On the other hand, tagged recaptures are still quite rare, which might also be saying the opposite.

What it certainly does seem to say is that there is no shortage of huge six gills down there, a fact backed up by the rarity of scoring a blank.

Unfortunately however, having the fish present and getting the takes doesn't necessarily mean you are going to have a successful day, or end up cracking the thousand pound barrier, because that is precisely how it ended up going for myself and Dave.

By the last day, we still hadn't seen a grander. There had been some big fish, but quite simply, not big enough. So for the final session it was all or nothing.

Thankfully, the fish themselves were in good feeding mood. Getting the takes was easy enough once the complicated drop down procedure was complete. Unfortunately, keeping them on the line was proving to be another matter.

One parted company due to a faulty hook which straightened under the strain. Another just simply came free half way up, presumably due to a light hook hold, while a third fish got away as the taut braid parted after touching the sharp head of a screw in the diving platform at the stern.

With all the baits out of the water, we sat down despondent for a spot of lunch, debating whether to call it a day and move inshore to finish off with a few hours on the stingrays. Miguel was up for that. But we were there to do a job, and as such, the opportunity might never come around again.

So having re-grouped and managed to find a few extra dregs of enthusiasm, the baits went down again, resulting this time in a six gill each with estimated weights at around four hundred kilo's, and a YouTube video. But not unfortunately four hundred and fifty kilo's, which is as near as damn it the one thousand pound equivalent.

With Miguel now gone to Cape Verde and a more recent big six gill attempt at Ascension dogged by big oil fish attacking, and in some cases taking the baits, the likelihood of that one remaining tick required to complete my bucket list has now gone. For anyone else out there wanting the same, the flight to Ascension out of RAF Brize Norton is probably the best remaining option now.

Associated audio interview numbers: 13, 14 and 123.

**FOOTNOTE:** There was also a time when, having studied the amazing story behind a fish known as the _coelacanth,_ and the fact that during the early part of the twentieth century the species had suddenly re-appeared in the flesh having supposedly been extinct for sixty five million years, I considered adding that to the list as the final ultimate angling challenge.

This fish which belongs to a group known as the lobe fins, one of which sharing a common ancestor with the Coelocanth, some three hundred and seventy to three hundred and ninety million years ago, left the water on an evolutionary journey that would lead all the way through to ourselves.

That was Tiktaalik, predicted in terms of anatomical characteristics, timing, and location by Prof. Neil Shubin, who later led an expedition to look for its fossilized remains and eventually found them in arctic Canada. A fish that had extended the development of the extraordinary fins found in the Coelocanth to the point where it could crawl out of the water and support itself, either to feed on invertebrates that had already made the same transition, or to avoid predation.

Like the people who re-discovered the Coelocanth to be extant by catching them on baited long-lines back in the late 1930's, I quite fancied catching one myself on rod and line. But those first specimens unfortunately came from the Comoros Islands just to the north of Madagascar. A politically unstable, often feuding island group accessible only from Yemen, which in today's religious and political climate would not be at the top of my must visit list, for which reason I quite naturally thought better of it.

More recently however, coelacanth have started turning up in other parts of the world. Northern Sulawesi in Indonesia for example, and Sodwana Bay in South Africa close to the Mozambique border, where some amazing documentary video has been shot in water shallow enough for divers to go down.

Ironically, I fished Sodwana Bay before their discovery there. Had I known of their presence at that time around a series of deep water caves just a few miles offshore, I might have been tempted to give that a go instead of chasing marlin and kingfish. But I didn't. And judging by the levels of international protection given to the species and the outcry that might have provoked had I succeeded, I think it's probably as well.

Big Cod, Seagull outboard:   
Photo Phill Williams

First digital article – Dave Carey Pwllheli:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill and Dawn Williams Liverpool 2004:   
Photo Phill Williams

Phill Williams Tuna and Wahoo:   
Photo Phill Williams

# PART FOUR  
OTHER STUFF

PERIPHERAL ASSOCIATED ANGLING TARGETS

**Bucket List status – result**

### THE EVOLUTION OF SMALL BOAT FISHING

Back in the very early 1970's, just after I got married for the first time, I was persuaded by one of my new neighbours Fred Bell to get organised and broaden my angling horizons by joining the Leyland & Farington Boat Angling Club.

Having taken his suggestion, I was almost immediately introduced to Loch Ryan in south west Scotland, and more importantly, to local angler-skipper, the late great Davy Agnew. A meeting that would have important implications for this section of the book.

What this would ultimately do was lead my practical angling in the direction of total self sufficiency through small boat fishing, which was very much in its infancy at that time.

Trailed boats back then were mainly small open displacement designs, invariably powered by seagull outboards, towed on rusting none galvanised trailers, and in that regard, my first outfit was no different.

How could it not be. Choice at that time was extremely limited, besides which, my mentor Davy Agnew chartered from a sixteen foot clinker built mackay viking powered by twin seagulls. An outfit choice I would kind-of follow a few years later with a GRP mackay viking of my own powered by the same amount of power, but in the form of a single Johnson outboard.

This would ultimately provide myself and Steve Lill with a quality of fish and of fishing that was head and shoulders above that which we have today, despite all the current advances in boats, engines, and technology.

My encounter with Davy Agnew up at Loch Ryan also spawned another strand to my angling life. In 1984, in conjunction with another long-time small boat fishing pal Brian Douglas, I got the green light from BeeKay Publishing for the first comprehensive subject specific book on small boat fishing ever to be written, entitled 'Dinghy Fishing at Sea', which I recently had a flick through for probably the first time in a good twenty years.

I have heard it glowingly described in the same way I have described some of the classic articles from Clive Gammon, Brian Harris and the like in the next section, which truly is an exaggeration beyond exaggeration. Those articles and our book are not even in the same league.

An archive piece, maybe. A classic, never. If anything, it now looks like an A5 version of some of those antiquated black and white fishing articles, the presentation of which I am often so critical of. But one very important thing it does do is demonstrate how far all aspects of boats, boat fishing, and technology have progressed.

Technological advancement and changes in boat design were just about starting to creep in by the mid 1970's. Initially we had nothing more technically advanced than a seafarer spot the ball echo sounder which was a flashing light on a circular calibrated dial indicating approximate depth.

Our first VHF, and one of the first I was aware of in small boat fishing use on my patch at the time, was a hand held 3 channel affair boasting a 1 watt output for local line of sight chatter, and 5 watts for distance work such as the coastguard, much of which was cancelled out by the fact of it having such a small dumpy aerial.

Once we'd worked that one out, a cuddy top aerial was fitted which improved things no end, shortly after which we started to see the first multi-channel fixed VHF units appear.

These were as much statements of wealth as they were pieces of communication kit, because with so few other people having them, there was nobody else around to talk to anyway.

Today of course, you wouldn't dream of putting to sea without one. Even the lads fishing from kayaks have access to waterproof submersible handsets.

Proper echo sounders were the next 'toy' to really catch on, particularly amongst the early pioneers of dinghy wreck fishing in the Liverpool Bay area such as Dave Devine and Ken Mitchell, who would also regularly be seen towing a magnetometer behind the boat as they tried to pin point the exact position of wreck marks bought in as bearings from the Admiralty.

These days you can pick wreck coordinates up online. Every man and his dog knows where these marks are and can find them with a repeat accuracy the likes of which was something akin to a sci-fi movie back then.

We were still in the dark days of Decca, where sets had to be rented at great cost and used by over-laying existing charts with the green, purple and red lane configuration that took a maths degree to master, on top of which, the land based signals were unreliable and could be affected by natural factors such as atmospheric pressure and rain.

As for the sounders, these printed onto paper with a red hot stylus burning the sonar marks onto it. Expensive to buy and expensive to operate, on top of which, you always had to have extra rolls of paper and a spare stylus handy, which, like the old fashioned gramophone needles, sometimes needed to be changed to get a meaningful result.

As you can probably imagine then, we were up against it. The odds of finding fish and accurately repeating visits to precise marks were well and truly stacked against us. But, as I've already said, and this is not me putting on my rose tinted glasses here, we regularly caught more and bigger fish back then despite the poor odds.

Perhaps not in the same mix, and certainly not some of the species we enjoy today such as smoothhounds along the Lancashire coast, which are quite a recent phenomenon. Imagine then how much better it might have been with today's outfits searching for yesterdays fish. Still, by increments, slowly we were getting there.

Digital sounders were unfortunately still some way off, and when they did first arrive, were so poor you would be forgiven for thinking that the seabed was made up of a series of steps.

It was like looking at a bar chart. No contours or bottom definition, and for a long time, no colour either. We did however get to move away from the large, cumbersome, expensive decca navigators with the eventual advent of the Navstar. Well, sort of.

Navstar wasn't cheap. But it was small and compact, and for the first time ever, it displayed in latitude and longitude. Unfortunately, this was little more than a conversion from the problematic land based decca signals previously mentioned, with all their frailties. Just a little more user friendly.

At the same time, boats, outboards, and trailers, were also being dragged screaming and kicking into the modern era. The first none displacement trailed boat that I can remember being used by anglers was the thirteen foot CJR. A short, blunt, high sided full cathedral boat, usually powered by something 'as big' as a thirty hp two-stroke outboard.

Looking at them these days you would shudder. But they opened up a whole new world back then. The ability to go more than a couple of miles from base and still have time to fish.

I actually owned one of the later short cuddied versions, which I had at the same time as the larger mackay viking, and as such I am well placed to make a objective comparison of the two concepts.

The traditional displacement design it was argued had better sea keeping capabilities. But had it. Unlike the full cathedral which slammed and banged, it rode a good sea well on to the bow, then rolled like a pig at anchor in a beam on swell, and was a nightmare in terms of balance when two of you needed to be at the same side together to deal with a good fish.

In the CJR, you could walk around anywhere on its flat deck and it stayed as steady as a rock. But the noise at anchor and the battering while under-way bow on into a sea was something else, the latter being particularly worrying in light of the flimsy way many of these boats were put together at that time.

In construction terms, most of today's boats are about as good as it gets. Their layup is what it needs to be where it needs to be, with heavy duty woven roving matting sandwiched between the lighter chopped strand matting layers, plus additional strengtheners for added support.

Back then, everyone was jumping on the band wagon, either through ill-informed home build from scratch, which many of us at some point or other did, or from equally ill-informed boat building companies popping up here, there, and everywhere, throwing together wafer thin poor quality hulls which were a very real danger to be out in.

I remember going out fourteen miles to fish a wreck from Ainsdale aboard a supposedly top of the range eighteen foot boat owned by a friend of mine Pete Sharples, the make of which I won't name and shame, as the company still I think trades today.

Conditions were such that we shouldn't have sailed, but we did, luckily as it would happen in the company of a smaller second boat. And we took an absolute battering. So much so, though we didn't know it at the time, that the cuddy bulkhead which went below the floor level but wasn't bonded to the hull, had been hitting the wafer thin hull as it flexed in the rough sea and had punctured it.

The first we knew about it was when the under floor cavity had filled and water began oozing into the fishing well though the bolt holes holding the pedestal seats in place.

Luckily, Pete had installed a bilge pump, and thankfully the rubber mounted windows didn't get also pushed through by the pounding swells or we would have really been in trouble. None the less, it was still a long worrying journey back to the beach.

Then when you got back to the shore, in anything other than mirror calm conditions, you had to face the nightmare of trying to get the boat back onto its trailer, the design and construction of which, in conjunction with the poor layup of these hulls, plus a lumpy sea lifting and dropping the hull on the rollers, was equally likely to put a hole through the bottom of the boat.

Cathedral hulls, and later the much better riding semi-cathedral design, both of which had spawned the concept of long trailer skid supports sitting under the arches of the hull instead of tiny upright rollers, finally helped make getting boats re-trailered far less problematic.

Trailers with proper rotating rollers and self centring cradles were still light years away, as was galvanising as standard, plus wheels, hubs, and bearings, designed specifically with heavy boats and marine environments in mind.

Internally rusted trailer box sections which eventually snapped while winching on, or juggling red hot wheel nuts heated by seized up bearings on the hard shoulder of the motorway, which when you dropped them melted their way into the asphalt and had to be chiselled free, were all a regular part of the small boat fishing experience back in those pioneering days.

Similarly, winch cables snapping and whip-lashing back, wheels that had sunk in the muddy sand being ejected from their tyres as the trailer was worked first one way then the other in an attempt to free it, and cheap unreliable hitches jumping off the car's tow ball.

Incidents of one sort or another were the rule rather than the exception. If it wasn't having over-taking cars flashing their lights and pointing back alerting you of smoke pouring from the hubs, or tyre blow-outs due to all that weight being focused through one point of a poor quality tyre, it was swampings as you tried to paddle through the breakers due to having no power trim and tilt, or struggling to get the anchor in by pulling the boat beam on to the tide while side anchoring in the days before the Aldernay ring.

Small boaters today literally don't appreciate the difficulties their pioneering predecessors had to endure, which is why I felt that this brief resume of some of those early experiences might both educate and amuse.

But, as I've said, those of us who experienced some or all of that catalogue of difficulties and more are now having the last laugh. For as good as you may think some areas, some marks, and even some species currently are in terms of productivity, none of it compares to the satisfaction in terms of achievement, discovery, and quality of fishing we enjoyed back in the 1970's and 1980's, and probably never again will.

### JOURNALISM TARGET

**Bucket List status – result**

Angling journalism has long been a passion of mine. Not so much from the perspective of being in the public eye, because I hate being on photographs, as anyone who has ever seen my trade mark miserable face in the magazines will probably well appreciate.

I am however a creative person at heart who likes nothing better than to get up early in the morning, park myself in front of the computer with endless cups of coffee trying to wake up while all around me sleep, and put my thoughts, findings, and aspirations out there into the public domain in the hope that others might benefit.

In the early days - the self taught no prior experience learning phase if you like when I can assure you nothing comes easy, particularly to an educational stray as I was in my school years, to actually get something published was an achievement, and a very occasional achievement at that.

Every article accepted rode on the back of several that weren't, which you had to take on the chin and learn from, or could have learned from, if only rejection came with some measure of constructive criticism to help avoid making the same mistakes again.

But, editors being busy people, and in particular the case of Peter Collins who back then headed up Sea Angler, some simply wouldn't like you for whatever reason, despite never having met you, and as such would tell you nothing, making guidance of any sort very difficult to come by.

So you would plod on, learning by a combination of default and reading what other people got published, until eventually getting a handle of sorts on what it was that editors were looking for.

Probably my biggest step forward came not from the right words, but from my illustration. Few if any of the all time greats I either met or fished with, such as Clive Gammon, even owned a camera, let alone took pictures. In many cases their descriptive writing was so good you could conjure up suitable imagery in your own head without the need for pictures.

But endless pages of print unfortunately doesn't draw in potential spending browsers in places like WH Smiths. Good illustration on the other hand does, and magazine editors were well aware of that fact, even back in the days when black and white pictures looked little better than ink poured onto blotting paper.

You can't beat a big eye grabbing catch to stimulate the urge to read on and spend money. So investing in a quality SLR camera certainly helped me, followed later by a second for transparency work when the occasional colour page started to creep in.

And the rest as they say is history, leading up to digital where we find ourselves today. No more waiting for colour transparencies to come back from the processors only to have the disappointment of not a single one of them good being enough to use.

