In the final issue of Total Sea Fishing magazine, I wrote an article about trialling live prawn (an established frontline bait in Devon estuaries) on thornback ray in the Helford. The result of this venture was that the prawns proved an overwhelming success, with four ray caught on a day when conventional frozen sandeel and peeler crab baits didn’t attract a bite. Since conducting that little experiment, I’ve felt a niggling urge to give the prawn a good crack on the Fal. After all, the Fal typically seems to produce the better doubles and, with my personal best thornback still sitting at 10.14 after some time, this is definitely something I feel that I’m missing on my resume. Perhaps prawn power could be the key to me bagging a monster?
Half the trouble with deciding to go about using live prawn as a bait is actually gathering the things. My first serious effort of the year (using traps) produced a mere dozen, with only a few decent ones. These were then duly wasted on a funereal session at Trefusis. With the wind blowing hard against the slight trickle of tide, the lines hung slack for the entire four hours, with only a solitary doggy succumbing to the juiciest prawn in the bucket. Ditching the traps for the next prawn hunt, I decided to go for volume over quality, and had a good root around a productive estuary site with my push net. This produced prawn in good numbers, but even the biggest examples were in the lower end of what I would consider to be the ‘medium’ bracket, size-wise. Regardless, I reasoned that I could always whip on several to produce a decent bait, and I carted the lot (probably the best part of 100 or so) home.
Part of the reason I wanted so many prawn was to see whether I could keep them for any length of time. I planned to leave them for up to a week in a large container with constant aeration but no artificial cooling. I decided also to try not to change the water at any point, but to keep checking to make sure that there were no major casualties (if there were I would have to change the water). The prawns seemed pretty happy with this arrangement, although the water became noticeably murkier as the week went on. The reason for this didn’t become apparent until the morning of the session, when I decanted the container into the bait bucket and found several dead and half-eaten prawns in among the live ones. This was only a minor proportion of the total occupants, however, and I would say overall that my experiment showed that you can get away with keeping prawns in pretty shabby conditions short-term. I don’t think, however, that this approach would have much mileage for longer periods though, as the prawns were noticeably more sluggish when it came time to bait up with them.
If you are new to using prawns for thornbacks, you might be a bit puzzled as to how to present them so that they survive hard casting. Information on this is freely available across the web, but I’m going to reiterate it here to save you troubling Google. The first thing to do is not worry about keeping the prawn alive as it does not seem to matter in the slightest. This means you have carte blanche to impale the poor creature in whichever way you think best, and to indulge in liberal use of the bait elastic. Last year when I first used them, I trimmed all the little whiskers and tails off to make them more aerodynamic, but lately I’ve reconsidered and left it all on. It’s a macabre thought perhaps, but I figure those feelers and appendages must do a little post-mortem underwater twitching, maybe enough to be picked up by the battery of sensors that ray are equipped with. I don’t worry about bits sticking out now either as the bait is so light and pliable that it doesn’t seem to affect casting performance too much.
Using prawn in this way for the first time calls for a bit of a leap of faith I think, as the bait looks so humdrum that it’s hard to imagine that a serious predator is going to favour it over an XL blast frozen eel or a good helping of crab or mackerel flesh. The proof, however, is in the pudding and, having caught well in the Helford on my goggle-eyed friends, I had high expectations that the prickly sand-shufflers of the Fal were going to find them equally as appetising. The only thing that bothered me slightly was the size of the prawns that I was armed with. I would have felt a good bit happier if they were proper units like I’d had that day on the Helford. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and I was fully committed.
Zero hour arrived and I made my way over to a popular mark on the eastern shore of the Fal, hoping that there were a few ray in residence. Conditions looked pretty good, although the forecasted north-easterly was, in reality a south-easterly when I arrived. Regardless, the water clarity was decent and everything felt ‘right’ for a fish or two. I had purposely picked a neap to tackle this mark, whereas, in the past, I had tended to visit exclusively on big tides. Springs enable you to get longer on the easiest spot to cast from, but the run on these tides is really hard and if there is any weed about, fishing with plain leads (my preferred tactic) becomes much less practical. A year or two ago, my friend Mark Reed had caught well on a small tide and it completely changed the way I thought about the spot. It made so much more sense to pick out these smaller tides where the run would be more manageable but still plenty enough to get the fish feeding. You still get some time on the ‘easy’ rock and there seems to be a longer window in which the current runs at a fishy pace.
