pb smashed.

geejayy · #1 05-28-2010, 08:51 AM

hi guys,
with the smoothound season well and truely under way in the solent i ordered up some pealer crab and set forth on a thursday evening after work. hopeing for a smut and poss an outside chance of a goood thornie.

8pm found me back at lee on solent at the spot where i landed my curent pb\'s for thorns & hounds, conditions looked good with a light westerly wind and a flat calm sea.
high tide was for 23.00 and it was nearing the top of a spring tide cycle with 4.5m i think on l.o.s. scale.

bait wise things wern\'t too bad with my mail order finnally arriveing wednesday, one day late (my fault right day stated but wrong date )
the 15 pealers were spot on , the frozen baits wern\'t when they arrived, & the lug for stock was missing, i\'ll be giveing them a bell to sort out where the lug went ?

anyway, armed with prime pealer, a packet of squid , a frozen mackerel & assorted leftovers from tuesday to ground bait with for the ray.
i made a start with 2 rods and 3 rigs double patting as i went.
1,pulley rig, single size 2/0 hook.
2,bomber rig, 2 snoods, size 2 hooks
& 3, a 3hook flapper with size 2\'s n all.

the only down side was the clear skys & a big full moon which didn\'t inspire me with thoughts of success but at least it looked prettty when it rose early.

After the first couple of casts i\'d descovered that the may rot/maywater was in progress which usually is the kiss of death for angling when it occurs as the algae bloom then rot down depleats oxygen from the water and leaves everything coated in brown sludge.
but it was a fine day to be just out with the whole beach to myself though another angler did turn up and fished for a while a couple o hundred yards to my right.

the 1st bite of the evening was noted when my 3ook flapper rod slacklined , i took up the slack & waited for something to happen, it didn\'t, and so i cranked it in a short while later to find,-
mission accomplished , though not very spectacularly, with a \'butterfly\' thorneback ray on the middle hook to crablegs n squid.

bites were thin on the ground and it was the pulley baited with a squid/crab cocktail that scored next with a better than average doggie
it then went quiet with the tide riseing slowly up the beach and the big bright moon sailing its way across the heavens while i sat and just chilled.
darkness didn\'t really fall at all it just seemed to creep in with the moonlight keeping it very light , i always hate this type of night because i\'ve never had great results under a bright moon, and i was starting to get bored 7 started to nod off from time to time so set the clutches lightly on both reels case i went for an unplanned extended snooze.

at one point i woke to find that one of my lines had swung around in the tide, guessing that it was weed i rose to retrieve it, lifting into it and pumping it gently towards shore when the weed turned and set off on a short but strong run , it seemed to run too slow for a smut & i first thought i may have myself a stinger but after 5 minutes of it running up & down the beach trying to avoid the shallow surf line, not helped by clumps of mayrot clagging on the line and jamming in the rod rings, i got a glimpse of it, a smoothy finnally beached after sorting the crossed line with my other rod.
fortunately i had packed my \'big fish\' weighing bag and when safely unhooked and bagged she pulled the scale arround to 12lbs exactly smashing my former smoothy PB and taking my personal all time heaviest beach fish.

after the quick photo call she was returned after being held in the shallows for a bit to recover.
shortly afterward the other rod accounted for a small pup of about 1 1/2lb & another simalarly sized fish followed that.

all the action was in about 21/2 hours over highwater, with the ebb the mayrot returned in force .
so on that note, i called it a day