The digital age has well and truly seen off disappointments and set-backs of that sort, and in that regard, I did a bit of the pioneering leg work there too, having the first ever fully digitally illustrated fishing article published of a wreck fishing trip out of Pwllheli aboard 'Judy B' skippered by Dave Carey.

This was a pre-planned article trip sanctioned by my then boss Jim Whippy, who at the time was editor of Boat Fishing Monthly. As usual, I covered the trip on colour transparency film, but also took along an early days 3.3 megapixel digital camera which I used to duplicate the coverage in the hope of building a digital library for the days when this medium would eventually become the norm.

On the Monday morning, I mentioned this to Jim and asked whether he could use it, to which he replied he didn't know, but if I put the pictures onto a disc and sent it through with the transparencies he would ask the publishers, who amazingly said yes. And so in 2001, the first full digital fishing article was published in BFM.

Some years later, before smart phones with their onboard high resolution cameras hit the scene, I also had the first article illustrated on a mobile phone camera in 2010, again in Boat Fishing Monthly, and again from Wales, this time fishing Holyhead Deep aboard Gethyn Owen's boat 'My Way'.

As you might expect, initially in the very early days, I was happy to get anything published anywhere. But with success comes bigger objectives, and when the opportunity presents itself, obviously you make the progression upwards, which usually comes as a stepped affair covering a lot of different, and in many cases now extinct magazine titles.

So much so, that when I started to think seriously about drawing up the tick list which would eventually become my bucket list and the basis for this book, I got to thinking how satisfying it would be to target having something published in every sea angling title, which as far as I am aware I have managed, plus as many of the various freshwater titles as I could provide material to of a suitable standard beyond simply having it there just for the sake of it.

Books then become an evolutionary next step in that process, though until now, with just the one under my belt, and with having had so much else on the go including my research and historical archiving, time has tended to steer me away from that particular medium.

Dinghy Fishing at Sea written in conjunction with Brian Douglas back in 1984 is my official 'claim to fame' there as they say, though I did do quite a bit of work on the Dorling Kindersley Encyclopedia of Fishing published in 1994, plus the illustrative work for two game fishing books written by Dr. Malcolm Greenhalge entitled Trout Fishing In Rivers, and Lake, Loch & Reservoir Fishing, both published in 1987.

And now here we are with the bucket list, which I hope is as much historical as it is practical, published as a free digital download in the hope that it gives something back to a pursuit that has given me so much, and as with the audio recordings detailed in the appendices, another piece for the national archives which future researchers can dip in to get a taste of what fishing could be like, if only the legislators would get their act together.

Associated audio interview numbers: 101.

### AUDIO INTERVIEWS ARCHIVE

**Bucket List status – result**

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which has been lack of technical resources as much as neglect or lack of will, far too many opportunities to record and archive angling history have already been lost.

Many of the so called all time angling greats whose names and contributions are still revered are no longer with us, and while their thoughts and example lives on by way of their writing, think how much better it would have been to have had those lessons delivered verbally straight from the horses mouth.

Not only that, but also put into the context of the time to give some feeling of historical basis against which to compare what we have today, and measure how much we have progressed on the technical front, while at the same time regressing in terms of quality of fish stocks.

With that in mind, I set myself the ambitious target of recording two hundred audio interviews, including as many of the top names and most meaningful contributors to angling across its entire spectrum as I could still find, while at the same time trying to anticipate potential big names for the future and grabbing them too.

My only regret is that the idea came to me way too late to catch up with more of those most deserving of having a microphone poked in front of them. But as the list will hopefully show, not in all cases (see appendix 1).

Not that long ago, this type of project would have been difficult at best, and impossible at worst. Let's not forget that even now, old obsolete video equipment doesn't stretch that far back in time, with the first consumer camcorders entering the market place as recently as 1983, and digital cameras arriving on the scene a good decade or so later.

Small digital voice recorders only became widely available around the turn of the century. So humping around huge, heavy, poor quality recording equipment back then, had anybody even thought to use it for archive purposes, was hugely prohibitive. Is it any wonder then that so much opportunity has been missed.

Thankfully, that no longer needs to be the case. For even if archive minded people are not willing to invest in tiny pocket sized voice recorders and HD quality video cameras, still there is no excuse, as all the quality recording equipment you could ever want and more can now be found in a typical smart phone.

So get out there and use the technology. Take lots of pictures; video things of potential historical interest, and record conversations with interesting people on historical or controversial topics, then as importantly, archive it.

It doesn't have to be professionally presented. Lord knows, mine isn't. I'm no natural on either audio or video, as many of my efforts will testify. But it's not the interviewers contribution that matters. It's the interviewee being encouraged to contribute that is important.

All the audio interviews I have recorded have been properly archived for future researchers to access. For immediate public access, I have also put them into the podcast folder of my own website Fishing Films and Facts, which again is a none profit making opportunity for me to put something back into a pursuit which over the years has given me so much.

But my site unfortunately won't be available forever. The video's it hosts perhaps may well be thanks to YouTube. But the audio recordings, for the moment at least, have no permanent online home. Instead, these are housed in the National Sound Archive in London under the collection title C1486 – Phill Williams Angling Interviews.

The same interviews have also gone to the Angling Trust and to Angling Heritage, the later also holding copies of everything audio, video and photographic I have ever produced. And it doesn't end there.

Wales and Scotland, though for some reason not Ireland, have sound and vision archives of their own which I have also fed appropriate material into, in addition to which, most English counties also archive local historical audio-visual contributions, and they too have received copies of material relevant to them.

So there is plenty of archive opportunity out there. Not only to record, but to preserve, and I strongly urge people to do this when suitable opportunities present themselves.

Associated audio interview numbers: 100.

Associated audio interview numbers: 101.

### Ph. D RESEARCH

**Bucket List status – result**

Having been offered the option of voluntary redundancy as an electrician working on the truck and bus assembly line at British Leyland in Lancashire back in 1985, I was suddenly presented with an opportunity to go into full time university education, which was something I increasingly felt I wanted to do.

Unfortunately, if that happened, having been a complete waste of space at school, unlike the usual age group going on from A-level college to university, in my case with no relevant qualifications, I was going to be disadvantaged to the point that even if I could get on a course, I would need to be learning at two levels simultaneously.

At the same time as trying to absorb that which would be thrown at me in university lectures, I would also need to learn basic biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and statistical analysis on the hoof, then integrate the two strands in order to keep up and eventually pass the requisite exams at the end of the first year if I was to progress.

A tall order in anybodies book. But first things first. With the proposed redundancy payment calculated at just about sufficient to keep family life ticking over for the duration of the proposed three year course expected to be signed off in March of 1986, I at least had a slight advantage over that years intake from the A-level colleges, by virtue of the fact that I could apply many months before they would get their results, which is exactly what I did.

The next problem was that I needed to find a place within daily travelling distance of home, which meant Lancaster, Preston, Manchester, or Liverpool. So, being a scouser by birth, I decided that Liverpool would be my first port of call.

I don't know why, possibly because it sounded potentially easier to get in to, but I chose to try Liverpool Polytechnic first (now Liverpool John Moores University), where I was put through to Dr. Pete Wheeler in the department of biology, who having listened to what I was looking to do, invited me in for a face to face interview.

What I didn't know at that time was that he was in a position to ignore any lack of formal academic qualifications and allow in a handful of mature students like myself, who after being vetted, if they appeared to be in a good position financially, and determined enough mentally, could have a shot at completing the three year course.

During that interview, it seems I must have managed to convince him of that, as I was given the first official place on that years intake list scheduled to start in October. Enough time we both agreed for me to do a self-help crash course in all the relevant science subjects up to foundation level.

Well, that was the theory. But as ever, true to past form, fishing had some say in how a great deal of the interim time period was spent, contributing greatly to one of the toughest years I can ever remember in my life.

Thereafter it wasn't too bad. Having caught up to the others, and in years two and three learning stuff from scratch in common with the rest of the intake, it got progressively easier to the point where I came out of the process with a B. Sc (Hons) 2:1 in applied biology, which was exactly what I needed to progress to the second phase of my plan, which was to go forward into Ph. D research.

Being married with two early teenage children obviously meant that I also had other responsibilities. Miraculously, by the time I had taken my final exams in 1989 and was awaiting the results, I had just enough money left to fund another couple of months.

Certainly not enough to get me through to results time. So job hunting became a priority, though for fall back security reasons, I also provisionally signed up for teacher training at Liverpool Edge Hill to give me a year of grant support which was still available during the late 1980's.

Around the same time, while reading the angling papers, I spotted an advertisement for a vacancy working on coarse fish breeding research with a new organisation to be known as the National Rivers Authority (NRA), which was about to be split off from the various water authorities by the government as part of its water industry privatisation scheme.

After much careful and concerned consideration I applied for it, was interviewed, and amazingly, at the age of almost forty two without my final results being available, I got the job, which was a bitter-sweet moment in that it meant while I would have an income, I was never going to be able to do research work full-time.

Still, there was always part time. But either way, I would first have to find a suitable project, then a financial backer, which several frustrating years later I finally managed to do with Dr. John Manning of Liverpool University as a potential supervisor, the Environment Agency as the National Rivers Authority had then become as a financial backer, and with the three spined stickleback as a study subject for my research.

Before looking in detail at the project itself, there are two fundamental preparatory pieces of information I would like briefly to put on to the table, the first of which is to remind people of the fact that physical adaptation to environmental change by living organisms is one of the corner stones of Darwinian evolution.

Organisms best adapted to survive changing conditions through favourable helpful genetic mutations, when they pass these traits forward to their offspring, these can over time become incorporated into the population where they first occurred, giving those individuals inheriting them either a better shot at surviving the changes in question, or the opportunity to take advantage of any new niches which may open up to them as a result.

By the same token, physical changes which are not heritable, and therefore cannot be passed forward, even though they may result from environmental change or stress, play no part in the evolutionary process.

I make these points because as will become apparent when I get into more detail shortly, in terms of viability, my proposed project could have gone either way, so the evolutionary implications were very clearly there.

Interestingly, one particular survival adaptation I did come across in sticklebacks was that in rivers where predation from other larger fish was a constant threat, increased length of the pelvic fin spines was almost universal, as this trait would make any individual having it that was subsequently taken by a predator extremely difficult to swallow, and therefore more likely to be ejected.

Now for the research project in summary.........

Most animals and plants exhibit symmetry in some form or other. In the case of anglers and most of the fish we seek to catch, this comes when an imaginary line is drawn from the top of the head to the feet (or in the case of fish, to the tail) along the centre of the body, the left side of which is in effect a mirror image of the right.

I say most fish, because flatfish such as plaice and turbot which have deliberately settled out on the bottom on one or other side of their body do not conform to this pattern, instead having what it known as directional asymmetry.

Most other animals, insects, fish etc. have left-right symmetry and invest a great deal of effort into maintaining it, for obvious reasons. Were that not the case, there would be very severe consequences similar to that which some disabled people unfortunately experience, except that out there in the wild there are no support workers looking out for them, and either predators or an inability to compete sufficiently well for food would critically disadvantage those individuals to the point where they would quickly be taken out of the equation. It's as brutal and as extreme as that.

Obviously, the ideal is to have perfect symmetry, and as such, a great deal of effort is put into keeping this under the tightest of genetic controls. This however comes at a cost in terms of energy, with the greatest measures of effort going to those areas with the greatest ability to directly affect survival.

As an example, for running purposes, it doesn't matter much if your left little toe is marginally smaller than your right little toe. But it would matter considerably if your left leg was shorter than your right, particularly if a predator attacks your family group and quite literally picks off the slow one at the back as everyone attempts to flee.

As Darwin put it, 'survival of the fittest'. Quite literally in this case, which as cruel as it might sound, in the broadest evolutionary terms, is what keeps wild populations healthy. It's the law of the jungle.

There is however another strand to all this. Fitness isn't just about the ability to escape predation. It's also about adapting to changing environments such as through the series of genetic mutations that led to say the giraffe evolving a longer neck and being able to reach leaves which its relatives could not reach at times of food shortages, and was therefore able to out-compete them in the survival race.

Studies of animals and plants which have symmetry clearly show that traits like the little toe example mentioned previously, do not always show perfect symmetry. It's a trade-off between effort and energy input by the body, versus degree of disadvantage suffered.

In other words, if it isn't life threatening, then that effort can be better diverted elsewhere, which is often what happens throughout the natural world. It's all down to prioritised importance, with some level of relaxation of perfect symmetry being tolerated.

Symmetry loss of this type is invariably driven by a range of potential environmental stresses, with the body tending to make sure all the fight or flight faculties are in best working order first, before investing resources into combating minor imbalances in traits which clearly won't make any survival difference whatsoever.

These imbalances, these asymmetries, are collectively termed fluctuating asymmetry, or FA, and are brought about by stress factors such noise, heat, pollution, and the like. Things which affect the body in a chronic way. In other words, problems that are life changing but not necessarily life threatening.

Understandably, as with most animals and plants, fish like to live in pristine environments. To differing degrees however, some species can quite readily live in sub-optimal environments. I almost said live quite happily, but that would not be the case as evidenced by checking individuals and populations for signs of FA, which as has already been said is stress induced, which clearly demonstrates that they do feel under pressure.

Choosing to live in a polluted stressful environment is not the same as having the ability to do so when forced to. Some fish can do it, and none better than the humble three spined stickleback _Gasterosteus aculeatus_ which can be found anywhere and everywhere from the most pristine water quality environments to the most grossly polluted.

Some situations in fact where you might wonder how they survive in terms of available food, never mind other factors, as many of the small organisms they feed on have long since been wiped out.

So much so, that when I was called to gather evidence for prosecution cases for the Environment Agency, if we found dead sticklebacks in the mortality mix, we knew we had something particularly nasty and serious to deal with, as these hardy little fish are usually always the last to go under.

My Ph. D research was to explore the potential to use FA as a tool for quantifying environmental stress in sub-lethal situations, and to see if there was any sort of meaningful correlation between the degree of that FA, and the none natural sources of stress that might be causing it. In other words, did it have any potential value as a monitoring tool for use in situations where more conventional methods simply weren't appropriate.

To understand the implications of this, you first need to understand how conventional routine aquatic monitoring and incident response is undertaken by organisations like the Environment Agency.

This is done in two distinct yet complimentary ways. On the one hand there is chemical monitoring such as the analysis of water samples to determine what pollutants might be present, while on the other, biological monitoring using macro-invertebrates to determine both the acute as well as the chronic environmental stresses present in rivers and streams, both as part of a routine program, and at the time of major incidents, to provide immediate before and after the event information to present to the courts.

Chemical sampling means filling a bottle and requesting either a specific or a suite of analytical tests be carried out. The draw back there is that unless you dip the sampling can in at the precise moment a potentially short lived but lethal slug of pollution is passing through, then it can be missed. It's as critical as that.

Invertebrate sampling done by trained biologists is considerably more forgiving, the evidence from which is presented on the basis of presence or absence. Life or death. There is no in-between.

In other words, animals you would expect to find and were previously there in a particular body of water according to its chemical composition, are either in decline, or have disappeared over time, pointing towards a chronic water quality problem. Or they can be gone altogether and suddenly, which would be an acute water quality issue that is invariably, though not always, the result of illegal or accidental contamination.