I fished for perhaps an hour with two rods devoted to the prawn. With nothing happening, I lazily put together my spare rod, baited it with frozen sandeel and dispatched it off to the left. I propped this rod against the rocks, leaving it to sort itself out. Concentrating most of my attention on the prawn rods, I kept only half-an-eye on the one fishing eel, so it came as a bit of a surprise when, on one of these, glances, I noticed signs of interest. A few taps and a bit of slack later and I was stood on the edge of the rocks, tight into a fish. It certainly resisted like a reasonable ray and, even as it came in close, it was still down deep and diving hard for the bottom. I felt like I’d got something in the 8lb+ category on, maybe even a double, so it came as a bit of a surprise when a male thornie in the 5-6lb class surfaced. Not for the first time, I was duly impressed at how well these little male thornbacks can go when they feel like it. What I wasn’t so impressed with, however, was the fact that the sandeel was now 1-0 up on the prawn. Having gone to a lot of trouble to collect the little blighters and being so sure that they would make the difference in me finding a better class of Fal thornback than I have gotten used to catching on frozen eel, it was a bit of a kick to the head that they had fallen behind to the old staple bait. Still, the session was far from over and I reassured myself that the prawns had plenty of time left to prove their worth. I also reasoned that the eel rod had been the furthest uptide and perhaps the ray had simply happened to find and accept that bait before it was aware of the prawns.
After returning the spirited little thornie, I continued on with my routine, aiming to rebait about every 40 minutes or so. There wasn’t much crab action out there at all, but there was a fair amount of weed on the deck smothering the end gear. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do to combat this and I just had to be happy that the natural staggering of my rebaiting and recasting should mean that at least one of my baits would be reasonably weed free at any one time. Nothing happened for several hours and gradually, the wind changed direction to the forecasted north-easterly, freshening quite considerably as it did. This coincided with a period of cloud cover and, despite the fact that just a few hours earlier I had been shirtless and sweating buckets in the sun, things became chilly enough that I had to put my coat on. I was starting to think about wrapping things up by this time, gradually increasing the size of my helpings of prawn in a conscious bid to attract a last gasp fish. I was casting into the teeth of the breeze by now and struggling to reach the range that I had been fishing at earlier in the session.
Well into the second hour of the flood, the tide was whistling through and a fair amount of drifting weed had begun to gather on all of my lines. The far right rod had moved a long way downtide from where I had cast it and, on beginning to retrieve it, I was met with a pretty hefty weight. Having not seen a bite of any sort, I naturally assumed this was weed (perhaps with a spider crab for good luck), but on the weight coming within 30 yards or so of me, I felt a few fishy bumps and I wondered if perhaps I had a dogfish or something like that in the mix as well. I kept hauling and soon enough, the weight began to appear through the water column. A pair of pale white undersides winked from the depths and I was staggered to see that I had attracted not one, but two thornbacks intertwined with each other. I knew that ray are occasionally caught together in the process of procreating but it was never something that I had seriously considered would happen to me. Anyhow, I plucked the amorous pair from the water, noting that the female was the one who had taken the bait and the male was tangled with her and my rig. They were both nothing special size-wise but the female had a lot of thickness and it was hard to put a weight to her visually. A date with the scales revealed that she weighed 8lbs 12oz; not a bad fish and one I was pretty pleased with, considering how slow the day had been! The only thing that marred her capture somewhat was noticing that she had some of her tail missing, although the wound had long-healed into a neat little stump. I took a few snaps of both fish before returning them to carry on their business.
I had another cast or two just in case there were a few more fish in the area, but with nothing doing, I packed away leisurely and began the journey back to the car. By now the wind had dropped right down again and the unruffled surface of the Fal looked almost oily in the evening light. I would have to say that I love my open coast rock fishing above most other types that I do, but I am still mesmerised by fishing the Fal, probably because it seems to me like it’s almost its own little world. I think this feeling has grown stronger over time, probably because I fish there less than I used to and I appreciate it more when I do. Having caught those two ray on the prawns also, I felt vindicated that this was the way to go for me from now on. For a while now I haven’t had much interest in putting in time for a proper paving slab of a thornback, but I think now the fire is starting to be rekindled. I have to be honest and say that I’ve never done well with the live eels that many Cornish anglers swear by for their estuary raying, and I felt like I’d hammered away with the frozen eels for long enough without bagging a real beast. Prawns, however, represent a new path for me and one that I’ve had instantly encouraging results on. I’m excited for the future to see where this road will lead, particularly if there are some big prickly brutes to come along the way!
