Fishing In Paradise with Morning tide fishing

 Dam these guys, dam them, bastards, bloody bastards, Jealousy is an ugly thing and I have it bad. Great film making, great fishing, great wildlife, great everything, go look them them up ,subscribe and share the hell out of their work.

If only they made fishing lures. The octopus from MIT

I have seen he future and scares the shit out of me, check the article below for more weird science.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603046/meet-the-worlds-first-completely-soft-robot/

Bollocks to a white Christmas, Show me the Cuda

Homemade Barracuda Lure from Mangrove Studio on Vimeo.

Seabooms a silicone alternative for soft plastics

Having taken to pouring soft plastic fishing lures in the garden on sunny days because the rest of my family do not share my liking for the smell of napalm in the morning, this looks like a decent alternative.  Seabooms.com is the kind of company I like; small, from the UK and run by a guy who gives a shit. So maybe when I have worked my way through the 5ltr of liquid PVC I am sitting on I may give the silicone a go.

Mackerel Fishing With Homemade Feather Rigs

There are those rare times when I am fishing that a fear creeps in. It is not the fear of going home empty handed but the fear that it is all a dream and in a moment the lap of the water and the tension on line will fade and I will wake up in an office with only the hum of copier machine for company.  

The lost fishing trip

Looking toward the Burg from Eilean nan damh (island of the stags) Mull, Scotland

I drove four hundred miles crossing the border into Scotland and taking the ferry to the Isle of Mull, I thought I had outran my pneumonia but there it was like a heavy suitcase that someone had chained around my neck. For the best part of a week I sat staring out of the cottage window or the windscreen onto the bay and beach while the ocean and my fishing tackle rested easy. Not fishing is hard; not fishing here is almost criminal.

At a loose end I read the guide books and some of the history of local settlements that had been emptied in the Clearances almost two centuries ago. Sad letters from old men begging to stay on the land where they were born and had made lives,  sad letters that were answered with bailiffs. While the words penned are now only a matter of historical record the voices they conjure have lost none of their power to tug at my own feelings for land and loss.
   

The empty villages still haunt the glens, un-roofed carcasses sleeping in moorland grasses or remnant hearths and stacks that have the look of giants stalled by the soft peat.

A little further up from the bay my friends are carving out at new life from that same island soil on a small croft. The first beds have been dug and the kelp collected from the beach has been laid as a blanket to rot down and replenish. 

 Their boat lies in the grass awaiting some minor repairs before it too returns to the bay a little ahead of the returning summer mackerel.  Maybe I will return but a little less weighed down with luggage. 

Gill Netting Sea Bass

Image Above: Sea Bass Caught With a Gill Net on a Welsh Beach.

The net stretched out from its anchor point at the seaward end of the jetty into shallows at the bottom of the tide. I wondered if it was sea trout they were after or bass. The net’s owner was up to his waste in water lifting the line and floats as he moved towards the ball that marked the end of its reach.  When I brought my gaze down to the sand I found almost at my feet four sea bass lying stiffly in the weak sunlight. I took some photographs and moved on.

I don’t know whether gill netting sea bass is wrong. I know I ate fish and chips for lunch and the fish tasted like cod but I didn’t ask the question so I couldn't say where it came from or if it was as endangered as the few cod who now make it into British waters are.

Image Below: The Net

Fishing the big Murky (Mersey)

Image Above: A rod at rest on the River Mersey.

Image below left: 2 Hook Flapper Rig

The tide has past exhausting itself amongst the flats and concrete elbows of the inner estuary. The deep, mud laden waters of the river pause as if contemplating their next move.

 I lean on the promenade rail in the sun feeling the warmth drain from me in the chill breeze. A line is out from a rod propped on the handlebar grips of my by bicycle. I close one eye and line the rod tip up with the corner of one of the giant sheds of a shipyard on the far bank. The tip traces a diagonal route over the cladding, down to the river and back marking a gentle breath and exhalation as the tension of each passing wavelet is transmitted through the taught line to the rod.

The  line is anchored into the riverbed by a spiked weight and a little above, two junctions carry short lengths to baited hooks that would ordinarily flap in the current, hence the name ‘flapper rig’.  I tied the rig last night as part of the preparations that have found their way into the ritual of a fishing trip. Other preparations included a trip to the tackle shop to buy line and pick brains.

The owner is never fearful of handing out advice despite the audience of misplaced fishermen that hang about ready to argue for some other rig, rod or just something else. I tell him about the tide carrying my weights off when I cast. He tells me not to let any more line out once the weight hits the water and that slack line will just act like a spinnaker giving the tide more leverage over the weight. He tells me other things as well and the stories build until only fishing and fish matter and everything else is pushed into the gaps. 

