As winter draws closer with each weather cycle, most have slowed down fishing around the coast but there’s still good days to be had.
We recently stumbled on a gurnard spot a 15-minute drive from home and have had regular catches, most days getting at least a few over an hour period.
Rig and elephant fish are in the local rivers, more rigs being caught on rods but locals with nets have had great catches in their nets.
We were out a couple of weeks ago and sent out two rods with the new Aeroo Pro drone, which we are currently doing test flights for , before their commercial release at the end of April.
We set one line out 300 metres and the other around 400 metres, Andy was down with his Shark X drone just up from us.
The lines had been out about an hour with no nods. We were chatting with Andy next to his rod and he had had no bites. I looked up and saw my rod buckled over and could hear the reel peeling line off from 100 metres away.
As I got to my rod it went slack. I wound in about 100 metres of line and had weed on it from the shallows. I laid the rod across the beach spike and as I finished taking the weed off my line it started peeling line off again.
I picked up the rod and it buckled over as I put some tension on it. I had to take a few steps forward as the rod bit into my hip. I got it back into the holder and reset the tension. The fight started with the fish moving across the beach then back again. We gained some line then lost some more. After 10 minutes I looked out across the flat seas and saw two fins breaking the water. A sevengill shark I thought, another 10 minutes later it was in the shallows.
As Tash walked out knee deep, “blue shark,” she said.
Great, our biggest one yet.
We got it into a foot of water, and it was really a solid fit fish, hooked in the corner of the mouth. We managed to get the hook out with our fingers and not hurt the fish. A few quick photos and we wrangled it back to deeper waters to live for another day.
To be honest I was knackered. We got back to the other rod, and it was nodding, not to the same extent, but we were rewarded with two fat gurnards, our karma for releasing the blue shark. Andy got two gurnards also so a successful morning all round.
