Catch Fish with
Mike Ladle

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SEA FISHING

08 June 2004

The 'Pop Pop!

SORRY! The delay in updating my website was due to some miserable ****** who placed a real beast of a virus/worm/trojan on another freeola website which then infected my computer. My eldest son Paul - bless his little cotton socks - has fixed it and I am up and running again.

My third son Richard came down for a couple of days last week end. He arrived on the Friday evening and was up at three-thirty the following morning for a fishing session down on the coast. Rich had his spinning rod and I had both spinning and fly gear with me (just in case). We began fishing just as it started to get light. The tide was already ebbing and although the sea was flat the water was a bit murky in the little bay where we started. Rich was using a shallow diving, single jointed plug of mine which I have painted with silver nail varnish and I fished with a J11 Rapala.

We had not been fishing long when I hooked and landed a small bass - encouraging! Shortly afterwards Richard also had a bass, of similar size, and then another one. He was chuffed. After about twenty minutes we made our way out onto a long, rocky ledge. I switched to a surface slider and Rich stuck to the shallow diving plug. he was first in and after a spirited battle landed a beautiful three pound ballan wrasse. A little later I had a good take on the popper which (in my early season haste) I missed. My first surface take of the year. By just after six o'clock we were home and back in bed.

Encouraged by our modest success we opted to miss out on the Sunday morning but to return on the Monday for another go. This time we arrived five minutes earlier than on the Saturday and almost with his first cast Rich had a bass from the bay - again on the shallow plug which is fast becoming one of his favourites (I'll have to keep an eye on it!). No more bites and keen to try the ledge mark again we trudged off along the shore. We had hardly been in the surf for more than a minute when Rich shouted that he had a fish. It was a bass of just under a couple of pounds which he beached and photographed. We were soon fishing again and this time I had a take on the popper, which I hooked. As I was playing mine Rich gave a shout and I saw that he was into another one. We landed both and Richard's turned out to be four-and-a-half pounds - excellent! Mine was smaller. Each of us had two or three more bites. For some reason I missed or lost all mine while Richard landed another smaller bass. In all we had five fish but, had we unhooked and returned them without faffing about to get pictures we would probably have landed a dozen in the hour or so that we fished. If I had used a J11 or similar plug I expect we would have had even more. Good sport by any standard.

If you have any comments or questions about fish, methods, tactics or 'what have you.'get in touch with me by sending an E-MAIL to - docladle@hotmail.com

Nice wrasse!

Is he pleased?

Another smallish bass.

My first 'popped' fish of the year.

Richard's best.