The big stuff from the Sound of Mull

Certhia · #1 06-22-2007, 03:33 PM

Species hunt 2007 No 25

Five of us were fishing that day on Davy’s boat Catchalot. We had caught our supply of mackerel and we each baited up in our own way for the long drop down, hopefully, to tempt some monster of the deep. I opted for a whole mackerel with a couple of “flapper” fillets attached - one either side - and the bait secured on the barbless 12/0 hook with a small square of old inner-tube. The drop down is into 500ft and with 2lb of lead to keep it there, you need to minimise the frequency with which you wind up that 2lb from 500ft to check that the bait is still there.

Once the bait was down and the clicker set on the reel, there was an hour or so to enjoy the magnificent scenery and identify some of the seabirds around: an assortment of gulls, auks, terns and a fantastic White-tailed Sea-eagle. Wow! That bird alone was enough in itself to make the day worthwhile. The clicker sounds regularly as we fish, just effects of the tide and the boat swinging, but then the line started slowly but persistently to run off my reel. This is it! On with a belt, into the gimble with the rod butt and a fast wind to secure the hook and confirm that it really is a fish, and with a bend like that on a tuna stick, it’s a big fish!

With all the slack and stretch taken up, the fish was clamped firmly on the mud like a huge sucker. It took twenty minutes or so of pumping and winding in low gear on the Penn International before I felt that I had the fish off the bottom and had a chance of getting it to the boat.

Once up off the bottom mud, though, it was just hard lifting and reeling with lots of encouragement from my fellow fishermen before, after another twenty minutes the leader appeared.

With great skill from years of experience, Davy grabbed the leader, gaffed the skate in the wing and brought her deftly on board.

The skate carried a tag from the Glasgow Museum tagging programme so her number was duly noted, her length and wing span recorded before she was eased on to the net for a photo
shoot. And isn’t she beautiful? Look at that patterning.

Davy and I lifted her back over the gunwale on the net and she slid back into the sea and down to the deep, far more easily than she had come up! Consulting the Glasgow Museum chart, which relates wingspan and length to weight, her size was estimated at 148lb. Not a personal best, but very welcome at roughly one species-hunt point per 100lb.