Be aware though that natural sudden invertebrate and fish kills can also result from rapid de-oxygenation leading to suffocation in the hotter summer months brought about by algal blooms.

Invertebrate surveying involves a simple technique known as kick sampling. The biologist stands in the water at a specified location with a submerged fine mesh sample net on a pole positioned immediately downstream of him or herself, then starts disturbing the bottom substrate with the feet to dislodge any small animals living in or on it, which are carried by the current into the net.

In the case of routine kick sampling, this is done at strategic points such as either side of an input of interest, or downstream of a tributary.

Pollution incidents however are different. The lead investigating officer, which was my role, would first determine the primary point of input, then have both kick samples and chemical samples taken either side of it while going about the business of back tracing the source by means of drainage plans, dye tracing, chemical comparisons, and the like. Sometimes even water divining rods.

The presence and absence of invertebrates either side of the point of input is invaluable on two levels. Firstly it shows what should, and indeed would have been present had the pollution incident not taken place. Secondly, based on what animals are missing or found dead on the downstream side, which in severe cases could be everything for many hundreds of yards, conclusions can be drawn regarding the severity and even composition of the offending material, which has often long since gone through by the time any investigation gets under-way.

Without going into too much detail, different types of kick samples will have different durations, but typically these will last between one and three minutes. The sample is then released into a large observation tray with a few inches of water in it where the animals are identified and counted, resulting in a designated score being arrived at.

In most cases, identification will be down to genus level. There are however a few specific instances in which species too are important, such as _Baetis rhodani,_ which is a mayfly larvae that is more tolerant of lower dissolved oxygen levels than would typically be the case for other mayfly species.

The higher the combined score, the better the water quality. So animals which need high levels of dissolved oxygen and pristine conditions, such as mayflies and stoneflies, score higher than species which can tolerate very low dissolved oxygen levels and gross pollution.

Organic pollution tolerant animals include chironomid midge larvae and tubificid worms, both of which have the ability to store oxygen in their bodies using haemoglobin, which is the reason why, like blood, they are bright red. And accordingly there are all measures of tolerance in between such as water louse, freshwater shrimps, beetle larvae, and the rest.

Pollutants fall in to two basic categories – those which are of themselves toxic, such as cyanide, and those which suffocate such as raw sewage.

Not suffocation in the sense of clogging up an animals gills, though that can happen with some fine particulate materials in suspension. More a case of suffocation by virtue of being organic in nature and providing 'food' for the decomposer network such as bacteria, which then explode in numbers and therefore respiration loading, in turn depriving other animals of dissolved oxygen to take from the water to be able to breath.

Under normal circumstances, the number of bacteria present at any given aquatic location will be in balance with the environment, where they are sustained by the decomposition of dead animals and plant material brought about by natural causes.

Put an organic pollutant into the water such as silage liquor, or milk from dairy washings, both of which are hundreds of times more polluting than raw sewage, and you can very quickly have a major situation on your hands.

Bacteria reproduce by splitting themselves into two units which each 'half' can again do every twenty to thirty minutes, dependant on species. Due to food availability, any given environment can only support so many bacteria, which is what keeps their numbers in check. Suddenly increase that food supply and you trigger a population explosion.

For ease of calculation, let's say that bacteria divide in response to increased food availability every thirty minutes. One bacteria becomes two, then becomes four, and so on. At that rate, in ten hours a single bacteria can result in excess of one million offspring.

Now imagine them all doing that at the same time. Overnight there will be literally billions of the things, and all requiring oxygen to survive, which deprives everything else in the water of the ability to breath.

Fish can in theory swim away from the problem, though rapid onset inputs taking them by surprise, coupled to their inability to 'think' the problem through and make their escape, often sees them taken out anyway. Invertebrates on the other hand can't escape, which is what makes them such a vital source of data to present to the courts.

But why is milk classed as an extreme aquatic pollutant. It's a food, and it's exactly that designation that makes it so lethal in this context. Milk has evolved to be quickly broken down for nourishment and growth, therefore bacteria feeding on it, or other inputs such as silage liquor which is full of sugars, find it particularly easy to utilize, and as such have an absolute feeding and breeding field day. The ultimate party.

As has been said, traditional biological sampling relies solely on presence or absence. Limited inferences can also be made from community mixes. But that's about as subtle as it gets.

Clearly then, what was needed, was some way of accessing stress related data from living animals whose quality of life is very poor, but still they are hanging on in there full of information accumulated over their life-time, which typically for a stickleback is around three years.

That's a lot of potential information if it could be accessed, particularly as it would allow investigators to look back over time using a single sampling event by collecting different age groups which would not be possible using other approaches. Something that can readily be done by measuring the asymmetry in traits that are not important for out-right survival.

Sounds simple. But first there were a number of very fundamental questions which needed to be answered to see if any of the data generated would be of value, the most important of which being, was there a direct and holding correlation between loss of symmetry (FA) and declining water quality of such an accuracy that one would automatically imply the other.

Heritability and reversibility were two further fundamental considerations. If FA can be inherited after water quality has improved, then it would no longer be there as a result of that individual or populations stressed environment.

Similarly, if it could be reversed should water quality improve, then the information wouldn't be stored as a record of stress over a life-time. Only when satisfactory answers to these questions were available could the viability of the project be assessed.

Fortunately, in research science, a negative result, while it might be disappointing, can still be a useful result, and is most definitely a valid demonstration of research ability and technique.

Investigating the reversibility question was going to take at least a year, and the heritability question, which involved running the reversibility experiment on to the next generation, would take the best part of a further year beyond that.

In the meantime, I was still in a position to start running the main experiment, which if it turned out not to show the correlation I was looking and hoping for, could still be written up. But first things first. I had to construct a pond in my garden to house a sample of sticklebacks taken from the worst possible water quality fish holding scenario I could find.

Based on routine EA biological surveys, this was a small stream on Merseyside listed as the poorest Class 4 habitat from which I hand netted one hundred mature sticklebacks.

That sample was then split across two buckets, one containing anaesthetic solution, and the other, water from the stream itself for transportation back to their new home in my garden which had been allowed to mature, and according to ongoing weekly chemical analysis, was a Class 2 environment where the 'fortunate fifty' would be left alone for a year.

The other fifty in the anaesthetic bucket were later preserved in alcohol to provide baseline data against which to compare the pond experiment one year on.

With that aspect of the project under-way, the next big job was to explore the potential for extent of asymmetry, and to determine which would be the best traits to use to get consistently accurate data from.

For this, a pilot study was required looking for changing levels of FA at locations with good, bad, and intermediate water quality as determined by routine EA monitoring data, and all on the same watercourse so as to be sampling what was essentially the same base population.

At this point I still needed to ascertain the best traits to use, so I took measurements left and right from as many paired traits as I could find, eventually settling on the nine best ones to be measured using thirty fish at each sampling site, and as I had hoped, these did indeed show that symmetry loss initially appeared to be greatest where water quality was poorest.

On that basis then, though still obviously pending the results of the heritability and reversibility experiments, the long hard slog of identifying fifty suitable sites, hand netting thirty specimens from each, then laboriously measuring the same nine traits for the mathematical and statistical analysis later could proceed.

The fifty sites in question needed to have an even spread, not only in terms of water quality ranging from pristine to grossly polluted, but according to historical EA data, they also had to have been that way of at least the previous three years to ensure that all fish sampled had been constantly subjected to the stresses of that particular location, which I have to say was very much easier said than done, particularly at the pristine end of the scale. Consequently, a great many potential sampling sites ruled themselves out.

After their year in the garden pond, and with the Class 4 FA results to hand from the 'unfortunate fifty' providing the reversibility baseline comparison data, the fifty fish at liberty in the pond were netted out.

By this stage unfortunately, probably due to predation either by birds or by cats, their numbers had declined to the low forties. However, on the plus side they had bred. So the offspring were put into a separate bucket for reintroduction later where they would be left for a further year, again with ongoing weekly water chemistry analysis to ensure the pond remained at Class 2 in terms of water quality for the duration of the heritability experiment.

Meanwhile, as was the established sampling pattern, fish retained for FA measurements first went into an anaesthetic solution, then into laboratory alcohol for keeping and ultimately having their nine traits measured and FA levels determined for comparison to the fifty measured immediately after capture a year earlier.

The hope was that the collective result from each of the two groups would be the same, indicating that despite improvements in water quality in the pond, FA cannot be reversed.

Initially however, the data did not appear to show this. Despite the water quality improvement in the pond, the asymmetry differences were greater, which initially had me scratching my head. Then I got to thinking that this might be because of the extra year's feeding and growth.

To cut a long story short, the one year older fish were typically twenty percent bigger than the other half of the sample, which mirrored the percentage increase in FA, establishing the fact that while FA might be halted in extent with water quality improvements, it cannot be reversed. Affected traits as they grow with the rest of the body continue to reflect the same measure of symmetry difference.

As for the heritability experiment, that also went according to hope and expectation. When the offspring were eventually netted out to provide FA data, despite the fact that their parent population had come from a grossly polluted Class 4 watercourse, these fish having been born into a Class 2 environment and lived for a year with the reduced stress that brings, had asymmetry levels typical of what a Class 2 water should impose on them according to FA measurements taken at other Class 2 sites.

I now had the green light to start analysing the data I had been gathering for a good two years by that stage from the proposed fifty sites, which while the full data gathering exercise still had quite some way to go, did at least might give me a feel for the direction things were taking. In fact, after a great deal of time inputting and analysing data from my minitab statistical analysis package, this looked very promising indeed.

Plotting FA against water quality showed a startlingly accurate mirror image to the point where I could confidently say that by taking a sample of sticklebacks from any given location, it should be possible to say with great certainty what the water quality at that site was.

Moreover, by sorting the sample into different sizes and inferring these to be representative of different year classes, it should also be possible to estimate at what point a problem had started if it was more recent than the age of the oldest fish.

So no more presence or absence decisions. The data these fish were recording within themselves could finally be down-loaded, interpreted, and used to make meaningful statements of a sort which could not have been previously made, and in situations where historical routine biological and chemical data was lacking.

Recognising that as a field tool this was a much more onerous job than simply dipping a sampling can into the water or identifying and counting the results of a kick sample, the next step was to try to refine it into a much more workable user friendly analytical tool.

To do this, I repeatedly ran the statistical analysis on a reducing number of traits, obviously keeping those traits offering the most consistency and greatest average discrepancies until the last, all the time looking to maintain a statistically significant result.

This finally proved to be the case with a roughly halved workload being just as strong a predictor as the much lengthier more detailed investigation, making the use of fluctuating asymmetry a much less wieldy job than previously, while at the same time, a more versatile and more accurate predictor of environmental stress than macro-invertebrate sampling and water chemistry analysis.

Something which could be applied to any type of situation, freshwater or marine, providing a suitable baseline data set was first established for an available species found at that location with tolerance of a wide range of environmental extremes.

To put the project in to some sort of meaningful perspective, it's time to trot out a few facts and figures from the results. But before I do, I need to say a few words about the results presentation.

Firstly, there are three variations on measuring and presenting FA data. The most obvious of these is to subtract the lower of the two measurements from the higher and take it as it is. This is known as absolute FA. Alternatively, you can take the same measurements and consider them as a percentage value, which is termed relative FA.

The problem with these two approaches is that often data sets need to be rejected on the basis of statistically abnormal distribution, which is the bane of the field biologists life.

For this reason, John Manning and I decided to try the novel approach of using the residuals of regression analysis which creates its own mean, and therefore always gives a normal distribution.

The down side of this is that it is the weaker of the three approaches, but on the up side, if the correlation between the historical EA data and symmetry loss is strong enough, which in my case it was, a statistically significant result could still be obtained, which ultimately proved to be the case, allowing all of my measurement data sets to be used.

The next variable to factor in is the way in which the results of macro-invertebrate kick samples are scored and interpreted.

Again, there are three different approaches in regular use. The Trent Biotic Index (TBI) which is derived from a consideration of the effects of reduced community diversity and progressive loss of certain groups of clean water fauna; the Biological Monitoring Working Party (BMWP) index, which assigns each family a score between one and ten according to its sensitivity to organic pollution, and finally, Average Score Per Taxon (ASPT) which is derived by dividing the BMWP score by the number of scoring families counted.

Of the three, ASPT is regarded as being the most reflective and therefore most reliable. Consequently, plotting ASPT against regression residuals as shown in the graph below for the full fifty sites I investigated, gives the best correlation with which to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of FA as a monitoring tool.

The regression equation is

MEAN RESIDUALS = 0.1934 – 0.01553 ASPT

Predictor | Coef | StDev | t | P

---|---|---|---|---

Constant | 0.19340 | 0.01076 | 17.97 | 0.000

ASPT | -0.015535 | 0.003022 | -5.14 | 0.000

S = 0.01883 R-Sq = 35.5% R-Sq(adj) = 34.2%

Analysis of Variance

Source | DF | SS | MS | F | P

---|---|---|---|---|---

Regression | 1 | 0.0093704 | 0.0093704 | 26.43 | 0.000

Error | 48 | 0.0170154 | 0.0003545 | |

Total | 49 | 0.0263857 | |

|

As a result, in 2004 I received my Ph. D from Lord Owen (formerly Dr. David Owen, MP) at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, and can now say that contrary to the opinion many people have of students, amusingly, I am perhaps one of the very few in history who actually did do FA for seven years, and still came away with something to show for it.

A full copy of the thesis entitled Fluctuating Asymmetry As A measure Of Environmental Quality In The Three Spined Stickleback _Gasterosteus_ _aculeatus_ [L] by Phillip Williams 2004, is available in the archive of Liverpool University. It is also available online at Fishing Films and Facts.

### A LESSON FROM HISTORY

At the bottom of the title page is a short adapted quote based on a genuine quote attributed to both Rudyard Kipling and to Cecil Rhodes, my version of which reads 'To be born a fisherman is to win first prize in the lottery of life'. This should read 'To be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life', both versions of which are true.

Taking my version one step further, let me also add that to be born a fisherman and to have been lucky enough to have lived at a time of relative peace and prosperity after two world wars, as well as at a time when there were still plenty of fish about to be caught, is like buying another lottery ticket and winning the big one for a second consecutive time. How lucky then am I.

As an evolutionary biologist, I am very well aware of how much we as human beings owe to a whole range of catastrophes and other lesser calamities which have befallen our planet and its numerous earlier inhabitants over the millennia, ultimately paving the way for our appearance some 200,000 years ago. So loss of species, even of whole families of animals and plants, is a natural part of how evolution works, without which we wouldn't be here.

Most scientists are now happy to accept this concept, both as a mechanism and a necessary process for advancement, which makes me wonder why some then jump onto the extreme conservation band wagon of wanting to save anything and everything from the process they profess to embrace, locking life up as a frozen snap-shot in time, as if to deny the process they acclaim the necessary tools to continue its as yet unfinished business. Human beings are not the ultimate product of evolution. It's not so long ago that _Homo heidelbergensis_ was in exactly the same position we are in now. Where is he now??.

They (the tree-huggers) would argue, and with some justification, that much of what is currently driving evolution or species destruction forward does not come from natural sources, and therefore needs to be resisted.

Deforestation, the plunder of the seas, and global warming driven by ignorance and/or greed, hardly fall within the natural order of things, despite the fact that some of these and other similar problems have played their part in a variety of ways at many different times for more than four billion years.

