Catch Fish with
Mike Ladle

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SEA FISHING

23 April 2005

They're in!

Email is a wonderful thing. The other day I had an email from my friend Jon. He had been fishing with his pal on the previous evening and they had seen lots of mullet. The information was instant and I knew that it was genuine (both unlikely in many of the magazine 'reports'). Anyway, the following evening Nigel and me went down for a look. Jon had not said exactly where they had seen the fish so, on arrival, I walked the full length of the beach looking for fish - I saw none.

I stopped at what I thought was the most likely spot (lots of floating weed and foam and a few maggots) waited and watched. Nigel arrived fifteen minutes after me and still there was nothing visible. In fact I'd seen one good mullet jump clear of the water close to the rocks but no surface activity at all.

We chatted for a while but seeing nothing decided to walk back to inspect another likely spot. Sure enough there were feeding mullet. The fish were there in quantity but, sadly, they were out beyond a wide band of floating crap which made fly fishing virtually impossible. We had a few casts but only succeeded in hooking miscellaneous bits of seaweed.

After about twenty minutes we decided that it was futile and returned to the first spot. In fact, just before we got to the place there was a stretch with very little weed in the water. There was a decent bit of tide flowing left to right and the water was shallow over flat rocks. Nigel picked up his spinning rod and began to fish while I moved on a bit further and flicked out my fly. It was only seconds before I heard a shout and turned to see Nigel into a fish. The bass had taken more or less at the limit of his cast. It fought well and by the time I had run back for the camera it was just coming ashore. I took a couple of pictures and decided that it was time to switch to the spinning rod. To cut a long story short, before it got dark, we landed three bass, lost one in the edge and missed two other takes - not a bad start to the season!

If you have any comments or questions about fish, methods, tactics or 'what have you.'get in touch with me by sending an E-MAIL to - docladle@hotmail.com

Our first bass of 2005.

The same fish.

Back it goes!

My first.