I buy mackerel from the fish counter in the supermarket and the sales assistant asks me if I am going fishing, I laugh and ask is it only fishermen looking for bait who shop here, he doesn’t answer.

I was away early this morning before the cars filled up the shopping streets hiding the takeaway cartons and cigarette butts that fill the gutters.

The river is moving again and I am reminded that I am fishing the shipping lane by the prow of a vessel that is folding back the water as it pushes on upstream.

T.I.Y. tie it yourself

Image Left: Homemade Tinsel Rig Lures (awaiting rigging)

I had day off island today and visited Oban, the nearest mainland port. As well as running errands for fellow islanders I got to visit the tackle shop. Despite spending far too much time making my own tackle I really enjoy browsing through the racks of readymade lures. It would seem that the biggest advances in mass produced fishing lures are largely limited to the packaging, I wondered if some the companies would have been better attaching hooks to the wrapper and throwing the contents away.

My real interest was in the feather rigs, not to buy them but more to check up on the competition. As I mainly fish with feather rigs and of course tie my own I wanted to see if the quality was comparable with store bought varieties and also check prices. I was a little disappointed that some of world’s major tackle manufactures were producing what could only be described as crap, but also I little happier about my own rigs. Over the last few of years I have pulled a few thousand fish out the seas around the island using home-made feather rigs so maybe it’s about time I starting making them to sell, so that is the plan.

Fishing with fixed arms

Image above. Fishing with fixed arms

The wind has not dropped below a gale force eight for over a week now, I want to go fishing and soon. Carved the lure in the above image out of pine in an attempt to stave off the boredom.

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.

Homemade mackerel feathers

Image Above: Homemade Mackerel feathers

Luckily today I found an hour between transporting people on and off the island to get in a bit of boat fishing. Realising the time constraints and the fact that a swell was still breaking heavily in the sound of Iona I stayed in the shelter of Easter Island fishing a reef that runs in a line from the island’s pier out into the sound.

No bait this time just homemade feather rigs jigged off the bottom. It didn`t take to find a shoal of baby pollock and cod. I moved into deeper water in an effort to find some large fish and struck into some saithe that were just on eating size. The real reason for the trip was to test out some rigs I had bonded rather than tied and then held with no problems even after a few encounters with kelp.

I am still waiting for a good calm day to get a little further out where the big fish live and really test some homemade tackle.

Image Below: Saithe (coal fish) caught on homemade feather rigs

Pollock Lure

I am back carving wobblers and this effort is an attempt to capture the look of a juvenile Pollock or coal fish. It is carved from pine with stainless screw eyes and will have a diving vane but first it needs a coat epoxy.Rather than a Stanley knife I actually used some professional Swiss made carving tools that I borrowed from my wife.

Image above: Drying Floats

I got back to bit of sliding float making using balsa wood that I had bought to make lures. It is a bit easier to work with than cork but still needs a lot of finishing with sand paper. The centres are once again of hollow cane and the heads have been airbrushed and then silver foil added. The foil really helps locating the float when the tide takes it some some distance especially in large waves.

Epoxy Putty Lure

Image Above: Solid Epoxy Spoon Lure

So I hand carved the 99e wobbler shown in my last post, through wired it, lead weighted and balanced it, covered its gills with foil, sprayed it with an airbrush, coated it with epoxy, added the bib and hooks. I thought I had the best lure in the world so I bought a new Abu pro-max bait caster reel, thinking I have the best lure I must have the best reel.
I have never used a bait caster so on my first cast I mess up, but I mess up using such force that my lure casts an amazing distance. I was proud until I realise the line has not gone with it and my lure was

out in the north Atlantic free and unattached. Farewell lure, you wobbled beautifully, you dived to just the right depth and surfaced so I could pull you over the weeds and tonight and for ever you will swim with the fishes.

Needless to say I have had to re-arm. This time I have made a spoon style bait using epoxy putty, lead and wire. It is flat backed and rolls from side to side on the retrieve even fluttering to the bottom when the line is let out. It can be used like a jerk bait and rises to the surface quiet easily making splashes a bit like a popper, it is really a good all-rounder.

The idea was to make a lure that had the look of a sand eel and weighed 20grams, perfect for my rod. So I weighed all the materials beforehand and adjusted them as needed. Now I have got used to my pro-max reel the lure casts like a dream and I am not sure if I will ever go back to a fixed spool reel. As for testing the lure, well I need some deeper water as we have had our first snow on the local mountain and the fish have headed out of the shallows. I may have to wait for the boat to go back in the water or make the long walk southwest corner of the island.