The current wisdom says there have been five major mass extinction events which have helped pave the way for life as we see it today. Responsibility for these is spread across such variables as volcanic activity, oxygen deficiencies, sea level changes, climate change, and extra-terrestrially sourced impacts such as the one which brought about the end of the dinosaurs, triggering the rise of the mammals some 65 million years ago, though dinosaurs it has to be said were in trouble by that stage anyway. The asteroid impact merely dealt them the final blow.

A not unreasonable question to ask at this point might be "What constitutes a mass extinction, and what possible relevance could this have to a book on fishing anyway". Well, a mass extinction event is defined as a period in the Earth's history when abnormally large numbers of species disappear simultaneously within a very short geological time-scale, the most severe of which is known as the 'great dying', occurring at the end of the Permian period some 252 million years ago, when 96% of all species disappeared.

Looking back at the fossil record, the 'big five' and many lesser calamitous events can readily be picked out, despite the fact that 'sudden' in a geological context can be a longer time span even than modern humans have been in existence. A very important point to make, because other than an instant catastrophe such as an asteroid strike, real time 'sudden disasters' should take so long as to slip by un-noticed at the time, until some other 'intelligent being' in the future checks out the fossil record currently being laid down.

The palaeontological record very clearly shows us that in real time, you don't see a mass extinction coming. Yet here we are equally clearly in the throes of what many scientists agree is an unequivocal sixth mass extinction event. One in fact which defies all the rules in that we not only know that it's happening, but can also see it happening, and at pace. Then, as with the plight of the European bass, with the exception of the usual vocal minority, we all throw our hands up in the air under a blanket of general apathy and say "what the hell".

Modern humans were forced to leave Africa around 60,000 years ago when dry arid conditions had their numbers down to around 2,000, and our own extinction was on the cards. Some took a route up into Europe, while others followed the coast around to Asia, eventually reaching Australia some 40,000 years ago, and via a land bridge from Siberia, the America's less than 20,000 years ago, all of which dates just happen to coincide with the loss of all the large animal species which had previously thrived at those locations when left to their own devices.

New Zealand followed, and in more recent times, the colonisation of smaller islands, many of whose long standing indigenous inhabitants were also quickly lost, the most recent and certainly most famous of which being Mauritius, where Portuguese and later Dutch sailors saw off the dodo through the predators they introduced, and by eating it themselves. The first sailors landed there in 1598. By 1755 the dodo was extinct.

So with total disregard, as a species, we instinctively exploit the environment and it's other inhabitants to destruction with a live for today sod the future arrogance. It's what we've always done, and no doubt it's what we will continue to do, despite the best scientific evidence saying that it simply cannot continue in this manner. And never more so than in the oceans of the world where we literally can't see what's going on, and as such, most people simply don't give a damn.

Fishery ministers ignoring warnings from the experts they employ to advise them, typifies the way in which a strong vocal minority in the shape of the commercial fishing industry run the show. Yet using the government's own statistics generated by their Sea Angling 2012 survey, in hard cash terms, it seems that commercial fishing contributes considerably less to the wealth of the nation than angling does, but still has the ear of government, both at home, and more importantly, at European level where the real damage is being done.

As has already been said, by definition, mass extinction events are extensive and sudden, though not so sudden as to be observed within an individual life-time. Yet I can look back over my 50 years of sea angling, which doesn't even qualify as the blink of an eye on a geological time-scale, and confidently point a finger at several examples of change, most of which, though not all, fall into the negative category.

What I've tried to do in Part 1 which looks at home waters species, is wherever possible, include some flavour of the history of species and fisheries according to my experience of them, some of which makes very stark reading indeed. And while my wanting the plunder to stop might fly in the face of my earlier jibe at the 'lets save everything' conservations, from an angling perspective, something needs to be done and fast.

In terms of losers, inshore cod fishing in the Clyde sea lochs, along Lancashire's Fylde Coast, and off Balcary immediately come to mind. Offshore cod fishing in the North Sea out from Whitby is another example, not to mention the common skate which was once regularly found in many parts of the UK and is now struggling to forge a come-back along Scotland's west coast, plus of course the well documented plight of the bass.

As a point of balance, I should also mention winners, which for the moment seems to be spear-headed by the ever increasing range of the Smoothhound, and to some extent, also the extension in range of the black bream, though it should also be noted that the bream appears on the struggler's list too in terms of many of its old traditional haunts along the Sussex coast.

And let's not forget the lesser spotted dogfish. How could we these days, though chance would be a fine thing. At times there seems to be little else available to catch in some areas. So the term 'winner' is perhaps a touch inappropriate in that context, with most other species falling below the transition point between hanging on in there and just about doing okay.

Back in the 1990's, research scientist Edward Wilson published a statistically supported current extinction rate prediction across all life forms of three species per hour. This equates to a staggering 27,000 per year. Now, less than thirty years later, that figure has been revised to several hundred per day, with the caveat that the current free for all, particularly in terms of over-exploiting coastal seas and increasingly the deeper oceans, must cease immediately to have even the remotest chance of dragging things back from the edge of the abyss.

Another survey done by the World Wildlife Fund states that populations of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles have declined by 49% since 1970, and that species such as mackerel and tuna which are relied upon for food, have fared even worse with 74% drop, adding that fish are being caught faster than they can reproduce.

It's a demonstrable fact that industrialized commercial fishing typically reduces biomass by around 80% within fifteen years of commencement, and as technology improves, this will increasingly move away from continental shelf exploitation to the open ocean, where large species such as marlin and tuna are already in trouble.

One of the audio interviews linked to this book (No. 114) is with Dr. Ruth Thurstan who has published a number of papers on historical commercial pressure. The use of otter trawls started to catch on in Britain around the 1820's, at which time it was towed under sail. Unfortunately, accurate records were not kept until 1886, so a range of interviews leading to witness statements done at the time for the intervening period is all we have to go on, an extracted example of which for the north east of England points to a perceived 64% decrease in white-fish stocks within the interviewee's career.

Accurate records kept between 1867 and 1892 show this trend continuing, with a statistically supported decline of 66%. Based on this, plus of course actual observations, by the 1880's, even trawler owners were openly calling for area closures and for protected nursery areas and spawning grounds. Sound familiar??. And now more than a century later, at a time when despite diesel power and advances in electronic technology make commercial fishing even more efficient, it now takes a demonstrated 17 times more effort for the same result, and still we are doing no more than talking about getting to grips with problems identified by our ancestors.

As anglers, including more recent converts than myself, we have witnessed at first hand tangible measures of decline. It isn't difficult to see once you stop burying your head in the sand. Yet still the deniers, those with a vested financial interest in mopping up every last fish to the point at which pursuing the few that remain is no longer financially viable, say there isn't a problem.

For me personally, nearing the end of what has been an incredible angling journey, it's true, there isn't a problem. I won't be around to suffer the consequences. Granted, I might have fewer miles left on my clock than those just starting to fish. But in a hundred years' time when we've all gone up to the big stock pond in the sky, at least I can say I took part at the best time of all, when not only were there fish to be caught, but we also had good access to them.

A time when the wrecks were full to capacity and big cod or bass didn't only exist in photographs. No LRF for us. And now unfortunately, unless something is done and quickly, for my money at least, there is little future prospect now looming up of anything much else.

# APPENDIX 1: AUDIO INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

This archive of audio interviews with a wide range of top angling figures is available both on the website Fishing Films and Facts, and as a collection at the National Sound Archive of the British Library under Collection No. C1486 Phill Williams Angling Interviews.

The overall collection entry is <http://sami.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchdata1=CKEY7528353>

The angling collection entry is <http://sami.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchdata1=C1486{087}>

Copies are also held by the Angling Trust, Angling Heritage, and at a variety of regional and county archives according to the geographical location of either the interviewee or the interview content.

**Podcast Interview 1:** Ian Burrett, Luce Bay: Recorded in 2009. Humberside sea angler Ian Burrett loved the Luce Bay area so much that he moved home there to set up the highly successful Onyermarks charter business. Ian is also a great advocate of conservation and a founder member of SSACN.

**Podcast Interview 2:** Mick Riley, Sea Rescue: Recorded in 2009. Mick Riley, sole survivor of a dinghy angling tragedy off Lancashire's Fylde Coast talks about the events leading up to that day, the feeling of isolation and desperation of the situation, and of his eventual rescue. Given a hard time later in the press, un-justifiably as it would turn out, here he puts the record straight and tries to persuade other small boat anglers to be more safety conscious.

**Podcast Interview 3:** Gethyn Owen, Holyhead: Recorded in 2010. Gethyn Owen is an ex-Welsh International boat angler turned successful charter skipper operating out of Holyhead. A measure of that success is anglers fishing aboard his boat 'My Way' having successfully claimed the Welsh records for tope, spurdog and smoothhound, which in each case was returned to the sea alive.

**Podcast Interview 4:** Frank Bee, Morecambe Bay: Recorded in 2009. Veteran angler Frank Bee talks about his long commercial and charter fishing career, and how that influenced the charter angling scene both at Fleetwood and in Morecambe Bay. Later, when he retired from chartering, he bought himself a small boat, which amongst many good catches was responsible for the North West cod record of 42 pounds.

**Podcast Interview 5:** Phill Williams, Fylde Cod: Recorded in 2010. As a dinghy angler who was present and participated in the famous Flyde coast jumbo cod fishing era between the mid 1970's and mid 1980's, Phill Williams takes a realistic as well as a nostalgic look at this probably never to be repeated event. Many huge cod were taken very close in to Lancashire's Cleveleys shoreline. But it wasn't a case of success guaranteed, as very often there would days with little or no reward for your efforts, at times in weather and sea conditions at the limit of what the small un-sophisticated boats back then could handle.

**Podcast Interview 6:** Tony Parry, Rhyl: Recorded in 2010. Tony Parry, skipper of 'Jensen II' based at Rhyl in the summer, and Liverpool over the winter months, talks about the history and current status of both fisheries, plus his thoughts on renewable energy in the form of offshore wind farms and their direct and indirect effects on fishing and fish distribution.

**Podcast Interview 7:** Phill Williams, North Lancashire: Recorded in 2010. The top side of Morecambe Bay on into the Duddon Estuary was once alive with summer cod, plaice, tope and bass. Vast catches could be made there on a regular basis. Then it started to slip into decline. Here we look at the area in its 1970's and 80's heyday.

**Podcast Interview 8:** Graeme Pullen, Billfish: Recorded in 2010. Graeme Pullen has devoted a large portion of his life to the pursuit of huge fish, and in particular marlin. Here he talks openly about billfish species on a worldwide as well as a European basis, explaining some of the developments in both techniques and pin pointing new hot spots that he has been responsible for.

**Podcast Interview 9:** Stuart Barrett, Dever Springs: Recorded in 2011. Dever Springs trout fishery in Hampshire has a well-earned reputation for cultivating and producing big and even record sized brown and rainbow trout. Its gin clear chalk stream fed lakes also make it one of the country's premier stalking waters. Stuart Barrett from the fishery discusses a range of issues regarding big fish rearing, stocking, and catching.

**Podcast Interview 10:** Jason Owen, Pwllheli: Recorded in 2010. Pwllheli has long been a very popular summer charter angling venue, but also has a lesser known full year round potential too where it offers a huge diversity, depending on the size of the tides, which includes reef, wreck, bank and open ground fishing. Charter skipper of 'Haf Aled' Jason Owen explains.

**Podcast Interview 11:** Graeme Pullen, Sharks: Recorded in 2010. Big fish expert Graeme Pullen talks about all aspects of fishing for big sharks both worldwide and in UK waters.

**Podcast Interview 12:** Graeme Pullen, Trout stalking: Recorded in 2010. For some, stalking big trout in the gin clear still waters of Hampshire became not only a pilgrimage, but an art form. Here Graeme Pullen looks at the history as well as the techniques behind the phenomenon.

**Podcast Interview 13:** Pete Thorman, Gt Whites: Recorded in 2010. Monster fish and great white shark enthusiast Pete Thorman talks about what it was like to catch huge sharks for a tag and release scientific research program off the coast of South Africa.

**Podcast Interview 14:** Bill Pashby, Tunny: Recorded in 2010. Between the 1930's and 1950's, Scarborough was the hub of big game fishing in the UK. Here Bill Pashby recalls his time spent taking out wealthy customers fishing for giant blue fin tuna, or as he calls them, tunny.

**Podcast Interview 15:** Ron Greer, Ferox Trout: Recorded in 2010. Ferox 85 is a single species research and study group set up in 1985 to look into all matters scientific and angling with regard to wild ferox brown trout. Much has been learned about this enigmatic fish by the group over that period, not too mention the fact that its members have also taken the British rod caught record to new heights. Now in its silver jubilee year, co-founder Ron Greer talks about a wide range of subjects relating to the group and ferox fishing in the UK.

**Podcast Interview 16:** Ian Burret, SSACN: Recorded in 2010. As projects director of the conservation lobby group Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN), Ian Burrett talks about the groups history, achievements, and future aims.

**Podcast Interview 17:** Andy Bradury, Fleetwood: Recorded in 2010. As the sole charter boat left operating out of the port of Fleetwood, 'Blue Mink' skipper Andy Bradbury talks about his transition from small boat angler to charter skipper, and the prospects for visiting anglers over the year.

**Podcast Interview 18:** Zyg Gregorek, Royal and Grand Slams: Recorded in 2010. Graeme Pullen discusses tackle and tactics for the tarpon, bonefish and permit grand slam, then goes on to talk with Zyg Gregorek, the only man in history to achieve three different royal slams by catching every species of billfish, every species of tuna, and the IGFA's nominated list of nine different shark species.

**Podcast Interview 19:** John McAngus, Zander Introduction: Recorded in 2011. John McAngus is the last surviving member of the team responsible for the controversial introduction of zander to the Fens back in 1963. A time when fishery managers could do pretty much what they wanted. Here we get the full story of what he describes as 'that fateful day'.

**Podcast Interview 20:** Wayne Comben, Langstone: Recorded in 2010. Greaeme Pullen joins Solent small boat specialist Wayne Comben for a days mixed fishing and boat talk out from Langstone Harbour aboard his 17 foot wilson flier.

**Podcast Interview 21:** Neil French, Littlehampton: Recorded in 2010. Greame Pullen interviews Littlehampton charter boat skipper Neil French about the prospects for visitors to the Sussex port, and for information on the techniques he uses to get the best out of what is available.

**Podcast Interview 22:** Mick Duff, River Mersey: Recorded in 2011 Over recent years, the River Mersey, both inside during the winter, and outside over the summer, has earned itself a well-deserved reputation for being one of the most consistent sheltered boat fishing venues in the country. Here Wirrall small boat club member Mick Duff gives us a guided tour.

**Podcast Interview 23:** Mick Duff, Peeler Crabs: Recorded in 2011. Arguably, the top bait on the sea angling scene is peeler crab. Unfortunately, it has something of a mystique surrounding it, particularly in terms of long term keeping and having it ready to order. Here small boat expert Mick Duff spells out the whole process of trapping, holding and bringing peeler crabs on.

