All Nighter At Brook

I had been planning on an all night session for around 2 months now with some friends who I would call 'part time anglers'! We were waiting for the perfect weather window that would allow us to depart late afternoon and return the next morning. The part timers: Iain and Mark, were hard to pin down for a date and when flexibility is not on your side, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and go.
We had the use of Iain's old man's Merry Fisher 610 and got on our way late Friday afternoon. With the North easterly wind making the Solent a bit uncomfortable we opted to head on round the back of the Island and sit off of Brook for the night in relative shelter.

A pic of the needles on route:

We found some rough ground and put in the hook just as the sun was beginning to disappear - perfect timing! After helping set up rods and traces all three of us sat back and took in an amazing sun set.....

With the small tide and off shore wind we were swinging around on the anchor for most of the night which was a pain in bum. However, a few fish, hot burgers, sausages, good friends and plenty of beer made up for it! The fishing was slow with sporadic spells through the night and in all we had a dozen or so conger eels, a bass of around 6lb to Iain, a smoothound, some small tope and too many pout....some of them were big old bibs too! Mark was targeting a big eel with a whole pout and found them up to around 30lb.....in 25ft of water you really know when you have one on!

Mark with one of his eels:

Iain with his Bass:

 A selection of Pout snaffling Eels!

 

I wish I had taken a few more pictures but towards the early hours of the morning I was feeling a bit tired and drunk!
As the sun came up we started to make our way back, all at this point, in need of some beauty sleep!!