A Summer of Varied Fishing – Justin Grapes

This entry was posted on 22nd September, 2016

With the spring over and done with, targets achieved and good fun had along the way, my thoughts turned to the summer months. I've always found the summer a difficult few months to target one particular species and, as spring drew to a close once again, I decided that I really wanted to target smoothound. I had enjoyed success in 2015 fishing off the Lincolnshire coast, with a personal best of 18lbs in last year’s season, so it was there that I headed this year.

As in previous years, I had booked a caravan through the summer holidays at a park near Skegness, which in June time is a good bet for some double figure smoothounds. With smoothound fishing, as you probably know, you need the right conditions and tides to have the most success, so I was hopeful that things would align in my favour. The time came and the week before I was meant to go the weather turned against me. The sea started to rough up with onshore winds, so, by the time I arrived the following weekend, the sea didn't look good at all. I decided to give it a go anyway. I started fishing just before low water and for the next three hours I didn't have a bite. As there was a match on beside me and I didn't see anyone else land any hounds I packed up and went for a cold beer. It's the chance you take with pre booking something, as there are a lot of things that can turn the fish off. The conditions didn't really improve over the coming weeks so I ended up selling my crab to a good friend to let them have a go instead.



After that weekend I had another couple of attempts for the tench, as the conditions were colder then normal and there hadn't been much hot weather so the fish could spawn. Once again luck wasn’t on my side and unfortunately I didn't have any joy. However, since I had enjoyed two doubles in the spring, I really could not be disappointed; in fact I was over the moon. After a couple of weeks of scratching about, myself and my fishing partner came up with a plan to targeting a big river roach. After a bit of planning and asking a few top anglers about the stretch we were going to fish, we gave it a go in the long evening sun after work. We caught fish from the off but nothing like what others were catching, so we went back to the guys for some more info and to ask what we were doing wrong. It seemed mainly that we were fishing the wrong tide, as the flood tide pushed along the bank we were fishing, and we started off by fishing the ebb tide.



We waited until the next week and gave it a couple of evenings again. Luckily things did pick up and the better roach were starting to be caught. However, we were still missing that monster roach I was hoping for. We were then told by one of the match anglers that fish the stretch every weekend that the better fish were scarcer because of the continued pressure from the anglers. Not to be deterred, we still gave it a few more weeks and did manage a scattering of pound plus fish and a bonus perch of 2lb6oz.



Then, on the eve of another weekend, we came up with plan to have a go for some of the stunning big rudd from the fens. On the next day we set off on the hour journey from our homes to try and find some bars of gold, which Facebook was now covered in. We arrived at a spot which Darryn knew from years previous and had a walk along the river with a rucksack, rod and long handled landing net, and a loaf of bread. It was quite a windy day and spotting the rudd was very difficult so I decided to catapult some small pieces of bread into the flow and see if anything came up for them. It didn't work very well as nothing came up, so we decided to move on and have a look around at some different stretches. After looking at a couple of other stretches and finding there was cows in them, so Darryn wouldn't go any further, we went back to the first stretch and ended up with one around the pound mark and I managed a crack old rudd at bang on 2lb .



In the middle of the next week we came up with a last minute plan to go to the coast to try to catch some mackerel in preparation for the coming winter’s pike fishing. There had been a few reports of good numbers of fish coming off the North Norfolk beaches and, with the weather in our favour, we set off for a bit of feathering. On arrival we were greeted with a car park full of cars and a beach covered in anglers. We had to walk a long way to the left to find a space but, with a couple of mackerel coming out as we walked, it looked like we might get one or two. We were both using spod rods so were able to cast around 140/150 yards which worked in our favour and as high tide came we started to catch regularly. We were even catching them on the drop so the cool box was quickly filled up with good sized mackerel. We fished for the next hour or so and ended up with over 100 mackerel to take away, which was more than I could have ever hoped! The long walk back to the van and the washing of the gear and us was not so funny…

My next blog will see me changing back to the flowing river again to target roach, so, until next time, tight lines and don't be afraid to ask any questions.