**Podcast Interview 24:** John Rawle, Uptide Fishing: Recorded in 2011. As the co-inventor of uptide fishing along with Bob Cox back in the 1970's in and around the Thames Estuary, Essex charter skipper John Rawle explains the history of this highly successful shallow water boat fishing technique, and how to get the best out of it in terms of tackle, terminal rigs, and approach.

**Podcast Interview 25:** John Rawle, Islamorada: Recorded in 2011. Essex charter boat skipper and co-inventor of the technique of uptide fishing, John Rawle takes a detailed look at both strands of his charter fishing life here at Bradwell in the UK, and Florida the USA, comparing and contrasting his US experiences in terms of fish catching and conservation to our side of the Atlantic.

**Podcast Interview 26:** Frank Shaw, Newhaven: Recorded in 2010. Graeme Pullen interviews Newhaven charter skipper Frank Shaw on a range of local topics.

**Podcast Interview 27:** Mick Riley & Phil Denham: Recorded in 2009. Mick Riley, sole survivor of a dinghy angling tragedy off Lancashire's Fylde Coast talks about the events leading up that day, the feeling of isolation and desperation of the situation, and of his ultimate rescue. Given a hard time later in the press, un-justifiably as it would turn out, here he puts the record straight and tries to persuade other small boat anglers to be more safety conscious. His RNLI rescuer Phil Denham also tells the story from his perspective.

**Podcast Interview 28:** Dick Farrer, Side Winder Trawlers: Recorded in 2011. Veteran Fleetwood trawler skipper Dick Farrer talks about his days on the old side winder trawlers running up to Iceland, both before and during the cod Wars.

**Podcast Interview 29:** Mike Roden, Game Angling Guide: Recorded in 2011. Full time fly fishing guide and instructor Mike Roden talks about fly fishing and guiding in the north west.

**Podcast Interview 30:** Chris Roberts, Salcombe: Recorded in 2010. Salcombe charter boat skipper Chris Roberts talks to Graeme Pullen about the inshore, offshore, and estuary prospects from the port.

**Podcast Interview 31:** Frank Vinnicombe, The Mako Man: Recorded in 2011. In the 1970's and early 80's, Frank Vinnicombe reputedly caught more mako sharks for his clients than every other boat and angler put together, earning himself the nick name 'the mako man'.

**Podcast Interview 32:** Martin Bray, Looe Blue Sharks: Recorded in 2011. Martin Bray, as did his father Jack before him, operates the tackle shop and one time boat booking office on the quay at Looe in Cornwall which was the hub of shark fishing in Britain, adjacent to the headquarters of the the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain. Then gradually, things slipped into terminal decline.

**Podcast Interview 33:** Zyg Gregorek, Anglers Paradise: Recorded in 2011. Zyg Gregorek owns the luxury multi-lake and accommodation complex known as Anglers Paradise at Halwill in Devon. Here he talks about the initial concept through to its completion and its prospects for the future.

**Podcast Interview 34:** George Wilson, Highfield Lakes Fishery: Recorded in 2011. George Wilson is the manager of the widely acclaimed Highfield Fishery at Hambleton on Lancashire's Fylde Coast. Here he talks about the construction and management of the fishery.

**Podcast Interview 35:** Dave Builth & Rodney Burge, Amble: Recorded in 2011. Dave Builth skippers the charter boat 'Upholder' out from Amble, while Rodney Burge was her previous owner. Both are members of the Amble lifeboat crew, and in their different ways, both know much regarding the history of sea angling along this part of the Northumbrian coast.

**Podcast Interview 36:** Andy Owen, Port Dinorwic: Recorded in 2010. Andy Owen operates the angling catamaran 'Morgan James II' out of Port Dinorwic on the Menai Strait where he has two contrasting options to offer his clients. The first of these is deep water wreck fishing out in The St. Georges Channel, the other being inshore reef, bank and open ground fishing for a vast array of popular species including bream, bass and tope.

**Podcast Interview 37:** Dave Chrisy, Bait Digger: Recorded in 2011. As a bait digger for many years, Fleetwood based Dave Christy has a vast reservoir of knowledge on the distribution, gathering and keeping of marine worms for angling bait which he shares with us in great detail here.

**Podcast Interview 38:** Nathan Lumb, Pole fishing: Recorded in 2011. Pole fishing is a very quick and precise approach to catching fish in a freshwater match situation. Here, still water pole match fishing expert Nathan Lumb takes us on a step by step journey through the technique.

**Podcast Interview 39:** Tammy Fisher, Female Charter Deck Hand: Recorded in 2011. Female sea anglers are quite a rarity, even in todays enlightened times. Women crewing or skippering offshore charter boats in the UK are almost unheard of, making Tammy Fisher, who works aboard 'Katie Louise' fishing for tope and cod along the Norfolk and Suffolk coastlines respectively, something of a different find. A short but interesting insight into the work and plans of this 21 year old lady sea angler.

**Podcast Interview 40:** Dave Taylor, Aberystwyth: Recorded in 2011. Aberystwyth has long been a favourite sea angling destination, particularly back in the 1970's and 80's when porbeagle sharks were present in good numbers. As with the rays, shark numbers unfortunately have gone into decline. But there have been winners too, particularly the black bream. And throughout that time, Dave Taylor who skippers 'Aldebaran' has been taking parties out looking for them all.

**Podcast Interview 41:** Dr. Ed Farrell, Smoothhounds: Recorded in 2011. Dr. Ed Farrell discusses his research work showing conclusively that despite claims to the contrary by anglers and fish recorders, only one smoothhound species, the starry variety, is found in northern European waters.

**Podcast Interview 42:** Rod Taylor, Coarse Fish Farming: Recorded in 2011. Coarse fish farming as a science was introduced to the UK in the wake of the Toxteth riots in the 1980's for river re-stocking, particularly around the Mersey Basin, wherever and whenever water quality would allow. At the forefront of perfecting these techniques was Rod Taylor, who explains both flow through as well as recirculation fish breeding and keeping.

**Podcast Interview 43:** Phill Williams & Brian Douglas, Fylde Cod: Recorded in 2011. As dinghy anglers who were present and participated in the famous Flyde coast jumbo cod fishing era between the mid 1970's and mid 1980's, Brian Douglas and Phill Williams take a realistic as well as a nostalgic look at this probably never to be repeated event.

**Podcast Interview 44:** Phill Williams & Brian Douglas, Fenit: Recorded in 2011. A story of an exploratory dinghy trip by Brian Douglas and Phill Williams to Tralee Bay in Co. Kerry Ireland which produced a wide variety of ray species including the rare bottle nosed ray with specimens of 140 pounds.

**Podcast Interview 45:** Mick Duff, Dinghy Six Gilled Sharks: Recorded in 2011. Surprising a lot of people, a six gilled shark in excess of 1000 pounds, the first ever grand plus fish from around the British Isles, was caught off the Irish port of Kilkee in 2009. But years before that, dinghy angler Mick Duff had already found their whereabouts.

**Podcast Interview 46:** Jeff Carroll & Bill Gibson, Char Trolling: Recorded in 2011. Plumb line trolling a string of lures over deep water for char on Coniston in the Lake District is a tradition that goes back many generations. Here modern day practitioners Jeff Carroll and Bill Gibson explain the process and talk about the life history of the char.

**Podcast Interview 47:** Ian Heaps, Ex World Coarse Angling Champion: Recorded in 2011. World and European coarse match angling champion Ian Heaps talks about his glittering career, his angling techniques, and his school of angling at Holgan Farm in West Wales.

**Podcast Interview 48:** Eric Hope, Lakeland Guide: Recorded in 2011. Cumbrian angling guide Eric Hope from Hemmingways at Keswick talks about his guiding throughout the Lake District, and the fishing he offers for pike, perch, salmon and wild trout, including some huge ferox trout.

**Podcast Interview 49:** Dave Lewis, Namibian Shore Sharks: Recorded in 2011. Dave Lewis and Phill Williams look back at what was arguably the most productive shore angling trip ever made which produced in excess of 15,000 pounds of fish to almost 300 pounds from the steep surf beaches of Namibia's skeleton coast.

**Podcast Interview 50:** Jamie Soons, Kayak Fishing: Recorded in 2011. Kayak fishing at sea is one of the fastest branches of fishing in the UK. Here kayak regular Jamie Soons talks the subject through thoroughly from buying and kitting out to monster common skate.

**Podcast Interview 51:** Dave Lewis, Guided Sea Angling Trips: Recorded in 2011. Over recent years, fully inclusive organised angling adventures to all corners of the world have become an integral part of the modern sea fishing scene. One such a guide is sea angling journalist Dave Lewis who talks here about the scope, potential, and strong points of the trips he accompanies offered by Anglers World Holidays.

**Podcast Interview 52:** Mick White & Jack Shine: Recorded in 2011. Jack Shine is an Irish shore fishing legend. Sadly, he died in 1997, but his legacy of over forty porbeagle Sharks caught from the shore has never been repeated, not even with one fish, and possibly never will be. Towards the end of Jack's life, Mick White spent quite a bit of time in his company documenting his achievements which he details and shares with us here.

**Podcast Interview 53:** Bob Fitchie & Phill Williams, Salmonid Slam: Recorded in 2012. Back in the 1970's, Phill Williams and Bob Fitchie set out to catch a salmon, sea trout, brown trout, rainbow trout, brook trout, grayling, schelly, and ch,ar each all in the same season as a salmonid grand slam. Bob Fitchie actually completed it becoming arguably the first person ever to do so.

**Podcast Interview 54:** Andrew Alsop, Welsh Sharks: Recorded in 2011. Both Milford Haven charter boat skipper Andrew Alsop and the port itself are fast making their names on the shark fishing scene. Already the British blue shark record has been beaten and released as one of a number of fish topping two hundred pounds, with hundred pounders a regular occurrence, and fifty sharks taken in a single day.

**Podcast Interview 55:** Dave Beecham, Canaries Carp: Recorded in 2011. Because the Canary Islands have no natural lakes nor indigenous freshwater fish species, local farmers rely on dammed reservoirs for crop irrigation purposes to which they have introduced carp to prevent weed growth. In the high temperatures there these fish have thrived and grown big. Ex-pat UK carp angler Dave Beecham guides visiting anglers on all-inclusive trips to these lakes where fish in excess of thirty pounds are regularly caught.

**Podcast Interview 56:** Ronnie Campbell, Loch Etive: Recorded in 2011. Much of the development of the common skate fishing in the Firth of Lorne, and of the spurdog fishery in Loch Etive is down to local charter boat skipper Ronnie Campbell, who discusses the fishery, its problems, and his regrets at the way the Loch Etive side of things are going, citing his own responsibility in the way things have turned out.

**Podcast Interview 57:** Steve Ball, Fylde Coast Shore Fishing: Recorded in 2012. Fylde Boat Angling Club shore section member and local shore match angler Steve Ball takes us on a tour of the Fylde coast, suggesting features, marks and tactics along the way.

**Podcast Interview 58:** Mick McCallum, England Shore Fishing International: Recorded in 2012. Blackpool shore match angler Mick McCallum charts his progression through the ranks to representing England and winning a gold medal at the home internationals, then on to the world championships, before becoming totally disillusioned with the squad, its south coast bias, and its politics. A no holds barred discussion of the entire topic, plus a wealth of tackle and tactical information used to get him to the top.

**Podcast Interview 59:** Dougal Lane, Guernsey: Recorded in 2012. The Channel Islands have long been an extended trip stopover for south coast charter boats. Here local commercial skipper/charter boat skipper Dougal Lane looks in detail at the wreck, reef and bank fishing within easy reach of his base on the island of Guernsey. He also gives an insight into finding and positioning over wrecks, plus details of a dramatic rescue.

**Podcast Interview 60:** Steve Quinn, England International Boat Squad: Recorded in 2012. Ex-England International boat angler Steve Quinn looks at the whole boat match angling scene, as well as providing a wealth of top quality tackle and tactical tips which he used to get into, maintain his squad place within, and ultimately win medals with, including gold, as well as becoming European cod champion.

**Podcast Interview 61:** Clive Gammon, Reflections: Recorded in 2011. Out of all the sea angling greats who helped shape today's sea angling scene by helping its transition from the old ways of the 1950's and 60's to those of the 21st century, Clive Gammon is the one held in the highest esteem by the vast majority of people.

**Podcast Interview 62:** North West Boat Club History: Recorded in 2012. Much of what we commonly see in small boat fishing clubs today has its origins in pioneering work done by a handful of Lancashire small boat anglers more than forty years ago. Here we explore the history of the Fylde, Wyre, and Blackpool boat angling clubs, with founder members from each.

**Podcast Interview 63:** Stuart Cresswell & Willie Kennedy, Tagathons: Recorded in 2011. As a response to the Scottish government demanding hard data demonstrating the need for marine conservation, the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network (SSACN) organised a spurdog tagathon on Loch's Sunart and Etive. So popular was this, and so revealing in terms of factual data that it has now become an annual event along with others at Luce Bay for tope, and Crinan for common skate added to the diary. Here event organisers Stuart Cresswell and Willie Kennedy discuss both the concept and the events.

**Podcast Interview 64:** Steve Quinn, Coarse Fishing Legends: Recorded in 2012. Ex-England International boat angler Steve Quinn actually started his angling career as a coarse match fisherman competing, and doing very well, against some of the all times greats such as the Ashursts, Ian Heaps and Ivan Marks. Here he gives his recollections of what these legends were actually like as people as well as anglers.

**Podcast Interview 65:** Alan Sharpe, Boat traces: Recorded in 2011. Ex-England international boat squad member Alan Sharpe discusses his trace design and manufacturing business. Terminal tackle items are also discussed at length, along with his time in the England squad.

**Podcast Interview 66:** Morris Clarkson, Spintec Salmon Lures: Recorded in 2012. Morris Clarkson of the Ribchester based workshop Spintec has been hand making bespoke salmon lures since the 1950s, including the flying C, devon minnow, and blair spoon. Quality not quantity is the company motto. He also regularly fishes with these lures on the River Ribble for salmon from where he has taken in excess of two hundred fish. Both aspects are discussed here in detail, along with a history of lure making in the UK.

**Podcast Interview 67:** Les Hall, Cod Wars: Recorded in 2012. The last of the three cod wars between Britain and Iceland left the UK fishing fleet banned from within Iceland's two hundred mile unilaterally declared territorial limit, and our home ports such as Fleetwood doomed to terminal decline. But before the retreat, there were many skirmishes and incidents, some of which were never reported. Here Fleetwood trawler chief engineer Les Hall recounts some of them.

**Podcast Interview 68:** Stuart McCoy, Barrow-in-Furness: Recorded in 2011. Renewable energy such as that from offshore windfarms is supposedly green energy, yet here we have the story of Barrow-in-Furness charter boat skipper Stuart McCoy being prevented from picking up customers by energy company DONG, and of problems caused by electromagnetic fields from their power cables affecting fish, in particular tope.

**Podcast Interview 69:** George Hemseworth, Fresh v Frozen Bait: Recorded in 2012. Throughout the famed Fylde coast jumbo cod era, besides going out in his own small boat rod fishing, Blackpool angler George Hemsworth also set lines on the beach on the winter night tides, taking cod far bigger than anything ever taken on rod and line, and always on fresh bait, to the point that he wouldn't even try if only frozen bait was on offer.

