Fishing Report: 25th April 09 - River Colne

As the spring season starts to get into full swing I generally find myself wanting to spend more time fishing the Colne estuary and as it was a reasonably good tide on Saturday night, with a good weather forecast I decided to try Bateman's Tower for a few Bass. Its a good venue for something sizable and silver on the bigger tides particularly this early in the season, when the better fish haven't worked their way up the river.

Favourite bait on the river has always been Ragworm but I'd noticed the previous day when I was peeler crabbing that there were a lot of spent Ragworm on the mud, indicating that they had spawned recently and so I had reason to be optimistic that Ragworm would be the favourite for a fish; despite my confidence in Ragworm however I decided to try a bit of variety and added some Peeler crab and frozen Sandeel to the bait bucket.

I was into fish as soon as I arrived at about 11pm, although not the fish I was looking for ... just small Bass, Pouting and Whiting. I missed a lot of tiddler bites on the flood due to the size of the baits (and the hooks) but landed enough to keep my interest up until about an hour before the top of the tide when I leant into a cracking bite on Peeler which resulted in me getting a Bass of about 1 - 2 lbs to the edge of the concrete before it shook off the top hook of the pennel and disappeared. Things went quiet over the top as usual with a couple more tiddlers and then about an hour and a half down I hit into another good bite, this time to Ragworm. Things went much smoother for me this time and my first sizable Bass lay on the concrete - not massive by any means but about 2lbs and certainly nothing to turn your nose up to on the Colne given that the Bass generally run fairly small here. Encouraged by the better Bass I fished on till the water had all but disappeared in the hope of another Bass but as is often the case here that was was it for the better fish.

I ended the night at about 3am with about half a dozen each of Pouting and Whiting and a couple of small Bass as well as the better one. I probably could have caught a mass of tiddlers as it was a bite a chuck but I just don't do small hooks and baits when I'm Bass fishing, I really don't see the point quite frankly if you are looking for better fish though my strategy does come a little expensive on bait with me polishing off 1lb of Ragworm, 25 Peelers and 2 packs of Sandeel without trying that hard.

Fishing Report: 4th April 09 - St Osyth

I'd had a mind to head up the local saltings with some Ragworm this weekend to try for some early Bass in the river but not having time to get the Ragworm I dug a few local lug, put Plan B into operation and headed to St Osyth to see what was about up there instead. The beach has had a tremendous scour of late which seems to have knocked the fishing a bit but with more settled weather recently the foreshore seems to have recovered a little and I was hopeful that the fishing may have improved a little: I was wrong, but you live and learn as they say.

I arrived in glorious spring sunshine at about 5pm in time to fish the last couple of hours of the flood and as much of the ebb as I could manage and much to my surprise, although there were a few weekenders about generally the bird reserve end of the beach was deserted and there was not one nudist up there. I passed only one lone angler fishing right by the first rock groyne, where the recent big tides have formed a high sandbank against the rocks but that was it as far as company was concerned, apart from a local Fox, a vixen in peak condition, who arrived just after darkness fell and came to within 3 or 4 feet of where I was sitting to sample a couple of Calamari Squid.

I had the baits out in the water by about 6pm, fishing Lugworm on one rod and whole squid on the other, but with the poor tide it was not until about 9pm, in the peak of the ebb current (such as it was) that the first bite came to a Lugworm bait and resulted in a small Codling on the beach, which was quickly returned and swam away strongly. Shortly afterwards a strong bite resulted in a good sized Pouting of about a pound and that signalled what turned out to be the end of any chance of a decent Codling for me.

Over the next couple of hours I fished the tide down to the bottom of the beach with a steady stream of tiddler bites, managing to put 4 more Pouting on my scorecard, two of which came in on the same pennel rig very much like "little and large" before finally deciding I'd had enough at just after 11pm. Despite reports of Codling still being caught in good numbers there is no doubt that the season (and therefore the fishing) is beginning to change. Although there are still a few scattered groups of Brent Geese about in the local estuary the bulk have moved on and with the days lengthening and the temperatures starting to rise its very likely that the Bass are on their way; for me that means its time to fill the bait fridge up with Ragworm and to head to the various marks around my local estuaries after the Schoolies.