It occurred to me the other day that most of the stuff that I put together and post is based on successful trips. I hardly ever write about times when I have made a complete turd of a venue choice or I’ve gone somewhere anticipating one thing and getting another. When I do look back negatively at something, it’s usually because I haven’t done as well as I would have liked, rather than because I haven’t caught anything. To be honest, I’ve not seriously thought about writing about my proper catastrophes before, maybe because I assumed that people would find them boring. Although it’s true that these ‘epic fails’ are getting fewer as the years go on, I still have my fair share of them, and I’ve begun to wonder if maybe some of my stories are things that other anglers can relate to and might like to read about... so I’ll share!
There’s plenty of ways that things can go sour in shore fishing; in the interests of keeping things manageable, I’m just going to cover three of my ‘favourites’ here for now. The first way and the one that worries me the most is making a dangerous misjudgement of the conditions. I like to think that I’m a shrewd angler as far as reading the sea goes, I used to surf when I was younger and I think that’s made me reasonably savvy to the nature of waves. That still hasn’t stopped me getting caught out from time to time, luckily without disastrous consequences, but I’ve had at least one experience that was too close for comfort. It was early in the year and I was absolutely frothing to get out and do some plaice fishing locally. As the sea was reasonably calm, I didn’t think twice about heading out to a mark a short distance from home to try my hand. This is a well-known spot that consists of a spit of rock pointing out into the belly of a middling-size bay. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t touch this mark in anything over 2-3 foot and I prefer to fish it flat if possible. On this particular afternoon, I had fished up and over the top of the tide without incident, although the sea was a bit bigger than I had hoped for and the water too coloured to make plaice fishing much use. As the sea dropped to around the half tide mark, I began to notice that the swells were increasing in size and that the period appeared to be lengthening. Thinking that I was pretty safe as I was a decent height off the water by now, I decided to have a few more casts to see if I could salvage something from the session. This proved to be so nearly a costly mistake, as I turned my back to bait up, a wave hit the base of the rocks and the angle of the rebounding white water carried it right up and onto the platform I was fishing on. In the blink of an eye, the whole rock was awash and time seemed to slow down as I watched my bag toppling over and being washed away (luckily it settled in a rock pool) and my tripod and rods being dragged sideways over the edge. It was only good fortune that stopped the whole lot going into the drink; the rod tips caught on the rocks below and the reels jammed face down on a crag, allowing me to quickly gather them up and carry them up to the top platform. I quickly rescued my bag and bait box from the rock pool and stepped back to assess the damage. Unbelievably, I had lost nothing, but I could so nearly have lost everything and even been dragged in myself. I was soaked to the waist where previously I had been standing on a bone-dry rock. I think that experience taught me a valuable lesson and I’ve treated that spot and others like it with much more respect ever since.
The second way, and a really classic one for me that crops up in my fishing over and over again, is when I spend my time trying for fish that I ‘hope’ are there, rather than being pretty sure that they are. I don’t mean so much the kind of speculative fishing you might do if you were fishing a typical mixed species mark and chucked out a bait for a conger, I mean more gambling on places that used to be good for a certain species but have little (if any) recent form for them. I can think of no better illustration of this than my attempts to catch a red mullet last year during my species hunt. As I recall, it took me around ten trips visiting different venues in different conditions to get this species on the list. What seemed like an ironic twist of fate was that when I finally caught some, it was from the mark I had first tried for them. I think if I’d just done two or three consecutive trips to that spot, I probably would have saved myself a lot of effort and money. I say ‘money’ because red mullet aren’t a cheap fish to target and it pains me to think what all those trips cost in total. If I averaged, say, £10 in bait every trip, along with perhaps £6 in fuel, the figure quickly becomes pretty substantial. What sticks out as a bad slip-up on reflection was me choosing to put so much effort into marks that I knew well but had never caught any reds from before (yet had been told were sound choices for them). All the time I was doing sessions at these places where, for all I knew, no-one had caught one that year, the spot that I did eventually catch them from had been quietly throwing them out. The smart move, particularly with me having pretty limited experience with the species, would have been to stick to the area that was producing the reds and put the other suggestions to one side to explore at a less pressing time. Lesson learnt.
The last way to go wrong that I want to talk about is one of the pitfalls that has commonly caught me out on the first trip to an unknown venue. An easy mistake to make, particularly when using tools like Google Earth to scope out marks, is misidentifying the patches of rough and clean ground. I remember my first trip to one particular spot on the Lizard some years back; I spent all day casting out to sea, losing the odd set of gear, and pulling in wrasse on what was supposed to be a clean ground flatfish mark. It was not until I talked to other people who knew the mark well that I realised I had been fishing right on the verge of where the clean ground began and that angling my casts straight across or to the right would have seen me on squeaky clean sand. Conversely, I have had a few sessions on new venues that were supposed to be made up of tackle-hungry rough ground that I didn’t lose a single lead at. My interest in ‘collecting’ new marks has produced quite a few of these odd experiences, although as time has gone on, I’m not as easily caught out as I used to be.
So, these are just a few of the things that have consistently rained on my parade. There’s lots more (I could write a whole other post just about bait), but I don’t want to get stuck on negative stuff for too long. How people deal with their own low points is up to them, but I would humbly suggest that it is better to try and get something constructive out of horrible experiences or dismiss them altogether, than it is to dwell too long on their unpleasantness. After all, negativity seems to be such a big killer in all forms of angling that I don’t think it is worth the risk of carrying it over into future sessions.
Next time: something a little more upbeat!