**Podcast Interview 70:** Dave Roper, World Coarse Fishing Champion: Recorded in 2012. Against the odds, using maggots under a waggler from a conventional rod and reel outfit, Preston pole and bloodworm expert Dave Roper beat the Italians into second place on their own patch fishing the River Arno in Italy to be crowned 1985 world individual coarse fishing champion.

**Podcast Interview 71:** Dr. Dave Shultz, Weather Forecasting: Recorded in 2012. Understanding and interpreting weather forecasts, while it may well be a science, and an inaccurate science at that, is crucial to all who put to sea in boats, including anglers. Here Dr. Dave Schultz explains in layman's terms how to get the best out of the weather information available.

**Podcast Interview 72:** JJ McVicar, Plymouth Wrecks: Recorded in 2012. Though not the man who sparked off angler interest in wreck fishing back in the 1970's, Plymouth skipper of the 'June Lipet' JJ McVicar is most certainly the best remembered name from that period, and rightly so, for his exploits with massive catches of record breaking pollack, coalfish and anglerfish

**Podcast Interview 73:** Justin Anwyl, Bass Fly Fishing Part 1: Recorded in 2012. Though popular in the USA, saltwater fly fishing is still in its infancy in the UK. Here, in a 2 part interview, Chichester bass fly fishing guide Justin Anwyl gives a very detailed and all-inclusive insight into the subject from the British perspective.

**Podcast Interview 74:** Justin Anwyl Bass Fly Fishing Part 2: Recorded in 2012. Though popular in the USA, saltwater fly fishing is still in its infancy in the UK. Here, in a 2 part interview, Chichester bass fly fishing guide Justin Anwyl gives a very detailed and all-inclusive insight into the subject from the British perspective.

**Podcast Interview 75:** Simon Clarke, Wels Catfish: Recorded in 2012. Despite being an alien species, unlike zander, wels catfish have been welcomed by coarse specimen hunters, tempered by the fact that they have not exploded throughout the UK in the same way that the zander did. Catfish Conservation Group secretary Simon Clarke explores their history, habitat, and feeding requirements, and most important of all, how to catch them successfully on rod and line both in the UK and on the continent.

**Podcast Interview 76:** Roger Beer, Conger: Recorded in 2012. To catch a conger in excess of fifty pounds from the shore is incredible. To catch a conger in excess of one hundred pounds from the boat is equally so. To actually catch both would be amazing. Here Devon angler Roger Beer, the only angler ever to have achieved this feat, talks about all things conger, particularly catching them from the shore.

**Podcast Interview 77:** Peter Arlott, Kennet River keeper: Recorded in 2012. The Aldermaston Mill day ticket stretch of the River Kennet has been in the Arlott family for many years. Here river keeper Peter Arlott talks about the many problems the Kennet and other rivers in the vicinity currently face from water shortages, predation, and alien species. He also discusses fishing for quality barbel.

**Podcast Interview 78:** Ian Gaskell, Fly Fishing Competitions: Recorded in 2012. Ian Gaskell, winner of the Lexus European fly fishing championship at Chew Valley gives a no holds barred detailed explanation of all aspects of competitive fly fishing using the loch style approach from a drifting boat.

**Podcast Interview 79:** Chris Ball, Surface Carp Fishing: Recorded in 2012. Carp historian and legendary surface feeding carp stalker Chris Ball discusses his favourite subject covering everything from tackle and tactics through to baits and feeding.

**Podcast Interview 80:** Kathy Barco, Florida Fisheries Commision: Recorded in 2012. Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission chairman Kathy Barco explains how state funded organisation has restored its coastal fish stocks from a very low ebb some years ago to a level which now supports a multi-billion dollar sport fishery, allowing it to justifiably call itself the sport fishing capital of the world.

**Podcast Interview 81:** Wayne Comben, Rays: Recorded in 2012. Langstone small boat angler Wayne Comben talks about the tackle and tactics required to catch his favourite fish, rays, five species of which he has caught on several occasions all in the same day.

**Podcast Interview 82:** Prof. Gerd Masselink, Coastal Engineering: Recorded in 2012. Quite often, shorelines and their fish holding features, plus water's edge conditions for small boat launching are the result of work done by coastal engineers. Sometimes these can be beneficial, while on other occasions less so. Here Professor Gerd Masselink discusses specific engineering features and their potential effects on sea angling, using examples from Blackpool and Morecambe as specific case studies.

**Podcast Interview 83:** Margatet Owen, Haaf Netter: Recorded in 2012. As always, there are two sides to every debate, and so far as salmon and sea trout are concerned, anglers think that commercial netsmen are responsible for taking far too many fish. Here salmon Haaf netter Margaret Owen talks about the sustainability of her fishing in the estuary of the River Lune.

**Podcast Interview 84:** Martin James, Life Story Part 1: Recorded in 2012. While angling journalist and broadcaster Martin James may well have originated in Kent, as the voice behind BBC Radio Lancashire's At The Waters Edge, he is well known to many throughout the North West for his probing interviews. Here, in a reversal of roles, he is on the receiving end of the questions, looking back over his long and varied angling career.

**Podcast Interview 85:** Martin James, Life Story Part 2: Recorded in 2012. While angling journalist and broadcaster Martin James may well have originated in Kent, as the voice behind BBC Radio Lancashire's At The Waters Edge, he is well known to many throughout the North West for his probing interviews. Here, in a reversal of roles, he is on the receiving end of the questions, looking back over his long and varied angling career.

**Podcast Interview 86:** Mike Millman, Legendary Journalist Part 1: Recorded in 2012. Think of the West Country and big fish from those parts, and to some extent, veteran sea angler Mike Millman will have been involved. An angling journalist for over forty years and now into his 80's, Mike looks back on the many highlights from what can only be described as the golden era of sea angling.

**Podcast Interview 87:** Mike Millman, Legendary Journalist Part 2: Recorded in 2012. Think of the West Country and big fish from those parts, and to some extent, veteran sea angler Mike Millman will have been involved. An angling journalist for over forty years and now into his 80's, Mike looks back on the many highlights from what can only be described as the golden era of sea angling.

**Podcast Interview 88:** Chris Ball, Reflections: Recorded in 2012. Carp historian and legendary surface feeding carp stalker Chris Ball discusses his early formative years and his advancement through both the weight ranks and fishery ranks up to the present time.

**Podcast Interview 89:** Chris Ball, History of Carp: Recorded in 2012. Carp historian and legendary surface feeding carp stalker Chris Ball discusses the history of the species introduction to Britain, charting its advance in both size and prowess through to Richard Walkers forty four pound Redmire record Clarissa.

**Podcast Interview 90:** Graeme Pullen, North Cornish Porbeagles: Recorded in 2012. Graeme Pullen lifts the lid on North Cornwall's inshore porbeagle sharks, then as an addendum, describes the day he and Wayne Comben caught and filmed the largest shark ever caught in British waters in May 2012.

**Podcast Interview 91:** Wayne Comben, Plaice: Recorded in 2012. Plaice are one of those species which all anglers love to catch. They are also a species which commercial fishermen prize, on top of which, when you do find them, they can be there in big numbers and are therefore vulnerable. Here Wayne Comben tells how best to approach all aspects of their catching, with a few cautionary examples of how best to ensure that they will continue to be there year on year.

**Podcast Interview 92:** Tony Bridge, Gantocks Cod: Recorded in 2012. Back in the late 1960's to mid 70's, the place to be for monster cod from a small boat was Scotland's inner Clyde, and in particular, a mark known as the Gantocks, immortalised by three Edinburgh anglers known as 'The Trio'. Then almost overnight it was cleaned out never to be re-seeded. Fishing at that time with 'The Trio' was Tony Bridge, who gives us an insight into the fishing over the Gantocks mark, and also offers up some reasons for its rapid decline.

**Podcast Interview 93:** Bill Briggs, White Water Worming for Salmon: Recorded in 2012. While it isn't held in the highest esteem amongst purist salmon anglers, upstream white water worming is not only a very skilful way of catching salmon in low water conditions, but if done properly, as Bill Briggs explains in minute detail here, can sometimes be the only way to fish on all rivers some of the time, and on some rivers pretty much all of the time.

**Podcast Interview 94:** Graeme Pullen, Carp falacies: Recorded in 2012. New comers to carp fishing could be forgiven for thinking that electronic alarms, boilies and bivvies are the key requirements for success. Well it would appear not. Here Graeme Pullen explores an alternative approach to carp which not only catches lots of fish, but often does so when the boilie brigaide don't see enough action to get them out of their bed chairs.

**Podcast Interview 95:** Sven Hille, Baltic Trolling: Recorded in 2012. Due to its brackish nature, the Baltic Sea increases in salinity with depth, and decreases in salinity the further north and east you go. As a result, anglers are able to catch salmon, sea trout, cod, pike and garfish from the same spot, on the same gear, and in the same day. Obviously these fish also have preferences. Here German angler Sven Hille lays the whole situation on the line.

**Podcast Interview 96:** Phill Williams BBC radio Lancshire: Recorded in 2012. Interview by Martin James for his BBC Radio Lancashire angling series At The Waters Edge.

**Podcast Interview 97:** Pete Shaw, Exposed Coast Kayak Fishing: Recorded in 2012. Kayak instructor and angler Pete Shaw gives a detailed insight into kitting out, handling, and fishing from a beach launched kayak along an exposed west facing piece of coastline.

**Podcast Interview 98:** John Horsey, Pike On The Fly: Recorded in 2012. Fly fishing for novel species is anglings big growth area currently, and for the most part in freshwater, that means pike. In particular, Chew Valley Lake in Somerset is the place to go, preferably with six times world fly fishing champion John Horsey who operates there as a full time guide. Here, for those preferring to do it on their own, John spells out the do's and dont's that should lead to success.

**Podcast Interview 99:** James Pinder, Salmon Perceptions: Recorded in 2012. Salmon fishing is seen by many as elitist, expensive, even snobbish, and there are many reasons why this might be so. But is it really any or all of those things. Here salmon purist James Pinder explores a wide range of perceptions and misconceptions while also delving into the politics of it all to challenge those views.

**Podcast Interview 100:** Sandy Armishaw, Angling Heritage: Recorded in 2012. Angling Heritage is a bespoke angling history repository with full charitable status, the patrons of which are Fred Buller and Chris Yates. Here its founder Sandy Armishaw explains fully what the organisations remit is, and how anyone and everyone can become involved.

**Podcast Interview 101:** Mel Russ, Sea Angler Magazine Editor: Recorded in 2012. Sea Angler magazine editor Mel Russ talks through the history of Britains most successful ever sea angling magazine, from its birth in 1972 to present, and from its early black and white days to going electronic and inter-active in 2012.

**Podcast Interview 102:** John Horsey, International Fly Fishing: Recorded in 2012. John Horsey, England's most successful international fly fisherman ever with six world championship gold medals to his credit, discusses the whole concept of international fly fishing competitions.

**Podcast Interview 103:** Alan Yates, SAMF: Recorded in 2012. Arguably, one of the most influential England shore anglers of his day and without equal on the open match circuit, Folkestone angler and Sea Angler contributor Alan Yates talks about his match angling career, and how he would ultimately become a founding member of the Sea Anglers Match Federation or SAMF.

**Podcast Interview 104:** Sid Pender, Mounts Bay: Recorded in 2012. Mounts Bay Sea Angling society is one of the oldest sea angling clubs in the country, and here its elder statesman Sid Pender, who has held most positions of office within the club, takes a detailed look at the organisation, fishing generally in the Penzance area, and how the future of Cornish sea angling looks.

**Podcast Interview 105:** Mike Weaver MBE, Wild Trout Trust: Recorded in 2012. As a founding member and former chairman of the Wild Trout Trust, Mike Weaver talks us through the formation of the organisation, its aims and its successes, plus reflects back on his trout fishing career with some insight into his thinking, tackle and tactics.

**Podcast Interview 106:** Charles Inniss, Fishing Inns: Recorded in 2012. Angling Inns were once a common feature in parts of the UK with none more famous than the Half Moon at Sheepwash in Devon run by Charles Inniss. A life long salmon and sea trout angler, Charles Inniss also ran ten miles of the River Torridge, was secretary of the Torridge Angling Association, and knows much regarding the angling history of this classic game fishing river.

**Podcast Interview 107:** Harry Whiteside, Salmon Netter: Recorded in 2012. Anglers and commercial fishermen will always be on opposite sides of the fence. But to understand any potential threat, anglers need to appreciate the commercial side of things too. This is particularly true of salmon netting. Here Ribble salmon netter Harry Whiteside talks the subject through.

**Podcast Interview 108:** John Holden, Distance Casting: Recorded in 2013. Far and away the most influential shore angler/distance caster of the past forty years has to be Essex based John Holden. A former distance record holder, casting instructor, and current stalwart at Sea Angler Magazine, here is a man who knows everything there is to know on this particular topic, and is willing to share that experience with us all here.

**Podcast Interview 109:** Robin Vinnicombe, Falmouth Mako's: Recorded in 2012. From his first mako encounter in the late 1950's up to the last ever British Mako Shark catch in 1971 which was aboard his Falmouth based boat 'Huntress', Robin Vinnicombe accounted for one in three of all mako sharks ever landed from UK waters. Now well into his 70's and wheelchair bound following a stroke, here he guides us through a detailed look at how he achieved what he did with this most enigmatic and highly prized angling shark species.

**Podcast Interview 110:** Dr. Stephen Atkins, IFCA: Recorded in 2013. In 2011, Sea Fishery Committee's, which were responsible for policing inshore fishing activities, were replaced by Inshore Fishery and Conservation Authorities with seats on those authorities being given to various stakeholder groups including angling. Here North West IFCA Chief Executive Officer Dr. Stephen Atkins explains the working of an IFCA, plus explores measures which could be employed to help boost bass numbers both regionally and nationally.

**Podcast Interview 111:** Ken Robinson, Scottish Shore Cod: Recorded in 2013. It's not that long ago that fish which would make the angling press these days, even from a boat, were regularly being caught from the shore in Scotland. Absolute monster cod in particular. Then suddenly, they were gone. Here Scottish cod record holder Ken Robinson reflects on the fishing back then at Balcary, what happened to it, and recounts the day of his record catch.

**Podcast Interview 112:** David Turner, The Last Mako: Recorded in 2013. As the captor of the last mako shark in UK waters back in 1971, and having thoroughly researched the species for his new book The Shark Hunter, David Turner tells us all we need to know on the subject of mako shark fishing.

**Podcast Interview 113:** Mike Winrow, River Ribble Barbel: Recorded in 2013. The River Ribble in Lancashire was illegally stocked with barbel during the 1970's. By the turn of the century, it was producing some of the biggest specimens in the country. Lancashire barbel fanatic Mike Winrow explains.

**Podcast Interview 114:** Dr. Ruth Thurstan, Commercial Fishing Pressure: Recorded in 2013. As anglers, we've all seen change, particularly in the numbers and sizes of our more popular fish species. But this has been going on since the 14th century. Here, Dr. Ruth Thustan looks at historical catch data and relates this to what we are seeing in terms of fish numbers today, projecting it on to what we can also expect in the future.

