CHRIST ITS BEEN TOO LONG!!

Well folks I must apologise for the distinct lack of any posts for the last month (god has it really been that long). Many things have happened to curtail my fishing exploits over the last few weeks, what with mum being airlifted off the islands (thankfully all good now) to the weather gods throwing gale after gale at me. Then when it all calms down I was on holiday missing the calmer weather and finally to me actually putting some hours into practising my tournament casting (I need to BIG TIME!!). FINALLY, last sunday saw me heading up to Bryher with reasonable tides and even nicer weather to have another crack at the hefty ballans that reside in and around Hellbay.

Anybody that read my post of when I was last there will know that this place is serious wrasse heaven!!!!! I was pretty confident of bagging up, provided I hadnt lost the ''knack'' of twitching senkos and 7g with a 8.5ft megabass rod due to swinging 175g around with a century ttr. What a HUGE difference!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, back to sundays fishing, I pretty much jumped off the boat and ran to the top of the hill to get a better look at Hellbay and check out what swell was about. Arse! Saturday night the weather had picked up and blew northerly but now had come round to north east meaning that the sheltered side of Shipman Head looked fishable but there was too much swell to fish the one mark that I really wanted to. The whole area of Hellbay looks fishy but I remembered speaking to a couple of old boys from Bryher about a certain spot which Iam sworn not to divulge that they fish with limpets and crabs which holds monsters. Sadly with that swell and an incoming tide it was impossible to get onto it and be safe! So I chose a spot tucked inside Shipman Head, nice bouldery ground which looked perfect. I rigged up with a Jacks lrf Baby Hogs in my favourite colour of watermellon green with a 7g cone weight (christ the rod felt tiny compared to the ttr) and flicked it out 10 yards. It hadnt even reached bottom before it was nailed by a hungry wrasse! Fish on, not massive admitedly but a fish none the less. Infact it was only 2.5lbs in weight it still put a nice bend in the rod. I was fishing again and I had a smile on my face so all was good in the world!!! Next cast and again the same thing happened and another wrasse had nailed the hog on the drop (OTD), certainly afew fish down there I thought to myself.

Third cast and amazingly no take OTD so a couple of twitches and bang, fish on again. These wrasse were certainly in a feeding frenzy and after 10 fish on the same Baby Hog they had managed to munch every tentacle and leg off it leaving me with a rather sad looking piece of green lure. What the hell, I cast it one more time and again bang fish on. This was getting silly!!!!!! I decided to try afew other lures that andy at Jacks lrf had sent me seeing that the wrasse were ''on it'' in a big way. Same result no matter what colour or lure I fished, purple, green, brown, blue, red, black and orange all caught fish!!! Maybe after the recent storms they were just grabbing anything that went passed them or annoyed them, who knows? It was great fun though! With the flooding tide my rock was starting to get alittle damp so a move was in order.  I only moved a hundred yards to the gully that cuts off Shipman Head from Bryher. Its only a narrow gulley and dries out at low water with boulders in the bottom. A quick look over the side and there were wrasse cruising up and down, this is going to be fun!!

Again I went back to my origional choice of lure, the  Jacks Baby Hog and flicked it up the gulley, a couple of twiches and all hell broke loose!! Trying to stop a 4lb wrasse in a gulley that I could jump was mental!!!!

Sport continued in the gulley, sometimes I didnt need to move the lure, just lowered it down and the current running through made it swim like all the other bait fish and shrimps towards the hordes of hungry wrasse that were waiting to munch on them! It really was getting daft and by high water and 3 hours fishing I had caught 50 wrasse. Sadly most of them were small, 1lb to 3lbs but the sport was just insane!!

Fishing started to slow with the dropping tide so I made another move to find some deeper water and some more fish that hadnt seen a lure before. A couple of casts with a nojos 9.5 inch serpent seemed to get afew plucks that resulted in a pollack of 3lbs which gave a spirited scrap before being returned like all the wrasse to fight another day.

The tide was dropping rapidly by now just when my old mate Neil Hansen joined me after finishing boating for the day. We fished on but bites and fish were hard to come by. What we did notice though was that the only lure that resulted in any action was a 3'' Jacks senko in a brown and purple combo that we literally did nothing with. Cast out, and occasionally twitch or move very very very slowly and bang fish on. What a massive difference to earlier in the day when they were munching and attacking everything and anything!!!

Neil managed to find the best wrasse of the session at 4.5lbs that fought really well from his lofty perch high above another gulley.

Time to head back to the quay to catch my boat back to St.marys and look back on an insane day, 70 wrasse had been caught but who knows how many more would have been had I managed to get up to Bryher earlier in the tide??????????????????????????????

It was great to be out fishing again thats for sure and I will be making plenty more trips to Bryher in the hope of connecting with one of those lunkers that we know are there!!!