Season Report 2022: Harsh Marks and Strong Hooks
PRO-Team member Alan Brown discusses fishing tactics for difficult marks at the beginning of the year.
It was New Year’s Eve and looking back on how hard the previous four months had been locally, I was not looking forward to the four ahead. At the time of writing this, I was soon proven right as the weather did not help the fishing one bit. When we had fished perfect tides, the weather was a nightmare of high wind and big seas. Yet, when the weather was perfect, the tides were all wrong for fishing.
If I wanted to travel, there were fish to be caught. East of Bognor, Brighton was showing small plaice and further afield the Bristol Channel was showing rays here and there, but I did not have the time to head to Bristol or the enthusiasm to chase small plaice.
January started off well with a nice undulate ray of 12lb/11ozs in the early hours of New Year’s Day. A shame then that January, February, and March, were a complete dog fest with a few blanks shoved into the mix. I struggled to motivate myself to get out and fish, instead finding myself doing a few whipping jobs on my rods, playing with my rigs for when things got better. The biggest change I made was to my hound hook links. With all the hype about the Dongle Rigs, needing to do this and that for them to work, I went the other way with no Perfection Loop or SCR44 Circle Hook! Shocker!!
Looking at the type of Hair Rigs carp anglers use to good effect, I wanted to create something similar. It needed to be stiff without much movement in the hook, the reason being hounds are aggressive feeders most of the time and can hit a bait hard. A Perfection Loop connecting my hook to the hook link could easily allow a Hound to push the hook away from itself on the take, so I reverted to tying my hook to 80lb Yuki 3G, creating very little hook movement.
I’ve always liked the Cox&Rawle SCR32 Chinu for Hounding, but the new SCR24 Crab Hook with its long razor-sharp hook point was an easy improvement to make. The dongle side was simple to do and when finished, I was left with a 40mm length of stiff AFW in 90lb, sporting a single bead to help hold the crab baits in place and a link on the bottom to clip onto my bait clip. Guess we will have to wait till later in the year to find out if it works.
By now we were into March and the first signs of life started to show in the shape of some Congers, I managed to pull into a few but nothing bigger than 6lbs, and the Dogfish were not so willing to eat everything I cast out. By the end of March, I found myself heading west looking for a Small-Eyed Ray. Armed with large sand eels on 3/0 Uptide Extras I quickly found five rays to 6lb. Despite the weather being so cold I found myself nice and toasty in the newly acquired Geoff Anderson gear, have to say very impressed. So well thought out and well made.
It was not long till I found myself heading back west at the start of April, just a little bit further than last time and again looking for a Small-Eyed Ray. The ray managed to evade me but a couple of small plaice in daylight and a surprise thorny of 7lbs not long after sunset made up for that.
Mid-April found me back home hunting undulates again. I was not disappointed with my first trip out, hooking into a male just shy of 10lbs on 3/0, SCR22 Specimen Extra on bluey and squid and a lost one in the heavy swell that was present. As I look into May and with the fishing now starting to pick up let’s hope we all have a better year than the last 6 months. Tight lines everyone, may these harsh times have passed us by. I hope to see a few of you on the beach hauling fish.
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