At last the wind had dropped on bank holiday Monday and after squaring off some garden jobs we loaded Marks new P13 and my P13 onto the car and met up with Mike in Aberaeron at Tuesday lunchtme.

The water was well flat and the sun shining ;D We launched off the beach and headed out to one of the usual marks




The plan was to plug and spin for bass on the way out, and then tie up with baited shrimp rigs to try for the bream if no bass showed up. Nothing to show for the surface plugging or bottom spinning, so we opted to tie up and put some mackeral baited shrimps down. After half an hour of nothing we went further out and tied up at a new mark - bites for the offset and Mike was soon pulling in the odd mackeral off the bottom as well as a plague of dogfish!







I managed a small pollack, and then more dogfish than I could shake a stick at ::)



Whilst Mike continued bringing in the mackeral and yet more dogs







I then had a characteristic set of bites and my rod did a dance for my first mackeral of the day; followed, much to my delight by a different sort of bite and the only black bream of the day (and first of the year for me) came up and into the supper box ;D I lost a couple more mackeral in between regular sandpaper rats.

I had a pot down on the bottom with mackeral in it to put a scent trail out for the bream, and to try for some live prawns or something bigger with claws, and had a bit of a shock when I brought it up feeling very heavy and discovered a decent size bull huss sat inside it, along with a frightened looking wrasse! As my better half likes huss, it was kept fresh for despatching later to make huss goujons :P

Mark got off the mark with his first dogfish off his new P13




and then had Mike and I in hysterics when he pulled up his first ever bull huss, and wasnt sure how to handle it :o





A scarred hand later and it was released to grow bigger ;D




It went quiet then so we went for another hour or so of drifting for the bass - one jumped clean vertically out of the water in front of me at one point but we didnt hook up with any despite trying bottom and surface lures.

We headed in after nearly 8 hours of fishing in the sun, tired but happy bunnies.




An enjoyable session, and nice to see some eating fish coming in.








Spend an hour after getting home, reading the relevant bit in the River Cottage fish book, and following the instructions on how to gut and skin the huss (not as hard as I thought it was going to be with the help of some large pliers) before removing the central spine and getting it ready to make goujons for the following days tea - a new one for the kids, but it seemed to go down well 8-)

After a couple of days back at work, it would have been rude not to have taken advantage of the still weather, so Mark and I got out again at 6pm on Thursday and spent a couple of hours plugging/spinning and bottom fishing for the bass/bream/mackeral but we both blanked - still enjoyable session though in the sunshine, fishing into dusk.

Heres hoping that this month brings more settled weather and less wind, and the bass onto the surface for some bigger sport ;)