Wight Water Angling: 3 in 1

This report, as the title suggests has three catch reports rolled into one as I have been a bit busy of late to type them up individually.

Trip 1
First go at the plaice this year and every thing had been meticulously planned as usual between Dave and I. We hadn't however banked on having heavy hangovers on the morning of the trip following birthday celebrations!
A bit wobbly and not quite mentally all there, we launched my boat at Ryde and headed over to Southsea to fish the 'blocks'.
With the anchor down and a slight swell Dave looked a little green to say the least! We both took an age setting the rods up with our eyes half closed, sore heads and jippy stomachs! After probably 25 minutes we finally had our rods deployed and sat slumped not saying a lot to each other. It was at this point I realised Dave was a lot worse off than me when he duly obliged to ground bait the area with his stomach contents!
An hour in to the trip and I started to feel a bit better and started on a bit of food, while Dave carried on puking his guts up!
His ground baiting must of done the job as a few pulls registered on one of my rods.......5 minutes later the first plaice of 09 graces the boat!....keep smiling Dave!

This was followed by more ground baiting, courtesy of Dave and another plaice for me!

I think Dave did well just to operate the camera as he couldn't do the same with his rods!! After a few repetitions of "can we go back now" we gave it ten minutes which saw my final fish of the day........a bass around the 2lb mark.
After a final ground baiting, we set off back to base........my stomach was a bit tender too but I think this was from laughing so much!

Trip 2
We set off with much the same plan for the day as the previous trip (leaving out the alcohol from the night before) A very early start saw us the first and only boat at the mark. Rods deployed in double time we concentrated on the fishing in hand.

First fish up was for yours truly and made up for the early start.

Like the trip before it was fairly slow and it was another couple of hours before the next fish came aboard...

Nearing the end of the trip, Dave finally managed to open his account with his first plaice of 09!

With that it was time to head back to the compound. On route we where flagged down by some WAFI's that had managed to run their Yacht aground on a sandbank just out side the harbour. Bit of playing taxi and we had six of them ashore before we could finally go ashore ourselves. The six of them were straight off to the pub with no offer of a beer, a hand shake or even a genuine thank you.....I'll leave them there next time!

Trip 3 (today)
After taking delivery of some prime worm, we were on our way out again for more of the same. Word had obviously spread because when we arrived there was an armarda of boats waiting to greet us. Undeterred we shot through the middle and found space at our mark just as the tide was beginning to ebb.
Rods deployed and yet more boats arrived........one even decided to fish right on our anchor. As long as they don't anchor up directly down tide then I couldn't care less but you have got to question their thinking.
Half an hour in and a twitch on the rod was duly followed by the first plaice of the day along with cheering from the boat sat on our bow.

On board cooking is always a good plan when plaice fishing so we decided to bring some burgers today and set about cooking those...........the aroma wafting past all of the other boats must have been a bitch!!!.......very nice they were too.
No sooner than the first burger had disappeared another nod on the rod resulted in a better fish.

This was followed by another burger and another fish.

By this time Dave was getting a bit twitchy and told me he might as well jump in if I catch another one. Well, he didn't when no.4 came in but he looked close to tears................funnily enough the cheering from the boat behind us had stopped too!

Things slowed up so we had a move for the last hour and within 10 minutes Dave had pulled one back. I think had it not been the smallest one of the day he might have even of cracked a smile.