Half the trouble with deciding to go about using live prawn as a bait is actually gathering the things. My first serious effort of the year (using traps) produced a mere dozen, with only a few decent ones. These were then duly wasted on a funereal session at Trefusis. With the wind blowing hard against the slight trickle of tide, the lines hung slack for the entire four hours, with only a solitary doggy succumbing to the juiciest prawn in the bucket. Ditching the traps for the next prawn hunt, I decided to go for volume over quality, and had a good root around a productive estuary site with my push net. This produced prawn in good numbers, but even the biggest examples were in the lower end of what I would consider to be the ‘medium’ bracket, size-wise. Regardless, I reasoned that I could always whip on several to produce a decent bait, and I carted the lot (probably the best part of 100 or so) home.
Part of the reason I wanted so many prawn was to see whether I could keep them for any length of time. I planned to leave them for up to a week in a large container with constant aeration but no artificial cooling. I decided also to try not to change the water at any point, but to keep checking to make sure that there were no major casualties (if there were I would have to change the water). The prawns seemed pretty happy with this arrangement, although the water became noticeably murkier as the week went on. The reason for this didn’t become apparent until the morning of the session, when I decanted the container into the bait bucket and found several dead and half-eaten prawns in among the live ones. This was only a minor proportion of the total occupants, however, and I would say overall that my experiment showed that you can get away with keeping prawns in pretty shabby conditions short-term. I don’t think, however, that this approach would have much mileage for longer periods though, as the prawns were noticeably more sluggish when it came time to bait up with them.
If you are new to using prawns for thornbacks, you might be a bit puzzled as to how to present them so that they survive hard casting. Information on this is freely available across the web, but I’m going to reiterate it here to save you troubling Google. The first thing to do is not worry about keeping the prawn alive as it does not seem to matter in the slightest. This means you have carte blanche to impale the poor creature in whichever way you think best, and to indulge in liberal use of the bait elastic. Last year when I first used them, I trimmed all the little whiskers and tails off to make them more aerodynamic, but lately I’ve reconsidered and left it all on. It’s a macabre thought perhaps, but I figure those feelers and appendages must do a little post-mortem underwater twitching, maybe enough to be picked up by the battery of sensors that ray are equipped with. I don’t worry about bits sticking out now either as the bait is so light and pliable that it doesn’t seem to affect casting performance too much.
Using prawn in this way for the first time calls for a bit of a leap of faith I think, as the bait looks so humdrum that it’s hard to imagine that a serious predator is going to favour it over an XL blast frozen eel or a good helping of crab or mackerel flesh. The proof, however, is in the pudding and, having caught well in the Helford on my goggle-eyed friends, I had high expectations that the prickly sand-shufflers of the Fal were going to find them equally as appetising. The only thing that bothered me slightly was the size of the prawns that I was armed with. I would have felt a good bit happier if they were proper units like I’d had that day on the Helford. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and I was fully committed.
Zero hour arrived and I made my way over to a popular mark on the eastern shore of the Fal, hoping that there were a few ray in residence. Conditions looked pretty good, although the forecasted north-easterly was, in reality a south-easterly when I arrived. Regardless, the water clarity was decent and everything felt ‘right’ for a fish or two. I had purposely picked a neap to tackle this mark, whereas, in the past, I had tended to visit exclusively on big tides. Springs enable you to get longer on the easiest spot to cast from, but the run on these tides is really hard and if there is any weed about, fishing with plain leads (my preferred tactic) becomes much less practical. A year or two ago, my friend Mark Reed had caught well on a small tide and it completely changed the way I thought about the spot. It made so much more sense to pick out these smaller tides where the run would be more manageable but still plenty enough to get the fish feeding. You still get some time on the ‘easy’ rock and there seems to be a longer window in which the current runs at a fishy pace.
