Fishing Report: 13th October 07 - East Mersea, Essex

I'd originally been invited to fish at Frinton by mates Stuart and Paul but pressing commitments at home had conspired against me, not least my Daughter's first birthday, and in the end I decided to decline the invitation and grab a few hours at a relatively new mark for me across the river, by way of an experiment. With the tide at about 2:30am there was no way I was going to get away with fishing over the tide so instead I chose to fish over the bottom of the tide and the first few hours of the flood to see if this deep water mark would produce a few fish while the shoreline on my side of the river was normally high and dry. The theory was sound enough but as is often the case, it turned out not to be such a good idea in practice.

After a lot of rushing about I finally found myself with the mark all to myself and was fishing by 7pm, one rod out at range with Lugworm baits, the other fished at medium range with a mixture of Mackerel and small Lugworm baits in the hope of discovering if anything was actually about. Things were very quiet over the bottom of the tide except for the crab activity which was unbelievable but as the tide started to flood back into the river at about 9pm things started to look up with the odd bite missed and a small Whiting of about 3oz. Unfortunately at about the same time as the bites started to appear so did the weed; tons of it!

Although I fished on till midnight I really should have saved myself the bother and in the end I was forced to fish both rods at short range simply to avoid the worst of the weed. The only other catch of the night was a number of sea anemone, what the old-timers affectionately call "Fisherman's Arseholes", which always seemed to take the Mackerel strip; I may have caught a lot more of them but a Fox stole the Mackerel from right behind me at about 10pm.

Despite this session being a bit of a bummer I'm encouraged, I think, to return when the weed dies down a bit. We used to get a lot of fish from the main channel of the Colne in the dinghy at one time and an 80 yard cast will get your bait into extremely deep water. There are also a number of boils here when the tide begins to move which look extremely "fishy" so I think further investigation is required.