Mackerel Feather Rigs Revisited

I have been back over some old ground, creating some more mackerel rig videos but I felt the original needed some improvements. Hopefully the addition of new patterns and videos will make the process of tying your own a little easier and maybe I can move on to breaking some new ground or at least get out fishing.

Stop Press. 

Depressingly the Marine Stewardship Council have taken mackerel off the ‘fish to eat list’ due to the threat of overfishing to its breeding stock in the north east Atlantic. 

How To Tie Mackerel Feather Rigs (Sabiki Rigs) PT1

Here goes a bit of illustration to go with the  Youtube Video I made earlier this year.

How to tie Mackerel Feather Rigs (the Movie)

Another ‘how to’ video, this time it's mackerel feather rigs in time for the summer’s bounty of the little striped monsters.

A Testing Session

The sea is almost flat calm, the wind is a little more than a breeze and the boat is waiting on the pier steps. There are few if any days like this at this end of the year and as the boat idles away from the pier I look out into the Sound of Iona and then to the jetty over the bay where the van waits. No fishing today I am driving the island’s candle maker and a selection of candles to a Christmas fair twenty miles up the Ross of Mull.

It is late in the afternoon when I get back and the breeze has picked up but there is still a chance to get out there even if it is only for an hour’s fishing. I rush to the house and collect a lure I had given a final topcoat of resin to only yesterday and it still feels a little tacky. Ten minutes later and I am in casting range of my favourite reef.

The lure is a prototype and this is its second outing, the first a week ago ended prematurely with the diving lip snapping after a something grabbed it and took it down into the kelp. With a little surgery and a thicker lip we are back to face the fish and the kelp.
I carved the lure to look something like a juvenile pollock hoping to appeal to a large pollock’s cannibal instincts. It seems that big fish like big baits, or just possibly that small fish don’t like large baits. There are lots of small fish here and avoiding is a major problem, maybe my lure will scare them off.

On the third cast everything stops with a bag, the rod whips over as the fish dives. I keep my head realising it is diving for the kelp and pull the rod up high turning the fish sharply toward the surface. It dives again and runs in the direction of the boat; I wind the line in as fast as I can trying to keep the fish’s head up. As it nears the boat it finds some depth and bringing it to surface is almost a straight hoist of a job. A four and half pound Pollock, not bad for the lure's first victim.

I half-heartedly cast again but the thought of losing my prototype gets the better of me and besides the island’s population has shrunk this week, one fish this size could probably feed us all.

Pendulum Casting

Image Above: Pollock on home made feathers

Sunset has made its way into the afternoon and an hour’s fishing before dinner has become a race against the light. Today I was trying distance casting from my favourite rocks at the northwest corner of the island. I hand been out in the boat a couple of days ago fishing over a reef which runs parallel to the shore about 90meters out and taken a mixed bag. Getting out beyond the reef from the shore would take a bit of doing with a lure so I opted for a string of home feathers and lead bomb. Having never really fished in places where long distances where required I thought I would try out pendulum casting. It took me a while to remember the stance and swing from a DVD I had found in a charity shop but it wasn’t long before I was completely emptying my spool which was carrying about a 120 meters of braid. Once in the deeper water over the reef I hit into a shoal of juvenile coal fish and Pollock. Getting them back over the kelp covered reef wasn`t easy but I think the cleanly tied rig helped.

I was hoping some larger fish would venture in from the sound as the light dropped but it wasn`t to be. I headed back to feed the cows before it got completely dark.