I fished for perhaps an hour with two rods devoted to the prawn. With nothing happening, I lazily put together my spare rod, baited it with frozen sandeel and dispatched it off to the left. I propped this rod against the rocks, leaving it to sort itself out. Concentrating most of my attention on the prawn rods, I kept only half-an-eye on the one fishing eel, so it came as a bit of a surprise when, on one of these, glances, I noticed signs of interest. A few taps and a bit of slack later and I was stood on the edge of the rocks, tight into a fish. It certainly resisted like a reasonable ray and, even as it came in close, it was still down deep and diving hard for the bottom. I felt like I’d got something in the 8lb+ category on, maybe even a double, so it came as a bit of a surprise when a male thornie in the 5-6lb class surfaced. Not for the first time, I was duly impressed at how well these little male thornbacks can go when they feel like it. What I wasn’t so impressed with, however, was the fact that the sandeel was now 1-0 up on the prawn. Having gone to a lot of trouble to collect the little blighters and being so sure that they would make the difference in me finding a better class of Fal thornback than I have gotten used to catching on frozen eel, it was a bit of a kick to the head that they had fallen behind to the old staple bait. Still, the session was far from over and I reassured myself that the prawns had plenty of time left to prove their worth. I also reasoned that the eel rod had been the furthest uptide and perhaps the ray had simply happened to find and accept that bait before it was aware of the prawns.
After returning the spirited little thornie, I continued on with my routine, aiming to rebait about every 40 minutes or so. There wasn’t much crab action out there at all, but there was a fair amount of weed on the deck smothering the end gear. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do to combat this and I just had to be happy that the natural staggering of my rebaiting and recasting should mean that at least one of my baits would be reasonably weed free at any one time. Nothing happened for several hours and gradually, the wind changed direction to the forecasted north-easterly, freshening quite considerably as it did. This coincided with a period of cloud cover and, despite the fact that just a few hours earlier I had been shirtless and sweating buckets in the sun, things became chilly enough that I had to put my coat on. I was starting to think about wrapping things up by this time, gradually increasing the size of my helpings of prawn in a conscious bid to attract a last gasp fish. I was casting into the teeth of the breeze by now and struggling to reach the range that I had been fishing at earlier in the session.
Well into the second hour of the flood, the tide was whistling through and a fair amount of drifting weed had begun to gather on all of my lines. The far right rod had moved a long way downtide from where I had cast it and, on beginning to retrieve it, I was met with a pretty hefty weight. Having not seen a bite of any sort, I naturally assumed this was weed (perhaps with a spider crab for good luck), but on the weight coming within 30 yards or so of me, I felt a few fishy bumps and I wondered if perhaps I had a dogfish or something like that in the mix as well. I kept hauling and soon enough, the weight began to appear through the water column. A pair of pale white undersides winked from the depths and I was staggered to see that I had attracted not one, but two thornbacks intertwined with each other. I knew that ray are occasionally caught together in the process of procreating but it was never something that I had seriously considered would happen to me. Anyhow, I plucked the amorous pair from the water, noting that the female was the one who had taken the bait and the male was tangled with her and my rig. They were both nothing special size-wise but the female had a lot of thickness and it was hard to put a weight to her visually. A date with the scales revealed that she weighed 8lbs 12oz; not a bad fish and one I was pretty pleased with, considering how slow the day had been! The only thing that marred her capture somewhat was noticing that she had some of her tail missing, although the wound had long-healed into a neat little stump. I took a few snaps of both fish before returning them to carry on their business.
I had another cast or two just in case there were a few more fish in the area, but with nothing doing, I packed away leisurely and began the journey back to the car. By now the wind had dropped right down again and the unruffled surface of the Fal looked almost oily in the evening light. I would have to say that I love my open coast rock fishing above most other types that I do, but I am still mesmerised by fishing the Fal, probably because it seems to me like it’s almost its own little world. I think this feeling has grown stronger over time, probably because I fish there less than I used to and I appreciate it more when I do. Having caught those two ray on the prawns also, I felt vindicated that this was the way to go for me from now on. For a while now I haven’t had much interest in putting in time for a proper paving slab of a thornback, but I think now the fire is starting to be rekindled. I have to be honest and say that I’ve never done well with the live eels that many Cornish anglers swear by for their estuary raying, and I felt like I’d hammered away with the frozen eels for long enough without bagging a real beast. Prawns, however, represent a new path for me and one that I’ve had instantly encouraging results on. I’m excited for the future to see where this road will lead, particularly if there are some big prickly brutes to come along the way!