A Day of Two Halves

The weather played ball and stayed as forecast today which allowed me to get the kids out in the afternoon too. I had promised them a few hours up Sandown pier float fishing for mackerel and as Dave and I were out in the evening.......they could catch our bait - what a plan!!
We arrived up there around lunch trying to time it right for the peak of activity. There were a lot of people fishing so we kept it to two rods between four kids and let them take it in turns when a fish was hooked.
Brought back a lot of memories - Dave and I used to live up the pier doing this during the school holidays......something quite special about watching a float and waiting for it to bury itself under the surface! Catching mackerel this way on ultra light gear is great fun too....if only they grew to 10lb - I don't think I would fish for anything else in the summer!
In any case, the kids all found fish and enjoyed themselves...........and besides that, we had bait for the evening - result!

Payment in ice creams secured our bait for the evening and come 7pm we were launching the boat for another crack at the bass.
We arrived for the last of the ebb and had a mad 30 minutes taking 2 bass each before the tide started to slow....

With the tide dying back the bass went off the feed as expected and with the fading light the congers came out to play. Dave had a great fight with one of around 40lb that really didn't want to come in for a photo - probably for the best as I had an out of the blue bass hit that nearly lost me my rod! This one fought very well and came in at a shade under 6lb.....a real chunky stocky fish that coughed up a whole scad mackerel on deck!

We had a move for the flood but for one reason or another it just didn't fish.....I found one more small bass before we conceded and called it a night. A hectic start with a slow finish but with 6 bass between us it could have been a lot worse!