**Podcast Interview 115:** Phill Williams, The Target: Recorded in 2013. Back in the 1980's, Phill Williams set himself a target of 100 UK fish species, 300 worldwide fish species, a double figure wild trout, a 100 pound fish in freshwater, a 200 pound fish from a trailed boat, a 200 pound fish from the shore, and a 1000 pound fish from anywhere. In addition there was to be a British, a European and a World record fish, plus a fisheries based Ph.D. This is the story of that quest.

**Podcast Interview 116:** John Wilkinson, River Lostock: Recorded in 2013. Back in the 1960's, the River Lostock in Lancashire was devoid of fish. Now in 2013 it's full of the things ranging from coarse species to brown trout. There's even talk of salmon. Here John Wilkinson talks about the fish and the fishing, while Phill Williams explains how they came to be there in the first place.

**Podcast Interview 117:** Mike Winrow, Specimen Perch: Recorded in 2013. Perch were once a prolific fish. Then in the 1960's, shallow ulcer disease all but wiped the species out in the UK. Now nearly fifty years on, from those few resistant survivors, the perch is back. But in the process, the balance of power in terms of which fisheries have the ability to produce specimen sized perch has changed radically. Here Mike Winrow explains.

**Podcast Interview 118:** Ken Robinson, Shore Big Game Fishing: Recorded in 2013. Fishing abroad for hard fighting warm water game fish species can be a costly business if you fish from a boat or with a guide. Here shore angler Ken Robinson gives away a wealth of tips and locations for going it alone in Europe and America, with some quite spectacular results.

**Podcast Interview 119:** Mike Winrow, Gravel Pits: Recorded in 2013. For still water species of coarse fish, far and away the most productive venues in terms of individual growth, particularly for bream and tench, are gravel pits left to fill with water when extraction work is finished. Here coarse specimen hunter Mike Winrow explores their productivity and getting the best from them tactically, with particular emphasis on specimen bream and tench.

**Podcast Interview 120:** Dr. Dietrich Burkel, Scotland's First Porbeagle Shark: Recorded in 2013. Controversey has surrounded the catching of Scotland's first ever porbeagle shark by Dr. Dietrich Burkel off the Mull of Galloway back in 1971. Dietrich Burkel gives the definitive version of events which should now lay the issue finally to rest.

**Podcast Interview 121:** Dr. Dietrich Burkel, Scottish Skate Tagging Program: Recorded in 2013. The common skate tagging program that has done so much to bring the Scottish population back from near collapse is taken for granted these days. But back in the early 1970's when the species received no help or protection, even from anglers, it was a very different matter. Here Dr. Dietrich Burkel talks about how he helped set the program up, then reflects on its success over the intervening forty years with SSACN now firmly in control of the project.

**Podcast Interview 122:** Ken Robinson, North East Shore Fishing: Recorded in 2013. Ken Robinson is one of the best know shore match anglers on his native north east coast. An area of excellent fishing prospects. But equally, an area of extremes with regard to terrain and the tactics, and ability to extract the best from what's on offer. Here he discusses tackle, tactics, bait, venues and species, offering advice on how to be in with the best shot of a result.

**Podcast Interview 123:** Luke Aston, 1000 Pound Irish Sharks: Recorded in 2013. The largest verified fish caught around Britain and Ireland was a six gilled shark of 1056 pounds taken in 2009 aboard Luke Astons boat 'Clare Dragon' based at Carrigaholt on Irelands River Shannon Estuary. That said, his clients have caught and released at least three bigger fish, plus other six gills in smaller weight categories. Here Luke Aston talks about his encounters with these enormous fish.

**Podcast Interview 124:** Michael McVeigh, Irish Blue Fin Tuna: Recorded in 2013. Though they had probably been there for many hundreds of years, back in 2000, it was suddenly realised that huge blue fin tuna were running up the west coast of Ireland very close in to the shore, and that through a process of trial and error, they could in fact be caught on rod and line there. Adrian Molloy eventually took the record up to 968 pounds. The other key player in all of this was Downings charter skipper Michael McVeigh who charts the rise and fall of tuna fishing for us here off the Donegal coast.

**Podcast Interview 125:** Mike Roden, Tenkara Fishing: Recorded in 2013. The ancient art of Tenkara fishing was developed in Japan for purely practical reasons, and again for practical reasons, it has recently been introduced to the UK where it is used to exploit running water wild trout and grayling situations in a way that conventional fly fishing cannot hope to match. Here Tenkara Centre UK director and game fishing instructor Mike Roden explains.

**Podcast Interview 126:** Keith Philbin, Fleetwood Charter Boat History: Recorded in 2013. Fleetwood rose to prominence as the North Wests premier charter angling port during the 1970's, a position it held until the mid 1980's, when through the recession years of the Thatcher government, and costly fundamental changes to licensing rules, it suddenly nosed dived into decline to the point where there were no boats at all. That number has now risen to two. Here Kieth Philbin who operated two of the boats in Fleetwoods heyday talks about the rise fall of the ports fortunes.

**Podcast Interview 127:** Gerry Foote, Gerry's of Morecambe: Recorded in 2013. If you want to know anything worth knowing about angling trends, or the recent evolution of fishing across each of its disciplines, the best person to ask is one of the big players in the retail fishing tackle trade, and in that regard, few are better placed than Gerry Foote, who for many years has owned and operated the tackle shop, mail order and worldwide online tackle business Gerry's of Morecambe.

**Podcast Interview 128:** Andy Steel, England shore manager: Recorded in 2013. Ex-England shore fishing team member, selector, and manager, plus current SAMF secretary, Andy Steele talks over a range of topics regarding international shore fishing qualification, selection and duties.

**Podcast Interview 129:** Brian Crawford, Freshwater Eels: Recorded in 2013. As well as being a big eel angler and author of two books on the subject of Eels and Eel fishing, Brian Crawford has also held a number of posts within both the National Angilla Club and the European Eel Angling Association, and is therefore very well placed to talk on all topics related to the subject.

**Podcast Interview 130:** Dr. Paul Gaskell, Trout In The Town: Recorded in 2013. Why should urban and city centre streams and rivers be effluent channels or rubbish dumps, and why should potential fish habitat be deprived of that main ingredient in the recipe, the fish themselves. Here Dr. Paul Gaskell looks at an initiative he manages, aimed at bringing fish back to city centre locations through the Trout In The Town Project

**Podcast Interview 131:** James Thorburn, Tope and Spurdog Study Project: Recorded in 2013. After working as projects officer for the Scottish Sea Angling Conservation Network gathering in and processing tag recapture data from Luce Bay, Loch Etive and the Firth of Lorne, James Thorburn was offered the chance of turning the project into a full Ph.D. Here he talks about the project and its preliminary findings at the end of a day tagging out in Luce Bay.

**Podcast Interview 132:** Alex Wilkie, Everything On Fly: Recorded in 2013. If it can possibly be caught on the fly, Alex Wilkie will try for it, both in freshwater and at sea. Even fish which many think are impossible on the technique, Wilkie will still try for them and has had more than his fair share of success. Here he talks through those fly fishing ambitions and successes, with a full run down of the tackle and tactics required.

**Podcast Interview 133:** Tony Lofthouse, Fishermans Friend: Recorded in 2013. Fishermans Friend is a small medicinal lozenge produced in Fleetwood, originally to aid the fishing industry in the 1860's, but more recently as a remedy of global marketing importance in a wide range of flavours and strengths. Here MD Tony Lofthouse talks about the history of the company and its commercial fishing links.

**Podcast Interview 134:** Mike Heylin, BRFC Part 1: Recorded in 2013. Part 1 of a two part interview. As chairman of the British Record Fish Committee, Mike Heylin knows only too well the depth and breadth of the job his committee faces to drag itself into the 21st century, a fact highlighted by an array of often awkward questions, all of which he takes here in his stride.

**Podcast Interview 135:** Mike Heylin, BRFC Part 2: Recorded in 2013. Part 2 of a two part interview. As chairman of the British Record Fish Committee, Mike Heylin knows only too well the depth and breadth of the job his committee faces to drag itself into the 21st century, a fact highlighted by an array of often awkward questions, all of which he takes here in his stride.

**Podcast Interview 136:** Dave Lumley, Hartlepool: Recorded in 2013. The charter angling boat 'Famous' has operated out from Hartlepool in a number of different guises and with different skippers at her helm. Currently a purpose built Blyth Cat, here her skipper Dave Lumley looks at the fishing in this corner of the north sea, and reflects back to the boats earliest days in the hands of Tom Williams during the 1970's.

**Podcast Interview 137:** Andy Griffith, Shark Grand Slam: Recorded in 2013. It's been the best part of forty years since a mako shark has been caught in UK waters. Then Andy Griffith comes on the scene fishing with Andrew Alsop out from Milford Haven and takes a world first grand slam of a blue shark, porbeagle, and mako, all over one hundred pounds and in the same day.

**Podcast Interview 138:** Allan Everington, Pollack Fly IGFA: Recorded in 2013. Scotland's Mull of Galloway is a world class pollack fishery where numbers of excellent fish come within range of fly fishing techniques from a small boat close in to shore. Here Allan Everington, who has bettered existing IGFA tippet records for the species on a number of occasions, talks through the tackle and the tactics required.

**Podcast Interview 139:** John Inman, Canals, Squats & Nationals: Recorded in 2013. Coarse match angling, and in particular club matches on canals seems to have lost its appeal over recent times. Here canal expert John Inman looks back over his very successful time match fishing in canals, and in particular with his key bait, the squat.

**Podcast Interview 140:** John Inman, Commercial Coarse Fisheries: Recorded in 2013. Small commercial coarse fisheries and smaller numbers of anglers match fishing have led to a real change in match fishing attitudes over recent times. Here Bolton matchman John Inman assesses the value of these fisheries, and the best techniques to extract the biggest number and greatest variety of fish from them.

**Podcast Interview 141:** Wayne Comben, Threshers and Porbeagles: Recorded in 2013. In the course of just over a year, fishing from a trailed boat, Wayne Comben caught a record plus porbeagle, a record plus thresher, and along with Graeme Pullen, boated blue shark on the fly, and the largest small boat single session haul of blue sharks ever in the UK. Here Wayne relives those experiences.

**Podcast Interview 142:** Michael Salmon, Secretary BASS: Recorded in 2013. Currently in its 40th year, BASS, the Bass Angling Sportfishing Society is an organisation devoted to getting bass the species firmly re-established in a sustainable way on the UK sea angling scene. Here the organisations secretary Michael Salmon explains.

**Podcast Interview 143:** Prof. Mark Everard, Roach: Recorded in 2013. With hundreds of two pound plus and many three pound plus roach to his credit, Mark Everard is the country's foremost expert on the subject of roach angling and all aspects concerning its biology. Mark is also the author of a number of books on the subject, and joins us here to talk over all aspects of his roach fishing life.

**Podcast Interview 144:** Graeme Pullen, Blue Shark On Fly: Recorded in 2013. Two blue shark trips producing a fly caught specimen and the biggest ever trailed boat haul squeezed in between catching a monster porbeagle and a monster thresher shark, again both dinghy caught, recalled by Graeme Pullen.

**Podcast Interview 145:** Roger Beer, Shore Rays: Recorded in 2013. Shore ray expert Roger Beer discusses his tactics and tackle for catching an assortment of big rays from a variety of Devon rock marks, catches that have included shore records for both the small eyed and spotted ray.

**Podcast Interview 146:** Dick Clegg OBE, MBE, England manager: Recorded in 2013. Without doubt, Dick Clegg has been not only the most successful national team manager in coarse fishing history, but also most successful manager in any sport engaged in by participants representing this country, resulting in an OBE and an MBE to add to his many trophies and gold medal wins, all of which, along with other aspects of his life, he discusses in candid detail here.

**Podcast Interview 147:** Richard Peirce, Shark Trust: Recorded in 2013. Shark Trust and Shark Conservation Society Chairman Richard Peirce discusses sharks in UK waters, looking at the role anglers both can and do play in the science behind the trust's work. Suggestions for better handling and conservation generally by anglers is also discussed.

**Podcast Interview 148:** Alan Scotthorne, the World's Top Coarse Angler: Recorded in 2013. With five world individual titles and numerous team titles, Alan Scotthorne is without equal the greatest coarse angler in the history or international match fishing.

**Podcast Interview 149:** Sandra Scotthorne, World Champion Female Coarse Angler: Recorded in 2013. Ladies in angling are quite a rare commodity. Ladies in Coarse match angling well capable of taking on and beating their males counterparts are almost unheard of. Here five times world team gold medal winner and twice individual world champion Sandra Scotthorne takes an in depth look at the ladies international scene.

**Podcast Interview 150:** John Bamford, Friends Of The River Yarrow: Recorded in 2013. While the group, Friends of the River Yarrow formed primarily to ensure the entire environment on and around the River Yarrow in Lancashire has been restored, there is no denying that fish have probably been the main beneficiaries. It has quite literally gone from running sewer to running salmon, and stands out as an object lesson to others who may want to restore lost fisheries to their former glory.

**Podcast Interview 151:** Dave Trafford, Canal Match Fishing: Recorded in 2013. Back in the 1970's, Dave Trafford was a keen and successful coarse match angler who took a time out from angling, twenty five years in fact, before coming back onto the canal match angling scene, by which time so much had changed. Now able to compare and contrast the two era's which are a generation apart, here he takes a look at those changes, plus his current match situation.

**Podcast Interview 152:** Didier Dellanoy, French coarse angling world champion: Recorded in 2013. French 2013 world coarse fishing individual gold medal winner Didier Dellanoy offers his thoughts on his win, his behind the scenes preparation including practise here in the UK, and the current England set up during a stay with multiple world champions Alan and Sandra Scotthorne.

**Podcast Interview 153:** Paul Maris, Big Fish UK: Recorded in 2014. Paul Maris, who is one of the Essex Boys, talks here about his big saltwater fish exploits in the UK, including the biggest ever one man one day Common Skate haul which saw him constantly playing big fish for well over four hours.

**Podcast Interview 154:** Eddie Mounce, MD Fish Thailand: Recorded in 2014. Eddie Mounce set up Fish Thailand as a business while back packing after graduating from university with a degree in fisheries management. Here he talks about the wonderful fishing, the fisheries, and the future of targeting some of the biggest freshwater fish in the world.

**Podcast Interview 155:** Ally Gowans, Scottish Salmon: Recorded in 2014. Ally Gowans is arguably the most inventive and skilled angler on the current salmon fishing scene. His fly the Ally Shrimp was voted by salmon anglers as the fly of the millennium. Here he discusses this and some of his other patterns, plus the fish weight calculator, conservation, fly fishing history, and of course salmon fly fishing itself.

**Podcast Interview 156:** Paul Maris, Marlin World Championships: Recorded in 2014. Part two of a two part interview with Essex Boy Paul Maris. This episode looks at the Essex Boys big fish exploits abroad, and in particular the marlin world cup and completing the billfish royal slam.

**Podcast Interview 157:** Leon Roskilly, Mullet: Recorded in 2014. To most sea anglers, mullet are looked upon as either un-catchable or hardly worth the massive amount of effort required for precious little return. But with the right approach, that need not always be the case. Leon Roskilly explains.

**Podcast Interview 158:** Leon Roskilly, Angling politics: Recorded in 2014. Most anglers prefer to leave their hobby related politics to a small number of able volunteers who tirelessly work on our behalf. The least we could do then is support them. But to do this, we first need to understand the issues. Here Leon Roskilly explains IFCA's, MCZ's, and the Sea Angling 2012 survey.

