Day off Today....

Well I still had a day's holiday to use up before xmas and as the winds looked fairly light, albeit Easterly I thought I would take it today.
Headed out to Ryde middle around 10:00 this morning with my brother in tow and as we arrived it was pretty lumpy. With wind against tide we sat side ways on with large waves (compared to the size of the boat) giving us a good slap now and then. So with one eye on the sea and the other on the rods we sat waiting for the tide to turn to make things a little more comfortable.

A steady stream of dogs and whiting started coming to the rods keeping us at least occupied enough to stay put. 
About 30 minutes later two trawlers turned up only 100 yards to our left and started going up and down and up and down in the same spot for nearly 2 hours....tooting at each other every time they passed....if your reading, it looked like a great laugh lads. Unfortunately this didn't really have any effect on the number of bloody dogfish that were still crawling up our lines but with the tide on the turn we decided to stick it out for another couple of hours.
Better sized whiting came to the rods as the tide picked up but not a patch on the ones we were picking up last year.....and yes more dogs. Still it was keeping Joe happy!!!
By this time I was fishing big on all three rods hoping for one of those oh so illusive cod....then a better bite and a fish that actually fought for once came to the surface in the shape of an 18" bass. This was quickly followed by several more all around the same size hitting both uptide and downtide baits.
A load more dogs finished the day off and we knocked it on the head at 15:00. Not the day I had been hoping for but it definitely beats work. All but a couple of bass and whiting (for the table) were returned and to be honest I'm glad to be back in the warm.....