**Podcast Interview 159:** Alex MacDonald, Redgill Lures: Recorded in 2014. The most iconic lure of the twentieth century has to be the redgill. A small rubber eel devised by Alex Ingram of Mevagissey which revolutionised the world of wreck fishing. Now a part of the Sakuma portfolio and still catching lots of fish, particularly from the shore, here Sakuma MD Alex MacDonald looks at the lure and its history.

**Podcast Interview 160:** Tommy Flower, Carp: Recorded in 2014. Carp are the 'in' fish currently on the coarse fishing scene, and while it hasn't always been that way, Tommy Flower wasn't around in the pre-boilie commercial fishing era, so who better to ask for a different perspective on the subject.

**Podcast Interview 161:** Alex MacDonald, Gilthead Bream: Recorded in 2014. Gilthead bream first appeared on the scene in the 1980's, initially as occasional migrants, but eventually establishing themselves as regular visitors to certain estuaries in the west country where a targeted fishery has sprung up tapping into their hard fighting capabilities. Here Alex MacDonald of Sakuma Tackle sings the praises of the species.

**Podcast Interview 162:** Tim Macpherson, Kingmere Bream: Recorded in 2014. Black bream and their habitat along the iconic Kingmere Rocks in Sussex are currently under so much threat that a campaign group has been set up to try to reverse the trend before all is lost. Instrumental within that group is Tim Macpherson who joins us here to explain the problem, and how both it and the potential remedies could have profound knock on consequences for other ailing fisheries around the UK.

**Podcast Interview 163:** Jim Whippy, Boat Fishing Monthly Editor: Recorded in 2014. Arguably the most widely capped England boat fishing international ever, Jim Whippy talks about his sea fishing and his time at the helm of some of the country's best known sea angling magazines.

**Podcast Interview 164:** Alex MacDonald, Sakuma: Recorded in 2014. Alex MacDonald, MD of hook designers, manufacturers and importers Sakuma, talks about all aspects of hook design, choice and usage.

**Podcast Interview 165:** Sarah Collins, GhoF: Recorded in 2014. Get Hooked on Fishing CEO Sarah Collins discusses the aims and successes of a charitable project designed to promote fishing to younger people, and in particular those with social problems.

**Podcast Interview 166:** Danny Parkins, Nocturnal Pike: Recorded in 2014. When you talk about lure fishing for big pike, probably the last thing you would expect to hear is a recommendation to do it after dark. Here pike enthusiast Danny Parkins puts the case for nocturnal lure fishing.

**Podcast Interview 167:** Danny Parkins, LRF & HRF: Recorded in 2014. Light Rock Fishing (LRF) and Heavy Rock Fishing (HRF) are two lure based techniques which have really grabbed the shore fishing scene over recent times. HRF in particular for big ballan wrasse, which regular practitioner Danny Parkins talks about in great detail here.

**Podcast Interview 168:** Dave Pakes, Commercial Bass On Rod and Line: Recorded in 2014. Commercial rod and line fishing for bass is no different to recreational fishing up to the point of selling the fish, which if all the necessary paperwork is in place, is the most sustainable method of commercial fishing out there. One other key difference is that the commercials also catch more fish, something we anglers could perhaps learn of a few lessons from.

**Podcast Interview 169:** Chris Ogborne, Bass Fly Fishing Guide: Recorded in 2014. Chris Ogborne is one of those rare people to make the grade as multiple world champion fly fisherman, then switch codes to take up guiding fly fishermen at sea. In particular for bass, though the game fishing side of things for pleasure hasn't been entirely dropped.

**Podcast Interview 170:** Brian Harris, Angling Magazine & Creel Part 1: Recorded in 2014. Ask anglers of a certain age which was the best fishing magazine ever published and most will say Creel, which later evolved into Angling edited by Brian Harris, a man who along with most of the contributors he recruited, is held in equally high esteem. Here Brian joins us for a two part interview about all things connected with his angling life.

**Podcast Interview 171:** Brian Harris, Angling Magazine & Creel Part 2: Recorded in 2014. Ask anglers of a certain age which was the best fishing magazine ever published and most will say Creel, which later evolved into Angling edited by Brian Harris, a man who along with most the of contributors he recruited, is held in equally high esteem. Here Brian joins us for a two part interview about all things connected with his angling life.

**Podcast Interview 172:** Carl McCormack, Coarse Angling Coach: Recorded in 2014. Once seen as something you might consider on say a foreign holiday, these days, more than ever before, the services of coarse angling coaches are being sought by youngsters, beginners, and people returning to fishing after a long break. Satisfying that demand are people like Carl McCormack, who besides helping his customers, has also coached his twelve year old son Callum to gold in the junior national championships.

**Podcast Interview 173:** Steve Souter, Scottish Boat Match Champion: Recorded in 2014. Steve Souter has had, and continues to have a glittering international career fishing for Scotland, where he has won, often on multiple occasions, all that has been put in front of him. But being so successful is no accident, as he explains, along with his thoughts on a range of other topics.

**Podcast Interview 174:** Neil Farnworth, CAST: Recorded in 2014. CAST North west is a Lancashire based charitable organisation set up and operated by Neil Farnworth with the aim of bringing dis-affected youngsters into education and training by using angling as a primary tool for grabbing their interest.

**Podcast Interview 175:** Terry Moseley, Disabled Angling Part 1: Recorded in 2014. Disabled in a sports accident while serving with the parachute regiment, Terry Moseley has almost singled handedly dragged the provision of access for disabled anglers kicking and screaming into the 21st century. He's also won his share of national and international medals in the process.

**Podcast Interview 176:** Terry Moseley, Disabled Angling Part 2: Recorded in 2014. Disabled in a sports accident while serving with the parachute regiment, Terry Moseley has almost singled handedly dragged the provision of access for disabled anglers kicking and screaming into the 21st century. He's also won his share of national and international medals in the process.

**Podcast Interview 177:** Dave Taylor, Off The Shelf: Recorded in 2014. With the writing on the wall for distant water trawling, back in the 1970's, the Whitefish Authority financed a number of experimental trawling trips along the edge of the continental slope looking for new fish species to eat. The last of those trips was made by the Fleetwood trawler 'Jacinta'. On that trip was Dave Taylor who talks about the experience.

**Podcast Interview 178:** Mike Thrussell, Angling Journalist: Recorded in 2014. Ever since the 1970's, Mike Thrussell has made a wide range of contributions to sea angling through magazine articles, books, TV, radio, and as an angling tackle consultant, and as such, he has had a say in the success of a lot of other anglers along the way. And being of that generation, he is also fortunate to have mixed with several of the sea angling greats of the past - something he reflects on here.

**Podcast Interview 179:** Dr. Malcolm Greenhalge, Life Story: Recorded in 2014. Dr. Malcolm Greenhalge is one of the most respected names on the game angling circuit, with particular emphasis on wild running water fishing. Here he talks about his early formative years and expresses a wide range of views in a manner best described as a real down to earth no nonsense reality check.

**Podcast Interview 180:** Dr. Malcolm Greenhalge, Fly Fishing Characters: Recorded in 2014. Behind the names accompanying books and articles in the world of angling are a range of characters which the reading public by and large get to know very little about. Here Dr. Malcolm Greenhalge enlightens us on a few of those he has come across on the game angling scene.

**Podcast Interview 181:** Paul Kilpatrick, Whitby: Recorded in 2014. After a dip in fortunes during the late 1990's, offshore boat angling at Whitby is right up there again with the best. But tactically speaking, it now bears absolutely no resemblance to what went before. Gone are the jiggers and muppets replaced now by shads, bait, and uptide fishing, pioneered for the most part by 'Sea Otter 2' skipper Paul Kilpatrick.

**Podcast Interview 182:** Tony Kirrage, Tony's Tackle Part 1: Recorded in 2014. Tony Kirrage of Tony's Tackle in Eastbourne has represented England on both the carp and the saltwater shore angling scene. He has also won the carp world championships. Here he talks openly about all aspects of his angling and business including almost going to the wall with the shop.

**Podcast Interview 183:** Tony Kirrage, Tony's Tackle Part 2: Recorded in 2014. Tony Kirrage of Tony's Tackle in Eastbourne has represented England on both the carp and the saltwater shore angling scene. He has also won the carp world championships. Here he talks openly about all aspects of his angling and business including almost going to the wall with the shop.

**Podcast Interview 184:** David Kent National Federation of Anglers & Angling Trust: Recorded in 2014. The National Federation of Anglers governed coarse angling, and match angling in particular, for just over one hundred years. Here ex-NFA Vice Chairman David Kent looks at the history of the NFA and its new role within the Angling Trust.

**Podcast Interview 185:** Warren Harrison, World record Carp Haul: Recorded in 2014. In September 2014, a trip by Manchester Carp angler Warren Harrison set the media on fire. Two carp topping ninety pounds apiece, plus others in the seventies and eighties as part of a 2.5 ton haul is the stuff of carp angling dreams, as Warren himself explains here.

**Podcast Interview 186:** Jason Owen, Charter Boat Outboards: Recorded in 2014. Recent times have seen an increasing degree of interest amongst charter boat operators in switching from inboard diesel power to large petrol driven outboard engines. Here, Jason Owen from Pwllheli discusses the pro's and con's of making the switch, and explores some of the new opportunities this should open up for him and his customers.

**Podcast Interview 187:** Mark Bowler, Fly Fishing & Fly Tying Magazine: Recorded in 2014. Mark Bowler, editor of the prestigious Fly Fishing & Fly Tying, talks about his amazing rise to owner-editor of the magazine after initial rejections and no formal journalistic training.

**Podcast Interview 188:** Bob Fitchie, Irish Tuna: Recorded in 2014. Around the turn of the century, the west and north coast of Ireland was treated to a short lived run of huge blue fin tuna with fish caught approaching a thousand pounds. Here Bob Fitchie recounts his memories of one such a trip.

**Podcast Interview 189:** Wendy Patchett, England Ladies Fly Fishing Team Captain: Recorded in 2014. Ex-England team captain and multi-medal winning fly angler Wendy Patchett talks about her life in competition fly fishing, offering a range of tips to other up and coming lady anglers.

**Podcast Interview 190:** Dr. Mike Ladle, Science & Bass: Recorded in 2014. Besides being a zoologist and fishery scientist, Dr. Mike Ladle is an acknowledged expert in the art of lure and fly fishing for bass and mullet, though other techniques are also discussed.

**Podcast Interview 191:** Chris Boagey, FRV Scotia: Recorded in 2014. Chris Boagey is deck boss aboard the Scottish fisheries research vessel Scotia. Here we discuss a range of research topics which will be of interest to sea anglers across the UK.

**Podcast Interview 192:** Dave Steuart, Coarse Fishing Legend Part 1: Recorded in 2014. Brian Harris, the renowned editor of the still highly regarded but now sadly no longer with us Angling Magazine, has described Hampshire angler Dave Steuart as the best all-rounder this country has ever produced. Here in part 1 of a 2 part interview looking at all aspects of his angling life, we explore Dave Steuart's coarse fishing credentials.

**Podcast Interview 193:** Dave Steuart, Coarse Fishing Legend Part 2: Recorded in 2014. Brian Harris, the renowned editor of the still highly regarded but now sadly no longer with us Angling Magazine, has described Hampshire angler Dave Steuart as the best all-rounder this country has ever produced. Here in part 1 of a 2 part interview looking at all aspects of his angling life, we explore Dave Steuart's coarse fishing credentials.

**Podcast Interview 194:** Dave Steuart, Discusses Kay Steuart: Recorded in 2014. Brian Harris, the renowned editor of the still highly regarded but now sadly no longer with us Angling Magazine, has described Hampshire angler Dave Steuart as the best all-rounder this country has ever produced. In addition to that, Dave's late wife Kay who he talks about here was widely regarded as the best female all-rounder the UK has ever produced.

**Podcast Interview 195:** Tim Harrison, Welsh Bass guide: Recorded in 2014. Full time New Quay bass guide Tim Harrison takes a look at bass population numbers, bass tactics, and his own pathway from leaving school without qualifications to heading up the Environment Agency's fishery department in Wales, which he then walked away from to concentrate on fishing for bass.

**Podcast Interview 196:** Chris Clark, Top England Shore Angler: Recorded in 2014. Chris Clark is in numerical terms the biggest international medal winner ever representing England on the shore angling scene, but rates his best win as one particular bronze after a farming accident threatened to leave him wheelchair bound.

**Podcast Interview 197:** Keith Linsell, Angling Encounters: Recorded in 2014. Back in the 1960's and 70's, angling journalists rarely carried cameras, and magazine illustrations were mainly line drawings or artwork. Heavily involved at that time was artist and angler Keith Linsell who as part of his job had to fish with many of the names we now regard as legends today. Here Keith reflects on a few of the those big names.

**Podcast Interview 198:** Keith Linsell, Angling Artist: Recorded in 2014. Back in the 1960's and 70's, angling journalists rarely carried cameras, and magazine illustrations were mainly line drawings or artwork. Heavily involved at that time was artist and angler Keith Linsell who as part of his job had to fish with many of the names we now regard as legends today. Here Keith reflects on his artwork, his fishing, and the future.

**Podcast Interview 199:** Brian Crawford: Power Generation. Recorded in 2014. As a race of people we need energy. That can come in many forms including fossil fuel burning, nuclear, and natural green energy. Unfortunately, each is not without its potential problems to aquatic environments. Physics teacher and IFCA member Brian Crawford has studied the implications of each and gives his verdict here.

**Podcast Interview 200:** John Quinlan: Irish Bass. Recorded in 2015. For years the Irish have lead the way in bass conservation with bag limits, size limits, and recreational only fishing. Bass guide John Quinlan discusses the politics and its implications on the Irish bass fishing scene.

**Podcast Interview 201:** Mike Thrussell Jr.: WSF. Recorded in 2015. The availability of top notch up to the minute angling information has come a long way since the introduction of the Internet. Arguably the biggest player in all of this has been the website World Sea Fishing, or WSF. Here its creator and MD Mike Thrussell Jr. talks about the concept, history and future of WSF.

**Podcast Interview 202:** Steve Yeomans: Winter Trout. Recorded in 2016. Contrary to widely held opinion, Rainbow Trout are actually a cold water species, seasonally better suited to the spring autumn and winter months. Fly fishing school instructor Steve Yeomans explains.

**Podcast Interview 203:** Mark Bowler: Sea Trout. Recorded in 2014. Sea Trout numbers in systems draining to Scotland's west coast have slumped dramatically over recent years. Here Fly Fishing and Fly Tying editor Mark Bowler discusses the implications, and arguably the main reason behind the problem.

**Podcast Interview 204:** Andy Copeland: LRF Matches. Recorded in 2016. Light Rock Fishing or LRF combines species hunting with light tackle fishing. Here LRF match angler Andy Copeland explains the tactics and rewards around his native north east coast.

**Podcast Interview 205:** Alastair Wilson: Big Fish Small Boat. Recorded in 2016. For most people, big fish in small trailed boats means at best Tope and Conger, and more likely Huss or Rays. Not over on the Irish small boat scene. Here Alastair Wilson discusses encounters with Blue Sharks, Porbeagles, Common Skate and Blue Fin Tuna aboard his Warrior 165.
